Well, it was an interesting trip, for some definitions of interesting. Three weeks, two families, two travel trailers. 5 adults, 4 children, all girls, ages 1-6 and two small dogs. This trip had two different goals – one vacation, the other a trial for eventual full time living on the road. Six thousand plus miles, 4 national parks, 10 campgrounds, 2 boondocks in 26 and 35 ft travel trailers.
My goal? To get everyone home in one piece.
Things I learned on this trip:
- The weather this time of year is unpredictable more than a day in advance.
- Don’t go to popular places during spring break.
- RV’s made today are junk. (I already knew this, but was reminded multiple times).
- No matter how bleak things are, wonderful serendipity can happen.
- There is no grass west of the Rockies and east of California. Some doggies simply do not know where to “go”, when there is no grass.
- Most people you meet are really nice and want to be helpful but some are just plain incompetent.
- Late March, early April – even in the southwest – its COLD! Only a couple of times on the entire trip were we pleasantly warm. We also froze a water pump on an unexpectedly cold morning.
My expectations for this trip were pretty low. It’s not that I don’t love to travel, I do. It’s that I simply can’t forget how complicated it can be. Keeping everything running, on the road and safe is, at least in my mind, largely my responsibility. I know things rarely go as we plan, so I’m always waiting for the next “thing” to happen, whether it is something broken or an over–heated interpersonal relationship. On the way out, we had plenty of issues to deal with, from re-routing to avoid high winds and storms to mechanical failures and simply getting used to caravaning such a group.
We had picked a pretty aggressive route: Illinois to the Grand Canyon, via Texas and New Mexico, up to the Moab area via Monument Valley and back, all in about three weeks. That alone was enough hike the tension level.
Yet for me it came together, the highlight of the trip, was walking hand in hand with one of my grand daughters on a trail. I never had this kind of time with my grand parents. What little time we spent together, they were always busy and seemed to barely tolerate the presence of children. Of course there were 8 of us kids, so sometimes we were barely tolerable. Our grand daughters hopefully will remember this trip fondly for the rest of their lives. We were traveling in separate cars, sleeping in separate trailers, but much of the rest of the time, we were all together. Every gas stop, most meals, most trail hikes – we divided up the girls so every little one had an adult hand to hold. They tended to pick a favorite person to walk with. I belonged to AJ. Deb (my wife) belonged to JC. EJ belonged to Sylvia (cousin). GG belonged to no one if she could help it. Having recently learned to walk, she was happiest, toddling down the sidewalk between us, totally independent, walking on her own. If you tried to reach for her hand, she’d push it away. It didn’t matter that she fell down every 10 feet or so – she got right back up, squealing with excitement tottering down the sidewalk. Just for good measure, every once in a while, she’d turn around and head the other direction to demonstrate her independence. Despite all the distractions, the girls often ended up the center of things and rightly so. I am using just their initials throughout this blog.
The “fun” started before we left. Watching the weather, it seemed the logical thing to do was to leave a day early as no one wanted to start out driving through thunderstorms.. That compressed two days of planning and packing into one, which mathematically means 5 things would be forgotten to be packed. Well we managed without them anyway. Some things we thought we didn’t pack were discovered when the trip was nearly over. In the rush, we simply forgot where they were put. Many other things were packed that were never used. We always take too much for this kind of trip. I’m sure on a slower paced trip, we might get to use most things we packed. The plan was to pull one trailer out of storage – to our house to finish loading and partially fill the fresh water tank. Then go hang out at Walmart while we pull the second trailer out and do the same thing. We underestimated by a couple of hours how long that would take – and the lock on my trailer storage “basement” broke while packing. Fortunately I had a spare lock that was originally on the trailer to swap it out with. We finally left town at 3pm, not noon.
We headed south out of central Illinois – aiming to pass into Missouri well south of St Louis. We like parts of St Louis, but pulling two trailers through it when we had no time to stop was not on our top 10 list. We got as far as Dexter, MO and boondocked in a Walmart there. We pulled in well after dark – parked and went to bed. I heard there was too much parking lot light, too much traffic noise and too much train noise – but I didn’t notice; I slept.
We woke up early, loaded up and hit the road. Half an hour later, we stopped for breakfast at Huddle House in Poplar Bluff (Rolla?), Missouri. Another 8 hours or so on the road and we pulled into Oak Glen RV just outside of Chandler, OK.
continued in next post.