Coda

It’s been a full week since our overloaded minivan sputtered to a stop in Alexandria. I’m back at work getting a new business up and running (It’s called StraighterLine. Check out this article!), the kids played with all of the toys that they never played with before we left, Jen whipped the house and yard back into shape, the dog resumed stealing food directly off of the counters while we are eating, and we got back on with our lives.

However, glimmers from the trip still poke out every now and then. For instance, last Friday Sawyer hauled his 132 matchbox cars up to the kitchen from the basement. He carefully laid each of them on the 3’ x 3’ ottoman, clearly taking his time with each one. Jen asked him what he was doing. He said that they all needed to be “leveled” like the RV before he could play with them. Further, once “leveled” they could not be moved because it would be too much of a hassle to re-level them. The cars stayed there until Monday.

I’m sure that more stuff will emerge as the Fall wears on. We’ll definitely use one of the pictures for our Holiday card. One thing about the trip that I might try to continue is this blogging thing. I’ve found that I enjoy writing about the things that strike me as humorous. Further, now that I have a fan base I could make enough to buy at least one giant orange cheese brick from Giant. Being unemployed, that’s something to consider.

While the heavy dose of quality family time was great, Jen and I did get a chance to have some time alone last Sunday. It was our anniversary, and we found a babysitter to watch the kids while we went to dinner. The restaurant was a fancy organic place, and the menu read like a seed catalog. Everything was organic, natural, 100% this, 100% that, made on-site with germ-free hands (except for the good bacteria that help your digestive tract, of course) except for the butter, which was Amish butter. It sounded great. The waiter brought us our bread while reminding us that it was made on site, and he said, “and here is your Amish butter.”

I must say that having Amish butter sounded pretty good. Amish anything must be pretty good. There are Amish carpenters, Amish cabinetmakers, and, apparently, Amish butter-makers. Actually, when Amish is an adjective for anything, it immediately denotes quality. I could see it as an exclamation, as in “That was so Amish!”

But why? What if there was one bad Amish butter-maker that got to free-ride on the Amish brand? Maybe he had bad cows, didn’t get up early enough, shaved his beard into a soul patch, but was able to make a killing because everyone thinks the Amish rock. The Amish are a group of families, not a corporation. Then I realized that maybe the Amish are acting like a corporation. They are developing a brand. I’ll call it Big Amish.

There is precedent for this. On our way back from the Big Big Trip, we went through Amana, Nebraska where a group of religious sects with seriously communal living habits settled a long time ago. They made ovens and other items. Eventually, this became the Amana brand. So, keep an eye out for Big Amish.

In other news, Luna, our 10 month old puppy, has returned to our lives. When she’s bored, she likes to pick things up in her mouth – like a sock, shirt or stuffed animal – and move it about 10 feet. Then, she will look for something else to move. It’s like she’s dusting.

It turns out that she particularly likes to chew on the kids’ stuffed animals. However, she doesn’t chew on just any of the hundreds of cheap stuffed animals around the house, she likes the Webkinz. Webkinz are the more expensive stuffed animals that come with a log-in code where a kid can bring their animal to life in a multi-user, virtual world filled every other kids stuffed animals. It’s a lot like Second Life, but for kids and the animals are a lot friendlier.

While it is annoying that the dog picks the most expensive toys to chew, Jen almost (to her credit she didn’t) bought Luna two of her own Webkinz at the Costco 2 for 1 sale. I reminded Jen that Luna is a poor typist due to a lack of opposable thumbs, and that, the New Yorker dog and Internet cartoon notwithstanding, dogs have yet to master virtual reality games (for cats, would a Second Life game be called Tenth Life?). Further, Luna has plenty of stuffed animals from which to choose. Unfortunately, Jen was proven right as Luna immediately chewed one of Zachary’s favorite WebKinz which could have been avoided if only Luna had her own.

That’s it for now. We’ll see if this blog thing sticks…

Back to Reality

For the first night in a month our bedroom didn’t have a suspension system. After a six-hour trip from Johnson Sauk Trail State Park in Kewanee, IL, we returned to the land of private bathrooms and frequent showers at Jen’s parents house in Howell, MI. We were all excited to talk to people other than our immediate family.

Today, we returned the RV to its rightful owners (John and Linda Emma, Jen’s parent’s neighbors), and let Jen work her magic with a sponge and vacuum cleaner on the RV interior. We also had some explaining to do about the significant scratches on the front right bumper. More on that later.

The end of the trip is fairly anticlimactic as our time was mostly spent driving and anticipating the return to the real world. For Jen and the kids, school and all of its logistic complexity starts in a week. For me, I inherit StraighterLine (www.straighterline.com) with the intention of building it into a thriving business. So, rather than talk about recent events, here is an eclectic list of reflections and individual items from the trip.

Here’s one that had me perplexed until Jen explained it to me. Zach and Quin frequently say the phrase, sometimes in falsetto or with an operatic affectation, “wotty potty.” Frankly, even writing it makes me embarassed for them and for their progenitors. It turns out that a “wotty potty” is a three-horned buffalo with a bathroom on its back that is found in South Dakota and can only be seen by Zachary and Quin. That makes me feel so much better… Where the name comes from is a mystery, though I am guessing that it is derived from the original Sioux “wah-ti pah-ti.” The kids think it’s hilarious.

Now that I’m back in civilization, here is a list of minor and major triumphs:

1) All kids returned hale, hearty, uneaten, and un-throttled.

2) We could pimp and un-pimp the RV like a NASCAR pit crew. We could dump, level, side-out, hook-up and re-fill in minutes.

3) Nobody acquired athlete’s foot or any other fungus known to frequent public bathrooms, though Jen harbors suspicions about my facial hair.

4) Jen and I had only one mutual exasperation session when backing up the RV. It turns out that one of the most frequent sources of marital friction among RV owners revolves around backing the RV into a parking spot. A typical flair up has one spouse at the back of the RV about 45 feet from the driver screaming “this hand sign means turn left” while the driving spouse screams “left?!!” and the RV is moving back and forth in a honey-dance buzzed by a very slow bee. Friction ensues.

For our one and only disagreement, Jen had a momentary synapse misfire where she insisted that her pointing indicated the direction that the front of the car should go rather than the rear of the car as it had for the previous three weeks. Like all of our disagreements, we quickly and politely reviewed the circumstances, identified the source of error, apologized and kissed. Yeah. In fairness, Jen assumed the role of the director because she was much better at it, and I assumed the role of the driver. All I had to do was follow directions. I’m not sure, but there may be a bigger message in this. However, in unfairness, despite Jen’s directing expertise, we did back into a low-post that caused some damage to the right front panel of the RV.

On the more serious side, this has been fabulous trip that I really hope the kids remember. It’s a rare opportunity to have a month of uninterrupted family time. If all goes well, we’ll do something like it again after my next employment change.

That’s about it for the RV trip. We head to Alexandria tomorrow, and will arrive tomorrow night. Back to the real world. For those interested in all 350 or so pictures, go here. For a link to our route, check out this map. Thanks for all comments. I'll write to everyone when I start hammering on my computer more frequently. Peace. Out.

Trout

I don’t know whether all boys love to fish or just ours. More accurately, our boys love the idea of fishing. They all have tackle boxes and they spend an enormous amount of time arranging and trading their lures. Despite having fished three times this trip, we have about 2 inches of fish to show for it. In the Tetons, we did see two trout under a bridge on a river that occupied the kids for nearly an hour of unsuccessful casting. That ended with Zachary wading in the creek with sharp stick. Unfortunately, that only works for Bear Grylls.

After Dinosaur National Monument, we hightailed it to Rocky Mountain National Park where we spent two nights. On the first day, we took the RV to the top of the Park at over 12,000 feet where we snapped a promising Christmas card candidate. This picture also proves, that, at elevation, my hair is lighter than air.

The next day was a travel day where we re-supplied and headed to our next destination. On travel days we shower, go grocery shopping, do laundry, find Internet access, get gas, and get moving. For this day, we recharged in Estes Park, Colorado. In Estes, we discovered the world’s most brilliant business plan, assuming the rest of the world’s pre-adolescent boys behave as ours do.

Estes is home to Trout Haven, a man-made pond that is so stocked with rainbow trout you could walk across it without getting your feet wet. They supply poles, tackle, lures, worms, and minimum wage teen-age labor to gut and clean your fish. They charge $.95 per inch of fish caught. I could drag a Cheeto across the pond and catch a fish. It is impossible to not catch fish at Trout Haven.

Admittedly, Trout Haven does not provide the healthiest living conditions for rainbow trout. Some looked a little pale around the gills, so to speak. There were a few that were swimming upside down. However, after promising real fish to our kids, I would have fought through a full PETA battalion plus celebrity activists.

The results were astounding. Zach caught 3 fish. Quin caught 3 fish. Even Sawyer caught two fish on his SpongeBob rod and reel. The largest fish was 16” long. We caught over 10 feet of fish. Brilliant business plan. The pictures speak for themselves. We ate 2 feet of the fish tonight.

After Trout Haven, we drove until 3 in the morning to Mahoney State Park about 25 miles east of Lincoln Nebraska. Our other stops have had picturesque scenery to attract visitors. Because it is impossible to choose a part of Nebraska that is park-worthy over any other part of Nebraska, Nebraska’s state park philosophy is to declare an area a park and then build a state-sponsored resort around it. So, Mahoney rocks! It has two fishing and boating lakes, one swimming pool with water slides, a conference center, an observation tower, bike paths, and many other amenities.

In other news, Sawyer removed his training wheels for the first time in Rocky Mountain National Park. He did great, as long as he doesn’t need to start, which sort of prohibits stopping, which is a little problematic. We’re working on it.

Lastly, for those following my ongoing facial hair experience (which should really be its own separate blog), I jumped to level four of beard evolution by creating the lamb chop/fu-manchu combo. However, every time I looked at it in the RV mirror I couldn’t help but think that it looked like I had picked up a hair fungus with an eerily symmetrical manifestation. So, the lamb chops were removed leaving only the goatee. In the interest of science, below is the only documentation of the lamb chops.

That’s all from Nebraska. We have 725 miles to Howell Michigan and 3 days in which to do it. I think we’ll re-cross the Mississippi tomorrow. Peace out.

Turning East

(Picture: Taken at Flaming Gorge Dam in Utah)

At 2:08 Mountain Daylight Time, I made a left hand turn onto Rte. 40 in Vernal, Utah. For the first time, we were heading East. We stopped for the night only 20 miles or so further at Dinosaur National Monument near Jensen, Utah. Tomorrow, we’ll search for more fossils before driving East for five hours to Rocky Mountain National Park near Denver.

Last night we stopped at the KOA in Rock Springs, Wyoming around midnight after driving for five hours from Jackson Hole, Wyoming. On the East Coast, Newark is generally considered the armpit of America, but the KOA in Rock Springs, Wyoming wins the award for the Mountain Time Zone. The KOA is nestled behind three large natural gas containers – the industrial kind that serve entire states. Without these behemoths, there would be no sound barrier between the campsite and the interstate 100 yards away. Now, remove all vegetation and replace it with gravel, a dilapidated playground, and constant howling winds. That was last night’s travel stop.

To be fair, the KOA was absolutely a stop-over type of place, and, as KOA’s do, it fulfilled all of our service needs. We effectively and efficiently “dumped” at midnight, filled our water tank, charged our batteries, leveled the RV without the dreaded “air dump”, and had very clean showers. Also, the KOA had an arcade with a driving video game and Wyoming’s requisite BuckMaster 2000 with plastic deer-shooting shotguns. I’m pretty sure the kids thought this was the best campsite of the trip.

Speaking of the kids, I’ve been mulling over how much they will remember/appreciate about the trip. Perhaps the constant family time is starting to wear on the adults, but the Total Complaint Volume (TCV, a psychological acronym often employed by the adult defense in abuse cases) seems to have grown. In the kids defense, even adults need to adjust to being uprooted every day or so. Even after adjusting, an itinerant existence can only be temporary. So, despite constant fabulous experiences, I think they are getting a little weary of travel. Also, I try to remember my vacation and travel experience when I was 3, 5 or 8 years old. I can only remember flashes, rather than whole segments. So, my conclusion is that they may not remember or even appreciate the trip. However, they will remember the act of having taken such a trip. I think that’s reward enough.

Dinosaur National Park, tonight’s stop, is a fabulous campsite. It more closely resembles the desert and canyons of the Southwest than the mountains and forests of the Tetons and Yellowstone. Like Big Horn National Forest, the seldom frequented campsites seem to have the most charm. While eating dinner, we watched the sun set over the canyon walls while listening to the burble of the Green River – all the while surrounded by million year old fossils yet to be excavated. Pretty cool!

From the kid front, today’s activity seemed to be some kind of reinvention of Harry Potter and Hogwarts with Zachary as Dumbledore. Zachary has fallen into Harry Potter hook, line and sinker on this trip. Since the beginning of the trip, he has read six books. Today he somehow convinced Sawyer and Quin to “read” from their “spell books” (which were really Harry Potter books that Zachary had already read). Zachary graded them and gave them various weights of homework (ie. one pound of homework, three pounds of homework, etc…) After their lessons, they started casting spells at each other. As we descended to the Flaming Gorge dam on the Green River, they were all screaming “luminos,” “stupify,” and other spells. At least they were occupied.

On to Rocky Mountain National Park tomorrow where I hear that the rodents carry bubonic plague and the ticks spread Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever. I’ll make sure Jen knows…

Leaving The Tetons

First and foremost, it's Jen's and Karen's (Jen's twin sister) birthday. Happy Birthday!

We’ve had a fabulous three nights in the Tetons with Karen (Jen’s sister) and her boyfriend John. We swam in Jackson Lake, fished in the local streams, Jen and kids rode the gondola to the top of Jackson Hole ski resort, and now we’re moving on. Most importantly, it was warm. We’ve had cloudless skies, 90 degree days, and 50 degree nights for 4 days. Yellowstone was fabulous, but the Tetons have been relaxing.

We plan to spend the afternoon in Jackson, and then pick a spot to travel toward. We’re thinking about Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado, but we’ll see. Last night, it dawned on me that we’re in the home stretch of our trip. We need to start moving eastward again.

More later…

Stone Cold (Yellowstone that is)

I’ll start with another Sawyer story. Yesterday was our day of sightseeing. After the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone – a 1200 foot canyon carved into the plateau – we went to Mammoth Hot Springs. Since we left for Mammoth around 2:00 pm, it was dead certain that Sawyer would fall asleep in the car, which he did. About an hour later, we arrived at Mammoth.

Now, if you have ever been around our family just after Sawyer has been woken, you will know that just about everyone will go to extremes to avoid annoying him. However, given that he is a 3 year-old and his brothers aren’t very good at not annoying people, this is almost always unsuccessful. Sawyer’s mood is less than stable immediately after sleep.

At Mammoth, there was no choice but to wake him up so we could walk the 1.5 mile boardwalk that rose about 400 feet. To keep Sawyer from ruining countless family vacations, Jen decided to carry him the entire way. I would have done it, but I was carrying Quin on my shoulders who was suffering from a cold. Near the very top, after Jen scaled the boardwalk and viewed the hot springs, Sawyer sighed and said “I don’t think I can make it the rest of the way.”

In other news, this is our fourth and last night at Yellowstone. Yellowstone is beautiful and diverse and tough. It has been cold, very cold. The temperature the last three nights has dropped below 30 degrees. During the day, it didn’t rise much more than the mid 50’s, with occasional forays into the 60’s when the sun came out. I keep telling the kids that it’s times like these that bring a family closer. Zachary responded, “yes, like emperor penguins huddled in the Arctic.” No more Discovery channel for that kid.

It was so cold one morning that we turned on the generator in the RV, turned on the furnace, and let the kids watch a video on the TV so they wouldn’t have to go outside. While this definitely runs counter to our camping and outdoor ethos, we did force them to watch a Man. vs. Wild Discovery Channel DVD. They watched the episode where Bear Grylls survived in Mexico. Since then, they’ve extolled the many ways in which the Mexican yucca plant could help us survive if the RV broke down, everyone left the park, the roads vaporized because of rogue geysers, and if the yucca could be found in Wyoming.

Today, I biked about 15 miles from West Yellowstone, Montana to our campsite. Once again, it was one of the most memorable parts of the trip. It was sunny, and I was biking alongside the Madison river, which I think was the inspiration for “A River Runs Through It” starring Robert Redford. Given the strange parallels between his life and mine – uncanny resemblance (without beard of course), Zachary’s middle name is Robert, he was the Sundance Kid and we drove through Sundance, Wyoming, and many, many others – it was life imitating art.

Tomorrow we head to the Grand Tetons where we will meet Karen (Jen’s twin sister) and her boyfriend John. Everyone is really looking forward to seeing and talking to people other than those in our immediate family. Karen’s arrival also reminds me that Jen’s and Karen’s birthdays are coming up. They both have a birthday fetish for cake with butter-cream icing. Normally, procuring such a cake would simply require a stroll to the nearest chain grocery store. However, in a National Park, this may require strategic ingredient substitution. I’m thinking bison lard and elk fat. I don’t think they’ll notice.

Tomorrow, we un-pimp the RV, evacuate the waste systems, refill with water, and head out. Until next time….

Traveling Rhinovirus

Picture 1: Zach in front of Mt. Rushmore

Picture 2: A South Dakota stop sign

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We all have colds. I guess that’s to be expected when five people share 50 cubic yards of breathing room for two weeks. It’s like the Hanoi Hilton, but with climate control and never-ending string cheese (which definitely makes it tolerable). Zachary was the original viral vector. He quickly infected the rest of us. Hopefully, it’s not swine flu, or we will be RV Zero in next fall’s flu epidemic. Maybe it’s some bison mutation we picked up in South Dakota and Wyoming. Stay tuned!

The last post was from Custer, South Dakota in the Black Hills which we visited after the Badlands. After the Black Hills, we drove through the Not-So-Good lands in Eastern Wyoming. We stopped for two nights in the Big Horn National Forest, and then drove through the Could-Be-Better lands before Yellowstone. Tonight, we sleep in the bustling metropolis of Yellowstone in August.

Apart from Devil’s Tower, noted in guide books as the most prominent site in Eastern Wyoming (the only site in Eastern Wyoming), the area between the Badlands and Big Horn National Forest is the most desolate and expansive that I have ever seen. Despite being barren and interminable, it was actually quite inspiring. There was nothing as far as the eye could see except hills and fields. If we had a thunderstorm behind us, it would have felt like the end of Terminator I.

Big Horn National Forest was gorgeous. It’s a little off of the beaten path, so we camped in a more primitive (ie. no electricity) camp site nestled in a mountain meadow and surrounded by 10,000 foot peaks. We just chilled out for the day and let the kids run around the campsite and the meadow. We hoped to stay up and watch shooting stars, but the clouds didn’t cooperate.

Tonight, we have squished into Yellowstone. Before finding our campsite, we “dumped” – RV lingo for evacuating the waste – and refilled with water. We’ve gotten to be pretty good at this. Since our first dumping disaster, we have gone un-besmirched for two consecutive dumps (would that be “smirched?”)We plan to do some fishing and visit some geysers tomorrow, though the high is supposed to be 50 degrees. If it doesn’t warm up, it could be board games in the RV.

Here are some kid stories from the road.

Lest anyone doubt that our society (and the Smith family as well) over-indulges kids with toys and stimuli – mostly made in China, the games and toys that the kids invent when they have no other options is a testament to kids’ creativity. In the Big Horn, first Zach and then the others took large pieces of aluminum foil and fashioned them into clubs that looked about like chicken drumsticks. They amused themselves for hours bopping grasshoppers on the head in the meadow. After laying into a grasshopper, they would quickly rush it over to the tupperware holding container where it awaited its fate – ostensibly to be bait for river fish.

At Custer State Park, Zach made friends with a tomboyish girl named Sky. They bonded while comparing mountain bikes. Zach first reported his friendship by telling us that he made a friend whose name was Sky, but he wasn’t sure whether Sky was a girl or a boy. This was understandable as Sky was a stronger mountain biker than Zachary and had a short Kate Gosselin hair-do underneath a concealing bike helmet. We quickly figured out that she was a girl.

A little later, Sawyer told us that he had made a friend, and he wasn’t sure whether his friend was a boy or a girl. However, his androgynous friend had a pink My Little Pony bike with long, white tassels coming from the handlebars, a white basket, and the rider had long flowing curls, and was wearing a dress.

Here’s another – Today (new day) we visited Old Faithful Geyser Basin at Yellowstone. To make sure that visitors don’t walk around the geysers break through the thin crust and boil themselves, the park service erected a 3 mile walkway made with wooden planks six inches across. Three miles equals 15,840 feet. That equals 2,640 planks. Since we went up and back, that would mean that we travelled across 5,280 boards. Sawyer wouldn’t walk on the cracks.

Lastly, it’s time to obsess a little over my newfound facial hair. First, I shaved a little on the cheekbone to create the “jawline” beard look. Having taken a razor to it for the first time, I now have a jones for cutting. Perhaps after Yellowstone I’ll go with the the Lamb Chops with the Fu Manchu kicker! Second, a cold and a mustache do not go together. I never thought about it until it became painfully and messily apparent. Third, I’ve noticed that the left point on my mildly cleft chin has significantly greater beard growth than my right point. Should I be worried? Is this a right brain/left brain thing? Maybe it’s beard cancer. I couldn’t find anything on the Internet about disproportionate facial hair growth except some ramblings by a nut job who interspersed his ruminations on facial hair with a documentary on his family vacation. What a loon!