Psychiatrists Take Detour From Everyday Routine
Photos: Doreen Orion, M.D. and Tim Justice, M.D.
For Orion and Justice, one of the highlights of their cross-country trip was the time they spent in Alaska. In the summer of 2005, they visited Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska.
When psychiatrist Tim Justice, M.D., first suggested to his wife that they drop everything to travel around the country for a year in a converted bus, she pronounced him “insane.”
This was the quasi-professional opinion of Doreen Orion, M.D., also a psychiatrist practicing in the Boulder, Colo., area.
Her reply to Tim's suggestion left no room for speculation. “I will never ever, not in a million years, live on a bus,” she told him. She also asked, “Why can't you be a normal husband with a midlife crisis and have an affair or buy a Corvette?”
Flash forward: Doreen is cruising down the road alongside Tim in a 20-ton Prevost coach bus, which has been converted to accommodate all of the comforts of home, including a full kitchen, bed, TV, and Internet access. When not experiencing moments of “bus phobia,” Doreen was having the time of her life. Not only that, but she was posting their every adventure on the road to an Internet blog titled “Leave the Driving to Him.”
By way of explaining his wife's change of heart, Tim told Psychiatric News that “some shrinks are better than others.”
In other words, it took a lot of convincing on Tim's part—five years, to be exact—between the time he became enamored with the idea of traveling the country in a bus and the day in June 2004 they finally set off.
Inaugural Trip Turns Difficult
It didn't start out very well. On the morning of their scheduled departure, they awoke to pouring rain. Someone was still fixing an electronic glitch on the bus, and they had to delay their departure to late afternoon.
As Doreen guided the bus backward down their narrow, one-way street, one of her sandals slipped off.
She “stepped behind the descending 40,040 pounds of Prevost” to retrieve her shoe, “not even flinching as the sound of air brakes hissed in my ear,” prompting a stern admonishment from her husband.
“Never stop behind the bus while I'm backing up,” he said.
Once they hit the highway, the bus door flew open, and Doreen climbed down the stairs to pull it shut.
“As I swung it in toward me,” she wrote, “the force of the wind pulled it open even wider, this time with me attached, being sucked out.”
Tim yelled at Doreen to let go of the door as he wrestled the bus into the breakdown lane.
The bus door opened two more times that day, but Doreen then waited until the bus came to a complete stop before she pulled the door shut.
That night, as they traversed Wyoming on their way to Nevada, a hailstorm struck, and they pulled over again. “The sound of the hail pounding into the steel skin of our bus was deafening,” Doreen wrote.
She checked on the other members of the family—dog Miles and cats Morty and Shula, who were traveling with them.
Shula, whom Doreen described as a neurotic cat “only a mother could love,” was cowering under the covers of their queen-size bed. Doreen's blog indicated that she was able to maintain a sense of humor through less-than-perfect circumstances. “I bet this scared the pee out of her,” she wrote. “It had. Right through to the mattress.”
Journey Guided by Whim
Fortunately, their luck turned, and they soon began to enjoy themselves.
Doreen told Psychiatric News that their travels were guided“ overwhelmingly by whim” and by her wanting to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer, and Tim's desire to see as many state capitals as they could. By their standards, they succeeded, and drove to every continental state except Rhode Island—“we didn't even realize we missed it,” Doreen said—Kentucky (it was getting too cold), between summer 2004 and summer 2005.
Highlights of the trip included visits to Carlsbad Caverns, Niagara Falls, Key West, Death Valley, and Alaska's Denali National Park.
They also made room for the unconventional: a trip to a UFO festival in Roswell, N.M., an event Doreen remarked that she and Tim deemed “a perfect opportunity to observe weirdness recreationally, without the expectation that we do something about it.”
They also visited Olive Dell Ranch, a family nudist resort in Southern California. As they pulled into the resort, Doreen wondered about protocol.“ I'm wearing earrings. Do I have to take them off?” and paranoia struck. “What if this is some godawful joke, and everyone is clothed but me?”
Her and Tim's favorite nudist turned out to be the maintenance worker for the resort, “who walks around with nothing on but a tool belt.”
Couple Recalls Trip Fondly
During their travels, Doreen periodically reviewed insurance claims to generate cash for the diesel fuel needed for their 179-gallon tank, which cost about $220 to fill.
Tim took over many of the domestic duties, such as cooking dinner every night.
Of their time together, Tim said, “I rediscovered that she and I are incredibly different, and I would have it no other way.”
Doreen said her favorite part of the trip was “spending 24/7 with Tim.” The worst part of the trip, she added, “was having to admit to Tim that he was right” about how much she would enjoy traversing the country on a bus.
During occasional bouts of bus phobia, Doreen became afraid that an overpass would shear off the top of the bus or that the bus would roll over on a sharp turn. Would they do it again? “In a heartbeat,” they replied in unison.
The blog, “Leave the Driving to Him,” is posted at<www.leavethedrivingtohim.blogspot.com/>.▪
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Published online: 6 January 2006
Published in print: January 6, 2006
Notes
“What do you get when you cram two married shrinks, their two cats who hate each other, and a standard poodle who loves licking them all into 340 square feet of living space for a year?”
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