We've Come A Long Way, Baby

We decided to stay home today and just putter around the Montana.  I had a couple drawers I needed to clean out.  Gene wanted his hair cut.  The cookie jar needed to be refilled.  Baking cookies makes the house smell sooooo good.  And there is only so many months that can go by before the basement storage HAS to be cleaned.  This afternoon I worked on transferring a paper journal to digital.  The journal I chose to work on was the one from our first extended vacation in 2003.  That sure brought back the memories.

We had three years of working 6 months and having 6 months off.  2003 was the first of those years and it was also the first year to be away from home for and any length of time.  We think of it as the “test” year.  We were testing the RV lifestyle even though we didn’t have an RV.  Before sinking a bunch of money into purchasing travel trailer, 5th wheel, or motorhome, we wanted to know if we would even like being away from family and friends for an extended period of time.  As backpackers and hikers, tent camping was our thing so that is what we did that first year.

Our REI tent all set up

We bought a larger tent than the Eureka timberline which we had used for several years for car camping.  There were two things we wanted in our new tent.  We wanted it to be tall enough to stand up in and we wanted room for cots to sleep on.  We found an REI tent we thought would be suitable.  Then we needed something for our clothes.  We didn’t want to live the summer out of a suitcase so we came up with the idea of sterilite storage drawers.  We took the middle seats out of our Honda van and stored them at Gene’s mother’s.  The Honda had sliding doors on both sides and 2 sterilites would fit in that open door space.  We didn’t even have to take them out of the van if we didn’t want to; there was easy access by just opening the sliding door.  We put the back seat down and had space for 3 more sterilites there.  All of the kitchen stuff was in these 3 back units.  When we were camped some place for more than a day or two, we would take the sterilites which held our clothes inside the tent.  The space between all these sterilites was where the tent, cots, dining canopy, packs and hiking gear were stowed for travel.

We used a small backpacking tent for 1-night stays.

We went to Colorado that first summer and had a fantastic time.  We were comfortable with this setup and it served us well.  We often stayed in small forest service campgrounds and at National Parks.  Many of those places had tent only camping or their sites were too small for the big rigs.  We could get in and out of some of Colorado’s most secluded campsites. And backing up was not a problem.  We learned two very important things that summer.  First, we learned that we loved being on the road for an entire summer and, secondly, we learned that this style of travel was a whole lot of work to set up and take down.  Almost the first thing we did when we got home was start looking for a pop-up camper for our next summer off.