Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Lily's hair got shorter and shorter during the year; she started by donating her pony tail in Minnesota! In Melbourne in January her hair got a lot shorter. Also, check out those freckles! The hair on my head has been getting scarcer for at least 20 years. Every haircut I've gotten in the last fifteen has been shorter than the one before it. For the last ten years I've been giving myself buzz cuts in the mirror, trusting Elise to tell me when I've missed a spot. Every few years the guard on the clippers has gotten smaller. During this time, I've missed barbershops and their casual banter. Elise once gave me a gift certificate to a place where I got a buzz, a beer, plus a hand and face massage but no chatter. I went to a place in our neighborhood and paid $30 for a buzz and a can of hipster beer but I was definitely too old and square to earn a conversation. Besides, even if I took a trim every two weeks (I prefer weekly), that would be an expensive habit....

I have enough time and energy to report on our 60+ hours as tourists in Sydney in a very narrow way only. We landed on Thursday afternoon, collected our luggage, bought our transit cards and rode the lovely, modern train for about 15 minutes into the city. The Museum Station in downtown Sydney reminded me of stops on the London Tube: big, winding, hot...and never before had I needed to depend on elevators. I think it took us 3, maybe 4, to reach the surface. We walked less than half a mile through the Big City to reach our hotel. The kids did remarkably well on their first non-taxi navigation of a city. I have a very favorable opinion of the Radisson Hotel and Suites near Darling Harbor. It's a familiar kind of hotel/apartment combination and our suite was clearly a converted apartment. The location was perfect and on Thursday evening we walked to the very-nearby Tumbalong Park in Darling Quarter where our kids devoured a really nice playground. We had a lovely harborside dinne...

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...

Sorry for the wait, folks, but things have been a little too hectic here to get a post (or several posts) online. This morning I pointed out to Elise that two weeks from today (Saturday, August 10), we will be in Duluth with our RV. Between now and then, she and I will fly back to Oregon, spend about a week packing and preparing, and then three days driving to Minnesota. That also means we're two weeks away from something resembling a first day of school. Holy cow, the preparation for that has really consumed us for the last few days. Probably procrastinated on that task a bit too much. Anyway, the purpose of this post is to tell you the story of last weekend, which we spent in Minneapolis. To set the scene, we left our cabin in northern Wisconsin on the morning of Saturday, August 3rd; we dropped excess stuff back in Duluth and then drove about three hours down to "the cities." Unbeknownst to the kids, our former nanny was on a flight from Colorado for a surprise visit...