Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Four generations of Maklers When your grandfather turns 99, you show up. When you plan a round-the-world adventure, arrange the itinerary so that you can show up. When you embark on a 30-state RV adventure, you get to Grandpa on the weekend closest so his 99th so that you can show up. So it was that we pulled into my parents' driveway on the evening of Friday, October 18th. The onboard travel calendar said, simply "October 19th: Hot Tub." This is one of the kids favorite features of the house in Los Altos and it was all the motivation they needed during the final hours of driving. So it was that the kids go to see their cousins, Theo (17) and Winter (13), their uncle Chris and Aunt Danielle throughout the weekend. There's something special about older cousins and these visits did not disappoint. So it was that the kids got to have endless snuggling with their grandparents while reading books, watching movies or jumping into and out of the hot tub. ...

We made it. The RV trip - this odyssey within an odyssey - is not complete but this feels like a virtual finish line. We left Portland on June 23rd to spend a week on the Pacific Ocean and since then we have been working our way, clockwise, around the country. On October 18th, we returned to the Pacific and it was glorious. After a short but somewhat harrowing drive over two mountain ranges, we chose Seacliff Beach State Park in Aptos (California) as our destination. It couldn't have been more perfect. We ate a quick lunch in the RV and then armed ourselves for an afternoon at the beach. For three hours, it was kite flying and castle building, wave splashing and even a few polar dips. There was the bizare wreck of SS Palo Alto beyond a fence at the end of a tall pier. There was pizza eaten at the top of the bluff and ice cream from a local shop. Then we drove for about an hour to reach my parents' house in Los Altos for a weekend of family fun. We might not be done with t...

We had done everything right. We had put in two days of hard driving, first from the Grand Canyon to Barstow and then from Barstow to a lovely remote RV Park just outside Sequoia National Park. We had facilitated a calm morning and encouraged the kids with news that we'd have lots of park time and relatively little parking. Then we found out that the park service advises against vehicles longer than 22 feet using the road ahead. Maybe it would have been fine. Maybe we could have found an RV blog that explained how risk averse the NPS advice was (after all, it was advisory, not regulatory). But the downside of failure was too great to risk and we turned around. Next came a two hour detour. This included an unwanted and unenjoyable lunch stop. Finally, though, we approached the entrance, this time of Kings Canyon National Park. Quickly, we reached our target, the Grant Grove that is home to one of the mighty sequioas. This was everything we hoped for. There's a negligable w...

On a different epic adventure, Elise and I discovered that bicycling across the United States was more about mental and emotional endurance than physical strength or stamina. We were in our early twenties then and falling in love in increments of roughly 90 miles per day. We're a week away from arriving back in Portland and those lessons are flooding back to us, even though they have been with us throughout the last two months of this odyssey. This has indeed been a long haul. We have two main set pieces remaining: visit the twin National Parks: Sequoia and King's Canyon; celebrate my grandfather's 99th birthday in the Bay Area. First, though, we had to cover about 10 hours of driving in two days to bridge the Grand Canyon to Sequoia/King's Canyon. In doing so, we added the last two states to our road trip list: Nevada and California, bringing out total to 30. (We've seen every state's license plate except for Hawaii but including the District of Columbia.) ...

There's a lot I wish we had known before we started out on this RV adventure, roughly two months ago. So the purpose of this post is mostly to amuse my future self with anecdotes about things we've learned. But maybe you, dear reader, are considering or even planning a similar adventure so this advice might be useful to you. Let's start with the ways we modified the interior. The theme of this post should be, "sponsored (without compensation or knowledge) by 3M." Because the RV is not ours, all of our modifications had to be without permanent impact. Fortunately, it's 2019 and 3M (and others, I suppose) makes all of these removable adhesives and associated products. In the picture at left, you see the inside of our bathroom door. At the top are three hooks (from the "fancy" line) and shoe organizer. Each pocket has something that a family of six needs in its bathroom cabinet, pantry, junk drawer, etc. This is also something that changed quite...

On Sunday, after driving for nearly five hours and stopping at the Four Corners Monument (thus adding Utah to our state-count), we arrived at the Grand Canyon. With fading daylight, Lily and Henry were amazed and Ali lamented, "it's not a canyon, it's a mountain farm." I've never heard of such a thing but apparently it's neither good nor impressive, whatsoever. Four kids, four states Four kids, two grandparents, four states Two lovebirds, four states On Monday, we had a really good day of school. We introduced a bunch of new curriculum materials last week that had caught up with us in Austin. Today we introduced some more: Henry started a daily science program by covering a week's worth of fossils in about fifteen minutes. (I don't see how a teacher facing a classroom of 25-30 students stands a chance!) Lily started looking up the vocabulary words she has been highlighting in her reading using an online YA dictionary. She had so ...