We Survived the Caravan!

32 Days

20 RV’s

39 People

11 Campgrounds

10 Travel Days

9 Travel Briefs

15 National Monuments or State Parks

9 Socials

10 Organized Lunches or Dinners

9 Organized Tours

5 by Tour Bus / 2 by Jeep / 2 by Boat

1 Trail Ride by Mule/Horse

3 Museums Stopped at in Transit

2 Campfires

2 Train Excursions

2 Critter Race Games

1 White Elephant Game

3 Performances

Over 1400 Miles Traveled

(I think I got the numbers right but I may have missed an event or two!)

Now you can see why we were a bit too busy to keep up with the blog!  As we continue our experimental year, we are learning so much about full-time RVing as well as how we like to travel.  Jon got to calling the caravan a “survey course of the Southwest”.  We got to see an amazing amout of the country but we felt rushed at every stop. This experiment taught us that, since we are full-time now, we can go at a much slower pace.  We were able to get a taste of each of the monuments and we now know which ones we want to go back to and spend a lot more time exploring.

The benefits of paying for a caravan is that the company does all of the bookings, organizes all of the excursions, and gets great seats at events which can be a great advantage and, though everything did work out in the end, on this particular trip, the coordination of events drove Joanna nuts with last minute changes and lack of advance planning.

The other great aspect of touring with a group of people, especially for full-timers, is socialization.  Boy, did this trip have that covered!  We were at an organized social, dinner, get together, bus tour, you name it, nearly every night.  Though it was a bit forced, we did meet some very nice, warm, caring folks that we hope to meet down the road again. For Jonathan, the social aspect was a bit overwhelming but he hung in there to the bitter end.

Currently, we are hiding out in a state park in Southern Idaho for a week before heading to Port Angeles, WA for the next month.  We will be visiting friends and attending the Forest Storytelling Festival then we will SLOWLY investigate all the Olympic Peninsula has to offer before heading to Seattle for the holidays with our kids.  Over the next couple of months we will start posting about each of the national monuments we visited with lots of great pictures and more about the caravan.

Till then,