Update (Where did those two years go?)

It has been a long time since Meg has posted in this blog so I was thinking that maybe I would take a stab at it. Since her last update we have mostly been rather tamely spending our winters in Florida and summers in Kansas, parked at my mom's old farmstead. 

We found a nice park in Florida for the last two winters, right across the river from Kennedy Space Center. We watched rocket and shuttle launches and made friends within a tight-knit community of "snowbirds" who winter there every year. We also met some local families with kids near the boys' ages.

Last fall we made an excursion to the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta. Turns out we have family there that flies balloons, so within moments of the first event we were helping to launch and chase balloons. It is great fun being part of a chase crew and the plan is to attend every year. Meg and Billy returned to Albuquerque in March to help "our Jan" with her goats kidding. Meg got to play midwife to several deliveries and seems to have really enjoyed the experience.

The side trip to Albuquerque is an example of the "away missions" we have been taking, where a subset of the family jets off to another part of the country for a few days to a few weeks. This has helped us all pursue some of our individual interests, and gives us some necessary time outside the five-person family dynamic. Meg took all three boys to Maryland last summer, and often visits friends on her own while the boys and I hold down the fort.

The boys are growing and generally doing well. The summers in Kansas are some of their favorite times. Who can complain about playing at the pool with your friends for hours a day? I really like the pool as a social activity. The kids get lots of exercise and social interaction. They end up playing games that, while competitive, are much more about everyone just having fun. While they still play together most of the time, they also have a chance to spend time with their own special friends. 

Meg and I are still really enjoying our RV lifestyle, although the last couple of years have been a lot more sitting still than traveling. We have managed to visit our friends in Mississippi (who we met on the road back in 2008), helped with my mom's move to Houston, and seen and done lots more than all the fun stuff I already mentioned. 

Meg and I have taken up walking. We try to get in several miles every day and it has made a lot of difference in our overall health. We are both a lot happier when we are keeping up with our walking goals.

I have had kind of a slow summer as in mid-April I managed to smash off the end of my left pinkie. That put me on bed rest for a couple of weeks and made it hard to do much of anything all summer. It was all I could do to drive a grain truck for a friend during harvest.

Right now we are visiting (without our RV) in Maryland. Meg's expatriate brothers were both in town and there was a small family reunion event. We kept finding reasons to extend our visit, and we have now stayed over a month! It will be nice to be back "home" soon.

Clifford gets some attention

How did a whole month go by? Very quickly, that's how.

About a month ago, I boarded a plane in Baltimore in the morning. A few hours later, Joe and the boys picked me up at the airport in Wichita, driving Clifford the big red truck, trailer in tow. It was fun to watch my entire household approach, stopping at the end of the arrivals area just long enough for me to throw my suitcase in the back and swing up into the truck cab. We drove east, expecting to get (back) to Maryland in about two weeks. Long enough for a leisurely pace, maybe even with a few days in a couple of nice parks.

Clifford, shortly after we took her on as our home-truck.

Clifford was showing off a new muffler (yay!), a new grating sound (boo!), and an occasional weirdness in the shifting (eh?). A few miles out, darkness coming on, we decided the sound and the shifting issue needed to be diagnosed before we left a familiar area, so we spent the night at El Dorado State Park, and headed back into the Wichita area in the morning. Joe towed our little house around for hours, first to the diesel mechanic, and then to the transmission specialist, neither of whom could immediately identify the noise, but both of whom thought it should be addressed before our 1500-mile journey.

He scheduled to have the transmission guy look at things after the weekend, then brought the trailer to park it at one of our borrowed homes -- his dear sister has a big house and a huge heart, and loves to have her nephews around. As we parked, shifting gears over and over, the transmission fluid started leaking, then gushed out. The road looked like an automotive murder scene, the reddish stuff splashed all over the place. We quickly finished parking, unhitched, and arranged for a tow to the shop.

Long story short (too late!), it was a relatively minor transmission failure, but we decided to have some upgrades done while she was in the shop. It took a mere two weeks to have the transmission rebuilt, bigger, stronger, probably not faster (Joe babies Clifford, and rarely approaches the faster highway speed limits). The noise was a vibration caused by the new muffler, and could be addressed later.

I gave up on getting to Maryland in time for the events that had set our timeline. My cousin's band was playing at a favorite little cafe, and a dear friend was having her last big birthday party in Maryland before moving to Chicago. Yes, these are the kinds of things that fill our sails and set our "un-schedule". Why not?

When it started to look like Clifford would be ready on Thursday, we knew there was no way to make the Friday night gig. But we'd have 48 hours to make it to the Saturday night party. Of course that, too, would be impossible at our habitual, casual pace. What we call a "sprint" is maybe six hours a day, with a recovery day after two days. But we were feeling bold. We decided to try the sprint of all sprints. 24 hours of driving in 48 hours.

Next entry - Maryland again!

Kinsley, KS

Now that we have no house near Spearville, we were challenged to find somewhere to park our home while we're visiting for the summer. There aren't any state park campgrounds close enough to be practical.

As summertime temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in Western Kansas, we needed to be hooked up to electricity so we could use the air conditioning. For a month-long visit I prefer to hook up to a spigot, instead of filling and re-filling the fresh water tank. And when we're using more than a tankful of water, a sewer hookup keeps us from having to pack and move just to flush the tanks. So it's just as well that we had little choice but to stay at a commercial RV park. (Commercial campgrounds more consistently offer "full" electric/water/sewer hookups).

The nearest RV parks are about 15 miles west, in Dodge City, and about 20 miles east, in Kinsley. Since Kinsley is a much smaller town, and we'd passed the RV park and thought it looked nice, we went east. Four Aces RV park is grassy and has a few nice, shady back-in spots as well as ten pull-throughs with concrete pads. The folks there are friendly as all get-out, and the rates are reasonable, with weekly and monthly discounts. Yes, we had to drive some 20 miles to Spearville to meet up with friends, but we combined all errands into no more than one daily trip (as we usually did when living in the country).

Kinsley is about twice the size of Spearville and well under one-tenth the population of Dodge. You can walk around most of the town in half an hour. The grocery store is open seven days a week and has a bit more of a food selection that the Merc in Spearville [though it is primarily a food store, without the "little bit of everything" department store half that distinguishes the Merc].

We enjoyed the Kinsley library and appreciated the town's always-open recycling drop-off point. They accept a variety of cardboard, paper, plastics, glass and metal. Dodge City also has a drop-off recycling program, and Spearville has a once-a-month drop-off. It's nice to see rural communities addressing the problems of resource depletion and waste and with programs like this.

Like many of the old towns on the railroad, downtown Kinsley is a mix of empty storefronts and active businesses. One rather crumbly but lovable little treasure we discovered is the Palace movie theater, where they show current movies for a reasonable price, on a tiny screen. The seats are terribly worn and the decor is vintage, if a bit sad. It's pretty sweet all the same.

Kansas State Parks

We spent a few weeks in May at Crawford Lake State Park. The campground was shady, grassy and spacious, and there were lots of places to throw in a line. There was a good road all the way around the lake, with nice farm and lake views, deer grazing, frogs croaking - perfect for riding bikes or walking every day. Since school was still in session across the state, and the park is out-of-the-way, it was fairly empty and extremely peaceful. It's our new favorite Kansas campground.

Crawford is proud of its CCC heritage, and has a nice memorial and interpretive stations with grand statistics and amusing slice-of-life accounts of the community that built the dam. A lot of the state parks we've stayed in were originally CCC camps. We always enjoy reading about the lives of the men who lived and worked there, and seeing the architecture that remains.

There were loads of birds, too. Most prized were the scissor-tailed flycatchers, first in what turned out to be the "spring of scissor-taileds" -- we saw more than we've ever seen this year, while roving around eastern Kansas. Here's a list of most of the birds we saw at Crawford, with apologies for any non-standard nomenclature:

Loon
Canada goose
Bald eagle
Red-tailed hawk
Great blue heron
Ducks (no idea)
Common nighthawk
Orchard oriole
Northern oriole
Red-bellied woodpecker
Pileated woodpecker
Red-headed woodpecker
Swifts and swallows
Scissor-tailed flycatcher
Eastern kingbird
Blue-gray gnatcatcher
Eastern wood-peewee
Pheobe
Eastern bluebird
Blue grosbeak
Yellow warbler
Yellow-rumped warbler
Black and white warbler
Black-capped chickadee
Tufted titmouse
Goldfinch
Robin
Bluejay
Cardinal
Brown thrasher
Mockingbird
Starling
Wood thrush
Summer tanager
Grasshopper sparrow
Tree sparrow
Carolina wren

We also spent a few nights each at Hillsdale Lake State Park, and Clinton Lake State Park. We met up with friends for a camping weekend at Clinton Lake Recreation Area (Corps of Engineers side). Mostly we just relaxed and enjoyed the beautiful spring.

Frugal tip: If you camp in Kansas more than a few weeks out of the year, it's worth buying an annual camping pass for Kansas State Parks (in addition to the annual state parks vehicle entrance pass). It pays for the basic camping fee, so that you only pay campsite premiums (for season and/or prime location) and electric/water premiums. This means that after the first twenty nights or so, we were camping for free, or for a few dollars a night when we got crazy and wanted to use the vacuum cleaner.

Fast Forward to Kansas

A friend recently remarked that he couldn't travel all the time like we do, always on the road, always driving. But we really cover very few miles, and spend very little time literally on the road. We'd rather be playing outdoors or cozy in our home in a temporary location than en route to another. So we move slowly, and probably spend less time in our vehicle than the average commuter or "stay-at-home" parent.

March and April found us heading to Kansas. From Florida, we marched steadily through Alabama to Mississippi. When we don't particularly want to linger in an area, we'll drive a few hours, stay just one or two nights, then move on. Especially if the drives are longer and the stays are shorter, we are soon ready to stop and feel "at home" again before moving on. In Alabama we stayed a couple of nights in Oak Mountain State Park. In Mississippi, we stayed in Lake Lowndes State Park and had a visit from a relative before moving on to a longer stay at Great River Road State Park in Rosedale, Mississippi.

Well, technically only the boys made it to Rosedale. From Columbus, Mississippi, Meg took off with her brother on a whirlwind road trip through South Carolina to Maryland and back again. Joe doesn't often get a break from the whole family, but Meg takes side trips every few months, to help someone out, to attend an event, to visit, or just to get away for a few days. People often tell me they'd go crazy spending so much time in close quarters with their families. Well, I do go a little crazy. So I balance it with time away. (Other people could spend all hours with their family through all seasons, and some might even be slightly offended by my admission that there's such thing as "too much" family time. Oh, well.)

What about Joe? Does he get vacations? The mechanical demands of the trailer aren't completely outside Meg's abilities, but it's true that she hasn't ever driven the entire rig. She's never dumped the tanks, hooked or unhooked, or dealt with any plumbing, electricity, or mechanical/chassis issues. That said, there are places Joe could leave us comfortably set up for a few days or a couple of weeks. So far he hasn't taken advantage of the possibility. Maybe he'll get some time alone one of these days -- we'll try not to drive him crazy in the meantime.

While Meg was road-tripping, Joe and the boys visited our Rosedale friends, a homeschooling family we met at a state park in Florida a few years ago. Back then, they were living in their motorhome and we were on the road only part-time. They've now built a beautiful home on an old plantation homesite, tucked into a grove of ancient pecan trees, right next to the levee. I was sorry to miss the visit, and can't wait to get back by there and see the new house.

Meg caught back up with the boys in El Dorado, Kansas the day after Easter, and we've been roving the state ever since. Kansas in the springtime is absolutely beautiful, and it's a great time to visit the family we have in the eastern part of the state.

Kansas in the summer is a bit less friendly, but that's the best season for the kids to spend a little time with the friends we left behind in their "hometown" near Dodge City. The town kids are out of school, and the public pool is the center of our social life. It's where the boys learned to swim, without which we would hardly enjoy our beach stays as much as we do. The two weeks around wheat harvest are all a-bustle, but otherwise things have been nice and slow.

So now that I've caught up our story to the present, I'm going to try (again) to give more frequent updates and little stories from the road. Check back in a week or two and see how I'm doing!


[If you were looking forward to a post about our extended stay at Walt Disney World last winter, I'm going to hold off writing about Disney until the fall, when we're going back to get in a few more weeks of fun on our annual passes.]

Florida State Parks - home for the winter

It's been about five months since I did an update about where we've been staying. And the quick summary is that we spent the winter in Florida, mostly in the state parks, averaging a little over a week in each.

Most park systems have rules that limit a camper's stay at any one park to a couple of weeks, either consecutive (as with Florida State Parks) or cumulative within a calendar year (as with National Parks). Some retiree "snowbirds" find ways around the limits, such as volunteering in exchange for an all-season slot, or making reservations under multiple names. When the parks aren't booked full, park managers will sometimes approve an extended stay.

We prefer to stay on a site for at least a continuous week. This allows us to relax, unpack, and put things out on shelves. When we only stay a day or two, it can be a toss-up whether to leave a bicycle on the couch or finagle it through the door and down the steps, then back up and in after not even riding it.

But because we didn't make detailed plans months ahead this year, there were some days (especially weekends and holidays) that were booked tight in the more popular coastal parks. This meant some hopping back and forth between inland and beach parks, or among sites within a single park, sometimes staying only a day or two. Our itinerary also included some time at the Disney resort campground (look for a later post on this), so we mixed in shorter stays at state parks to recuperate from the intensity (and "expensity") of mouse-centered vacationing.

I wrote about Fort Clinch State Park (SP)  and Faver-Dykes SP in December. We ended up spending several weeks in Faver-Dykes SP, which offers fishing, paddling, and nature trails through piney woods. It's remote enough to be quiet, but is only a short car trip to Flagler Beach.

Also on the east coast, Tomoka SP was a bike ride or a short car trip from Ormond Beach. It was too chilly when we were there, but there was a good waterway for kayaking/canoeing in other weather.

The campground at Gamble Rogers State Recreation Area is right on beach, and we could walk a block along the beach to High Tides at Snack Jack - a cute little restaurant/bar that makes the most of its quaint history and its great view.

Florida has more than a few freshwater springs, and the warm spring runs play host to manatees in the winter. In prior years we've stayed at Manatee Springs SP, which has a great boardwalk along the bank of the spring run, through the cypress woods. It was out of our path this year, but we will be back there someday.

This year we did most of our manatee (and gator) watching at Blue Spring SP, which is similar to Manatee Springs, but near the east coast. We happened to be there for the Manatee festival, and the boys spent hours watching (and chatting up) a blacksmith working on the grounds of a historical house which is maintained as a museum in the park. The birds there were great, too, especially the red-shouldered hawks (mating season?), an osprey, and a reliable bald eagle. A couple of nights, I walked alone down to the spring run to listen to the scores of manatees gently splishing and breathing in the dark. Some experiences are truly unique.

At Wekiwa Springs SP we went swimming in a rock-lined pool at the headspring. It was chilly, but really fun to feel the current push us around, and to watch the fish do their fishy things in the clear water. Hillsborough River SP has nice wooded trails along a blackwater river.

After some time at Disney and visiting with friends, we headed to the Gulf Coast. A few years ago we adopted Henderson Beach SP as our Florida home. We started visiting Destin when my brother lived in Navarre, and we've come back almost every year to stay at this campground. There's a boardwalk trail through a pristine dune landscape, fragrant with rosemary, to the best beach we know. The boasts of "white sugar sand" and "emerald green waters" are not exaggerations.

Just inland a bit is Rocky Bayou SP which has several short walking trails, water for paddling, and is also a base for day trips to Henderson Beach when that campground is full.

The last Florida park we stayed in this year was Grayton Beach SP with a beach almost as nice as in Destin. We usually ride our bikes over to Seaside, which is sort of the polar opposite of the campground life - a planned and polished gingerbread resort town, worth seeing once or twice.

Well, this was a long post, and glossed over so many great experiences. I'll come back soon and write about our extended and friend-filled experience at Walt Disney World. Otherwise I think I've caught us up to ... March?

Here are some photos ... winter solstice in Ormond Beach and manatees at Blue Spring. We don't take many photos, so these are just iPhone quickies -- better than nothing, eh?

  

   

  

Illinois to Maryland

(back to the trip journal)

The rest of the way to Maryland was relatively uneventful. We motored up a mountain in Kentucky to stay at Carter Caves State Resort Park. It was pouring down rain when we got there, and we buzzed past the visitor center. There seems to be plenty to do there if the weather's nice and you're in the mood for exploring.

We're still learning how the new rig combination works, as far as backing into campsites. We can't just drive up and park at any old campsite, unless we happen to find a long, unoccupied pull-through site (this hasn't happened yet -- these might be imaginary). The trailer itself is as long as our old motorhome, plus we have the long-bed crew-cab truck that pulls it. Only the longest sites accommodate the combination *and* leave a spot for the minivan. Reducing our selection still further is the maneuverability of the rig around pavement corners, trees and other obstacles.

This park was our biggest challenge yet, with the added quirk of water and electrical hookups being unpredictably placed among the campsites. Aside from the random setup, it was a well-groomed campground with very nicely graveled sites (the paved pull-throughs were all full).

Somehow we managed to keep from arguing through this difficult parking job in the cold rain. As soon as we were parked, connected, and ready to get cozy inside, the rain stopped. We congratulated ourselves, took a walk, and crashed for the night.

In the morning, the sun was shining through the trees, and we couldn't really ask for a more beautiful mountain forest to wake up in. But this time our eagerness to get back on the road trumped the tug of nature. We left this park relatively unexplored and made a beeline for Maryland, stopping overnight at a Wal*mart in Virginia.

Bumps in the road

Within weeks of buying our new rig (a lightly used fifth-wheel trailer and a significantly used diesel pickup) we enjoyed a couple of impressive but ultimately harmless mishaps. Heavy rains produced an indoor waterfall when water pooled on the roof of the slide and breached a defect in the weatherstripping. And then a nasty hailstorm left its indelible signature on two sides of the unit, also breaking a window, roof vents, and the exterior speakers.

Joe made the necessary repairs and the insurance company paid us something to acknowledge its near-worthlessness for resale. The replacement window frame and speakers look significantly fresher than the yellowed originals, so overall we weren't too fussed once we accepted the dents.

The next issue was a little more alarming, being the first one involving roadworthiness. Somehow the safety chain came into conflict with the gooseneck adapter. (This is an extension which allows one to pull a fifth wheel trailer with a ball hitch mounted in the bed of the pickup. We purchased them separately, and they happened to be set up to accommodate each other, so we had kept that configuration.)

Something about the interference between safety chain and adapter caused an important bolt to shear off. Joe, doubting the integrity of the system, decided to immediately unhitch the truck and have the ball hitch replaced with a fifth wheel hitch. The delay was only half a day, and we were on the road the very next evening, feeling a bit more secure with the more robust connection.

Three days and three states later a tire blew out.

Joe is pretty good at checking things over, and air pressure and fluid levels are regular checks for him. He drives the speed limit or slower, and is careful about road hazards. But shit happens. So he changed the tire, caught up with us and bought a replacement for the spare the same night.

We used to be slow about the follow-through on these kinds of repairs. There was always a spare vehicle, or a project with higher priority. Having such a short list of "stuff" to maintain (and rely on) means we resolve them right away. This reduces stress and conflict in our family. We're getting plumb philosophical about bumps in the road.

I started this post before this latest little bump:

We returned to a city parking garage yesterday to find a window of our minivan smashed, but most of our random stuff still there (we don't have much that's worth taking). We went quickly from "Oh, crap!" to "Bet we can get this fixed tomorrow," and then "I'm glad this happened to us and not some actual tourists from Kansas -- it would've ruined their trip!"

We had a new window by noon this morning. In fact, the glass folks installed a new regulator (bought by Joe at the auto parts store) so the power window that hasn't worked right for a year is completely functional again.

Somehow everything that happens to us leaves us a little better off for a few dollars and some inconvenience. And maybe that's just the way our road is gonna be.

Shit happens. How great is that?

Kansas to Illinois

Our first stop outside of Kansas was a disappointment. Katy Roundhouse Campground and RV park in New Franklin, Missouri is a private accommodation on the Katy Trail, which is part of the Missouri State Park system.

While we highly recommend the Katy Trail for hiking and biking (we've hiked on it before), we don't recommend this private campground. It's better than nothing for people on the trail who just need a place to pitch tent for the night, and aren't particular about the condition of the bathhouses. Half the sites were overgrown and poorly identified, and rampant poison ivy in the open space made it off-limits for play. In our experience it was overpriced and under-maintained. We've had much better luck with state parks in Missouri and surrounding states. We didn't stay long in the morning.

Karl, Leo, and I took off for the St. Louis Zoo, and Joe and Billy, at their slower pace with the trailer, headed straight for our next campground.

The St. Louis Zoo is a gem. There's no entry fee, which makes it worthwhile even for a short break from driving. Parking is steep -- $11 -- but the zoo is located at the end of a road that winds through a public park, and there is free parking along that road. Visiting on a cloudy afternoon, we found nearby parking and had perfect zoo weather.

We were treated to a much larger version of the snake-eats-a-rodent show, as a Dumeril's boa was just starting on a huge white rat when we arrived in the reptile house. We wandered about one-third of the zoo, then got back on the road with time to get to our destination before dark.


Joe found Washington County Conservation Area in Nashville, Illinois by centering the iPhone Google maps search window in his target area and typing "camping" (sometimes there's nowhere else to start). He and Billy were ahead of us with the rig and had started a campfire by the time we got there.

As we pulled into the campground, Leo exclaimed "Oh, it's beautiful!" Our loop was well-shaded with oak and hickory, and had a groundcover of grass, moss, leaf mould and wood chips. Our two days and nights here were rather drippy and damp, but the place didn't run with mud as some campgrounds do. There was plenty of fallen wood not too distant from the campsites, and the menfolk made firewood with the pruning saw.

For other entertainment there was a nice playground, as well as fishing a short walk through the woods at the swampy little lake. The kids caught and threw back a few too-small bass, and watched strange "footprints" move across the water. They later reported that they saw a muskrat jump into the water, so perhaps that was the source of the surface ripples.

The general state of things was quiet, as campgrounds in the woods often are. There were no highway or airplane noises, and any little noise made by campers sort of echoed around the relatively cleared space of the loop. Cozy. We heard great nature noises here, too … red-bellied woodpeckers, plenty of other birds, and some unidentified bigger animals.

Nashville is a nice town, pop. 3200, with a little Kroger grocery, a worn but serviceable laundromat (we hear there is another in town), and the lovely little Coffeehouse Cafe, where we had coffee and nosh while the laundry finished.

We'll visit Nashville and Washington County Conservation Area again.


Next post … things start breaking on the way.

Chaos therapy

I realized today that in this smaller space I have developed some habits that are already so ingrained that it's stressful to know certain things are not in their proper place or state of completion. If I am distracted from making my bed as soon as I rise, then later I see it not made, my brain screams, "WRONG!" and it becomes very hard for me to tear myself away from the idea of making the bed *right now*.

What is a creature of habit? Is it good to be one?

I'm relatively new to the idea of household order. My childhood home and our family homes exhibited what I will call "benign chaos" in the placement of things and the routines of people. Though I was once teased that I'd decorated my home in the style of "nouveau crackhouse," we actually kept it above squalor, but well into "lived-in during construction" territory.

We now have islands of order in the chaos, as well as an underlying plan of what "order" looks like when it returns. There's a place for everything. And every once in a while, everything is in its place. This makes me happy. Maybe a little too happy.

I almost always notice deviation from the household plan. A toy left out, a pile of someone's clothes, a glass that will probably be used again before it's washed, but there it sits -- in plain sight, obviously not clean and put away, not dirty enough to offend, but in dish limbo!

I'm pretty sure this comes from a sense that I need to meet some ideal standard of housekeeping; a worry that I won't meet it; and the consequent guilt that I haven't. I identify too closely with the state of my home: I'm the MOM! I'm supposed to keep things shiny and faces smiling! (Especially mine! But that's another post.)

Most variances I can note and quickly discard as unimportant in the moment. I know it will be okay, and I don't worry about fixing it, cleaning it, putting it away right now, because if I did I'd do nothing but correct things all day long.

If I had a family that indulged my neuroses, I might approach the insanity of Petunia Dursley, or the mother in the novel Bee Season, who both have elaborate nightly rituals of sanitizing (if not sterilizing) every surface in their kitchens, among other signs of psychological maladjustment. Ever so grateful that my family is not so indulgent, I have only to choose between eternal frustration and lightening up a bit, letting go a bit, knowing it will be okay.

If you're wondering whether moving into a tiny home with a very manageable inventory of household goods and strictly defined stowage is going to be good or bad for my mental health, you've caught up to my point.

Is a creature of habit someone who lets absolutes of routine create who she is? Would I ever want to be that? Am I flirting with that possibility with this new lifestyle?

Healthcare on the Roam

People often ask how we handle healthcare while traveling for months at a time, and it's one of our largest expenses, so I thought I'd share our experience.

Individual Insurance

When we gave up the pursuit of the weekly paycheck, we also gave up access to group health plans. We purchased an individual family policy and a dental plan from a major insurer with a national presence. It's a PPO, or Preferred Provider Option, meaning that if we use a provider in the network, the provider will bill the insurance company a contracted amount, and we will pay a portion of that, as outlined in our policy.

We elected a higher deductible/lower premium option, and we have a co-pay for office visits, a different co-pay for accidents/ER visits, free vaccinations, and free routine dental care. There's a separate deductible for labs and imaging, and probably a hundred other cost details that I won't know until I come up against them.

The premium has changed over the four years we've had it, actually edging down the first year, later bumping steadily up. It took a giant leap this year, we think because Joe turned 45, putting our policy into an older age-based risk pool. We might pay more for routine healthcare than if we self-insured, but having insurance makes the overall cost more predictable by reducing our upside risk if we incur major medical expenses.

Along with higher premiums and no employer subsidy, individual policies are less generous than group plans in other ways. There's no employer with the power to terminate hundreds or thousands of contracts negotiating benefits with the insurer. There's often a health questionnaire and physical exam as well as blanket exclusion of pre-existing conditions. In a typical group policy there's no waiting period for specified conditions, if you join as soon as you're eligible (or within a larger employer's annual "open season"). As soon as you sign up you can go to the ER and be fairly certain you're covered.

Our waiting period covered a specified group of bodily systems and diseases. Unfortunately, Joe had his most severe (and first clinically diagnosed) gall bladder attack within that waiting period. So we learned how much gall bladder removal costs, including the primary care clinic, the surgeon, the hospital (images, labs, OR, and patient room), and the anesthesiologist, all of whom billed us separately. It's enough to bankrupt a family that lives from paycheck to paycheck. And this was a minimally complicated case of a very common condition. That event confirmed my resolve never to attempt to self-insure for healthcare.

Rather than wait for the bills to start coming in, a week after Joe's surgery I went around to the various medical offices, asked what discount I would get for immediate payment, and made full and final payments then and there. I was so prompt that the hospital departments hadn't finished posting all their charges, but we settled on a figure and I wrote up a quick contract for the business manager to sign that showed my obligation as satisfied. The discounts were all 30-35%. Think of that. They spend so much trying to collect, and they write off so much bad debt, that the 30-35% was reasonable to them. Does this mean we're all being charged 30-35% more for healthcare because of the administrative cost of collection?

Providers

Because our insurance company has subsidiaries across the country, we have no problem finding in-network providers. So far all of our routine care has been close to our home base. Now that we have no home base and we're changing our state of legal domicile, we'll either return to our old stomping grounds for annual check-ups or we'll find providers on the road.

We've sought urgent care in Kansas, Maryland, Mississippi, and California, and every facility we've contacted participates with our insurance company. Once or twice we've been to an ER at an in-network facility, but the doctors staffing the ER weren't in-network, so we had to pay them out-of-pocket. Again, not hard for us, but I feel for the folks who don't have a rainy-day fund for such things, or easy access to temporary credit. One healthcare resource we are just becoming acquainted with is Departments of Public Health, which offer various clinical services and health education. The clinics charge reasonable rates for routine services such as vaccination, and they also accept insurance.

We've been generally pleased with the quality of care we've received, from a small-town clinic in the Mississippi Delta to a large hospital in populous (and prosperous) Orange County, California.

Tomorrow I'll write about our approach to wellness and prevention.

We're Not Camping, This Is Home - Part 2

We aren't very good at camping

Serious campers have the coolest stuff: camp stoves, lanterns, fancy folding tables, coolers full of goodies, space-age folding lawn furniture, citronella candles, that cast-iron dutch oven with the nifty tripod, the old-fashioned enameled coffeepot for the campfire. Yeah, we don't have any of that. We drive in, slide out, level up, throw out a welcome mat, and we're pretty much done settling in, on the outside. Eventually the bikes come out, and maybe a basic chair or two.

Don't get me wrong, we like to spend time outside, sometimes even sitting around our campsite. There's nothing like morning coffee out on the verandah, enjoying whatever view we've parked at. We love campfires, and the boys enjoy building and igniting them whenever they're legal and convenient. Joe occasionally cooks meat or corn over the coals. And of course we roast marshmallows. But most of our cooking happens on the stovetop in our little kitchen, with ingredients out of our pantry and refrigerator. We usually eat at our dinette, only occasionally ferrying the fixings for a meal out to the provided picnic table. If we're really planning ahead, we'll dig out the vinyl table cloth and the clips that hold it on in the wind. Then we practically look like campers.

Earlier this year Joe found a portable Weber grill next to the dumpster at a campground. (Craig's list curb alerts have a venerable heritage in good, old-fashioned trash-picking). This grill was apparently the victim of another camper's prejudice against the beginnings of rust, because that was the only thing keeping it from looking quite new. I imagine Joe will do a little more cooking out with his new grill, when a campfire isn't available or would take too long. If he happens to find a sale on chicken, or some discounted bratwurst, that is.

I'm consistently impressed with how my camping friends plan out the meals for the trip, shop for specific recipes and menus, and keep the ingredients cold on ice until they are needed. Joe has always been a "what's on sale?" shopper, so we continue to throw together meals as we always have ... starting with "what's in the pantry?" We're creative and forgiving. We don't starve, we don't waste a lot of food, and we try to be aware of what we're eating without overdoing the food guilt.

Ditto the eco-guilt. We drink a lot of bottled water. Although we're not opposed to drinking potable tap water, there are many potential points of contamination in an RV system, so we only drink from our faucet under specific, controlled conditions. We're still trying to find a system that uses less plastic than purchasing water in jugs and bottles (occasionally getting into a cycle of refilling, but not usually).

For a while we thought that paper plates and plastic cups and cutlery were easier than real dishes. We still keep some disposables around, but real dishes simply function better and make us feel at home. Washing up after a meal is one of the little pleasures I find in daily housekeeping. The added challenge of water conservation (to minimize the frequency of dumping our tanks) elevates it to an exercise in efficiency.

A good chunk of most days we spend away from camp -- exploring, playing, or shopping, on foot or with our bikes. We walk right past our "borrowed yard" on the way in or out. Relaxing at home in between outings and meals, we'll kick back on our beds or the couch, or play a game at the dinette table. We just don't manage to turn a campsite into an extra room the way all those fancy campers do. Maybe that's something to work on this year.

We're Not Camping, This Is Home - Part 1

Living full-time in an RV isn't just an extended version of weekend or vacation camping -- it's a completely different approach.

All we have is what we have

On a weekend camping trip, you might leave behind personal luxuries in favor of simplicity. The laptop, the kids' video games, your DVD collection are left at home in favor of family card games and horseshoes. You might even forgo daily essentials because you're "roughing it." The full suite of girlie makeup and hair products, the toaster and coffee maker are replaced with the natural look and campfire cooking appropriate to the setting.

Full-timing means we bring everything with us, or more accurately, all we have is what we have. There are a few luxuries others might appreciate that we don't bother with, and the rest we bring with us everywhere. We don't have dress clothes or fancy shoes. We have coffee and pint mugs, but not wine glasses. We did trade up to the silver cutlery, partly to get it out of storage and keep it in the family, and partly because it was more practical for small spaces than the chunky plastic-handled stuff we'd been using for years.

While we can't let sentiment completely undermine utility, we do have some useless things that we're just attached to. Such as every wooden sword, stuffed animal, and random action figure that was deemed indispensable. And a ceramic hand mold from a latex glove factory. A small wooden bowl, turned by a beloved relative. A pretty fishing creel inherited from another. A few cherished pottery vessels. Stuff that makes us feel "at home".

As we define the necessities and practical luxuries, the inevitable question for each is "how much" or "how many?". We don't have laundry machines, nor do we have room for a month's worth of clothes for five people in various warmth ratings. So we have a budget set aside for coin laundries, and our wardrobes are sparse. We wear things more than once, and we'll have to wear almost everything if the temperature drops to freezing.

Consumables like dry and canned food, tissues and toothpaste are tough ones for me. I've always been one to have a spare laid by of anything that won't spoil. And Joe tends to buy multiples of anything that's on sale, so we sometimes end up with a year's supply of something we rarely use. We've curbed those tendencies some, but we have a few places to stash an extra can of beans, a jar of peanut butter, or a few rolls of toilet paper.

We had to get rid of most of our books, although we made room for the pop-up books (lightweight and entertaining), several dear cookbooks, and some high-quality reference books. We kept most of our boardgames, cardgames, and dice, and enough art and office supplies to keep our hands busy and our papers in order. We kept our small collection of music and movies, some of them tinyized -- the CDs were transferred into iTunes; DVDs are with us, but consolidated into zippered cases. We have a small TV and a DVR, though we don't often tune in to broadcast or cable signals.

As I take inventory mentally, it seems that we still have way more stuff than we need. Time will tell, and ballast will be jettisoned.

So, it's as you might expect. We aren't as lean as campers, nor as indulgent as homemakers. We're somewhere in between. Tomorrow I'll tell you how our campground living differs from what we've seen of experienced casual campers.

How and Why We Live Like This

Joe and I met in Maryland when I was still in college. Joe was a very frugal and average-earning civil servant (NASA engineer), socking away every penny, weighing every purchase. Keeping the thermostat low and combining car trips to save gas. Buying groceries discounted for age or condition. Doing all his own oil changes and most auto repairs. Saving money in hundreds of non-glamorous ways. He planned to retire from working at 40. He was completely confident in this goal.

So we lived according to his bachelor rules of frugality through my master's degree, my couple of years working, and his job change to the private sector, which also brought a small bonus of stock options. Nothing astronomic, our earnings ... maybe we had two years in six figures, as a couple. But we put most of it away, or into assets that would hold their value or appreciate.

We lived for a few years in a little house on a few acres in Maryland, raised some chickens, had a big garden, and started our family. When Joe got laid off in 2002, shortly after we had our second kid, and a couple of years shy of 40, we decided he wouldn't go back to work. I went back part-time for a year or so, but came home when I was expecting our third child. That's also when we found our Kansas farmhouse, which Joe's great-grandpa had built in the twenties, 2 miles from the house he grew up in. It looked like our dream home: lots of room for three growing boys, great soil for a garden, a community we knew and loved, and a low cost of living (our idea of frugality was a joke by western Kansas standards).

We bought the farmhouse on its six acres, and Joe immediately started planting fruit trees and cultivating an annual garden. A scant year later, we had tired of maintaining two complete households 1500 miles apart. We bought a 12-year-old motorhome (so we'd be able to visit family and friends in Maryland without entirely moving in with them) and sold our Maryland house. We then bought the rest of the quarter section (1/2 mile square, or 160 acres) around our farmhouse.

It's a pretty piece of land, with a half-mile shelterbelt of woods along the blacktop road and a creek that's dry most of the year. We contracted with a neighbor to plant alfalfa, and he cuts, bales, grinds it and takes it to a nearby feedlot, where it becomes Kansas beef. Joe had a new shelterbelt planted (baby trees!) to shelter the homestead from the north wind. We experimented with chickens and goats (which always had to be given away when we went a-traveling). Joe put in a woodstove and a water-source heat pump, serving both aesthetic and frugal ideals. We started fixing up the house, room by room, but never really getting ahead on the heap of projects the old place suggested to us. The barn (c.1903) wants love, and two smaller buildings are sliding into horizontal oblivion. The house is sound, and charming, and in need of paint. And then there are all the seductive ideas of alternate energy, improving the passive thermal management of the masonry house, more trees, more permaculture, more, more, more ... pie in the sky.

After a few trips in the motorhome, we realized how much we enjoyed being elsewhere. We quickly developed a preference for nature-focused state and regional campgrounds over commercial RV parks, which tend to be resort-type seasonal communities, or parking lots for people visiting local attractions. We spent months on the road, visiting friends and family and exploring new places. When my brother Frank was in Florida, we discovered the Emerald Coast, where Henderson Beach State Park has become one of our favorite places to stay. Last winter we stayed three months in coastal Southern California, and fell in love with the beaches, the canyons, the sunshine, the tacos, and the ready availability of ... well, everything!

With all this traveling, we do spend some money, but we still have a frugal core. We never buy new vehicles, we try not to spend money that's better spent elsewhere, we don't have to dress fancy or keep a vehicle under the demands of commuting. We homeschool, so we have no child care costs and no school activity costs. We eat grocery bargains at home (the RV is home), and we go as cheaply as satisfies when we dine out. And Joe is a helluva handyman when it means saving money (although he's delegated oil changes to the pros at this point, and as our vehicles get larger and newer, other repairs as well).

There are downsides to frugality. We move very slowly on home improvements, and we aren't the first couple to struggle with disparate ideas of what "has to be done". Joe always preferred spending time in the garden to working on the house, and I was barely keeping up with housework with little ones to mind. Joe also has a bit of the packrat in him -- he grew up on a wheat farm in Kansas, with older parents who'd survived the Great Depression. It was always a relief to leave behind the chaos of our ever-increasing load of stuff and get on the road with a well-defined set of necessities and truly valued luxuries.

On our last couple of trips, we realized that the weight of running our old homestead, the constant struggle of maintenance and clutter management, depressed us as soon as we turned for home. We considered the problem off and on for a year or so. With the kids getting older, we could potentially start to work down the never-shrinking list of homestead projects. Maybe we could limit our gardening, maybe stay home for an entire year, fit in the living around the work (like most people do). As we thought and talked, we realized that we couldn't even agree on what we were working toward -- we each had different ideas of what "home" looked like. We came closest to agreeing on the qualities of a pleasant home when we were on the road, and the home in question was our RV. A-ha! After some soul-searching on the relative value of stuff vs. simplicity, and roots vs. freedom, we concluded that we would pull up stakes entirely.

We've traded up to a 4-year-old fifth wheel RV pulled by a 13-year-old pickup. We're selling the farm. We've given away almost everything useful or beautiful that we owned. And we've sent a whole lotta junk to its final resting place. It'll be a challenge to be as frugal as before with a minimalist attitude toward property. This is the first time we've surrendered all of our precious junk, which we often mined for solutions instead of buying new things. But being on the road for months has gotten us used to living without stuff, and it's downright liberating when you really start pitching all the crap that's been collecting dust in corners and harboring spiders in storage rooms for years.

So, here we go. And you get to watch. We might even come live near you for a few weeks. Hope to see you then!