"Roughing It" in the morning...

When we camp somewhere with electrical hookups (as we are here in Escalante Petrified Forest State Park in Utah) the ideal morning for me, before everyone wakes up, looks like this picture. iPad, plunge pot full of coffee with water that I just heated in that electric hot pot doodad at the edge of the table. The camper, unfortunately, had to be parked in such a way as to obstruct my view of the reservoir that sits behind it, but that'll have to do...

Trying the tent again tonight...

Tonight we are camping at an actual campground without hookups, with some good scenery and a place to put our tent. There is some thunder but we are still going to try to sleep outside without the tent fly and do some star gazing. And when I say "we," I mean all four of us! We'll see how Buster does at sleeping outside. The day was hot today - we saw up to 110 degrees on the car thermometer, but the sun has dipped behind the mountain to our west and the breeze has picked up a bit, for the time being the weather is perfect. AND we have cell phone coverage so I can post this blog entry! Life is good.

Except that somehow Charli keeps on injuring Korin. It's really weird. Just now she stepped on her finger. Earlier in the day she kicked her in the head. Well, hopefully nothing too serious will come of it...

Death Valley detritus...

What is it about deserts that seems to attract old dilapidated contraptions whose functions are difficult to discern from just looking at them. Here is one such device that was sitting at the gas station just outside the park. Gas here cost like $5.60/gallon or something and even though we had more than half a tank we thought it prudent to go into Death Valley with a full tank, you know, just in case. Now we are in the synthetic, air conditioned comfort of Treasure Island in Las Vegas. The good news is I haven't lost any money yet. Te bad news is that after 15 hours here I haven't gambled once.

a confluence of events

Well it sure has been great having Brian home so much.  We go out to lunch a lot, and he has been making the lunch for Charli's play school that we have to make once a week, and he fixes things up around the house...  While I was on maternity leave, I would even go walk around the hill while he ran, so he got me to exercise, too - what a miracle!  We've been having a lovely time.

My parents have been visiting a lot, too, to hang with the grandkids.  They recently bought a new RV (a small one), and drove it out from Colorado.  Then they left for Hawaii for a month and a half, with plans to leave the RV at my uncle's house in Santa Rosa.

Well, heck, say I!  Brian's got nothing but free time, plus some severance pay; I'm not doing anything terrifically involved at work seeing as how I just got back from maternity leave and there's kind of an interim thing going on; Charli is not in real school yet; and we have access to an RV for a month?  Clearly we're going on a road trip!

It took a while for us to get the most important logistic worked out, which was how to get the carseats safely into the RV, which doesn't have any forward facing seats in the back with seatbelts.  After much frustration, Brian came up with the brilliant idea of using rock climbing gear as additional straps, and the car seats are in there facing in the proper directions and solid as rocks.  We took a test trip last weekend (a road triplet, as it were) to an RV supply store a little over an hour away.  It took us all day, and it was awesome!  We stopped for lunch, we stopped to buy diapers because we sort of forgot to bring any with us, we toured some seriously decadent RVs at this RV store after we bought some very important supplies (like lights to hang on the awning), we stopped on the way home to feed Buster...  It was completely relaxed, and Charli could see out the windows and talk to us about all the stuff she saw, and Buster slept most of the time the car was moving.  When we were stopped, Brian lounged on the bed and read his iPhone.  Breastfeeding in a Toyota Matrix with 2 carseats in it = no fun.  Breastfeeding in a Tiger van with 2 carseats in it = no problem!

Of course, we saw this on the way home.  Someone's always got to have a better house on wheels...

Meanwhile, Buster... partied!

So a week into our road trip we finally managed a day where all the timing worked out right. We got to our campsite (aka our parking spot) at a decent hour, about 5:30, and our delicious noodle dinner is on the table at about 7:30. And Buster isn't sleeping! He's partying with Charli on the top bunk!

Breakfast in Oakhurst, CA

We just got out of Yosemite and spent the night at the Days Inn about 16 mi. south of the park in Oakhurst. Yosemite was completely unbelievable. The 2 highlights were 1) the awesome first-come-first-serve campsite we got and 2) glacier point, which sits atop the edge of Yosemite Valley. Oh my God. Anyway, we survived it and are now regrouping before we head south. More later...

we're off!

Hooray!  It took us an extra day to get out, but we finally managed it.  We made a quick stop at the MOM for a ton of instant noodles, then we were off to our first real stop: Railtown State Historic Park, where they have a 40 minute steam train ride.  Charli even wore her girl train engineer outfit, even though it says the size is 18 months.

We got there in time for the last ride of the day, and it was baking hot.  My fragile San Francisco self could barely handle it.  We rode in the open train cars, because as the train lady told us, the closed cars were hotter than a biscuit.  Buster really didn't like the train whistle as we were waiting on the platform, but he was OK with it while we were on the train.  It turned out the train is not actually a steam train, and the route is just a 6 mile out and back ride through not tremendously picturesque areas, but it isn't bad, and a lot of movies were made in the area (there's not a lot of stuff around to indicate what century it is) and that's interesting.  There was also a lot of gold mining done in the area, and we found out the interesting fact that the Sutter's Mill gold mine is supposed to reopen next year.  If you wait long enough, everything comes back around!

They also had a real live roundhouse, so we went to see that, and all the fancy steam trains are actually in the roundhouse,

We will be staying in some random RV park outside of Yosemite tonight, because several of the campgrounds inside the park are first come first serve for sites, meaning you can't make reservations for them.  They take longer to fill up on the weekdays, so we figure we'll camp outside one night, then go straight in the next morning and get a campsite.  Then Nina and Bella are going to join us for a couple of days of camping!  How exciting - we can hardly wait!