In two weeks Steve, Doogie, and I will leave for a 2-month, cross-country trip in our 28 foot travel trailer to see family, old friends, and places we have never been. I will try to keep a diary of our travels on this blog and share stories and photos of our trek.

We have a route planned, and reservations made at critical destinations. Click on the link to see our route.

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&msid=100627603444297666663.00045089ca98e40d54a7d&ll=39.842286,-98.085937&spn=36.151046,90.703125&z=4 .

We've also begun to make dates with old friends we want to connect with while we're traveling. Planning the route took a lot of time, but was a lot of fun. If you aren't familiar with GOOGLE MAPS, take a look. It's a wonderful, interactive, high-tech tool for planning a road trip. You can even collaborate with others on your itinerary. I disabled that feature. Also look at KOA and the Good Sam club websites for itinerary planning. A lot of hotels that are along interstates also have maps of their locations on their web site. Check it out. If you are considering the Motel 6, drop me an email before you make reservations.

Anyway, we're going to hit Lake Tahoe, Flathead Lake, Glacier National Park, Cheyenne Wyoming; Hamilton, Ontario; Port Bay, NY (Lake Ontario); Utica, New York; Bantam Lake (Connecticut); Pennsylvania, Alexandria, Virginia; the black hills of South Dakota; Mt. Rushmore, Casper, Wyoming; and end up at Grand Teton National Park on Labor Day weekend. Estimated return home to Southern California is September 4 or 5.

If you have an RV, you know that there is a lot of preparation for a trip like this, especially a first-time trip in a new RV. We have been talking about it for at least 5 years, and have taken road trip vacations before, and have lots of camping experience, first in tents, then in a VW Eurovan, then in a small rental trailer. Although we haven't had the luxury of a trailer with a full bath, flat screen TV, and a pillow-tip mattress, we have a pretty good idea of what it will be like (it beats a wet sleeping bag by a lot). And we will love it.

We bought the trailer from a dealer in Arkansas who specializes in custom orders. Because the dealer doesn't have a showroom or sales people, there was a substantial savings on doing business this way, even though we had to drive 1,600 miles each way to take delivery. Yes, even with the horrific gas prices, traveling from Ventura County, California to Little Rock, Arkansas saved a substantial amount. And we had a really nice time seeing the Southern and Southwestern parts of the US from route 40. It also gave us a chance to try out the process of pulling the trailer, making and breaking "camp" daily, and seeing if we really want to do this (we do). We also needed to find out if Doogie, our Labradoodle, would be a good traveler/camper (he definitely will).

Right after we got back, exhausted, we took a short vacation, and "dry" camped for 2 days at one of the Malibu beaches along Route1. The great thing about California is the accessibility of the beaches here. If you live on the east coast you know that you can't just pull up your RV along the beach and spend a day or two. Here you can. It's just wonderful. Even though you're along a major highway with cars whizzing by 24 hours a day, once you're parked the surf drowns out the cars and you feel like you are all alone. Anyway, it worked out great and gave us a chance to fire up the generators for the first time, see how much water we need (more than we had), and how long our tanks will last (long enough). It was also a nice little vacation after the long trip from Arkansas.

So now we're heavy into preparations for the long trip!

One of the things you do when preparing for RV life is to buy LOTS of stuff. The trailer is like a second home, albeit much smaller, but you really need all the stuff you need at home. Bedding, towels, dishes, glassware, cooking equipment, trash cans, pantry items, laundry items, lawn chairs, hoses, tools, dog junk, and so on. Thank God for the internet! There are great web sites for spending money related to your RV. Buying the trailer is only the starting point. An RV is like a boat, which has been defined as a large hole in the water into which you pour money. Spending tons of money when you're retired is different from spending money when you have the option to earn more. But, like I said, we've been planning for this and hopefully have planned well enough. What we didn't plan is gas at close to $5.00 per gallon, and because of the way prices for gas and everything else are skyrocketing, we have cut out our originally planned extra month to drive across Canada on route 1. But that's ok.

So we're preparing T minus 15 days and counting:

One preparation today, that was sort of fun was to weigh the trailer and our Nissan Titan tow vehicle. The purpose of this exercise is to make sure we don't exceed the GVWR (Gross Vehicle Weight) that Nissan recommends (that's the R). The trailer's posted weight is well below the recommended GVWR for the Titan, but we wanted to be sure. Another thing to worry about is the hitch weight, or the amount of weight that sits on the little round ball that pulls the trailer. Steve has been worried about this all along, so today we obtained the weights that will enable him to calculate our "hitch" weight. Here is what you do:

Load all your crap into the trailer and truck, including the dog, your partner, and a full tank of gas, generators, lawn chairs, golf clubs (which we forgot). Hook up the trailer and find a public scale. They are all over the place. Dumps have them, but there are also public scales around that truckers use. Who knew? So, you drive in and pull your front tires onto the scale and weigh the front of the truck - or "tow-axle". Then you weigh the rear axle by pulling the truck, but not the trailer, completely onto the scale. The scale's computer weighs the truck and subtracts the first weight,which gives you the rear axle weight. Then you pull the whole rig onto the scale and get the total GVW (not the recommended, the actual) - which, thank God, in our case is way under the GVWR! Then you take the trailer off the truck and weigh the truck. I'm not sure why. Then you hook up the trailer again and drive away. The way you calculate hitch weight is to subtract axle 1 from the truck GVW. Then subtract axle 2 from the tow-axle, or is it toe-axle? Compare the difference to the total GVWR and multiply the truck GVW by the square root of the sign of the total GVW and divide the remainder by the cosign of the number of words in an average Dave Barry essay. Or something. At any rate, I feel completely reassured.

Another preparation, in our case, is to have 70 people at our house for a picnic on July 3. A lot of people wouldn't do that a week before a long RV trip, but our July 3 party is a tradition, and people are coming, so we better have it. I'll keep you posted in the next few days on the party and other preparations for our trip.