Johns Trippin'

When I went to the bathroom this afternoon, I was struck with a seemingly odd thought. "The toilet has water in it." Now this might seem weird to those of you who have regular toilets, but ours is not a normal toilet. No, our toilet is a broken toilet!

If by some random reason — maybe you want to be out there with no worries, or you just NEED A REST FROM YOUR KIDS' ENDLESS AND POINTLESS TALKING!!!  — you'll probably want an RV trip. But! you don't want just ANY RV trip you want THE RV trip. A trip that will make you feel free of the world's problems. A trip that will be the best vacation OF ALL TIME. Well, you are in luck my friend! for I have put together a list of what you SHOULD bring on your, 'The RV trip.' Enjoy! Full size soap bottles There you are after a long day of driving. YOU NEED TO TAKE A SHOWER!!! You feel like you have bugs crawling ALL OVER YOU. So you head to the bathroom to get your 'super small travel size soap' that will make your RV shower experience efficient and easy! But your wife/child/cousin beat you to it! You wait twenty minutes for your wife/child/cousin to get out. When they finally get out you realize your wife/child/cousin has used ALL the hot water. NNNOOO! You wait ano...

When you drive in, the office is on the right with a lane to park in while you check in. You drive on a paved road through a campground with plenty of trees. There aren't any ditches or tight turns on the road.  Then you arrive at your clearly marked site at an angle convenient for pulling in. The site is level and held back with a retaining wall made of natural materials. The utilities are close to the site and there is plenty of room for the slides. After setting up, you could bike to the big playground on the smooth roads, or you could take a walk around the lake. Dinner could be eaten outside at the picnic table on the concrete patio, without any neighbors right up next to you.  If you fancied a shower after dinner, then head down to the bathhouse along the well lit street. All the lights are facing downward as to not contribute to light pollution. The bathhouse is clean and also well lit. The lights in the bathroom are always on.  Step into the shower, clos...

Along with Biscayne National Park , we failed to get to Dry Tortugas National Park on our first attempt two years ago. The Dry Tortugas are a set of islands about 70 miles off the coast of Key West, Florida. Islands means ferry, and it turns out you have to book the ferry months ahead of time. Lesson learned. We started planning our return trip a year ahead of time as a joint vacation with my sister's family. I was in charge of getting us down there, and my brother-in-law Marc took charge of getting us to the island (booking the ferry) and keeping us on the island for a few days (camping). There is one RV park in Key West, and it's as expensive and hard to book as you'd imagine, so we parked the RV at the campground in Everglades National Park, rented a 15 passenger van in Miami, and booked a hotel in Key West. The ferry departs early, and we had an extra early wake up call because we were camping. We had to have all of our gear at the ferry, inspected and ready to load by ...

Those that have been with us since the beginning will recall that we failed in our first attempt to hit two of Florida's three national parks. Biscayne National Park was one of those two, and the failure was a direct result of the park being mostly in the water, us not owning a boat, and a failure to plan ahead. Two years later, the park is still mostly in the water, we still do not own a boat, but we did  plan ahead this time! About a year ago I started talking to my sister about doing a joint family vacation to Florida. We knew we had to return to pick up the two parks we missed, and we figured it would be fun to get the cousins together for a trip. We set plans in motion to do a spring break trip, driving down in the RV to give them a taste of our lives. We made two stops  on the way down to the Everglades, which was home base for the RV during our visits to the parks. Our plan was to visit the Biscayne Visitors Center upon our arrival in the evening and then spend the en...

We arrived at Indian Mound Fish Camp in the afternoon. First we parked the RV. Then we went to catch crabs! We caught a lot of hermits. It seemed like crabs were rare. We caught about three medium sized ones that night. Then we ate a dinner of tacos and fresh shrimp and went to bed. In the mornin' I saw a manatee! Sophia came outside too and we caught crabs together! It was fun! Then the other kids came outside and we went to a big dock behind the office to catch crabs. We caught a lot by lifting up rocks and catching them with a net because they were under them. Sophia caught the crabs and I lifted the rocks. Because I lifted the rocks I got two big scratches. One from a big rock falling on my toe — I have a scar from that one — and another from a sharp rock. I got it just by touching it. Then we let the crabs go. Me and Sophia went to the bath house to get a nice wonderful shower. Then we went into the RV for a much needed sit-down. Then Nathan had a shower that he did not l...

We started our Florida vacation by driving to Southern Grace Farms. If you don't know, we went on a ten day vacation to various places in Georgia and Florida. We also are going to go to these three National Parks: the Everglades, Biscayne Bay, and Dry Tortugas. We are going on this vacation with one set of Aunts and Uncles (Alaina and Marc) and with both of our Cousins (Sophia and Nathan).  After a fun drive of video games and stories, we arrived at Southern Grace Farms. Southern Grace Farms was a Harvest Host in Georgia that had fruit trees, fruits, strawberries, and vegetables, but only the strawberries were in season. When we arrived, we bought a basket to U-pick the strawberries. Nathan, Sophia, Asher, Jordan, and I went out into the field to pick the strawberries. We picked (and ate) an overflowing basket (and mouth) of strawberries. I really liked going on the playground. The thing I liked most was a roller slide made up of a bunch of PVC pipes. It was usually slow but I stoo...

We went to the State Park on a Sunday. After popping into the Visitor Center for a few minutes, we hit the trail to the gorge. In case anyone who is reading this is unfamiliar with the concept of a gorge, here you go: Gorges are deep. In order to get down into one, you typically need to go down. There are a few (non lethal) ways to do that. One way is stairs, lots and lots of stairs. Three hundred and ten to be exact. Stairs More stairs What do you know? Stairs! Stairs coming down as seen from the opposite side of the gorge At the bottom of those 310 stairs, there is a suspension bridge crossing the gorge, eighty feet above the river.  The bridge even swayed when you walked on it! From there you have the option of continuing down two hundred and twenty one more steps to an overlook of Hurricane Falls. And, unless you have a permit and are planning to go downriver, that means you have two hundred and twenty one stairs back up. Hurricane Falls Bottom of gorge Now that you're back to ...

We didn't know what we were doing when we started. That's not entirely unique in this lifestyle, but most people spend some time planning things and learning about RVs. We didn't have that luxury due to the compressed timeframe when our house sold. That said, would we do anything differently if we could do it again? Yeah, we would. Would I term those "regrets?" Nah, not really. That implies that I'm dwelling on these things, and I'm not. So while we don't regret the decisions we made, here are a few things we'd do differently if we could start over: We would have gotten a Costco credit card a lot earlier than we did, which was more than halfway through our trip. We bought a lot of gas, so we might as well have been getting rewarded for it. We would have signed up for Thousand Trails. We heard all kinds of mixed reviews on the program, but we're confident we could have saved money on campgrounds had we signed up early on. Julie would have put th...

We are now settled in at a campground in North Georgia for the next 3 months. The plan is to use this as our home base while we search for a permanent place to live. Whether that will be a plot of land upon which we build or an already built house, we don't know yet. Before this trip started, I was pretty confident we were going to build when we were done, but I've had a lot of time over the last 22 months to think about it, and now I'm less certain. Regardless of whether we build or buy, our first job is to narrow in on a location. We know we want to be near family, many of whom are in north Atlanta, but we also know that we don't want to live too close to the city. That likely puts us between Gainesville and the South Carolina line. We want to start by finding a good church. Our kids are either at or approaching youth group age, and youth group was such an important part of Julie's and my childhood that we want our kids to have the same opportunities we did. It...