We’re preparing for our longest trip ever. 11 days, 10 nights, six different campsites. Yippee!

Around our home turf there is a young NFL quarterback who is just super. Knows his stuff, wins games, goes to Super Bowls, the whole thing. He says The Separation is in the Preparation. He says it a lot. He believes it. It seems to be working, and he is about to get a sizable raise.

Sooz should have been an NFL quarterback. She lives to plan, and then re-plan, and so on. I, too, place a high value on planning, but I don’t so much like to do it. But, as a former IT project manager type, Sooz is always casting about for something to plan. So when a trip is in the offing, I’m really enjoying some fantastic ROI on my life partnership. One of my best investments ever.

Okay, planning. We have been planning our upcoming California trip for many months. We’ve done lots of online research into RV parks and campgrounds, mountain passes, spring weather patterns and some other stuff.

You don’t go to visit people in Granite Bay, California in the middle of summer. It’s too hot. Even they think it’s too hot, and they live there. So you visit in the spring or fall, when it will only be 80 (F) in the daytime and cool at night.

Our trip to California won’t be like, well, your trip to California, assuming you actually want to see the place. We’ve been there (lived there for most of our lives), so, yeah, Yosemite, Marina Del Rey, Hollywood, whatever, who cares. (We will admit to wanting to see certain places in California, but they’re more about special times in our lives and not so much concerned with places tourists, or campers, want to go).

Instead, this strategically planned trip will give us some quality time with family and friends, and some good experience with Toto. What sorts of experiences?

• Mountain passes. We’ll be going over six baby ones and one young adult — that one only a little over 4,000 feet– so just challenging enough for us less experienced trailerist types.
• Weather. We’ve tried to time this trip to be after most mountain snow in the passes, and after heaviest rain in the northwest, but before it gets too hot in central California. As of this morning’s weather forecasts, we should miss snow in the passes on the way down — but we may have to delay a day while en route. Day 2 of our trip will involve the four highest passes, and the forecast keeps moving back and forth regarding snow for that day. If we know there will be snow in those passes we will delay a day and spend some quality time in our first RV park. We have snow chains for both TinMan and Toto — we’re required to carry them — but we don’t want to use them.
• RV parks. We’ve never stayed in one. But we want to get down to our first California destination in just three days, so we’ve found a couple of RV parks to try on the way down, and we have pull-through spaces reserved. We hope they’re sufficiently level that we don’t have to unhitch on these first two overnights. Don’t want to do that. We’ll be staying in two more (different) RV parks on our slightly different route back home.
• Dry camping — another first for us. We’ll stay two nights at Doran Regional Park in Bodega Bay, CA… no hookups! We’ll have to fill up our water tank a bit when we arrive, rely on our solar to keep the batteries happy, and use the dump station when we head back north. We paid extra for the higher-capacity, two-battery setup, and for the solar panel and controller, so it’s about time we try ’em out.
• Mobile drudgery. Hard as I try, I’m still not retired, and my clients want me to write stuff for them. I’ll have the laptop, the smartphone-with-wifi-hotspot feature, and a spot in the TotoLounge to work. I also picked up a cellular booster and antenna that had just been replaced by a new model, and we’ll see how that works before I go drilling holes in Toto’s roof.I think there’s a white paper wanting me to write it during this trip, and there may be other stuff. If I can focus on the work, it will inform our plans for future travel before the eventual retirement thing happens.

So there. Lots of new experiences to try. Fortunately we’re a strong team, with complementary skills, and I think it will be good. We’ll find out.

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