Adjusting to Full Time Family Travel

Wow! We’ve been busy! We officially sold our house in December after doing a lot of work on it. We bought our travel trailer in Iowa, took it back to Kentucky, and moved into it. We spent a month trying to get settled and visiting with our close family and friends. We have spent about half of our time since buying the camper in late December trying to figure it out. There’s been a bit of a learning curve. It wouldn’t be as bad but things have continued to break and go wrong. We have gotten to the point now that we begin each day wondering what we will be fixing today.

We started our trip with a drive to Nashville. It snowed and rained the entire time. We were only supposed to stay for a day in Nashville but that quickly became a week. We had a minor leak in one of the front lights because of a rusty screw. We didn’t know it was minor so we extended our stay to two days to fix it. Then we found out our water pump was leaking after using everything for a couple of days. It was just a bad connection on a hose. An easy fix but we needed a day to do it. While Michael was at the store buying the hose, I took the kids to the campground play area. Ivy ran back to grab something and the front door lock broke. Thankfully we have another outside door in the bathroom. Michael picked up the stuff to replace the lock too. We decided to just extend to a full week because of the discounted rate and the fact that our luck had been questionable.

I want to say that Nashville wasn’t all doom and gloom. We also had a few nice days. We went to the Parthenon, ate barbeque, and visited a couple of the city parks. We got settled in more to living in the RV. On our last night in Nashville, our microwave stopped working while making a quick dinner in it. We still haven’t bothered to replace it.

We left Nashville and headed to Arkansas. We spent a couple of days at our first campground. It was the best. It was so quiet and I felt so calm there. Things continued to go wrong but that was the first time that I really felt like it might be ok after all. That feeling was short-lived. We left the next day to go do a weigh-in of the camper. Michael said that he couldn’t drive our rig because of sway and was hoping it was a weight issue. It was barely over the weight he was hoping for and he didn’t think it was the issue. We spent a couple of nights at a glorified lot of a campground near the highway. We got rid of some weight anyway just to make sure. We also tried to load our camper better.

We decided to continue our way to Texas. We stopped for a night in Texarkana before continuing on to Dallas. Michael decided that we should just stay off of the major interstates because of the sway. He thinks we may need to buy a bigger towing vehicle. Financially buying a truck stinks but I guess that’s what we will need to do if we wish to continue our RV adventures. As many issues as we have had already, it’s very hard to put a ton more money into it. I’ll be honest. There were a few times I thought of throwing in the towel and just picking a spot to live for a while.

Camper life has been such a rollercoaster. We were not nearly prepared enough for the amount of drama that was going to drop into our laps the minute we hit the road. We have heard a lot of people saying that you don’t feel settled and comfortable with this life for at least six months because it takes time to work out all of the issues. I don’t know if we have six months of this chaos in us. We have days that we love the experiences we’re having. Then other days we are done.

We continued on to Glen Rose, Texas to take Octavia to Dinosaur World and the whole family to Dinosaur Valley State Park. We really enjoyed our time in both locations. We had a few days in Dallas planned before heading to the next location but we didn’t get through most of our plans because of the weather. We are currently running south to get away from the winter storm. On the upside, we found out that our weight distribution was set up wrong by the dealership. After changing some things, it tows better. It’s not perfect and we likely still need a truck but it’s much less scary. We can drive on the interstate now. It made running from snow much easier.

There is a possibility that I will be taking a contract job shortly for a few months. This will have us stationary in one place to give us time to adjust and plan our next move. I will let you know more about that when we know more. I just wanted to take a moment to update everyone about what and how we have been doing. I will be posting about some of the places we have visited in the near future.

As always, Happy Travels!