OK, Now What

So it’s time to figure out how to satisfy part one of our plan for 2009/2010: “1) A rig that had a toilet, shower, and a north-south bed that could be made up easily.” It’s time to go shopping! Cathryn knew early on during our trip that a bathroom was importantto her, so she had used her skills to get herself (and me, when she found one with interesting features) inside a lot of rigs while we were in Baja. Based on this, and conversations with people about the pros and cons of motor homes, 5th wheels and travel trailers, we decided that a small 5th wheel was right for what we wanted and where we planned to go. So off we go for visits to RV dealers. We expected to have to deal with lots of salesmen who would pull all the “used car salesman” tricks on us. Interestingly it was a pretty good experience. The prices and discounts where all freely offered and the salesmen tended to give us a quick orientation of their inventory and then send us on our way, saying, “Let me know if I can answer any questions”.

Reflections On Our Road Trip

For those who read our blog during our trip to Baja and the Southwest last winter you know we enjoyed it tremendously. You may recall that the purchase of the Chalet last spring and the winter trip to Baja were officially regarded as experiments. Would we like traveling for such an extended time? Could we stand each other for that long, living in 72 square feet? The answer to those questions was unambiguously yes. In fact we spent many hours of the trip home asking ourselves: OK, this is great, but what would we do differently if we were to do it again? We came up with three basic changes we would want to make for the trip for the winter of 2009/2010. 1) A rig that had a toilet, shower, and a north-south bed that could be made up easily. 2) A plan that allowed us to be both gone longer and home for the holidays with our friends and family. 3) We want to reduce the number of days where we moved, so we can do more exploring in each area and to get a better feel for the communities we are visiting. We also hoped this would provide the potential for friends and family to come and visit us. So we arrived home at the end of March and began to figure out how to do that. We will describe how we addressed this plan in a series of posts. (The photo is from Playa Requeson, one of our favorite beaches, located south of Mulege, but the one place on the trip where we literally needed to take a shovel with us on our morning constitutional – and there were only a few small bushes and no trees. It’s included here as an example of why we think having our own facilities is important).