6,386 Miles. Off We Go!
August 2020. We winded down the twists of the Pacific Coast Highway, the ocean lapping at the sandy edge of California. Three days before, we’d driven south through the Redwoods, putting some time and distance between our plane flight to Seattle (masked and middle seat empty) before we’d visit family in the Bay Area. There, staring at those shaggy-barked giants, we talked about how we wished we could stay for longer than a day. By the times we’d reached Big Sur, the bee in my bonnet was buzzy enough to provoke me to say, “What if we turned our car into a camper?”
Classic Emma. Another wild idea that I’d have to save for another day.
To my surprise, Jackson nodded slowly, then turned to me and said, “I think we should do that. It’s kind of out there, but since we’re still social distancing, we could take it out, be in the woods, reading and writing for school and for our own stuff. I’m down.”
October 2020. We took the 2x4s that had been in the wall in our new house that we hired Chris Crowder Construction (highly recommend) to remove. I channeled my childhood afternoons spent drawing elaborate plans for impossible forts and drew some mock-ups for the build. A few trips to Lowe’s later, and we had a saw, plywood, and bolts to secure our structure to the car. See our conversion (and a few of our restful days) in October in the video below!
Fast-forward to Thanksgiving. We’d been in full isolation and trying to assess what our holiday season would look like this year given the spikes of COVID across the nation. We knew we didn’t want to fly. But driving would be kind of nuts, right? How would we do it without exposing ourselves to other people? And how long would it take? Could we figure out a way to see Grampa in Southern California on the way to see Mom in Northern California? SO MANY QUESTIONS.
December 2020. Let’s start with the gratitude we have for our friends watching our plants and home - y’all rock!
We’re all packed up (a photo of that later) and hitting the road! We’ll have intermittent service, but we’ll do our best to post an occasional update. If you’ve got any favorite road trip things—car games, radio stations, podcasts, albums, audiobooks, stops we hadn’t considered, tips and tricks—drop us a comment! With over 116 hours in the car ahead of us, you might just be saving our sanity.
The twelve national parks we plan to hit:
Rocky Mountain
Arches
Canyonlands
Bryce
Zion
Sequoia
Kings Canyon
Yosemite
Joshua Tree
Grand Canyon
Petrified Forest
Hot Springs
Catch you on the flip side, folks!
xo,
em (and jacks and tato)
