The noisiest part of the wind is the tent flapping all around 10 yards away. The windows are open in the RV and I can see the sand blowing through the air in the small space inside our 23 ft travel trailer. Going to have to dust again. One of the things that comes with being parked in the desert. Trying to keep the kids quiet while my husband is on his work phone calls is difficult to say the least- especially the 8 month old! It is early afternoon and school is done for the day for my big kids, Loriann 13, Victoria 12 & Jafius 10. They, along with my 3 year old are attempting to shape clay pots with clay they found in the Colorado River on our hike down the canyon a few days ago. They are hoping to bake them around the campfire I’m sure. What should I do with myself? With no house projects to do and and no yard to maintain, that question often presents itself. Again I consider starting a blog to track our journey and to help answer the many questions that come up for the families considering or beginning the journey to full time RVing. If I don’t find something to occupy myself I am going to start day drinking or becoming the laziest mom of 5 on the planet and spend my afternoons chain watching tv shows.
It is late April 2020, you know what that means. Yup. CoVid-19 Pandemic. Easy to forget for a family that already works remotely, and the kids already homeschool and you spend much of your time off-grid in some remote location away from society. Until I go to the nearest grocery store for my weekly groceries and find everyone wearing masks and empty shelves where the toilet paper would be.
I am surrounded by a lovely desert oasis. A long tall half moon of slick rock in one direction and open desert that leads to a canyon in the other. It’s deceiving really, you wouldn’t know there is a 300ft cliff down to the Colorado River unless you walked over to the edge which can’t be seen from here at “camp.” I find it difficult to consider this “camping” as I grew up tent camping without things like electric and cell phones.
This is just home. Home for now. Yes, this is home. 5 kids, 2 crazy married adults, and a Colorado Mountain Dog (picture a great pyr).
2019 ended with us purchasing a house in Ohio. In January 2020 we began to move in with the goal being to get it set up as a nice home base and then continue on the road. Moving into a house after living in a 23 ft travel trailer for two years is very strange. We purchased a small house for the size of our family, yet it feels huge! Also, we owned basically nothing in the way of setting a house up! No furniture at all. We actually spent at least the first week sleeping in the trailer in the driveway because we were waiting for our beds to arrive. It took us some time to get the house furnished and purchase the basics. We spent the first few months of 2020 settling in with plans to hit the road in April.
As you well know, things started to go nuts in our country as March approached along with the CO-VID-19 pandemic. We were in Ohio and we don’t track news very closely so it took awhile for us to realize the magnitude of it. Since Jon already works from home and the kids already homeschool, it was amazing how little of a direct effect it had on us as a family. However, as March settled in and the social engagements came to a halt, nobody was coming around anymore and we realized we really had no reason to be in Ohio anymore. So, we decided to start our summer early and we hitched up and headed west. Yes, I know, this is exactly what we were not supposed to be doing during this time, but technically our residential address is still Colorado, and that is where we wanted to be if there was a nationwide lock-down. Besides, we come into contact with far less people than the average american due to our lifestyle and ability to order groceries for pick up. So we left the first week of April and pointed west stopping to visit family near Kansas City on the way.
Steamboat Springs
Early April is too soon to be in the mountains in Colorado so we didn’t stay in Steamboat long. There was a winter storm blowing in and although we can stay in the RV in snow and cold weather, we prefer to avoid it. We were really hoping to get in a Moab trip this spring but COVID had all the camping near Moab shut down. So we decided to try out a new place. We headed past Fruita to one of the very last I70 exits in Colorado before you get to Utah. Rabbit Valley is an area located right off the highway on the border of Colorado & Utah. There are miles of public land here and it is very popular with OHV riders of all kinds. There are a few free designated camping areas (as far as I know none of them have any type of hook ups) and plenty of boondocking stops in between. We really learned to love this area and ended up spending several weeks here throughout the summer. It is great because it is close enough to Fruita for everything you need. Also Fruita has a free dump station with fresh water at their welcome center! The Rabbit Valley area is also awesome because the internet is good enough to work from and there is plenty of hiking opportunities as well as slick rock to play on. Our first spot was a beautiful spot overlooking the Colorado River. We had quite the adventures hiking down to the river. The kids collected clay and a few of them joined Jon for a swim in the river.
We went back to Steamboat for a quick visit and loaded up all the dirbikes for a weekend at Sandwash basin (a popular OHV playground in Colorado with miles of riding to explore)
We were headed to the Oregon coast to visit my brother but decided to break up the trip a bit with a stop near Salt Lake City. We found public land right on Utah Lake in the town of Provo, Utah. We spent a week here exploring the area, paddling our inflatable raft in the lake and hiking a few cool trails in Provo.
Another stop we made somewhere around this time was to Flaming Gorge Reservoir. This Reservoir is partly in Utah and partly in Wyoming and is absolutely gorgeous! We found a really cool boondocking spot right on the lake where we hoped to spend more time, but the internet wasn’t good enough to stay longer than a night and it was too windy to enjoy being outside.
We headed on to the Oregon coast to visit my brother. Along the way we drove along the Columbia River and through the town of Hood River, where there are dozens of kite boarders and wind surfers of all kinds enjoying the sport along this giant river. We had seen these guys before and they always inspired us. Jon decided he wanted to give it a try. My brother was on board and so was a friend of ours who was also traveling in the area. So instead of buying a couple lessons and giving it a try (the smart thing to do) we found a great deal on a used kite gear and bought it. As it turns out, Kite Boarding is quite a difficult sport to learn! We spent most of our time this trip waiting for wind to pick up and then hurrying to the beach where the boys would attempt to kite board and I would sit in the truck and watch them get their asses kicked. Unfortunately, a good kite surfing day is not a good beach day! My brother lives near Astoria, OR, where the Columbia River meets the Pacific and you can see Washington across the water. We love this part of the country and always enjoy our visits. It is such a unique and beautiful place where you can be on a lake beach, ocean beach or river beach in just a couple minutes. The weather is often cold and breezy though with lots and lots of rain.
After a couple weeks on the coast and many, many kite boarding attempts, we headed back towards Steamboat. Along the way, we spent a night at Antelope Island State Park in Salt Lake City, this is a super cool state park located on an island in the Great Salt Lake. There was bison roaming around the island and lots of cool hiking trails to explore. It was neat for the kids to play in the salt lake and see just how salty it really is!
We spent the last few weeks of our journey in Steamboat Springs before heading back to our new home in Ohio. We had a wedding to be back for so it was time to head that way.
We headed home to settle in for the rest of the summer, but our 2020 travels weren’t over yet….We did some really fun stuff in the fall and winter I will talk about in Part 2.