Month: March 2018
Typical Day

Typical Day

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Hey Guys! There are a few questions we get asked more frequently than others. We get asked all the time what a typical day is like for us and honestly, it’s probably not all that different from what your typical day looks like. We actually have three kinds of days…the typical day, the move day, and then the adventure day. In this post I’ll take you through what one of our more typical days looks like.

This, we’ve found from numerous people, is what most people think we do all day. Camp. We don’t camp…not really. Now, we love to stay in state parks, but you won’t find us hanging out outside by the campfire every night. It’s rare that we have a campfire. So, what do we do all day?

Our day starts off like yours. Jerl gets up around 6’ish and I get up around 7’ish. Our cats would like us to get up about 4’ish and feed them. That doesn’t happen. Sadi (you can see her in the pic above) is my shadow all morning until she’s fed. She’s a foodie. She fits in well. The very first things we do are make the bed and get dressed.

And then I start on my chores. Laundry is done Tuesday through Friday. I’ll do a couple of loads a day. Our combo washer/dryer is smaller than your average residential unit so it takes me more loads to get done what most of you can do in just two or three loads. I don’t mind it. I’m glad I don’t have to use the RV park laundry facility or find a laundry mat.

By this time Sadi has had about all she can take of waiting and starts to passive aggressively demand food. The longer it takes for me to feed her…the more demanding she gets. Ha! I feed both of our little furry maniacs and clean the litter box.

I let the boys sleep until 8:30 am while I’m doing my morning routine and then I wake them up.

School starts by 10 am. They each start the morning at their own pace and as long as school is going by 10 am I let them do what they need to do to get the day going. The Alex and Nicholas like to do school on the big bed while Charles likes to sit on the couch to do it. We use a curriculum called Switched On Schoolhouse. It’s a computer based program that tells them what they need to get done each day. Each morning they network into my computer where everything is. That way I can keep track of who’s doing what and how they did that day. Now that they’re getting to the higher grades, SOS will kick any essay questions or math questions that require them to write out an answer for me to grade. Luckily, it also has the answer there and tells me exactly what to look for. We supplement SOS with Rosetta Stone for language classes, workbooks for logic, and Charles will have an online writing class this next school year. Jerl sits at the dinette to work and I’m just all over the place doing stuff that needs to be done.

Lunch is anytime between 11 am and 1 pm. We’ll each stop when we’re at a good spot and make our own lunch. Anytime this involves meat, Magnus assumes it’s for him. He usually gets a morsel or two.

When work and school are done for the day we either run some errands…

get in a quick hike…

or we start dinner. Sometimes it’s a combination of those things and sometimes it’s just one. It really depends on where we are and how big our “to see” list is. Dinner usually happens anywhere between 5 pm and 7 pm-ish.

Our evening activities vary as well. We’ll either play a family game,

or the boys will play a video game,

or we all go our own ways…into our separate spaces to do our own things. I like to read…Magnus likes to help me while demanding to be loved on.

So, there it is! Not too exciting is it? Y’all are probably reminded of your own daily schedules a bit. Ours is the same as most family’s…just in our home-on-wheels instead of a stick-n-bricks home. I hope I covered everything y’all were curious about. If not drop me a note, shoot me an email, or comment below and I’ll try to answer any questions in a future post!

Thanks for spending the day with us!

See y’all down the road!
Rescheduling, Repairs, and Recouping

Rescheduling, Repairs, and Recouping

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Hey Guys! We’ve been back in Missouri for two months now.

We got back to Missouri Sunday, December 31 just before midnight. It was a very long 15 hour drive day! We had Monday to recoup from the drive and then Jerl had an eye appointment Tuesday then surgery Wednesday. This was his second eye surgery in less than five months. He’s still healing, but it’s going much better this time. He had to have another gas bubble inserted into his eye…this time during the surgery. It was much less painful for him that way. The bubble finally completely disappeared Tuesday, March 7. He was pretty excited that it was gone before we took back off on our adventuring.

Mother Nature greeted us the week we got back with some snow. It was pretty, but it kept us from getting our home-on-wheels to the Ford dealership for engine work.

Once the weather cooperated and Jerl was able to drive, we made the three hour drive to the dealership where we had to leave our home for repairs. I’m not going to lie…it was really hard to drive off and leave our home there. We’d heard some pretty gnarly horror stories of things that had happened to other people’s home-on-wheels while they were on dealership parking lots getting repair work done. We had to prove we’d had proper maintenance done on the engine (regular oil changes), but after that Ford was great to work with. We ended up needing a whole new engine and catalytic converter. Not from anything we did…apparently the engine was malfunctioning from the start and we were lucky it lasted as long as it did. The dealership never seemed to be bothered by our many calls for updates and always answered all of our questions.

With our home-on-wheels staying three hours away, we had to move out. I didn’t move every single thing out, but I moved out everything we might want or need and anything that I didn’t want to lose just in case something happened like a fire, or theft, or a storm…you never know…and y’all know I’m a planner. We ended up being out of our home for about six weeks!

Luckily, we were able to stay with my (Jennie’s) mom and dad. Our furrbabies made themselves right at home. I think they kind of liked all of the space…and the carpet. They really liked the carpet. We don’t have any carpet in our home-on-wheels. It was really funny to watch them roll on the floor and spread out. We ended up getting a runner to put in the RV for them and they’ve been enjoying that too. The things we do for our furry family members…

This unexpected detour really threw a kink in all of my planning. The Grand Western Loop was cut short. Big time. So, I had to rework the schedule. We won’t have time to do the entire loop I’d originally planned. It’s kind of working in our favor though. We’re going to be spending more time in California than we’d originally planned…which means we’ll get to see more places! We’ll be breaking the Grand Western Loop into two smaller loops with a winter in Florida in between. The blue loop is our revised Grand Western Loop, the red is our Florida winter, and the green is our…well, I haven’t named that loop yet…it’s the other part of the original #grandwesternloop. And yes, we are booked all the way through the blue route and most of the red route. Florida is another hard state to book for those of us who are under 55 and have kiddos…and wear clothes. The state parks book eleven months in advance and boy howdy…let me tell you, they book up the day they become available…usually within hours!! I still have two more state parks to book, but I have to wait for the eleven month mark to do it.

The boys enjoyed an actual winter…for about a week. And then they were over it. None of them complained when I told them we would be spending next winter in Florida. Ha!

We’ve enjoyed frequent family game nights! If you don’t have 5 Minute Dungeon, you’re missing out. It’s a fun, fast-paced, short game where you work as a team to defeat the dungeon.

Alex and Nicholas had fun helping my (Jennie’s) mom and dad down at their shop. Nicholas helped Grammy in the office while Alex helped Grandpa out in the shop. I think Alex kind of loved wearing Grandpa’s shirt. They both did stuff I used to do when I was growing up. It’s kind of funny to hear them talk about their day at work.

Oh! I’m learning to make bracelets. It’s something for me to do to pass the time…I’m thinking about eventually opening an Etsy shop for it. I’ve had so much fun picking out beads and learning a new craft.

We signed up for UniversalYums…it’s been sooo fun! Every month we get a box filled with snacks and every month it’s from a different country! It comes with this great little booklet that tells us about each snack plus some facts and games about the country of the month. Plus, you get clues as to where the box will be from the next month!

When we got our home-on-wheels back, we found out some of the plumbing pipes had frozen and busted. We thought we’d winterized it before taking it up to the Ford dealership, but we didn’t get it done fast enough (all that snow and ice) and the water filter busted which made it impossible to blow all of the water out of the lines…so…we had busted pipes. We had to take our home-on-wheels to an RV dealership for some more repairs. They worked their magic pretty quickly. We’re still moving back in as I’m writing this post.

We definitely didn’t plan on starting 2018 like this, but that’s ok. Honestly, I think it’s going to work out even better for us. We head back out this Saturday, March 10 to get back to our adventuring…so, I guess I’ll…

See y’all down the road!

Mad Dash To Missouri

Mad Dash To Missouri

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Hey Guys!! Are you ready for more of the story?

It took us three days to drive the 1,400 miles or so to get back to Missouri. We were in sunny and warm Arizona when we started out. We said goodbye to Lost Dutchman State Park early Friday and took off for Las Cruces, NM. Now, there are three ways to get from Phoenix to Las Cruces. One path goes up and over and takes you up the steep Colorado Plateau, one path takes you straight east through Globe, NM and some steep grade mountain passes and the other path takes you down to Tucson and then over.

We chose the down and around route to avoid the steep grades since our engine was acting up. We ended up at the Hacienda RV Resort the first night after a fairly uneventful day. We’ve stayed at…I don’t know…close to 100 RV parks and this was the first one to give us treats for our cats! I thought it was super cute and the cats appreciated the treat. I don’t know how the RV park is other than the treats. We got in right before they closed and we left before anyone was in the office the next day.

We started out even earlier on day two. We had a long day ahead of us and there would be some elevation gain that would slow us down. Our route took us through El Paso. You’re looking at Mexico in the picture above on the left. We’ve heard a lot of…not so great…things about El Paso. We didn’t stop. We just drove on through. It’s a big city and took forever to get through, but we made it with no issues. The engine was behaving.

We got to our RV Park in Abilene pretty late that night. It was so dark on the road we weren’t really sure we were in the right spot at first. Thank goodness the office had the forethought to put us in an easy in and out spot. It was dark when we got there and dark when we left.

We woke up to ice on day three. We’ve driven in a blizzard, we’ve driven in wind storms, and torrential rain…but, Guys…driving on a sheet of ice was a whole new ball game.

We crept along at around 20mph and noticed our windshield wipers were freezing up so we thought we’d be smart…and safe…and stop at a gas station to recoup and fix a few things. We didn’t know we were driving onto a thick sheet of ice until it was too late. Our only course of action was to go with it and try not to run into anything. We slid past the gas tanks with the cars…we slid past the propane fill up…and somehow we got stopped without hitting anything. I think Jerl and I were in shock at this point and  sat wondering how the heck we were going to get out of the ice covered parking lot. The only out we had a chance at making it to was the one in the pic above and we watched car after car slip and slide up and down it. My (Jennie’s) dad had the idea to use cat litter to get enough traction to get out. Luckily, the gas station had one bag of it left. It worked and we made it out of the parking lot an hour and a few heart-attacks later.

It took us four hours to go 90 miles that morning.

We made it though. It took us 15 hours that third day to make it to Missouri, but we made it safely. It was the most stressful day of driving we’ve had in the three years we’ve been nomads…I’m getting all stressed out again just thinking about that day.

I’ll leave y’all here and next week I’ll give you all the updates and the plans for the rest of the year!

See y’all down the road!

#itsnotallfunandgames