Preparing to Head West

Have you ever felt the need to press pause on your life?

Maybe you realize that work has taken over and become a bigger part of your life than you had ever anticipated it would be. Maybe you feel like you are on a hamster wheel just spinning around doing the same things day in and day out. Marriage, raising children, work, life have all become mundane chores and you can see your kids literally growing before your eyes.

We were feeling all of those things last summer and inexplicably found ourselves the owners of a new-to-us camper with a half-baked idea to spend the month of September driving cross country.

If you have known me for any length of time, you probably aren't surprised that I would pursue this kind of adventure without much a plan. And, if you know Daniel, you know that this whole endeavor is somewhat outside of his comfort zone.

And yet, even he was feeling the tug to do something a little different with our lives. Perhaps because of watching from a distance as one of his good friends from high school experienced a child going through cancer. That kind of thing can make you reevaluate where you are, even if it isn't happening to you directly.

We were feeling that tug to make our relationship and our family a bigger priority, and so we bought a camper.

It may have seemed like we did this on a whim, but we had been toying with the idea for awhile. Even if the actual purchase did happen rather quickly which officially set a plan in motion for September.

I spent countless hours planning the actual route of our trip and figuring out storage solutions for packing the camper, while Daniel worked on the mechanics of fixing things that we hadn't anticipated (the biggest things being having to replace the hot water heater AND the axles on the camper).

Thank goodness for Amazon and two-day delivery (even on camper axels!), and also having a good friend who was willing to help (who happened to have the right skills and equipment to make this happen in our allotted time).

Besides these projects, Daniel spent countless hours doing mechanical maintenance on our new-to-us tow vehicle (the biggest project being replacing the radiator with a Koyo Aluminum Racing Radiator). In addition he made sure fluids in the vehicle were all new, he replaced the parking brake, installed trailer brakes and a front trailer hitch for our bikes. While I helped some as assistant grease monkey, most of this work rested heavily on his shoulders.

Our original plan was to be gone for the entire month of September. We bought both the camper and tow vehicle on July 28, 2018, so we only had a month to really prepare for the trip. Daniel was working full time during the entire month of August and pulled many late nights getting the vehicles ready to travel.

I'm not going to lie, August was a tough month. And August quickly turned into September. And Daniel was still doing work on the camper. As the days ticked by, I was mentally marking things off of our extensive list of places to visit. It was a taxing time for both of us, and at times we weren't sure we would actually leave at all.

And on top of everything we had going on, we managed to get the camper stuck on our driveway (which has a retaining wall that drops off several feet on one side). This was a nerve wracking experience and ended up requiring us to think outside of the box. If you missed it, or just want to relive our experience, the video we made is below...

It was probably a good thing that a good friend of ours helped give me some perspective by pulling me aside and reminding me that if anything went wrong on the trip, Daniel would never forgive himself. I needed to hear that, but it was a hard thing to hear at the time.

Each day that we delayed our departure meant more stops were going to have to come off of our list of things to see.

When I was creating our original itinerary the trip log quickly reached the 6,000 mile mark. As I continued to tweak and adjust the route, I found the process to be quite exhausting and wondered if our proposed route was even practical. We would be traveling with a 10-year-old dog and two little boys, ages 6 and 3. Could we really do a trip of this magnitude? Would there be mutiny?

I revised our proposed route several times and when I thought it was manageable, Daniel chimed in and said we should visit the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone. In the end we ended up driving about 5,500 miles, though we did have to mark several things off our list due to time delays including Zion, Canyonlands, and Rocky Mountain National Park (we had already decided that the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, slot canyons, and Sand Dunes National Park weren't going to make the cut this time). 

Daniel was committed to being in Logan, Utah for the week of Sept 16-20 for work, so we couldn't delay indefinitely (unless threw in the towel on a family trip and he flew up without us). To say we were under stress about this would be an understatement. I did my best not to nag and he did his best to finish. We were by no means perfect at this, and both of us were beyond ready to leave by the time we actually pulled out of our driveway on September 6.

My next blog post will be about our early travel days. Stay tuned for recaps of where we ended up visiting during this 25-day trip west.

*Please know that I am not saying you should out and buy a camper if your life isn't what you envisioned it would be. But I would like to encourage you to make changes, if necessary, to have a fulfilling life and not one where you are just doing the bare minimum to get by.