Road Trip NY VT PA

Home is where the heart is.

We just spent 2 weeks traveling about 1,800 miles to go to a trail race in Vermont, meet up with friends in the Poconos and just generally enjoy a road trip adventure and time outside. This blog started with a road trip back in 2006 and things are certainly a little different now. We used to sleep in the Saturn by flipping the back seats down and putting our legs in the trunk! Now we have a full size SUV towing a 20 ft travel trailer to accommodate the 3 additional people in our family. We looked at trailers for 3 years before we decided on the RPOD 176, mainly because it has full-size bunk beds and the profile of the trailer makes it very easy to tow. After going on a half dozen trips, I think we made a great decision, although there has been a lot to learn about RVs, warranties, hookups, towing and wifi. M works most of the time we are traveling, which is a slight challenge when it comes to scheduling travel days and where we are going to stop, but there's no way we could travel this much without his employer allowing him to work remotely. So we will find the wifi!

Play. Ground.

One thing I love about our trips now is I usually get really good sleep. This trailer is really tiny. Definitely just for sleeping and shelter in bad weather. Therefore, we are forced to spend a lot of time outside. We do a lot of the same types of activities that we do at home, but the eating, playing with toys, reading and hanging out happens outside a lot more. We all usually go to bed when it gets dark. M reads Harry Potter by headlamp and it's so relaxing to fall asleep with all the summer time insect noises. Max is our daily alarm at 6am, no matter what we are doing or where we are, but Laurel will sleep in until 8 or 9. Laurel became a really strong swimmer this year and she can spend hours in a pool or lake, which I think contributes to her long hours of sleep. After a tough year in third grade, she seems to be back to her creative, enthusiastic self and played for hours with her brothers or with any kids she happens to meet at the campgrounds. Speaking of other kids at campgrounds, we met a family with three kids who is hiking the Appalachian Trail together. It was fun to talk with their teenagers, Max introduced himself to them in the pool one day, but I wondered how much of the trail they would remember. I absolutely obsessed over those section maps along our way (we carried paper way back then, lol). Even now, when I step onto the AT, I can summon some memories of what it was like in 2007.

Life is better with a flower crown.

One of the best parts of this trip was that we were able to arrange a few days together with my friend Leah and her family. Despite living 3,000 miles apart, we've managed to keep our friendship going, even growing I think, for 15 years. Last year we we had the guts to get our spouses and kids altogether in a cabin for 3 days, despite none of them really knowing each other at all. If I didn't write about that trip, I should, because it rained the entire time and I'm talking the heavy summer rain that falls from the sky and rises up from the mossy, flooded yards and mists through the trees and floods the river and knocks out the power to the entire county, which knocks out the well pump. But luckily you can still flush the toilet by putting a bucket outside to collect water from the overflowing gutters. Adventures! And yet, I think all of us considered that a good trip. So we did it again, in the Poconos this time, and it didn't rain the entire time. We spent a lot of time at the lake at Tobyhanna State Park, with our five kids swirling around us casting Harry Potter spells on each other and fighting over sand pails. The cabin had a comically long couch in the basement. A sort of party room set up, and most of the kids slept there, all laid out in a line. We arrived in a vulnerable state, having just come from the Vermont 100 race, and that deserves a post of its own, because that was M's 11th hundred miler and no, it doesn't get easier and that doesn't just refer to the runner. But they thankfully offered to cook the first dinner (we split meal prep, which is a very good idea for these types of trips). We made a lot of campfires and stayed up too late talking and took turns playing with the kids. While I was there I realized we don't do a lot of socializing with other families anymore...we do a lot of splitting up and taking one or two kids to various things. The five of us spend a lot of time together, but not with other people usually.

We finished out the trip with 2 days at Hyner Run, one of our favorite camping spots. This was an excellent place to wind down and then the last leg home was only 3 1/2 hours of driving. Nobody felt tired and there wasn't a ton of stuff to clean up when we got home because we had cleaned everything in the camper pretty thoroughly and had been doing laundry along the way. This trip was kind of a test to see how we could live on the road for a few weeks, It went so well, we are all looking forward to our next trip.