It's time to hit the road again!

When we were planning last year's "Crossing America" trip, Kristen and I each came up with our own list of the sites in America that we wanted to see. Then we compared, combined and prioritized the lists. Not surprisingly, we found that we had  a pretty big list. There was no chance that we would  see all (or even most) of those sites as a part of a 3-4 month cross country trip. I'm sure that we'll never get to many of the sites.

Figuring that last year's trip might be the only time that we pulled the trailer all the way to the East Coast, we made the decision to try to spend as much time as possible touring the East. We left the Western sites that weren't on a relatively direct route to and from the East for later trips. This time around, we'll be staying in the West and  we will attempt to visit a lot of the sites that we missed last Summer.

We started making our plans months ago. Last year, we didn't get started until May 16 after we returned from attending our granddaughter Maya's 4th birthday party in Rutland, MA. This year, we had a babysitting commitment (grandchildren Colton and Riley) for the last 2 weeks of March but we decided to get started just as soon as possible afterwards.

We were well into laying out a rough itinerary when we realized that we hadn't taken granddaughter Riley's 1st birthday into consideration. After determining that the date for her party will be April 26, we laid out a route that has us leaving tomorrow, April 4, and working our way up the Eastern side of the Sierras (Joshua Tree, Death Valley, Lone Pine, Mono Lake, Tahoe) and then back down the West Side (Columbia, Yosemite, Sequoia, Kings Canyon). We'll stop near Palmdale long enough to hit Riley's party in Thousand Oaks and then we'll take off on the real trip.

We did what preparation we could before leaving for our babysitting commitment. The truck went into the dealership to make sure that it was up to the challenge. After last year's experience with nearly getting stuck in a couple of RV parks that had sloping gravel roads, we decided to replace the stock tires with some all-terrain tires (we've also figured out that, if we do anticipate trouble, we can temporarily adjust the load leveling to shift more weight onto the rear tires.

We got home from our babysitting commitment last Sunday evening (we had a wonderful 17 day visit with Colton and Riley by the way). While babysitting, I was able to spend nap times making most of our earlier reservations.

Getting "Baby" ready for the road

This week has been exhausting. We not only had a ton of last minute preparation to do for our trip but there was almost as much work to do to get the house prepared for our absence. Our HOA rules only allow us to have the trailer at home for 48 hours so "Baby" came home yesterday morning. We've been working long hours to get her ready. We have a few last minute items to take care of in the morning but we think that we've just about got her ready to roll.

-JC-