If our first disastrous trip taught us anything, it was that we needed more practice. So much more practice. Initially, out of some ridiculous hubris, we only booked two practice trips this summer. We figured that was all we needed to conquer the steep hill of getting to know our RV. It was clear that we were wrong.
So, I frantically booked a few more trips. A variety of trips. A “middle of the week in a park with only electricity” trip. A “practice run for working on the road” trip. An “overnight without any hookups at all” trip. Because it was abundantly clear that we would need some more RV time under our belts before we hit the road in August.
So. For trip number two, we headed out to explore a sweet program called Harvest Hosts.
Listen, my phobia of a year of sleeping in Walmart and Cracker Barrel parking lots is real. Pilot truck stops and rest areas are a close, nightmarish second. But I know there will be nights when we are on our way to the real place- the destination- and we need to stop because the drive is too long. Luckily for me, some brilliant souls also had this same phobia and dreamed up the Harvest Hosts program as an antidote.
You pay a ridiculously low yearly fee, and the program gives you access to wineries, breweries, lavender farms, orchards, bison farms, etc., where you can stay for one night for free. For free! Obviously you throw a little money to the host in the way of purchasing goods and services, but it’s a far cry from hunkering down at a rest stop or Wally World.
This kind of camping requires us to do something called “boondocking,” which means we must be fully self-sustaining. There are no hookups, so we have to have our own water and electricity and, afterward, find a place to dump our black and gray water tanks. Okay, so this would give us a chance to practice finding clean water, running off of our battery power, finding a dump station, and sleeping in a parking lot. Let’s do it.
I signed us up and started browsing Harvest Host stays. Lots of breweries in our area. Lots. This was my kind of RVing. Right away, I got super geeked about a meadery with a parking lot out back and room for two RVs. Mead! That’s honey…what…wine? Beer? Whatever. Alcoholic honey. Perfect. Booked it. I ran to show Trav where we would be staying next. He wasn’t nearly as enthused.
“Where is this place?” He pulled it up on Google Maps. Zooming into the parking lot that would “accommodate two RVs,” he pointed out that there was no way on the whole green earth he could turn our rig around in the narrow, long lot. So we would never be able to stay there. I didn’t want him to be right, but I looked at the map, and he was.
Our 60-foot rig was hard to maneuver. Technically, we might be able to pull into the lot, but we would never get out again. Our only option would be to back in and out, and that was a loooong driveway. Backing in and out was off the table. So we could pull in but, then we would have to live there permanently at that meadery. I noticed on Google Maps that it was in the same building as a gun range, which was not where I wanted to spend eternity. My mead dreams dashed, I clicked “cancel trip.”
And somehow, this stupid mistake made me angry.
Because there it was again—my impulsiveness. This is my M.O.-- to have an idea, to get excited, jump with both feet, to make quick decisions. And then I get angry when Trav points out that I haven’t thought things through enough. And it’s not really anger at him. It’s anger at myself. For running ahead when I should be walking or even crawling. I can’t even list the mistakes I have made in this life because I ran ahead and ignored all the caution signs. Or how many times I have been called careless or irresponsible or reckless because of the way I make decisions. How many times I have been made to feel stupid for rushing ahead.
The anger wasn’t about mead. I don’t even really care that much for mead, to be honest. This anger was deeper than that. It was more shame really, that, once again, I was running when I should crawl.
Okay, and maybe there was a little anger at Trav. Not because he would shame me for being careless. I am sure it is annoying to him. But he would never say it out loud. No, the anger was because I had somehow become the unofficial default trip planner/site finder. I had already booked several stays on our route. I planned the two summer practice trips. I planned the “Oh no, we need way more practice” trips. And I loved planning the stays. I did. But it was frustrating when I planned them, and then he nixed them, especially since he wasn’t giving any front-end input.
So yeah, it was definitely not about the mead. It was about the stress of the possibility of a year of this-me planning trips that get nixed over and over. Even if they were valid reasons for nixing. A whole year of being reminded of my shortcomings. Of my own shame.
But I loved the research part. I love looking at parks and sites and routes and cool roadside attractions. This part was my strength. Finding places. And I was the default site finder because it was my passion. My jam. And one of the reasons I think Trav and I work well together is that we honor each other’s strengths. He knows I love to plan those things. And I am sure if I said, “Hey, let’s look at some ideas for places to stay together,” he most definitely would. But I don’t ask. I forge ahead like a steam engine and do it all alone. And so my anger at him for not doing the planning with me is fruitless.
Besides, his passions and strengths lie elsewhere. Like calculating how many amp-hours our batteries will hold and how many watts of power we have using the DC conversion formula. Yawn. I actually fell asleep writing that sentence.
So, yeah. I’ll keep on planning the trips. I want to do the research site finding and stay planning. But to do this right with a rig this size, I had to go about this at Trav’s pace. Slow down, Jen. Let’s just be a little more deliberate.
So, with more planning and research, I found a Harvest Host stay at Nordic Brewpub in Monticello, a small town about 45 minutes away. The parking lot looked enormous, and after zooming in and out on Google Earth, Trav declared it suitable. And so a brewery it would be.
Our hook-up went so much more smoothly this time, mainly because I started making checklists on my phone detailing every step. We slowed down this time and went step by step. Trav backed the truck onto the hitch like a champ.
Our first task was filling up our fresh water tank with clean water. We would need water to wash our hands, brush our teeth, and most crucially, flush the toilet.
Ideally, we would fill it somewhere close to the brewery so we weren’t driving with the extra weight for too long. We had two seven-gallon water jugs and decided to fill one in case we had issues finding water. We could always siphon that into the tank in an emergency. Trav suggested filling both, but I was confident we would find water, so I figured one was enough. (Spoiler alert. If you are following along, you’ll notice my impulse-decision making is usually wrong. And so you’ll know what’s coming).
I used several different RV life apps to find a place with potable water stations. I found a truck stop just a few miles short of Monticello. But we couldn’t find a fill station when we got there, so Trav got out to ask about it inside the truck stop.
“Oh, we haven’t had an RV fill station for a while. I guess you can use the hose out back, but I wouldn’t advise it.”
Yeah, no.
We sat in the truck stop parking lot, and I used all the apps to find another fill station. I called another truck stop past the brewery and asked the young lady who answered if they had a potable water filling station.
“What does ‘potable’ mean?” she asked, not bothering to hide her apathy. So that’s a no, then.
I looked at Trav. “Maybe seven gallons is enough?”
I was grateful Trav didn’t say, “I told you so,” out loud, but we both thought it. Instead, he said, “Well, they are a brewery. I imagine they have water. Maybe they will let us fill our other jug.” Somehow, the thought of asking that made me cringe inside. But we didn’t have much choice. And so we headed there with our seven gallons of water.
The brewery was in an L-shaped strip mall, and the parking lot was behind it. This parking lot was huge. Like, football-field huge. I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth this place needed a parking lot so damn huge, but I was also grateful they were putting it on offer to folks like us.
There was only one other rig there, so we had plenty of space to pull in and park. The lot was level and surrounded by trees, so we wouldn’t even need to unhook from the truck. We could park, pop out the slides, and voila—home.
Our batteries held enough charge to run some lights, and our solar panels were in full sun. We got set up and headed inside to eat and drink some cold beer.
But damn, the food was good (I’m still thinking about their salmon flatbread), and the beer was awesome (and they had crowlers-which was handy for our short trip “home”). Bonus: they accidentally poured us two pints when we asked for two crowlers to go, so they gave us the pints for free. Free beer! There were video games, and the girls bled me dry of quarters while Trav and I drank cold beer and sighed bout how much nicer this place was than a Cracker Barrel.
Luckily, the bartender graciously let Travis fill our portable water containers in their back kitchen. Not awkward at all.
Sated and exhausted, we wandered across the lot to our rig and siphoned in all our water. We had planned to pull out our generator to test it, but the extra beer and the long day decided against that. We called it a night.
It was so quiet I forgot we were sleeping in a parking lot.
I got up to turn on the heat in the middle of the night, but we were out of power. Oops. Maybe instead of sitting around drinking free beer, we should have focused on testing out the generator.
Trav plugged in a tiny Jackery generator so we’d have just enough power to run lights but we had to bundle up because that morning brought cold rain, hail, and thunderstorms. Of course.
And also the realization that we had no food. Our meal planning had been this: dinner at the brewery and pick up some muffins or something on the way for breakfast. And home by lunch. As you can tell, we are not the world’s greatest meal planners. It is a daily wonder we aren’t all wracked with scurvy or rickets under our meal-planning system–or lack thereof.
A quick inventory of our options turned up only a dusty old granola bar from the bottom of my purse and a bag of chips the girls had in the backseat during the drive. Maybe, I thought, if we had been staying in a Walmart, we could have gone inside and gotten some muffins and some juice. Then I laughed wildly in my mind about that and pulled up Google Maps. There was a Perkins about two blocks away.
So we walked on over and had pancakes and eggs. Problem solved—kind of expensively solved, but solved.
And this is why I tend to make such rash decisions. Because things tend to work out in the end. I admit this is probably a horribly stressful way for someone like Trav to have to live. He doesn’t like risk. He likes plans. He likes certainty. I wing it way too much for his liking. On the flipside, I feel like we are always in planning mode, and I get restless and want to move. I feel like if we were both working at Trav’s pace, this RV trip would exist as nothing but a dream and a plan for about 20 more years.
But I like to think that we balance each other out and have pushed each other to grow in how we approach this life. I have learned to listen to him when it comes to things like blindly booking meadery stays, and he has learned to relax when we forget to bring food because something will shake out.
I sat there with my family eating my eggs benedict, grateful for this: Travis is someone who can pull me back when I am running blindly down an overgrown path too fast to see the caution signs, but he is also someone who will keep walking down the same untrodden path beside me and explore with me, faithful in the fact that we will find our way out okay and along the way, we will discover unspeakably beautiful things together. And that’s how we will continue to travel this road together. And that’s a glorious way to explore.
We headed back to the brewery and packed up the RV just as the rain and hail came through. I called ahead to the dump station I had found on my trusty RV apps, our fingers crossed that they wouldn’t say, “What’s a dump station?” Thankfully, it was an actual RV park just up the road, and he was more than happy to have us come by for a mere $5 we could dump away.
When we got to the park, the fella from the phone greeted us at the station as we were just unloading our sewer hoses. Unfortunately, this guy was a bit chatty. What is the etiquette for this sort of thing? Is it impolite to continue hooking up your hose and dumping your raw sewage while you're standing there, chatting with a stranger? Somehow, it felt wrong to do that, so Trav stood there holding a giant sewer hose in his gloved hands, while we talked about the crazy weather and the history of the makers of our RV model with this guy for an awkwardly long time.
Finally, the guy bid adieu, and we could dump in peace. That’s important. To be able to dump in peace. And just in time, too. We packed away the hoses just as the second bout of hail came through. We hunkered down in our truck, wet and shivering, waiting for the rain to pass but thrilled that we made it yet another night in our new home. Success!
We dragged our building back to storage, used my handy checklist to unhook without issue, and then headed home.
So, here are the main takeaways:
I need to think things through. This is not new information, but it is a good reminder.
Even though things tend to work out in the end, we still need to be prepared because our RV apps are hit or miss.
And most importantly, staying in a brewery parking lot is dope. Because no matter what goes wrong, you’re only feet away from excellent beer and food. And that’s all it takes to make me happy most days.
I also realized that seven gallons of water is enough for one overnight trip. So, sometimes, despite my rash decision-making ways, I am right after all.
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