CAMPING!

So here we have the reason for making our blog invite-only: our big camping trip! At work, Andy is granted a sabbatical every six years, no strings attached. Unlike a university sabbatical, his leave is paid but he doesn't have to do any work-related stuff or research the whole time. Wow! "What to do on your sabbatical" is a big water-cooler discussion at his workplace: some people take big, spendy trips, or rent a vacation house for the time, or undertake major renovations at home...what were WE to do? With several weeks of time free and clear, we wanted to take advantage of our liberation and do something amazing, something we'd never done before, see new places, etc. We considered doing something warm and tropical, like Hawaii, or something farther afield, like Europe, but we knew that by the time we paid for plane tickets, food, and accommodations for the three of us (not to mention a dog kennel), our bank accounts would be so cleaned out that we'd barely be able to spend a weekend in these gorgeous locations. We needed a more inexpensive way to do something epic, and landed upon...camping!

Slowly our trip took shape. We've always enjoyed camping and take Alton every summer (start here and read back if you need to remind yourself of our previous adventures), so we had more than a head start on the gear necessary for such an excursion, we just needed lots of lists, planning, research, and some trips to REI.
With a few stops interspersed in there staying with family, friends, hotels, and a vacation home in Rosarito, for nearly two months our trip will take us south from our home in Oregon all the way down to Mexico, then we camp our way up the Pacific Coast to British Columbia.

And if undertaking this trip wasn't challenging enough on its own...we'll be traveling Mini-style. Like a snail, we'll be carrying our house on our backs for the next seven weeks. Tent, sleeping bags and pads, clothing, toiletries, toys, kitchen supplies, food, three people and a dog all arranged into our cozy little 30 mpg car with the roof box on top.



We're all very excited...but of course right now I'm overwhelmed, nervous, stressed, exhausted. Andy was the one up on a stepladder installing the roof box and cramming outdoor gear into it, I was in the kitchen giving myself a tension headache trying to solve the infinite puzzle of nesting all our cooking equipment into a small plastic rubbermaid box so that the lid still actually closed. It all fits! Although the rubbermaid is now so heavy for its size that Andy refers to it as the "box of gold."
It's a weird kind of camping hybrid that we're going on...not as convenience-oriented as car camping, but not backpacking, either. With car camping (the kind of camping we do, where you drive your car right up to a campsite next to other people with their campsites and cars or RVs), you usually fill your car to the gills with stuff, overpack food, don't care what clothes you do or don't bring since you're just there for a weekend, and you even pre-cook the food you're going to eat sometimes. With backpacking, you hike to a campsite carrying all your gear on your back, so weight, pounds, ounces, even GRAMS matter with the things you choose to bring. In our case, we have a car...but it's a small one, so size matters even if weight isn't as much of an issue (hence our 2 quart cast iron dutch oven). We will be on the road for a long time, so we clearly can't pre-cook food at home like you ordinarily could with car camping, but we want to eat good, healthy, fresh things that are in season, so we're not grabbing the backpacker's dehydrated packets of spaghetti, either. Our plan is to hit a lot of Farmers Markets along the way for tons of produce (that we'll probably have to transport on our laps--hope we pick good-smelling stuff) and fill in the gaps at grocery stores. Our second pot 'o gold is our food bag; a strong-handled tote that I packed with glass jars full of bulk ingredients like olive oil, oatmeal, sugar, flour, peanut butter, and coffee (oh yesssss, coffee). This bag weighs a ton!
Our adventure begins in two days and my mind is abuzz with questions. Will our clothes be enough? How is the cooking going to work? What will the weather be like? Are we going to be able to sleep? Will we get lost? Can I relax and not worry and just have fun? Did we turn all the lights off at home? In nearly two months of travel, we'll be forming a lot of new habits and routines and I'm sure making a lot of things up along the way. We will kick back and enjoy bonding together as a family, but we'll still have the ability to "plug in" with the cellphones and GPS if we need to in order to keep up with our navigation (and blog updates, hopefully). We're embarking upon something pretty huge here, and can't wait to experience this!

P.S. Since we will be away from home for quite a while and on the road, we made the blog "by invitation only" so that our travels are kept private from the rest of the Internet. If you're reading this, you got the invite! But just know that if we're ever vague about where we're going or where we've been, it's because we're erring on the side of safety.