Travel Time

It’s an interesting perspective for me to actually have an open ended time line.  For 50 years I’ve had industrial jobs, and my wife has had public service kinds of positions, which always meant a limited amount of time available for family, community activities, hobbies, and travel.  So I’ve tended to force my family to follow along with my vacation schedule.  I’ve always loved to travel and wanted to get the most activity in for the time allowed, so we kept some pretty hectic schedules when on “vacation”.  I’ve tell my oldest daughter she has slept through more states with me driving than most people have been in.

Now for the first time since I was in school with a long summer vacation I actually don’t have to be anywhere at any time, unless I want to be.  So this next month (October 2016) we have the first real scheduled event since I retired July 31:  an RV rally at the West Virginia State Fair grounds in Lewisburg.  So we have a target date and location that we need to get to.

It was hard leaving our youngest daughter and her young family behind; we miss them dearly when we’re on the road and haven’t seen them nearly as much as we would like since they moved out of Texas.  It’s not that we don’t understand (we moved our family around far away from parents and other family members over the years), but it is still a downer when we’ve spent so much time with them and they are such an integral part of our lives.  The other side is heading back to my home state with lots of time to spend where and how we want.

We are starting to develop a pattern for how we tavel.  We’re both still not totally comfortable with just picking up and driving and then looking for a spot to stay, but we don’t want to be too tied down to campground reservations either.  For now, we’ve settled for reservations where we know we have an extended stay and a relatively fixed time frame.  That gives us a sense that we just have to get there and when we need to arrve.  We’re also comfortable with changing that up on the fly if we decide to change our plans.  We typically don’t think too much about where we are going to stay on our journey until we get close to a planned stop, usually then at the stop right before that one. 

Once we’ve gotten to one stop (could be for a day or several weeks), then we look at where to stay next. We use several different aps to pick what to do next.  Once we get an idea about the options, we depend on review and rating web sites to give us an idea about the quality of the park, and Google Earth to look the terrain over.  This is an evolving process and we may tweak it a bit as we get more experience with this lifestyle.  Here’s one example of how that has worked out in practice:

I knew we wanted to go back to Blackwater Falls State Park in Davis WV.  It’s a beautiful part of the state and it is claimed that the falls are the most photographed spot in the state.  (My opinion is that it’s either that or the New River Gorge Bridge area).  When we checked out the parks web site, we found that they dont take reservations at that park, and we were now deaing with a time frame for some other places and family we needed to see, as well as start back to central Texas for commitments there..  There is another park close by that does take reservations so we made them.  A second choice by location but we had a guaranteed spot.

We were arriving on a Monday and knew that most parks have a high load on weekend but can be almost deserted by Monday.  It occured to us on the drive to the area that we could check out the park we wanted and probably get a decent spot there since it is first come, first served in the campground.  We were able to do that and the picture of the Monaco on this site (as of November 2016) is from the camping spot.  We called the other park and cancelled our reservation once we had the desired location secured.  Just a note on doing it this way, you may have a deposit already on the secured spot and it may cost something to cancel it on such short notice.  In this case, there was no cancellation fee.  By staying flexible, we got the place we really wanted with only a couple of phone calls needed.  As they say, your milage may vary.

As a footnote, we are really starting to enjoy the freedom and flexiibilty that we have.  It’s not for everyone, but I’ve gotten very used to driving a 40 foot motorhome with an overall length of 65 feet, counting the towed Jeep behind us.  There are still some tense moments on narrow roads with 18 wheelers going by in the opposite direction, but we’ve got most everything we need right with us.  Our chlothes are in our own closet and we don’t have to pack suitcases when we move, and we sleep in our own beds every night.

Somewhere in West Virginia

November 2016