Teacher Recovery Can Look Like Adventure (Not a Beach Chair)

I finished year 27 of teaching on a Thursday. I was on the road by Friday.

Not a metaphor. An actual plane ticket, booked before the last report cards were shared. It's also, if you've been following along with the STRONG Framework, the "R" — Recovery and Renewal — except not the version with a chapter title and a bullet list. The version with mosquito bites.

I've been filming these videos as part of a series I call Teacher Gone Wild for a while now. No script. GoPro running whether or not the moment is flattering, which it usually isn't. This summer gave me six of them, and watching them back in order I noticed something — recovery isn't one thing. It's not a beach chair and a good book, though sure, sometimes it's that too. It's fire pits. Float planes. A bike ride you're nowhere near ready for.

Different every time.

On day one of summer, my daughter Jaime and I unboxed a new Solo Stove in the rain, with no idea what half the pieces were. We figured it out. About 600 mosquitoes tried to ruin it and didn't quite manage to.

Then it got bigger. Wisconsin to Janesville to O'Hare — three-hour delay, because of course — to Portland, and then the actual trip: Mount Hood, Timberline Lodge (yes, the Shining place, look it up), the Columbia River Gorge in the rain, the Wallowa Mountains, which my dad calls the "Mini Alps" and which you stop arguing with him about once you see the snowcaps sitting over that river. We hiked. We sat by water that stays 41 degrees year-round, apparently forever. We hit the sauna.

We celebrated Big Al's (my dad) 81st with the whole crew there, which is really the only reason this trip happened. Then a sprint to the coast I started calling "Race Across Oregon" — crabbing with a family friend named Captain Tom, who's apparently been teaching Jorgensen boys the ropes, literally, for years.

This one's not polished. Wind noise. My brother talking over me. An actual argument about assembling a grill. More driving than any human should do.

Camp Jorn is a different animal. I first showed up there as a 19-year-old counselor in 1992. Now I bring my own kids back every summer, which either means I've grown up or means nothing's changed; I'm not quite sure.

This year a storm blew the roof off the tent on day one — almost — the GoPro got its first real waterproof test, and there was a bike tour through downtown Manitowish Waters (Dixie's coffee, worth the wait), a ruck around Fawn Lake Circle that got more sentimental than I planned for, and a cornhole tournament the Corn Wranglers did not win.

Watch it here if you need reminding that the money you spend reconnecting with people isn't an expense. It's an investment. Bug spray included.

Not all of these are restful, though. One's just me, behind schedule, riding the Bearskin Trail because if I didn't start training then, September was going to hurt. Twelve windy miles, interrupted once by a German Shepherd. Renewal isn't always rest. Sometimes it's just momentum, and you have to go find it yourself because nobody's handing it to you.

Then there was the Ontario trip. Six of us, ten hours in a truck, then a float plane, to a lake remote enough that "if you don't hear from me in seven days" was an actual joke somebody made before takeoff. Seven days. A heat wave nobody saw coming. Three CPAP machines running off one generator. A shore lunch that somehow turned into a full Wisconsin cheese curd experiment.

This is what disconnecting actually looks like — not the curated version. The one with bugs, bad sleep, and a guy who lost his hat in a campfire and refused to wear it once he found it.

And then it ended the way a lot of my summers do. Seventy miles of Door County coastline, same weekend as every year since 2012, same roads, same friends. Coastal bluffs. Cheese curds at the aid station. A halfway grind that somehow feels harder every single year even though the route never changes.

Tired and sunburnt at the finish, glad I did it again — which, if you think about it, is a pretty good description of teaching too.

If you want the rest as they happen, the Teacher Gone Wild playlist is here.

None of these look like self-care in the yoga meditation sense.

Here's the thing nobody tells you about recovery: it doesn't feel like recovery while it's happening. It feels like arguing about a grill on a hiking trail. It feels like getting stung by mosquitoes trying to light a fire with your kid.

It feels like being too tired to enjoy the last ten miles of a bike ride you signed up for voluntarily. You don't recognize it as the thing that saved you until you're back in your classroom in September, and you realize you're not running on fumes for once.

I finished year 27 on a Thursday and was on the road by Friday because I've learned that waiting for recovery to feel restful is how you end up never taking it. Sometimes renewal looks like a nap. This summer, mine looked like six trips, one bad tent, and a lot of cheese curds.

Both count.

What adventures are at the top of your list?