On the Road Again
Back in April when we last provided an update, we had been parked at the same RV park in southern California since the start of March, with plans of staying a few more weeks. With the daily high temperature starting to regularly climb into the mid-90s, we were happy to finally roll out on May 1. Our destination was Charlotte’s Grandma’s house in Omaha over 1,600 miles away.
Normally when we’re pulling our home and nearly all of our worldly possessions down the highway, we don’t like to rush. Drive times of four hours or less per day and multi-day stops between drives are what we prefer. But with a lot of coronavirus-related uncertainty still in the air, we decided our best course of action would be to get to Omaha as quickly as we dared. This meant five straight driving days with four overnight stops along the way.
Every morning, Charlotte and I would work to empty the tanks, unhook the RV from electricity, water, and sewer, prep a cooler lunch, gather lots of snacks, pack everything away securely so it doesn’t break, bring in the slides, remove the chocks, check the tires, check the hitch, and then hitch up the truck and trailer before we would hit the road. Of course, the whole process is reversed upon arriving at the destination for the evening. It made for some long days.
We were thankful though to be hauling a fully self-contained bathroom behind us. We could stop wherever there was room to park, and never had to use a public restroom. No catching the ‘rona from a dirty shared toilet for us!
We made it to Omaha tired, but in one piece, and were able to back our RV into Grandma’s driveway. We feel very lucky that we had a house to live in and a place to park our rig just outside. Grandma moved out back in March, so we had the place to ourselves. Living in a house brought some nice things back into our lives, like a dishwasher, a big fridge, and and even an extra fridge and freezer in the garage. We were able to shop at Costco again! We stocked up on all sorts of beverages and ice cream bars which we never had room for in the RV. At the same time though, we missed our RV and all the little things we had done in order to make it our home.
We stayed in the house for over three months. While we were there, Izzy got to spend a lot of quality time with all of her grandparents, we threw a small family party for Izzy’s fourth birthday, we managed to arrange a few socially distanced backyard visits with friends, and we spent plenty of time working on the RV. Charlotte finished a lot of projects inside, putting up new decorations, coming up with better ways to organize and store our stuff, and prepping Izzy’s room and bed with the hope of actually getting her to sleep in there. Charlotte has promised to write her first blog post showing off all her hard work, hopefully sometime soon. I focused on maintenance items, like flushing out the water heater and re-greasing the trailer axle bearings.
Over the course of our stay in the house, we moved quite a bit of our stuff out of the RV and into the house. Moving back into the RV and cleaning up the house before we left was quite a chore and took much longer than we anticipated! Thanks again to my parents for helping out and keeping Izzy entertained and out of the way during the process.
We hit the road again on Sunday, August 9, heading for Forest City, Iowa, which is just a couple hours north of Des Moines. We stayed at a very nice RV park located on a small lake. The park has a single cabin available to rent, and we managed to book it for a few days so Charlotte’s parents could come out and join us. Izzy was excited to get to spend more time with her MorMor and Grandpa, and Charlotte and I were happy to finally share our RV lifestyle in-person.
While we were there we got in some fishing, some kayaking, some campfires, and caught a lot of gorgeous sunsets.
We stayed at the park for another week after MorMor and Grandpa had to head home. One day we visited nearby Pilot Knob state park. We had a picnic lunch, went for a hike around rare Iowa bog, and climbed the tower located at the top of Pilot Knob (for some reason hills were called knobs back in the 1920s).
That’s about the end of our time in Iowa, so I’d better wrap up this post. It feels good to be back out and about in the RV and to have adventures to share. I will try to keep updates coming a bit more frequently. But until then, we’ll see you down the road.