Hello, hello!

This week I wanted to share a former blogger and fellow pipeline wife’s story of her family’s experience on the pipeline.  Blaire experienced both staying at home while her husband worked on the road as well as traveling as a family for the last 11 years.  Since 2019, her family has settled in their dream spot in Florida and are finding out again what is like to travel just for fun!

 

Meet Blaire…

 

Hi y’all, my name is Blaire, and I was a traveling pipeline wife and a stay-back-home pipeline wife over
the last 11 years. I am also a mother and photographer. We have traveled coast to coast and drove the
wheels off a few trucks and travel trailers, literally.

It’s been wild, fun, and stressful, but I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. We were a traveling family when almost no one was doing it. We were told by well meaning individuals, other pipeline couples too, that we were weird and even bad parents. It’s refreshing to see how things have changed in the pipeline community in the last decade.

I know describing something as a “journey” has become pretty cliché, but there really is no other way to
describe being a traveling wife, is there? My husband Robert and I have never had reservations doing our
own thing, even if family and friends didn’t understand it.

Going on the road as a pipeline family seemed like an journey we were made for, we were young and excited. I grew up traveling and moving with my family every few years, and he was itching to see the country after living in one town his whole life.

Our beginning

When I say were were young, I mean we were barely adults when we hit the road. Our first babies, twins,
were born 3 months after I graduated high school in 2004. By 2007 I was pregnant with our fourth. At
this point we were struggling to keep a roof above our heads and food on the table of our small home in
Texas.

Robert had been going to school and working, getting more and more interested in the oilfield. He
knew that leaving his job as a shop mechanic and getting on with a pipeline company could be our ticket
to a better life.

Finally in early 2008, after the birth of our fourth, his persistence paid off and he got the call to start work as a welder’s helper five states away. He left, we stayed behind. It was one of the hardest days of my life. We didn’t know if this would be a temporary or permanent career change, but we were ready for something to give.

Let me tell you, that first paycheck was like winning the lottery. He made more in one week than what he
was making in a month at home. We were hooked. Now, we all know money doesn’t equal happiness, but
as struggling young family, it equals security and prosperity which is something to be happy about! When
he got home from that first job he had me convinced to travel with him, as neither one of us wanted him
missing out on our babies’ lives. He soon left again to start another job, and again we stayed back
temporarily.

I’m sure everyone we knew thought we lost our minds when I said we were going to go travel with him. First I had to purge everything we owned and then find a realtor to sell the house. I managed to
do it all on my own in a few weeks.

In late summer of 2008, we had 4 children under the age of 4 and didn’t know what we were getting into. Looking back we were a little bit crazy. I will never forget driving away from our little house feeling so excited and nervous. I had my babies and my GPS, and it was 23 hours to New York.

These days a lot of families begin traveling in an RV, but for the first year we were on the road we lived in
small rentals and hotels. He worked through the winter so many RV parks were closed and it wasn’t
practical to buy the propane in the northern states we were in.

That fall we spent in New York, then winter in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Talk about a shock, we got to experience a real winter for the first time. We moved about every 3 months in the beginning; Indiana, Colorado, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi,Tennessee, the Carolinas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, many more. Living in a small space with 4 toddlers was actually very freeing.

In the first year of traveling I became an extreme minimalist. Everyone had a few sets of clothes, a plate, a cup, a couple toys. It took me 10 minutes to clean up the entire cabin.  Everything we owned fit into a couple of Rubbermaid bins. My stress level regarding our home and children went down considerably when we were traveling because I didn’t have to worry about keeping up a whole house.

Making the most of it all

When we did get a travel trailer (which was an old, modest, tiny Coachmen we paid cash for) it felt so roomy after all the hotels. We made it work, we made it home. The kids were small enough that they could share beds. I figured out how to use that small oven to bake and share successful recipes on my own blog, Roadmommy. We even planted a movable garden we took around with us.

Our days were also spent exploring the small towns we were in. The library, McDonald’s playplace, parks, ice skating, sledding. We were all about being together as a family, meeting locals and experiencing everything our new locations had to offer.

It’s one thing to take a vacation to certain spots in the USA, it’s another to live there for months at a time.
You really get to know the area and the people and it begins to feel familiar. We were always staying in
smaller towns where people were curious about our life and friendly to us. Every state in America has
amazing natural beauty and interesting places to visit if you just look. We visited 22 states in all.

There’s fall foliage laced mountains in New York, some of the best hiking & secluded waterfalls in the Virginias, hot springs in Montana, a frozen lake you can drive your car on in Minnesota. The list goes on. I could talk all day about the breathtaking scenery and huge cities we have experienced as a family. What makes the journey truly special are the people you meet, some of which change your life entirely. My best friends are scattered across the nation.

Everyone who meets our children now says they’re so friendly and full of common sense. I’d like to say
they were taught that by their parents, but it’s obvious they learned a lot of it on the road. To be honest, I
threw traditional parenting rules out the window when we went traveling. No one knew us, no one was
judging me. With social pressures released I parented the way that felt natural to me and our family bond
was very tight. We were having fun and growing up with our kids, learning and adapting to one situation
after the next.

On one job in Nevada, I began my own side business doing laundry for the guys my husband worked with. Every morning I’d wake the little ones up at 5 am and we would sit at the entrance to the yard collecting their bags of laundry as the men and women filed in for work. Then I’d drive to the laundromat and wash, dry and fold about 20 loads, the next day we would return the clean laundry to the guys.

We did this 6 days a week. The kids were my helpers. They carried soap, counted quarters and folded socks. They would color in their coloring books while the dryers were rolling and stick their artwork in the bags of clothes. More than one pipeliner told me the colored pages brought them to tears missing their own children back at home. To this day my kids say that laundromats bring back a sense of nostalgia.

Time for a change

In 2012 we decided to follow a new path; my husband had a job offer to work in a gold mine in Alaska.
We decided to run with the opportunity. It was a position as a mechanic, a throwback to his original
career interest. It still meant he was traveling 3/4 of the year, but we could settle and buy a house again as
he would only be traveling to one place and had to stay at a man camp. It was perfect timing because our
oldest girls needed to start first grade and we were uncertain about switching schools every few months on the road.

We had always wanted to live in Colorado so we bought a home there and settled into a new life.  Robert was going on 4-week long hitches to Alaska, home for 2 weeks, and repeat. Settling down again
was bittersweet. The traveling journey had ended but we were ready for something new.

A few years later he was able to save up for his own mechanic service truck and go back to pipelining as a
operator/mechanic. We decided this time it was best I didn’t go. Our reasoning behind me staying home
with the kids was for their sake. They all truly love school and sports and were thriving in their new school
environment.

As much as traveling together would have made sense after doing it once before, it just didn’t feel right. Our kids needed to be home. After he went back to pipelining we decided to ditch suburban life and buy a farm in Michigan. You could call that another journey… two city people buying a farm… but that’s another story all together.

The last couple years that Robert’s been a pipeline mechanic we visited him and he flew down to see us as
regularly as possible. Our kids have a great bond with him because he put in the effort every week, every
day, for years. With young kids I feel it’s really important for daily physical presence to form a healthy
bond with a child, but as they get older there are many ways you can connect with your child.

Thank goodness for phones and social media! He FaceTimed us regularly. We have family group texts and
family Instagram messaging. The simplest thing like sharing memes brought us together when he was far
away.

Traveling took on a new meaning, it was some serious effort. There have been times just one child
visited him in another state. I have driven 20+ hours with 2 big dogs and 4 cranky kids to see him. Just
this past summer I made a 20-hour trip four times to try and coordinate the kids’ sports schedules and
getting us together for school breaks, holidays and birthdays.

On the flip side, he’s spent 10 hours flying to see us just to turn around within 24 hours to go back to work. Families make it work. And when we were together we had some fun grilling out, hiking, kayaking, doing all the things we love together.

A new start

This year, with the slowdown of the industry as a whole, we decided to move on. In 2017 we bought a
home in our dream location, the gulf coast of Florida, and have been researching starting up our own
business since then. Robert has 15 years of experience at what he does and it just felt right to step away, or as we look at it, step forward into something new. It’s the natural progression. This year he started his own business as a mobile heavy equipment mechanic, and I am doing photography as I have been for a while now.

Pipelining is an interesting industry and it’s like a roller coaster. Every pipeline wife will tell you—the highest highs and the lowest lows. You’re never really ready for big change, that’s the way we look at it. We weren’t really prepared to start pipelining yet we did it, somehow. We weren’t really ready to stop, either, but we are doing it now. We have been successfully pursuing our goals since the day we met and don’t plan to stop now.

These days our children are 15, 15, 14 and almost 12. We moved to our town in Florida specifically for the
amazing school district so the kids could further their education with their choice of schools, and it seems
to be the right move. All of the kids are honor roll students in advanced programs, athletes, and generally
great, well adjusted kids. I know living on the road shaped them positively. They are excited to have their
dad home for good now.

Here in south Florida everyone is a transplant. Every time people ask the kids where they grew up, we all
just smile and laugh. Where do we begin explaining?!

 

***

Thank you so much Blaire for sharing your family’s story here on Traveling Wives Club!  I don’t know about y’all but I love hearing other people’s stories, their experiences and how they are making things work for them.

 

If you are interested in sharing your own pipeline journey please send a message to travelingwivesclub@gmail.com or comment below.

If you want to know a bit about my story, check it out here.