My First Post

Kicking things off

So…I finally did it. Well, at least there has been enough set in motion that “it” has sufficiently started. It all started last year in March, before I even realized it, when I ordered a new Ford F-150. This was the first domino that fell, and allowed the rest of the chain reaction to start. It took a long time before my truck was ready for me due to all the supply chain issues during Covid-19, so I didn’t actually take delivery of my truck until the middle of August. A quick road trip to Granger, Iowa, and I was driving back home in this beauty the next day: It was shortly after I had a truck that an idea was born: a long road trip across the country. Or more accurately, this wasn’t really a new idea for me, but the possibility of it becoming a reality was much closer than it ever had been.

From there, it was easy enough to find a camper/trailer that I could pull with my truck. (A decent bed, a shower that I could stand up in, and light enough to keep me under the payload limitations in my truck were the main requirements.) I ended up with a Grand Design Imagine 2500RL: It satisfied the above requirements, plus had a floor plan that seemed to suit me:

At this point, two obstacles remained. I needed a route (I originally liked the idea of mixing in some planned stops with lots of wandering), and I needed to figure out when and how to take the trip. Planning the trip seemed relatively straightforward, dump a bunch of awesome sights to see around our country into some mapping software and find campgrounds near the places you want to visit. Unfortunately, another side effect of Covid-19 was it seemed like I wasn’t the only one with the idea to travel around the country, so campgrounds near the popular national parks fill up way in advance. To make matters worse, some national parks even require reservations to get in to the more popular areas of the parks. I didn’t like the idea of taking a chance and not being able to see some things I really wanted to see (e.g. Going to the Sun Road in Glacier National Park), or dealing with the headaches of not being able to find a place to stay, so I swung pretty hard the other way and decided to plan out and get reservations for as much as possible as far ahead as possible. This made things challenging as a very large percentage (most?) campgrounds seem to be independently owned and operated. This means different rules for how far out they take reservations, how long you are able to stay, and whether you can do reservations online in real time, send an email (with 1-5 days response times), or have to actually call (what year is it?). Anyways, once I navigated all those challenges, I ended up with a route that looked like this (subject to change still due to planning some of the last part of the trip):

Finally, for the when and how. The when was relatively easy to answer. Start with almost eight years on the same team at work (basically forever these days, especially in IT), the first two plus as a contractor and now just over five years as an employee, and add in a touch heavy helping of burnout, and my desire for a change soon was pretty high. I considered the option of trying to work while traveling, but was concerned that may end up with me failing at work and hating travel, so ultimately I decided to take a break from work, as soon as reasonably possible. Obviously I’m very fortunate to be in the position to do that, but a large part of this trip is to help recover from burnout, so having to focus on things like maintaining a consistent Internet connection didn’t seem like it would be helpful for recovery. I’m more of a summer guy, so I was most interested in seeing most of the national parks during the summer instead of during winter, so when was mostly decided around hitting the popular parks during close to peak season. This does mean hitting some areas in less than ideal times, for example Michigan’s UP in May (hopefully no snow), or Arizona in September (hopefully my AC can keep up).

Anyways, I plan to use this blog as mostly a journal for myself in order to help me keep straight all the amazing sights that I’m planning to see over the next six months or so. Hopefully I can keep it interesting enough that friends and family (besides my Facebook-less and Instagram-less mom) have a place to follow along as well. Stay tuned, I leave in just over two weeks!