This is a continuation of the previous post. If you haven’t checked it out, go read it here.
Pilot + Co-Pilot = Flexibility
YouTube is a really cool thing. We’ve learned a ton from RVers on there and we still follow several of them. Now when we watch some of these solo travelers I am really bummed for them because I can’t fathom how they can be quite as flexible as what we just experienced on our 10-day trip.
I suppose the aspect that made our trip so successful as a spontaneous, reservationless exercise was that there were two of us. I could focus on the driving and complaining while Keli looked at the potential stops along the way, estimated our arrivals and called places to find us a patch of ground to park on for the night. I think traveling solo would take some of the fun out of that. Who would listen to me complain? But we’re newbies so its still all exciting and fun.
The takeaway here is that RVing as a couple or simply with someone else who can help is really the way to go versus traveling solo.
RV Gastronomy
We like to eat. Honestly we like to eat what we cook more than we like to eat what other people cook for us which is funny because we are not chefs…and we don’t even pretend to really know what we’re doing in the kitchen most of the time. Our stationary home has (obviously) way more flexibility than our home on wheels so right out of the gate we knew it would take some planning and adjustment.
We’ll probably do an entire post (or maybe ongoing series) on this topic sometime in the future but the bottom line here is that we totally surprised ourselves with what we were able to accomplish with food on this trip.
I think it is only fair to discuss briefly here what we actually eat so we can put this all in context. If you read the Day 10-recap post, you’ll remember that we only ate out twice on the whole journey. Add one more meal where we had a weak moment in a greek bakery and brought spanikopita back to our RV (we should’ve brought a LOT more back).
So here’s what our normal breakfast consists of every single day of our lives, RV or home: coffee, bacon, eggs and orange juice OR coffee, sausage links, pancakes and milk. How easy is that? We both agree that buying breakfast ANYWHERE is just about the biggest waste of food money, bar none! We make damn good breakfast, too.
Lunch was always variable because we were usually moving during that time of day. It might be PB&J with chips or warmed up black bean and rice burritos that we made at home and brought along or various lunch meat sandwiches. Simple, quick and easy cleanup was the rule of the day on lunches. I will tell you when you’re looking out your door at a quiet, secluded coastline, just about everything you put in your mouth tastes better.
Dinners were more interesting because we were pretty much always set up somewhere and could bust out some ingredients and the flat top griddle outside. Now we’re getting fancy with burgers, fried potatoes and onions, local shrimp, reheating tamales we’d brought, etc., etc… We never felt an ounce of remorse for our food choices. In fact, our normal non-mobile life works pretty much the same way…we’ll make a bunch of food on the weekends and eat it all week for meals! So this worked the same way.
Here are some photos of our basic setup inside and the gear we decided to bring to cook outdoors while in camp.
Nothing crazy. Nothing earth-shattering.
The only thing we need to figure out is how to use the convection oven part of the microwave more effectively. It seems there is some sort of specific sequence of button presses equivalent to nuclear launch codes or memorizing 128 bit encryption passwords in order to really use the oven the way it is intended. I wish engineers would understand that people who do their own cooking are not smart people and we much prefer something with a simple knob and an on/off button at most. Mrs. Coppolillo from my geometry class will be more than happy to confirm that me and quadratic equations are not compatible in the same universe no matter how many times I had to take that damn class and my *%$#*% oven shouldn’t be that complicated.
Anyway…
We came home with more than enough food left over to stay on the road another 10 days without eating out at all. I call this one a big win!
It’s Not as Scary as You Think
Embarking on a trip like this with virtually zero experience was scary. I’ll just go ahead and admit it. That also meant it was incredibly exhilarating and unexpectedly, very freeing.
I’m sure that sounds contradictory when you hear me talk about being mentally exhausted from driving, etc., but I’m not sure I’m smart enough to pick the right words to make it make sense. We were living day by day on this trip. We had a vague idea of what our plan kinda might look like but we had to decide the night before or the same morning which way we were going to go, approximately where we would like to end up for the night, and sometimes what we wanted to see along the way. When is the last time you lived like that? For me personally its the kind of mindset that I remember when I was a teenager in the summertime before cell phones.
Get up at 11:00ish, maybe clean yourself off, maybe call a friend on the phone to see if they’re home, maybe you end up going on a hike in the forest, maybe you end up hanging out at someone’s house talking about their newfangled CD player in their car, maybe you end up driving around aimlessly until you end up at the mall hoping to meet girls…basically all the kind of stuff I yell at my teenager about so he doesn’t think this is how life is supposed to be when you’re an adult.
Maybe the real truth is that us adults have got it all wrong and we could learn a little something from our past selves or from our offspring about how to really live in the moment again.
Don’t tell him I said any of that.
Hit us up on the contact page if you want us to elaborate on something that we know very little about, just say “hi” or tell us how we’re doing it all wrong!
