Allens Adventure of a Lifetime

What do we do now?       We started a master plan of where we wanted to be and when, but that is constantly changing. One of the biggest changes is that we decided to go to Michigan in September instead of over Thanksgiving / Christmas break. Almost all of our family lives within an hour drive of each other and we were really looking forward to seeing them again. Why change the dates though? After enduring 35 Michigan winters, we have seen enough snow for a lifetime - that's why we moved south! Our usual route to Michigan travels on smaller back roads through Virginia, West Virginia and Ohio, and is about 750 miles. We wanted to stay on more major highways while I got comfortable driving the RV, so we opted to take I-40 straight west across North Carolina, then get on I-75 around Knoxville and take that straight north to Michigan. That added probably 100-150 extra miles, but it was worth it for my peace of mind. We planned on averaging a few hundred miles of driving ...

The spark that lights a fire      “I bet we could do this full time...” I made this comment to Katie as we were finishing up what we called our trip of a lifetime. She had just graduated from dental hygiene school, which was quite intense - basically a full time job with very little time off for vacations. She wanted to go out west and visit some of the national parks, as she had done with her grandparents when she was a kid.        But how were we going to make that happen? I like hiking/backpacking and back country camping, but that’s not her cup of tea. Did I mention we have 4 children within 5 years of each other? In the summer of 2019 their ages were 10, 9, 7 and 5. Two girls, two boys. I think since we started having kids we have gone camping MAYBE a total of three weekends. So tent camping wasn’t really something we wanted to do for a month either. So we did what any rational human being would do...         Well I ...