Getting Ready

We’ve had a year to think about this trip in the background while we’ve finished up school and jobs as well as plan our wedding. Those things have taken so much of our time that there isn’t much in the way of a plan yet. Although part of our plan is not have too much of a plan. 

The RV needed a few repairs: we removed the A.C. off the roof because we were worried that the roof can’t support it (maybe we’ll write another post about that), we replaced the fresh water tank, an air hose and some belts in the engine. We purchased new freshwater and blackwater hoses and a 2.5 gallon gas can. We also put a few things for the RV on our wedding registry, including collapsible food storage, organizers, camping chairs, a hammock, a road atlas, bungees, a water filter and more. The last thing we did before loading up was to have a new radio and speakers installed so that we had a sound system and radio that worked. Of course, we want some tunes and podcasts for the trip, but also having a working radio for road information seemed useful. It was really a quality of life as well as a safety investments. 

We’d been working on doing all of those preparations as well as getting ready to move out of our apartment for most of the summer, however wedding planning was also taking a lot of our time. We had a week between the wedding and when we needed to move out of the apartment and it was a bit of a whirlwind. Kathleen’s parents have kindly given us space in a very large closet to store some of our possessions, especially some of our wedding gifts that were very much not intended for RV life. All summer we were making piles for wedding, Eugene, RV, Craigslist and Goodwill. It was much harder than we thought. There were a lot of things that it seemed silly to drive 5 hours and store but it also seemed silly to buy them again when we got back. Somehow we eventually got it done. We’ll see when we get back if we made the right choices… 

After moving out of the apartment Andreas’s mom let us stay with her for a few nights so that we could pack up the RV. We used the RV to haul a lot of stuff as we moved out and had been stashing RV pile things through out the RV wherever they fit. We used the entirety of Andreas’s mom’s garage and some of her driveway to completely unpack everything, make some more decisions about things that we wanted to leave behind, and then pack things into logical places back in the RV. If people are interested in how this all fit in, we can do another "RV tour" type blog. Let us know! 

As for our plan: we know we want to go to Alaska first and we want to hit all the national parks. Other than that, our plan is to relax, enjoy ourselves, and see how long we can go.