Lessons We’re Learning

By: Julianne Lillie 6/20/22

Today marks 12 days of being on the road and we are already on our 5th leg of our trip. (Yes, we are bookin’ it!) So that’s 5 times we’ve pack up and loaded with a 5-hour travel/roadschool day. Even though it hasn’t even been 2 weeks of fulltime RV living, we’ve learned several valuable lessons and rules we’re going to start living by. I wanted to share them with you so if any of you are crazy enough to follow in our footsteps, you won’t have to learn the hard way!

1. This isn’t vacation, this is living. We learned pretty quickly we can’t keep up the “vacation pace” very long. (Or the spending!) We all need down time, period. We also realized we need time to actually “live” like making grocery runs, doing laundry, working, cleaning, having school lessons, RV/truck maintenance projects, etc. And as my kids would say, “we need time to just chill.”

2. Weekends are needed. Jason and I realized it’s easy to get lost in the week as days tend to just blur together. So we’ve decided to make the weekend days “feel” more like a weekend. This past weekend we let the kids stay up later on Friday & Saturday nights and even had a campfire (despite the record-breaking HEAT we brought with us to Minnesota.) And we even pushed our mornings back a bit to allow time for everyone to sleep in a little. It was a nice break for us and the campfire seemed to really help make the night feel special.

3. Have to be flexible. And for those that know me, this one is personally tough. Routine is good, but it seems like we’ve been given every opportunity to practice our flexibility and patience in these 5 legs of the trip. As I type we are currently on the side of the road somewhere in Northern Minnesota with an RV tire blown. So here I am practicing patience and using this time to catch up on my blogging. And then we might even get to squeeze in an extra BONUS math lesson today… yippee! Might as well put these 2-3 hours of just sitting here to use and save time to play later! We have also already had to switch around some daily excursion plans due to the extreme temperatures we’re experiencing… high is 100 degrees in Minneapolis today! And due to the extreme flooding in Voyageur’s National Park, our 5 hour dinner cruise to Kettle Falls that was scheduled for tomorrow unfortunately was cancelled. So, we’ll get to put our heads together and come up with a plan B for Jaycie’s 13th Birthday experiencing Voyageur’s National park. So yes, we are learning that being flexible is just a required part of this nomadic adventure together!

4. Impromptu date nights are possible! First night in Minneapolis (last Friday night) Jason and I were craving sushi and that’s all we had to stay to start the kids groaning. So we looked it up and there was a sushi place literally 3 minutes from our KOA Campground. The kids insisted we go and leave them alone for an hour. So we locked them in and made sure their phone was turned all the way up and we headed out on a date night. We came back to the RV to some very pleasant surprises! The kids had cleaned the camper, Jett made us special ice cream sundae desserts (as pictured!), and Jaycie left us surprise water color art squares and bookmarks all throughout the camper for us to find which was fun! Just that one hour of time separated did us all some good and helped all of our attitudes.

5. We aren’t alone! It’s been fun meeting other families that are doing either the same or similar thing that we are doing. In Iowa, one of the families that we randomly starting playing the pick up baseball game with at the Field of Dreams ended up staying at the same RV campground as us nearly 45 minutes away. We got to talking with them later that day at the campground and turns out they also were in St. Louis for 2 days when we were! And they were heading back to Missouri to Roaring River where we just came from! They have already been to 36 of the 48 contiguous states and it was fun listening to their kids (similar in age to ours) talk about their favorite national parks. It was encouraging knowing that we aren’t the only crazies out there pursuing our dream!