The truthful answer is I really don't know! The man of the house and I have agonized and thoroughly thought this through for the past six months. I cringe at the thought of what we may have overlooked. You, gentle reader, are hoping we overlooked many things to make your reading more entertaining. Shame on you.
Food-Clothing-Shelter
All three seem to be a problem on this trip. The will to take the trip is so great that we keep trying to rebuild this card house we are creating to make something sturdy that will stand up. At first it seemed so simple. Take the camper. Drive around. See the National Parks. Simple. But when we really started thinking things through......It became much, much more complicated.
Food
Our camper is the world's smallest tent on wheels. No amenities. No kidding. (See Shelter below.) So refrigeration would be quite sketchy. Think about it. Try not to eat anything that has to be refrigerated for 6 weeks. See what I mean? And make it healthy.......and taste good.....to all four people involved.....and filling,,,,and budget friendly.....and did I mention healthy? So for many weeks, I carefully worked out a menu, with the help of Pinterest, trying to meet the aforementioned criteria. After much trial and error, I had a menu worked out for 3 squares a day. Then a chilling thought occurred to me. How much food were we talking about here? My weekly grocery trips fill the back of my Escape. We concluded that it would be necessary to refill supplies once a week. In order to save time and money, I knew I could work out my shopping list from everything I could collect at Walmart. Plus, there are Walmarts everywhere, so we would be good to go.......Until the nurse at the doctor's office told me that I would need a lot of good luck trying to find a Walmart near Yellowstone and Glacier National Park. This Hoosier girl didn't know there weren't Walmarts every 30 miles sprinkled across the United States! So we had to find the Walmarts we could access and reworked our trip plans. Our first days on the road, we are going to have to go 9 days without groceries or laundry. Even still with restocking groceries, the load we have to carry with us is huge. I tried to get everything together to see how much it would be........Could we even tote this much food with us? There are a few things missing in the picture, but this is a lot to take considering the size of our camper and car.
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| The "fridge" is on the right. |
Michael has a never ending love of tools and just so happened to have a brand new plastic toolbox on hand. What a surprise.....ha ha ha. That will be where we store all the canned, dried, and boxed food. (See Shelter below.) The chest cooler will store the 84+ pieces of fruit we will need for a week to keep everyone, ahem....healthy. We added another cooler (not shown) for snacks. The cooler that is standing up is what we will be referring to as the fridge. It plugs into both the camper outlets and the car. It isn't really a fridge. It will only keep the food 40 degrees less than the outside temperature. So when we get to the desert sporting 120 degree temperatures, we might have to rethink our plan. I am also a little paranoid about plugging it into the car because I was giving it a test run while I was doing errands and taking the kids to the ISTEP tests, and it drained my car battery. Super Mike had to come and rescue us. On the trail, we will have no Super Mikes to rescue us. This trip is sounding more and more dangerous......We did a short test run to see if all of this would fit into the box. Then we had to test if the camper would be too heavy on the front hitch to pull all of this weight. It worked out well in the test run, but when I was packing for the real trip, I added all the can goods I had on hand to make shopping easier and cheaper later. Adding those cans made it so heavy that Mike and Harrison could just barely lift it up onto the hitch. It is probably too heavy, but we are going with it like this. This is the heaviest it will be for the whole trip. The picture makes the box look small, but it is really huge and heavy.
Cooking all this food is another hurdle we have had to jump over. We will classify cooking into the category of :
Shelter. Up next: Read the drama that the Yeltons agonize over in order to find a camper that will work for a 6 week trip.
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