Introduction

In March of 2008 we purchased our first RV. It’s a beautiful 27-foot Coach House Platinum with two slide outs. It is cozy and provides everything we need for our great adventure. We have a great kitchen and satellite TV. The slide outs gives us extra room in the bedroom and living area. You can go to the Coach House website via this link www.coachhouserv.com and see what our coach looks like as well as view the other models available.

We have been asked, “What will you do”? Of course we will tow our Chevy HHR behind us. We are taking our bicycles, hiking boots, golf clubs, fly-fishing poles, and inflatable boat right along with us. Sandi has a goal to fish in every state in the lower 48! We will visit lots of National and State Parks and see beautiful scenery across this great country. Best of all we will meet new friends!

When we tell people of our plan, many have said they would like to do something similar. We hope that this Blog will encourage you and give you tips on how to plan for a trip of your own. Don’t let the “little things” stop you!

The Blog will chronicle how we have prepared, our plan, things we see and special places we find along the way and of course pictures. We will share tips and tricks for traveling and best of all you can ride along with us on our Great Adventure starting in mid May 2009.

THE PLAN
Ken and I have spent the last 2 years planning our trip. We have broken this into 3 sections. Naturally this is all tentative, which is the beauty of it because we don’t have to be anywhere at any specific time! We don’t make reservations, except maybe on holiday weekends, which will allow us to alter our trip as needed. Also it will test whether we can really stay on the road for 5 months on the first leg without getting homesick!

Leg 1: Leaving home in May 2009 we will head through the northern states including NY,PA, OH, IN, IL, MI, WI, Minnesota, North & South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and end up somewhere in the southwest, possible NM or Arizona to store the RV. We will come home to spend the holidays with family.

Leg 2: We will head out sometime in January 2010 and head through the southwest and work our way up the west coast getting to Prince Rupert British Columbia to take the Alaska Marine Highway. We will take the Marine Highway north and explore Alaska eventually driving down the Alaska Highway back to the lower 48. We are still planning for this leg. Again we will store the RV for the holidays and come home.

Leg 3: This is the most tentative part of the plan. We will return to the RV in January and hope to head down the Baja of Mexico to Cabo San Lucas. We will return to the US and work our way across the southern states and eventually back home.

THE PREPARATION:
Whew! Preparation wasn’t just deciding where to go and what to take. We have gone through several different stages, but although it has been a lot of work we have enjoyed working together to make it all come together!

The first decision – to RV or not to RV! The preparation began several years ago when we rented a mid size (Class C) RV. We took a 3 week trip through northern New England and Canada in the fall. We wanted to ensure we liked traveling and living in an RV. This helped us decide what we did and didn’t want if we bought one. This trip helped us decide we did not want a large rig as we drove through many narrow roads in downtown St. Johnsbury, Canada and Sandi had to get out and check the roof clearance to ensure we had enough room to go under some of the bridges we came to. (Yes we were definitely new to this whole environment!) We took our bicycles with us for transportation and quickly learned we would definitely want to tow a vehicle when doing extensive travel.
We caught the remnants of a small hurricane while in New Brunswick and spent 2 days inside the 24 ft vehicle. We decided that we could survive together in small quarters, but we would be looking for museums and movie theatres when we had extended bad weather! So the decision was made – Yes this was what we wanted to do!

Decision 2 - What to buy!
How do you select your RV?
First it took us (rather Ken) two years of research to find our perfect RV. We had to decide how big, what did we have to have, what were nice to haves, what kind of travel did we want to do, would we tow a vehicle or not. Yes, we started out looking at the beautiful and very large RV’s. We started out going to the RV show in Boston to see what the different manufacturer’s had to offer. Then we started reading websites like Go RVing and looked at magazines like Motor Home. Wow talk about information overload!

Although the large (Class A) RV’s are beautiful, we decided we did not have to replicate our house to be comfortable on the road. We wanted to be able to easily pull into any campground, be able to park on a regular street, and not have to worry about every bridge we come to! We also wanted good kitchen facilities and the bed had to be comfortable! Ken focused on the technical, driving and storage requirements, while I paid attention to the inside and living requirements. We made our requirements list (the first of many!). Then we started shopping. We went to the other end of the spectrum and looked at the small RV’s that look like custom vans and that you can drive as your normal vehicle. We wouldn’t have to tow a vehicle, but we decided we needed something a little bigger. So on to mid size (Class C) vehicles. Ken found the Coach House Platinum on line and it had everything we wanted and more. The “look” is awesome as you will see in the picture and is a totally different look from most RV’s on the road. So we drove to Hershey PA to go to the RV show there. (Naturally we weren’t going to buy only look—ha). We had a short list of manufacturers and by the end of day 1 had ordered our 2008 Coach House! Now things were really becoming realistic! We took delivery of the coach in March 2008 and drove it for the first time from Pennsylvania back to New Hampshire. We love the coach!

Decision 3 - All the “little things”:
Now we had to decide how to handle the mail, pay the bills, will our medical insurance cover us on the road, do we get a wireless card so we always (sort of) have access, how do we stay in touch with the family…..what do we do with the house.
We researched the services of the Good Sam Club, Family Motor Coach Association and Passport America as well as AARP. These groups have many good packages that can resolve some of the challenges you may have when planning a trip on the road.
Also we are very lucky to have family members who are supporting and helping us along the way.

Mail & Bills - we decided not to get a mail forwarding service as we wanted to keep our costs down as much as possible. So we asked our son and daughter-in-law if we could forward our mail to them.(Thanks Mike & JoJo) Once a week we call and determine what needs to be done. Most bills are paid on line and we can do that from the RV.

Medical - we are fortunate enough to have coverage that will cover us all over the US. Hopefully we won’t need this.

Staying in Touch - we tried to get the family up on the same search engine but that didn’t really work out. We will be using a combination of Skype and Yahoo mail to stay in touch. We designated one family member as an emergency contact. (Thanks Mel G!) This way we let one person know where we are all the time and if we can’t be reached by our normal cell phones the information can be passed on in an emergency.

One challenge has been the access to wireless. Many campgrounds have hot spots but don’t have wireless at the sites (little inconvenient, but it works). We are looking into whether a wireless card will work better. State Parks don’t have any access at all.
Cell phones have been patchy, The best thing we did was to get a satellite phone with our OnStar package in our tow vehicle (Chevy HHR). This has been a real blessing because it allows us to call from anywhere!

The House - we debated whether to try and rent the house or not..finally we decided to go ahead and rent it monthly for the summer. However, this meant we had to pack everything almost like we were moving out. It was some work and we locked everything in a spare room so we didn’t have to rent a storage place. Once September comes and we are still on the road we will decide whether to rent it for the year (2010). When we come back we will either rent a small apartment or stay with ‘the kids”. Atleast the house won’t be empty.

Final Preparation - What to take:
Checklists, checklists, checklists!! This was in a way the most challenging. Again Ken tackled the technical and outside requirements and I handled the household requirements. We read RV websites and found checklists on line that really helped (kitchen, pantry, bedroom, bath etc). It is like stocking a new house! Because we chose a small RV we really have to be careful as there isn’t a lot of storage space. Once we got the coach set up (including the 7 good bottles of wine from our wine cellar at home) we were almost ready. Time was getting close to our departure date… will we make it ….Ken said YES no matter what.

Now the big checklist…clothes! (harder for me than for Ken). All the books say take 10 days of clothes (ha) I have just a “little“ more and 5 pairs of shoes. It is important to have mix and match stuff though and no “fancy stuff” We did take our winter jackets and polar fleece as we will need them to come home We still have space and of course both of us read so we had to have books and cookbooks for the road. Wow I think we are packed!!
We filled the fridge Monday morning and looked at each other…....HERE WE GO!!!