HaveKidsWillTravel

And despite all the miles covered, the confined quarters and each others annoying little habits, we’re all still healthy, sane and on speaking terms, so it must be worth sharing some of the secrets we’ve discovered to life on the road.

First of all, the RV has turned out to be a great way to travel. It’s easy to drive and comfortable on the road, the kids have space on the table between their bench seats to draw, do their schoolwork, and watch an occasional movie. The iPad is rationed – half an hour each, and none for the first hour on the road, which seems to result in better backseat behaviour – sometimes less is more.

But the trip isn’t just a big holiday – being out of school for so long, we’re trying to cultivate their minds with a little home-schooling. Fiona was very organised and bought a range of school workbooks for Maths, Spelling and Grammar before we left home, and Angus and Evie work through them with a bit of help while we drive. We all read a lot – even Digby can sit and read ‘Where’s Wally’ for hours. I’ve been reading them bits from the ‘Young Patriots Guide to American History’ (which they seem to enjoy, apart from my rendition of ‘The Star Spangled Banner’…) and picked up a ‘how to learn to draw’ book for our arts curriculum, which has at least kept them entertained – even if I do tend to hog the watercolors.

Every destination has a visitor center of some sort that we make good use of – Angus usually grabs the first person he can find wearing Khakhi and peppers them with obscure questions on local fauna, (“uh, I don’t know much about Wolverines little dude, I just work in the giftshop…”). Digby races around to find out what he’s not allowed to touch, while Evie divides her time between taking in the exhibits and physically steering Digby away from things likely to get him into trouble or harm. The best part of all this education is the way it helps them absorb and engage in what they’re seeing – and there’s nothing that gets them out of the RV and exploring the campsite quite like the threat of revising the 6-times table.

At camp, unless the weather really is miserable, everyone bundles out and only really comes inside for cooking and sleeping. At night-time, everyone fits in pretty snugly – Angus and Evie share the bunk above the cabin (with a few grumbles), secured with an old piece of fishing net we found on a beach. Digby sleeps in between the two of us in the bed at the back (stretched out in starfish position), so we only bother fiddling with folding the table into a third bed for movie nights. The hardest thing about bedtime has been just how light it is – when it’s daylight past midnight, it’s difficult to convince everyone that it’s time to go to sleep. Maybe the best part of having an RV is that breaking camp in the morning involves little more than getting the kids dressed and breakfasted, doing the washing up and pushing a button to retract the slide-out – which is still all too difficult some mornings, when we just drag them out of bed into their car-seats and hit the road.

The Winnebago View is a good bit of engineering, too – the Merc Sprinter is great to drive, surprisingly fuel efficient, and having lived in her, there isn’t too much that we’d change. And the other View owners we’ve met along the way seem to feel the same – we’ve met folks who have done over 150,000 miles, and driven all the way to Prudhoe bay (so maybe we can go Ice Road Trucking after all). And 24′ is a good size. Just like a house, it doesn’t matter how many bedrooms you’ve got, there are going to be days when being couped up inside with 3 children is going to be drive everyone nuts (usually in the last 15minutes of the drive – just in time to try and reverse park into a quiet, unsuspecting campground with three tantrums in full swing, both parents yelling and toys being thrown out the window).

But 24′ can pretty much fit it in and out of anywhere, and even (taking a few liberties and making a few apologies) squeeze it into a standard size car park. And the slide-out section gives us an extra 2 feet of width in the middle, which I reckon it’d take a lot of extra length to make up for in terms of usable interior space when you’re parked.

Wherever possible, we stay in fairly rustic camps – $15 or so a night camping in national, state and provincial parks, state forests and the like – usually pretty settings, fairly secluded and with a level parking place, a fire ring and a picnic bench. We’ve never really had a problem just finding a site when we turn up (although we’ve been lucky to get sites at the last minute in the big national parks). But stop at any $40/night RV park (basically big gravel car parks with hookups for water, power, sewerage, cable TV, and just enough space to park your RV), and it will be packed. The paradox is that while the whole idea of an RV is to be entirely self-sufficient, a lot of the rigs are just so big that I guess they won’t fit anywhere but the RV parks. We probably end up staying in one once a week or so – either because we need to be close to a town, do the laundry or connect to the internet.

Our fellow campers seem to be either retirees (usually an active looking couple of 60-somethings, many ex-military, and often living full time in their RV – all are friendly, well organised, and keen to offer mile by mile itinerary suggestions); holidaymakers (usually 40-somethings renting for a week or two, more often spotted in transit than in a campground, and always in a hurry to get somewhere); or locals (sometimes ‘colorful characters’, full of useful information and insights into what life up here is really like, and occasionally (jackpot!) have kids the same age as ours).

Now I’m sure all greenhorns make a few silly mistakes early on (having messy accidents at the dumpstation or driving off without unplugging the services…), but we quickly got into the routine. Most of the tasks seem to naturally divide into pink jobs or blue jobs – Fiona cooks inside, I cook outside, Fiona knows where everything is, I handle the sewerage dumps. So much so, that breaking the code is a cause for consternation – doing the laundry gets me odd looks and patronising comments (as I sort all our clothes into piles of beige and khakhi), and Fiona doing a reverse park can bring out the whole campground to watch – and culminate in a standing ovation. The fire is another strictly segregated affair – I was going for a stroll around the campsite one evening when a guy came all the way across the campground to grab me, nearly in tears from laughing so hard, “Quick, man, you’re wife’s splitting wood, I’ve never seen anything like it!”

She does have an (ummm…) interesting technique.