Quest and Venture

Today marks the end of our seventh day on the road, and we’re still having fun! That said, the learning curve has been steeper than most of the roads we’ve been driving on. Prior to this week, I had towed an RV exactly TWICE, once when we bought it, and a week before our trip when we went on a ‘practice run’ without kids. HO! Like that even counted.  Now that we’ve been on the road for a week, I wanted to share some things we learned this week that might be relevant to other RV newbies. I call this segment TODAY I LEARNED: TIL: Kids Need Practice.  We bought this fancy ‘piggy backer’ for our 20 month old  to use, but we never actually used it. It's just a metal bar attached to backpack for him to stand on and ride as a piggy back. It seems simple and awesome enough (the branding is legit) but Xander doesn’t know how it's supposed to work, so it is a struggle. Our first time using it resulted in tears and tantrums. Our second time ALSO resulted in tears and tantrums, but h...

If I had to choose a word to describe today, I would choose ‘harrowing.’  Harrowing (adj) acutely distressing.  Ex: Driving 6 hours through up and down twisting mountain roads when you have only three days of experience driving an RV is harrowing.  We knew going in that today was going to be rough. Our plan is to make it to Michigan in a relatively quick amount of time, so we can enjoy the cooler temps and take our time on the way back down. A solid plan, I hope, except it involved frontloading the trip with a couple of long-ish days.  I’m sure there’s people out there that think six hours of hauling is nothing. Previous to this trip, the most I ever hauled was my kid and a watermelon on a trailer on my bicycle. Yesterday we drove three hours, and that was alright, but it was nothing like today.  I have driven through both Oklahoma and Arkansas before, so perhaps some of the blame lays on me. I associate Oklahoma with cropland and Arkansas with… the woods? I gu...

We woke up at six am today to begin our adventure. Months ago, we decided to buy an RV and a truck to tow it across the country with our two kids to see as many national parks and birds as we possibly could with two kids under five.  I would call today a success With the help of two grandmas and a grandpa, we got our house clean and ready for our renter to move in tomorrow. Without too many tears, we hugged our goodbyes, loaded our kids in the carseats, and prayed that everything was stowed safely in the RV.  We were reasonably sure it was. After all, we had gone camping in it before… once. Last week. And it went mostly fine. What was the worst that could happen?  The drive itself was less than pleasant. It was a drive I’ve made quite a few times. IH 35 North to Waco is less then spectacular in my book. Strip malls and future suburbs cut into the gently rolling hills that tested the cruise control of my F150. With fuel economy around 10 mpg (less than half of what I’d hop...