We’re 4 days away from leaving on our big 6-month RV trip, so we should probably have at-least a vague idea where we’re headed. Plans will likely change, but here’s what we’re currently thinking.
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In order to make our 6-month trip more financially sound, we have been planning on renting out our house. This has been one of the more stressful parts of preparing for this trip. Fortunately, we’ve recently found some great tenants, and we couldn’t be more relieved.
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The Airstream Sport 22 unfortunately comes out of the factory with very low ground clearance. The grey water tank hangs down below the frame of the camper at the rear, where it drags pulling into and out of driveways that have more than a negligible slope. More than once we’ve winced as the tank made a terrible grinding sound as it dragged across the asphalt on the way out of a gas station parking lot. It was time to give this Airstream a lift.
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After returning from our 2 week Olympic Peninsula trip we spent two weeks at home before we got the itch to get out camping again. We headed out to Mt Hood National Forest for what was supposed to be an off-grid-campsite scouting trip… but things didn’t go exactly as planned…
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I’m going to try to get in the habit of tallying our miles and expenses for after-trip summaries. This is a summary of our 2-week trip up and around the Olympic Peninsula in Washington last month.
Our two-week Olympic Peninsula trip was our longest trip yet in our Airstream travel trailer with the girls. The trip was long enough that we could start to get a bit more of a feel about what long term life on the road might be like with our young kids. Here’s a few things that we noticed.
Our GTRV camper van came fresh from Craigslist with two open cell lead acid deep cycle house batteries installed in a sealed battery box in the rear of the van (and vented to the outside). These two batteries provided roughly 100 amp-hours of capacity. In this phase of the electrical system upgrades, we’re going to replace these two batteries with lithium batteries, which will double the capacity to 200 amp-hours and reduce the weight from about 100 pounds to 60 pounds (that might not sound like much, but since we’re just about at the van’s weight capacity when we are towing Wobbles (the Airstream), every pound is important to us. We’ll also be adding a battery monitor (the same one we installed in the Airstream).
For the second stop on our 2 week Olympic Peninsula trip we drove 1 hour from Dosewallips State Park up to Fort Worden State Park in Port Townsend. Since it was a Monday, we didn’t make reservations and assumed we’d have no problem finding a site. As it turned out when we arrived there were only 2 sites available for the 4-day stretch that we wanted to stay (at-least at the more popular beach campground), so we considered ourselves lucky to have snagged one! We loved Fort Worden and the surrounding Port Townsend– there was so much to explore that we couldn’t see it all in our 4 day visit.
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During short weekend camping trips, not having a phone or internet connection can actually be part of the pleasure of getting away from the hustle and bustle of daily life. However, for longer trips staying connected is essential for communications, navigation, planning, etc. For our travels, I researched various options (WiFi, cellular & satellite). In this post I’ll tell you what we chose and why.
We’ve started our next “test trip” with the girls in our new camping rig, “Wobbles” the Airstream and “Dimes” the van (which has recently been given this name by our 4-year-old). We’re exploring the Olympic Peninsula and Olympic National park for 2+ weeks. Since our girls don’t make driving long distances particularly easy or pleasant, we’re trying to break up the drives as much as possible. Therefore, we reserved the last available campsite at Dosewallips State Park, part way up the peninsula, in order break up our drive up to the North-Eastern corner of the peninsula.
