Why Walk When You Can Drive?

The distance we will drive on this trip is hard to wrap my mind around, over 7,000 miles. That is crazy to think about especially because all my mind can think about is walking.  I miss walking.  I mean I can walk, I do walk, but I miss walking as form of transportation.  A means of getting from point A to point B.  You see, for many years I could walk a lot of places.  When we lived in Annapolis the first time around, I walked to work everyday.  I could walk downtown.  No need for a designated driver when we went out, we could walk home!  It got even better in Chicago.  The kids and I almost never got in the car.  I could carry $80 worth of groceries and the 2 kids between myself and the double stroller.  It was great and I loved it.  Moving back to Annapolis, it just wasn't in the cards for us to move back into town.  So here we are in the burbs and although we can walk to our local shopping center, the lack of sidewalks and a busy road means it doesn't happen often.  So I miss walking. Everyday.

Starting the hike of The Presidentials

Last year I was lucky enough to accompany 19 women on a hike across The Presidential mountain range in New Hampshire.  It was the hardest and most amazing thing I've ever done in my life.  3 days and 9 mountains ranges.  I commented to my friends at the time how amazing it was to me that by the third day my body was already adjusting.  It knew that is was supposed to just get up and walk.  All day.  That is one of the incredible things about being human, our bodies are designed to adapt to what they are asked to do.  I am now reading a book called Wild by Cheryl Strayed.  It's about her solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail though California and Oregon.  It reminds me in small ways of my hike and all the wonderful things that come from walking as a form of transportation.

Looking towards Mt. Washington

So, in some ways, it's hard to imagine all the endless hours we'll spend driving.  I enjoy driving and seeing all the sites on the road, but it's not anything like traveling by foot.  I can't really describe it but it's magical, getting off the road and traveling by the power of your own body.  What I have to remember is that we are going to some of those places where traveling by foot is the best if not the only option.  There will be amazing hikes in Yellowstone and Glacier and the other parks.  There will even be some opportunities to explore urban places like Vancouver and Chicago.  So, driving will be necessary to get us to places where we can walk, truly walk.  I can't wait.

Kristin's Opening

So now that you've heard from Greg and how the trip evolved I thought I'd share some of my perspective.  First let me just say I'm excited about this trip, but I'm also scared.  Scared that we won't plan well enough, scared that will all drive each other crazy, and a bit scared that I might never want to come home.  Mostly though, I'm excited and I think that's because as much as this is for the kids, it's also for us.  Greg has done a bit more travel throughout the country than me; but overall neither us have seen most of the places we are going.  I like to joke that growing up my Mom thought living in Florida was vacation enough so we really didn't travel.  Also, I spent most holidays with my father in Michigan and with 4 kids between them my Dad and Step Mom couldn't afford to take us on trips around the country.  I did get to spend some great summers up in the U.P. of Michigan but that's about it.  So, I'm truly excited to see all the National Parks and drive through the heartland and over all those mountains.  It is truly going to be an adventure for us all!

Ice cream after a hard day of travel

So how did we decide a month long trip in an RV would work for all of us? Since the kids were born, we've done quite a bit of traveling.  We are lucky to have family in cool places (New York, Florida, and California).  Several years ago we did Northern California, Oregon, and Washington by car for two weeks. We learned then that our kids are great car travelers. We flew out to San Francisco, which is a tiring trip itself.  The next day we plopped the kids in the rental car and drove 7 hours into the redwoods.  Amazingly it wasn't until about hour 5 that they got cranky.  After a break and some ice cream we managed the last 2 hours to our hotel.  So, it wasn't hard to imagine going cross country with them in the relative luxury of an RV.  I'm sure we will talk more about our test runs but in brief, we did a week long trip to Key West and a two week trip to Maine and Canada that were both relatively successful.  The month in the RV was starting to be easier to imagine.  

So with lessons learned from our prior trips, and lots of time spent planning, we hope to make this trip as fun and memorable as possible for all of us.   There still lots to do before we are ready to go but so far everything seems to be falling into place.  The itinerary is set, national park campgrounds are booked, now we just need to start filling in ALL the details.  Wish us luck!

Decisions, decisions .....

The first major decision we tackled after deciding to travel cross country as a family was "What do we drive".  Initially, we were thinking of taking Browny, our 1968 VW bus.  Browny was in the process of a major renovation, and one thing I learned from driving her from SF to Annapolis was that an old VW is a great conversation starter.  My favorite conversation started with

Gas station clerk: "Is that your van?"
Me: "Yes"
Clerk: "I remember when those things were cool".

Thanks for the hospitality Salt Lake City.

The (main) problem with driving a 45 year old car on a 10,000 mile journey is one of time.  And not the "Be happy if you can go 40 mph up the hills" time.  It's the fact that we need to return to our jobs on a specific date. Or so they tell us.

If we could take, essentially, as long as we wanted to make the trip, breakdowns can be part of the adventure.  I've been entertained by several fellow adventurers in old VW's going through great lengths to affect repairs on their vehicle.  Such as bringing a transmission as "carry on luggage" on a flight from Texas to Central America.  But waiting for parts in Topeka for a few days would be a big deal to us.  We have to be home by a certain day, and missing one of the main attractions would certainly dampen the trip.  I can live with the noise, the lack of a/c, and top speed of 65 m.p.h, but having to decide if we skip San Diego or the Grand Canyon so we can get back to our jobs before our vacation time ran out was just not something we want to deal with.

Then there's the sleeping arrangements.  If we decided to camp, there are two options.  Tent on the ground, or tent on the roof.  The bus can sleep 2, but we are 4.  The good news is the bus can park just about anywhere in a National Park, not just in the "RV Camping areas".  But that leads to the third problem, the bathroom.  Women like bathrooms, my wife included.  And she really likes one at 2:00am.  And 4:00am.  And 6:00am.  We've been using a marine port-a-potti for our camping trips, but on a cross-county journey that's going to get old, fast. It tipped over in the bus once when full. It was like a hundred cats using the car as a litter box awful.  This lead us towards an RV.

I thought about pulling a very small trailer called an Eriba Puck. But that didn't help us with the time/breakdown problem.  Although, a bus and a puck together are probably even better conversation starters than a bus alone, we kept looking at other options.  After much debate we landed on a motorhome (as opposed to a trailer).  But we wanted something small. Must have's included a bathroom (see above), room to sleep 4, hot water, and a refrigerator.  The smaller the better.  I sometimes drive a Chevy cargo van at work, and that thing has never failed to punish my body on any drive longer than 30 minutes.  This made me very apprehensive to the class C motorhome path we were headed down.

But luck intervened, and we found the smallest motorhome with a full kitchen and bathroom that's out there.  And, it's a VW to boot! At 21' this Winnebago made RV called the Itasca Sunstar checked all the boxes on our list. Plus, it is built on a VW Eurovan with a 6 cylinder engine, and the gas mileage of 13-14 mpg is going to be appreciated on the long trips. The larger class C's with V-10 engines get 9-10 mpg.  And the deal clincher is we found one in the next town. On it's second owner, it was immaculate.  We couldn't believe our luck and pounced on it!  It literally needed nothing other than gas, so we took our first trip to Assateague National Seashore new year's weekend.  Our first RV experience, and we were hooked.

In the beginning.

I guess it all started in 2003.  My uncle offered up his VW bus, which he had purchased new in 1968 and had been the only owner.  My co-worker, Ken, insisted that I take my uncle up on the offer, and committed to make the drive from San Francisco, where the bus had spent it's entire life, back to Chicago with me.  Ken had also received a 1968 VW from the original owner, his uncle, just a few years earlier.  His VW was a bug and Ken was in the process of restoring it, so he was pretty stoked about keeping my uncle's bus in the family and restoring it to its former glory.

Ken finally convinced me that I needed an air cooled VW in my life, so I called my uncle and told him I would love to have the bus.  Like the opportunistic people we were, Ken and I signed up for a training course in Santa Clara and flew out to San Francisco on one-way tickets.  We wanted to bring along our friend and co-worker Mark, a total gear head, thinking that the probability of something breaking was, well, 1:1, and would be great to have someone around that could actually fix things.  Unfortunately, our E-commerce employer wasn't keen on the entire network engineering team driving through Nevada in a 35 year old car with no cell or pager service.  So, we went with 2.

We needed to be back in Chicago by Saturday night (which is a story for another day).  Over lunch on Tuesday, we did the math.  ~2200 miles, top speed of 60 mph (excluding hills!) = 36 hours of driving.  With only 4 days to complete the journey, there was little margin for error.  So we left San Francisco Tuesday night after dinner in the Castro, gaining a few hours head start and missing the morning rush hour traffic.  The San Francisco -> Chicago trip became more of an exercise in "getting it done" than a relaxing cross county excursion, but it served as an appetizer for better things to come.  Before this trip I never had dreams of cross county travel; the road was always a medium to getting to the next destination.  But the original destination became the genesis of our trip this year.

We have been in the planning phase for about two years now, at least in the general sense.  But with actual dates and reservations in hand, the trip is real.