Earlier this summer, Rob, the girls and I spent five and a half weeks living on the road. The trip was so long, the post office refused to hold our mail — mail can only be held for thirty days. “Is there an address that we can forward your mail to?” Um, no, there isn’t.
Of those thirty seven nights on the road, we spent two nights at my parents house, two nights in a KOA Kamping Kabin (when your car is also your tent and it breaks down, you have few choices), three nights in a friends’ vacation house in Red Lodge, MT, and two nights in motels as we headed home. The rest of the nights? We slept in our VW poptop, Evie (she’s a EuroVan, EV, get it?), at campgrounds and RV parks.
How does a family of four travel, sleep and live out of a van for that long? Pretty comfortably, in fact.
downsizing:
Early on, I decided we needed smaller pillows and smaller camp chairs. We headed out to REI and found nice pots and pans to replace the camping pots we had received from our wedding registry. I bought these great Stowaway Folding Chairs; they fold up small and work great as beach chairs too. We bought Thermarest pillows … pretty comfortable.
packing:
We packed by function rather than by person. I came up with this system when we first traveled in Evie and was frustrated with the way the girls would dig through the bags looking for pjs or swimsuits. So we used mostly canvas bags: one for swimming gear, one for winter gear (long underwear, scarves, hats), one for raingear, one for pjs, one for underthings and socks, one for shoes, one for games and chargers and so on. We each had a backpack for our books, electronics and other forms of “personal” entertainment. We had a bag of “cooking essentials”, like plates and matches and jetboils. For twoels, we took thin beach towels that did double-duty. Overall, this packing system seems to work fairly well for our needs.
food:
I tried to keep food simple. We ate out less than once a day. Often, we ate out in order to take advantage of fre wi-fi or for the novelty of eating in an interesting place. Otherwise, we went to the grocery store and bought food that was easy to cook. Our cooler ran of the battery (and then battery and electricity). We had a big brown bag of staples like peanut butter and crackers. For meals, we had pasta, veggie sausages, veggie burgers, soup and sandwiches. I’d love to get new ideas on camping meals…
wi-fi/electronics:
I had the mistaken impression that “Free Wi-Fi” at KOAs and other RV parks would be similar to hotel wi-fi. WRONG! Some places only allowed us to connect one computer (we had five computers/iPads with us). Many places the wi-fi was often down; others the wi-fi was extremely low bandwidth. In the end, we tried to find local coffee shops to hang out in for an hour or two in the morning; the girls grew bored, but we were able to get work done and blogs updated. Otherwise, we might find a Starbucks or McDonalds with an open wi-fi that we could use.
As for electronics, we bought car chargers for just about everything, including the computers, iPads, iPhones, DSes and more. This way we could try to keep everything fully charged, in case our campsite had no power.
homeschooling:
Yes, we did actually homeschool on the road (carschooling? worldschooling?). Neither girl has finished with all their subjects for the year. I had each girl pack the homeschooling that we be most compact and easiest to do while on the road. For Chloe, we ripped apart her books, punched holes in the pages and made a nice binder of work. Very nice. I also had the girls write journals, though they got bored of doing that fairly quickly. They also lost interest in writing postcards after the first week or two.
