Quest and Venture

  We call our RV the Whitehawk, because that is the brand that it is, and, well, also I like birds. But perhaps after three weeks of travel, it is time for that name to change. My cousin Natalie named our RV the Icebreaker, upon saying bon voyage to it and the stinky Mitchells it carries. And indeed, I believe that there it is something glacial about our passage as we tow it across the country, driving the speed limit (or 5 under to burn my gas more efficiently!) while Americans of every stripe rush past me. We visited my family this month, Jehovah’s Witnesses from central Michigan. We arrived on the eve of a craft fair, to a piece of land crowded with sheep, chickens, dogs, beehives and people busy packaging laser cut merchandise. Their yard had been a swamp until the Father of the house filled it in with backfill from a basement and planted it with grass seed. I had to be careful not to run over the head to a well, which looked like little more than an easily crushed clump of...

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...