By Barry Zander, Edited by Monique Zander, the Never-Bored RVers
Snow begins to cover the creek bed on our property, a beautiful scene that keeps us indoors
A month away from our six-month cross-country voyage from the mountains of the Golden State, California, to the historic shores of the East Coast and then up into Canada. In preparation for the upcoming adventure, when it’s not snowing (like today and, according to the five weather apps on my phone, for the next two days), we’ve been cleaning out our 28-foot travel trailer and sorting through things to decide what to take and where to place everything.
And that reminds me of a warning learned through experience. Don’t put bottles in the upper cabinets, and especially not in the rear of the RV. We bought a bottle of wine and a bottle of balsamic vinegar in Oliver, British Columbia. A few miles down the road we hit a nasty bump … it took us hours to clean up the mess.
By way of background, we lived in a 22-footer for a year before moving up to a 28-footer with a slide-out. We had sold our home and 95 percent of “ our stuff” in 2006, and having never stepped foot in an RV except at an RV show, we hitched up and traveled for five years, stopping 403 times on our random-but-planned routes.
We could afford the long vacation by virtue of putting the profits from the home sale (after paying off the mortgage and buying the trailer and truck) into CDs that, at the time, were paying us 5 or 5½ percent. I tell you all this, because if it were me reading this, that’s a question I would have.
Since hopefully you’ll be with us on our journey over the ensuing months, I want to let you share as much of the experience as you can digest.
IT ALL STARTS WITH PLANS
As I said, it’s snowing, which is keeping us inside. In the past few weeks I’ve been finalizing editing our Alaska blogs from 2010, which had hundreds, if not thousands of readers, getting them ready for the website I’ll launch in the next week or two. Meanwhile, Monique has been doing her due-diligence by researching routes and places that we will embark upon in the days ahead.
In past years, her planning has been achieved mostly by pouring over maps, checking out brochures, magazine articles and tourist handouts, and asking me to do research on the web. That’s changed recently.
While holed up in our woodsy cabin setting, we bought her one of those “computers for seniors” that you might have seen advertised. Up until the moment I set up this sleek contraption, Monique had probably logged in 5 minutes total time on my computer. She hated it!
But, almost from the moment she got into her new “computer phase” of life, she was hooked – not for long periods of time, but she has taken to it like a bird to a suet block, an analogy to something we see every day here.
We are in the “gettin’ ready stage” of the trip. It actually began when we did our “Shake-Up Cruise” two weeks ago, as described in our previous blog. Or even before that, last March, when we agreed to join a Fantasy RV Tours caravan from Maine into the Canadian Maritimes. With that commitment, we planned our takeoff date and route up there.
There are lots of considerations to take into account at this point. For instance, when northern parks open for the season (May 1st), what are the must-see attractions (we’ll spend a week outside of Washington, D.C.), and how do we zigzag through New England to hit every state and maximize our time in each.
A Cooper's Hawk outside my window
What we do know is that we will be tripping over shoes in the TT for the next six months. I won’t bother to take the satellite dish with us, since we won’t be in any place long enough to hassle with it. And despite living in only about 200 square feet of floor space plus the GMC diesel, Monique will put up with my weirdness — experience from the five years on the road tells me she probably won’t kill me. Best of all, she will provide input and her editing skills to these blogs to make them all-the-more fun and readable.
Tedious though it may be, life gets more exciting by the day as the hitch-up date nears. We can’t wait to resume our adventures as the “Never-
Bored RVers,” We’ll see you on down the road.
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© All photos by Barry Zander. All rights reserved