RV Living

How we are living in this small, mobile home...

After spending the weekend in Rochester, we needed to make some tracks to the West, towards Minneapolis. I'd planned an 8 hour drive day -- one of our longest. On Sunday night, we were to camp at Warren Dunes State Park, on the Eastern banks of Lake Michigan.

4 small plates, 4 large plates, 4 bowls

I thought this might be a good time to show you a little bit about the inside of the RV and how we are using it. There are a ton of cabinets in the RV. Some are pre-filled with kitchen items that the rental company stocked for us. These are called convenience kits and are optionally rented per person.

In addition to eating utensils for 4, the convenience kits also give us a toaster, coffeemaker, cooking pans, and mixing bowls. And for linens, we were supplied with 4 bath towels, hand towels, wash clothes and the sheets and blanket for the 2 beds. It really is a nice set of basics.

The fridge has plenty of room for staples, like lunch supplies or one day's meal. But you are not going to be storing a week's meals in there. I like to consider it a bonus to the camping situation. If I were in a tent, I would have to lug my food in a cooler, but in the RV, I can keep around cans of water and milk for my coffee.

Some Storage And the Fridge:

The rest of the storage is open for us to use as we want. There are 4 little cubbies above the bed so we gave each person a cubby as a catch-all. This is where we throw our toiletries, books, legos -- whatever we are using that day. 

Mixing bowls, toaster, coffee maker.

shoe cubby

We have a cubby by the front door that seemed perfect for shoes, so you can kick them off as you enter and find them easily as you leave. There are two tall cupboards or closets with bars and hangers where you could put hanging clothes, but I never had it in me to try and organize my clothes that way while we crammed into this vehicle.

It would be futile to try to keep some kind of neat orderly closet for clothes-- not to mention shared by 4. So I left the tall cupboards for more general use; we use them for the laundry bag, the clean linens, and left over bulk groceries like jugs of water. This space could definitely be used more efficiently, but it seems once a cupboard has a function assigned, theres no going back. 

Instead, we keep the clothes in the suitcases under the RV. I figured, we only changed clothes once a day (sometimes once every two days, to be honest), and when we are changing, the RV is stopped at a campsite. 

We keep the clothes in the suitcases, under the RV.

Maintenance:

The whole sanitation thing has not been very difficult at all. We chose not to use the toilet very much. We use it when we are on the road or early in the morning. But when we are at campsites, we try to use the facilities provided whenever we can. Part of the reason we use the toilet sparingly is because I wanted to book the most scenic sites we could and those tend to not include sanitation hookup. When camping in an RV you have the choice of booking sites with electricity, water, and sanitation hookup (and cable). Since we are not usually hooked up to sanitation at the site, we just need to find a dumping area when we get full. Not terribly difficult, but still, we try to minimize the need.

So after traveling for a week, we did our first clear out of the black water and grey water. Our campsite had electrical, but on the way out there was a self-serve sanitation station where you can fill with water and dump your waste. You take out your tube, connect it to the RV and to the hole in the ground. Then you pull a lever and gravity helps with the rest. I documented the event:

RV Bucks:

Before the trip, I packed a little box for each of the kids with activity books, colored pencils and other things to keep them busy. My big plan for the RV trip, was to give out little challenges when on a particularly long leg of the trip, or to motivate them to do things they wouldn't otherwise do. As a reward for the challenges I created RV bucks, a fake dollar bill with Ryan's face on it.

RV Buck

One of the first challenges I gave the kids was to take pictures with the instant camera. For example, on the first day of the trip (7 hour drive), I challenged Rex and Fay to take 4 pics (a driver, sibling in front of RV, selfie, and someone sleeping), for which they would get 1 RV buck. Only Rex earned it.

I've also challenged them to learn how to do a cartwheel. Once both learn, they each get one RV buck. This way, when they have "nothing" to do, perhaps they can practice cartwheels (out of the RV, of course ;) RV bucks can only be spent on the trip, for souvenirs and such. This way Fay cannot hoard her money, like she tends to do. And the kids won't have to ask me to buy expensive souvenirs. Case in point, at our first gift shop (Niagara Falls), Fay chose to buy nothing! (hoarder)

Next up: Warren Dunes State Park...