Omaha

April 14 – June 1, 2021

RVers like to say, “Home is where you park it,” but heading to Nebraska feels like coming home for us. We pulled out of St. Joseph, Missouri for the relatively short drive to Omaha. It was a quiet Wednesday morning, which was good as we blocked three lanes of traffic to get the trailer backed into Charlotte’s grandma’s driveway.

Mid-April was a bit sooner than we had initially planned on arriving, but with Charlotte’s arm still broken, we decided to skip some site seeing and spend some extra time in town.

We ended up staying in town for seven weeks, which gave us time to see friends and family.

We had a few celebrations, including my dad’s birthday.

We hosted Mother’s Day.

And we threw Izzy an early birthday party since we would be back on the road on the actual date. She ended up having two parties in the same day! One in the morning with some of her friends and another one in the evening with family.

We also got to see a couple of families we made friends with out on the road, when they were on their way through town. We even hosted a small birthday party for one of the dads.

Izzy also got to spend quality time with her grandparents.

Here’s some more stuff that happened too.

In one of our bigger (in terms of both size and price) Costco impulse purchases, we snagged a display model inflatable canoe for a nice discount.

Izzy and Charlotte also took a quick trip down to Kansas City with MorMor to get in some shopping at IKEA.

In addition to all this fun, Charlotte and I also tackled some RV projects. It’s quite a bit easier to work on things in the rig when you’re not also trying to live in it.

I installed this 200 watt solar panel, a Victron charge controller, a couple of circuit breakers, a cutoff switch, and a battery monitoring shunt and display. Later, I replaced the lead acid battery that came from the factory with a 100 amp hour lithium battery.

I also upgraded quite a few components on the trailer suspension as we were slightly over the rated weight limit. I installed higher rated bearings, bigger leaf springs, a new equalizer with crossmember, and connected everything with new heavy duty shackles and wet bolts.

Charlotte lightened up the interior by painting almost all of the cabinets, and removed the drawers from the bunk room and replaced them with with a keyboard and mouse tray as well as a spot to park the desk chair. They new setup works really well and is probably a better than what we had in the house.

All too soon, it was time to head out. While we would have liked to have stayed longer, getting to a wedding meant we had a firm deadline. We’ll cover that one next time. Until then, see you down the road.