Prepping to Leave

After a long day a packing, we are ready to shove off bright and early tomorrow. This is the biggest trip we've taken, and thus it's by far the most packing we've done. Despite spending an hour here or there packing stuff over the last few weeks Allyson and I still spent just about the entire day packing and preparing more. It seems excessive looking back on it, but all this stuff adds up to a lot of time. Some examples of the things we did were:

• Packing for multiple climates. It's supposed to be anywhere from 20-40 deg cooler up in the mountains of Colorado, so we had to plan for temperatures ranging from the 40's to the 90's.

• Making and freezing 30 PB&J's.....with the crusts cut off.

• Packing motorhome repair equipment I typically wouldn't bring.

• Organizing stuff for the kids to do on the long drives.

• Managing inhalers and other kid medications

• Borrowing backpacks to put kids in

• And much more.

It is by far the fullest the fridge has been for a trip.

On top of all the packing I was dealt some pre-trip sass from Julia. Julia is 4 years old, has the intellect of a 10 year old, and behavior of a 2 year old. She must have asked me for a snack 20 times today before noon. It was wearing me down and culminated with the following exchange:

Dad: "Julia, I can't give you snack every time you ask for one"

Julia: "Why not?"

Dad: "Because if I did that you would end up weighing a thousand pounds"

Julia: ........thinking......."If I weighed a thousand pounds would I be able to reach the snacks?"

It could be a long trip.

We have a map on the side of the motorhome with a sticker for each state we've camped in. Here's what it looks like now. I think if we adhere to the plan we'll add 7 stickers on this trip.