Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Welcome back, folks. Parts of today (hours and hours of phone negotiations) were awful. Parts of today were okay (visiting Niagara Falls but failing to avoid multiple gift shops. Parts of today were wonderful (arriving at a friend's house for dinner and kid play time). But the best part of today was when the service manager at an RV repair business said, "we've fixed the slide and we're almost done with the bed." Let's break that down a bit. On Tuesday, we left a beautiful lake-front campground and drove from Munising, on the upper peninsula of Michigan, to Port Huron, north of Detroit and near the border with Canada. Before we hit the highway, we made a brief visit to Munising Falls Visitor Center in Picture Rocks National Lakeshore. There's a short (800') hike to the visitor center there. Site A79, in case you happen to be in Munising. Elise getting in a beachfront workout while the kids feed the birds. Munising Falls The drive ...

And so, on the first day of traveling in an RV with four children, significant things began to go wrong. It was inevitable, of course. We’ve been talking for more than a year about how we would handle problems, how it would alllow us (adults) to grow through adversity, and how it would teach our kids valuable life lessons, including the fact that their parents are fallable.  First, the retractable bed above the cab (driver’s and passenger’s seat) became stuck in the down possion. This meant that departure day began with a trip to a local (Duluth) RV shop, only to find that a repair was not possible on the spot. Fortunately, this situation doesn’t prevent us from driving (or driving safely) but it does interfere with keeping our scalps intact each time we stand up from those front seats. On the plus side, more storage. Here were are pre-departure. All smiles! Second, after we reached our destination (Munising, MIchigan) in the middle of a downpour, we found that the autom...

This day we put down the miles. The tripmeter started at 762 and ended at 1582. We started in western Montana and finished an hour into Minnesota. In other words, we crossed most of Montana and all of North Dakota. We also logged our first thousand mile mark. One thousand miles and a cool reflection in the dash. There were terrifying construction zones; narrow lanes next to oncoming traffic aren't a big deal in a typical car but, holy cow, motorhome + narrow lane + cross wind = white knuckles. There was a really funny sign outside the Teddy Roosevelt National Park visitor center (remember, we visited the park last time but not the visitor center). The evening gave us an opportunity to try out a few of the travel apps we've collected on the advice of the never-ending world of RV lifestyle blogs out there. The KOA app helps you find exactly what you'd expect. The Good Sam is a bit broader, including all RV parks, including KOA but differentiating places that are...

The second reservation we made for this global adventure was for a recreational vehicle (RV). About 11 months later, we stood in the driveway of RV Northwest in Tigard, Oregon holding the keys to a 2019 Forest River FR3. This beast sits on a Ford truck chassis with a V10 engine. It is 34 feet long (not including our bike rack, which has never looked smaller), almost 13 feet tall and just over 8 feet wide. After Elise drove this monster to our house through nearly an hour of rush hour traffic and after she parked it on our block and after friends and neighbors popped in for a tour and after we loaded it with everything we had carefully prepared and after we spent a full day running around Portland acquiring more stuff, making two and a half trips to Target, and after one of those nights of sleep shaped by anxiety and excitement, we pulled away from the curb at about 7am. RV Driving Lesson #1: There's a $95 limit on pay-at-the-pump gas transactions. This isn't relevant, eve...

This is a post I wanted to write before we left. I hope I can still capture the sentiment. The kids - Lily (11) and Henry (8), especially - began to have complicated emotions as our departure approached. The departure was materializing all around them in the form of our household purges and nonstop planning/decision-making. The school year was ending and it was already a moody time for Lily finishing fifth grade because quite a few of her close friends will be moving to different (local) schools in the fall. At each opportunity, we took a picture of the children with one (or more) of their buddies. This is by no means exhaustive. In preparing this post, I'm enjoying the opportunity to look closely at their faces. Since two significant months have passed, I'm writing from the position of knowing how they've grown and changed; how they are (and are not) longing for these friends and these friendships. We've been sending (and receiving post cards) during the two mont...

There have been many firsts, of course. Henry lost the first trip of the tooth and we expect there to be many more. But because our birthdays are in March, April, June, August and December, this was the first birthday for us on the road. We had a great little party yesterday (which was Sunday) with a few kids who have become friends to Ali and Cate. If you're unfamiliar with our family, you should know that some of the birthday parties we've had for the kids over the last decade have been epic, especially in the craftiness category. The genius of yesterday's party was that the entire "party" was dispatched in about 15 minutes. The friends arrived. There were cupcakes. There was singing. There was tearing into wrapping paper. And then it was done. The kids dispersed to play in and around the house. There was water play in the sprinkler. There was the swingset. There was a moderate amount of playing with new presents. Then the adults sat around and talked! C...

I wrote a couple of short posts about certain days during our two-week stay in Iron River, WI but I feel impelled to reflect on that time. It was exquisitely vacation-like and it will make me happy in the future to remember the things that created this. Let's do this Letterman style: #10: Hayward, WI Sometimes you need something to do. The kids are getting rammy. The house is feeling small. The weather isn't what you hoped. So we hopped in the car and drove about an hour to Hayward to see the Fresh Water Fishing Hall of Fame and a small-town amusement center. We skipped the latter and instead spent quite a bit of time on main street shopping, eating ice cream, eating dinner and also enjoying a small little city park along the river. Elise, Ali, Cate and Henry in the mouth of the worlds largest Muskie. This gave us the chance to see the banner advertising the lumberjack world championships later that week. This was an unexpected highlight of the trip so far. Hayward...