This is our family:
From left to right there’s me, then Milo (17), Abe (7), Dave, Gus (14), and Ari (19). We also have three dogs, who often travel with us, and 2 cats, who don’t. My husband, Dave, is a high school math teacher in his non-traveling life. And I’m Gretchen; I homeschool all those kids, and I also blog about our house at Boxy Colonial.
(Until the travel side of things started to demand its own space, I blogged about travel there, too. You can find all those posts here.
And this is the blog where we talk about all the travel and RV related things we do.
I wanted a place to record all the things we do and places we go for us and the kids to look back on later, and also in hopes that other people out there might find it helpful. When I write about travel, I write the sorts of things I like to read in other people’s blogs: I like to read travelogue-esque accounts of the places people go, see their pictures, and hear what they liked and didn’t like, what planning tips they can share, what they would do differently next time. Basically, I like to hear stories and personal experiences that are different from what I’d find on the website or in a guidebook.
I guess in a way the idea for this blog was born back when Dave almost quit teaching. It’s a long story, but, to sum up, there are good and bad things about teaching, and for awhile the bad seemed to be outweighing the good. Resumes were sent. There were interviews. There were no good job offers. There was second guessing and soul searching. And, eventually, he decided that he was in the teaching thing for the long haul after all (and, lately, good is triumphing again. He’s really enjoying it these days. Knock wood).
We’ve always traveled a fair amount with the kids, but after this near miss with a giant life change, we decided we needed to start taking full advantage of one of the best parts of a teaching career: summer.
We started planning a massive, summer-long road trip for 2017. Then we started thinking maybe we should take a practice trip summer of 2016…maybe just three or four weeks. Then we started thinking that hotels get awfully expensive when you stay in them every night for weeks at a time, especially when there are six of you and you can’t fit in a standard room.
Then we started thinking about a travel trailer.
And then we bought one.
It was a 2010 Passport 2910bh, which we bought mainly because there were four bunks in back for the kids, and options get pretty limited when you have more than two kids. And we bought a big blue van to tow it with. We call it Big Blue.
And then we bought a new trailer, a Jayco Octane SL 272:
Now we have five years of RV travel behind us. We followed up our giant cross country trip with an also giant trip up the east coast and to Atlantic Canada, and we’ve done a ton of shorter trips, too. You can read about them all here!
Thanks so much for stopping by!
