Road Note: Parking Under Heat

A motorhome is a house, a body, a weather instrument, and occasionally a toaster.

In summer, mostly a toaster.

The great skill of hot-weather road life is not endurance. It is reading a parking spot the way sailors read water. Shade at four in the afternoon matters more than shade at ten in the morning. A tree to the west is worth two trees to the east. Asphalt remembers heat like a grudge; dirt forgives it by evening.

Ember and I have developed a rating system, unofficial, cat-approved:

• One awning: survivable. The cats flatten themselves into professional puddles.
• Two awnings: actually pleasant. Wind exists. Someone nearby is grilling something and the smell is a free amenity.
• Three awnings: rare. River nearby, big trees, the kind of afternoon where you write letters slowly and mean every word.

There is a version of this life that looks glamorous from outside — the van by the sea, the golden light. That version exists for roughly forty minutes a day. The rest is logistics, water levels, and a thermometer you check the way other people check their phones.

And still. Yesterday evening the heat finally lifted, the swifts came out to hunt, the cats emerged from their puddle-forms, and the whole parking lot — an unremarkable gravel rectangle behind a supermarket — turned briefly into the best address in Europe.

You cannot book that. You can only be parked there when it happens.