Two Months In...

Time to hit some numbers.  In my pipe dreams, we were living on less than 3k a month.  We missed that by a HUGE amount.  We've spent over 9k in a little over two months.  Sigh.  So not how I wanted things to go.  BUT, we've spent some time internationally, we've had to repair some tires, we've had some amazing experiences, and we've had a great time.  Now it's time to buckle down.

We can't be doing everything we want every time it comes along.  We also need to tone down our eating expenses.  Here's a breakdown of how we spent our money:

Fuel:  $1342.28
Stuff:  $2042.08
Snacks:  $299.07
Meals:  $4216.28
Lodging:  $1519.96

Clearly our food is out of control.  Stuff?  Who even knows how we spent that money?  Our categories are too vague, so I've decided to track a bit more detail in our next leg of the journey.  I want to know how much we're spending on ice.  I'm gonna say it's an obscene number.  How often are we buying DEF?  So much that would help me to plan much better.  I'm going to differentiate between groceries and eating out.  I want to see how much we're spending on laundromat.  How much firewood do we buy?  How are we doing with propane?

And just to keep track, we've gone 9,974 miles in nine states and one foreign country (two provinces).  We spent 65 days on the road, nine of which were in Canada, seven days spent at family's house.  The boys have earned one merit badge, seven Webelos adventures, six Wolf adventures, and the Wolf Outdoor Activity award.  And the youngest three have earned a TON of Jr. Ranger badges.

And then again, is our journey really in the details?  We can learn so much from the details, but can we enjoy our trip any more or less based on them?  I need some philosophy class to work out my issues....

Contained Chaos

We're out of the house now, and in my parents' house.  I thought I was doing so well.  Boxes were labelled, I kept an inventory of everything, I had stuff separated according to whether or not we were going to take it with us on our trip.  Ah, the devolution of my organization.  Blah.  

 

The storage room.  When we first started this venture, I felt like our stuff would fit the space just fine.  Perhaps we left a bit much empty space (to make it easier to look at our boxes on the shelves), perhaps we don't have nearly enough shelves.  Perhaps we just have too much stuff still.  Who can say?  But the junk just keeps going....              

My parents have an in-law suite in their basement, which is what we're using.  We're using the kitchenette as storage.  A lot of it is our camping stuff, plus the chairs to our table until our table is set up and ready to use.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The living room is actually not so bad.  Very crowded, especially considering we have their couch and our couch sharing the space that just held their couch.  Plus we added my desk, another couch over by the kitchenette, and our tv stand.  Their poor house is groaning with the all the added junk.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The boys' sleeping quarters.  We brought all our Sterilite dressers in the house, but we've still got clothes strewn all over the place.  Oish.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The other side of the room, where K sleeps.  Still a disaster zone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh, and the largest mess of all.  So sad.  Must work on this.  According to Bill, I have 10 days to lazily organize it all.  Hmm.....

Prepping the Van

Before we bought the van, we spent lots of time looking at DIY mods of the van, nice little upfits.  Oh, the amazing things people have done with their Sprinters.  We have dreams of what we could do to the Sprinter, but I think we're keeping it pretty small on this round.  Instead of custom chairs and pull out or up desk tops, we'll stick with modding the back to hold all our dressers and keep us organized.

We're going with the Sterilite three drawer dressers.  I have had one for years and years, purchased when I was teaching Sunday school and needed transportable storage.  The wheels came in handy back then, but for now, I want everything to NOT move, so we removed all my wheels and then never put the wheels on any of the other ones.  Fitting seven of these bad boys means stacking some, so Bill's building shelves for the back.  The awesome part of that is that we'll have room for the coolers under the dressers on the side.  Yeah!  Our old coolers had served us well, but required additional weight on top to keep closed, so we bought new ones since we'll be relying on them for many months.  We went with Coleman marine coolers.  Five days of ice.  We'll be testing that out.

We also invested in a Thule bike rack.  REI was having their anniversary sale, so we hit them up for shoes and a bike rack.  We've been looking at them for a couple months now, so it's a relief to have it checked off our list.  In my searching for places to go and things to do, I found Hiawatha Trail up in ID.  It looks really awesome, and the boys have some longer bike trips for their bicycling merit badge, so it's a perfect match.  We had only planned on taking three bikes, but Bill will need to go with the boys on Hiawatha, so we'll also end up taking a bike for  Bill.  Good thing we bought the four bike rack!  Talking to my parents about needing another bike, it turns out my dad is done with his bike, so we'll be taking his! The other mod we'll be taking on in the next week or so is installing a DVD player.  We won't be putting in screens, though--the van doesn't have a CD player.  It's got bluetooth, USB, auxillary, but no CD.  We could have gone with a portable disc player, but I worried about skipping and such.  I wanted something installed and stable, so this is the solution Bill found.  I'm very excited to get it installed finally.  So many people advocated us transferring our CDs to a USB drive, but I have a ton.  And I don't want to spend my time transferring formats.  Not to mention my technology woes, which would cause me much more frustration than I have room for in my life right now.  Now we'll be able to get back to listening to Story of the World. That's what we have planned for right now.  One of our goals at this point is to sell the tiny trailer before the big trip.  We'd like to fit everything into the van, safely and securely.  We should have the room, if we're smart about it all.  I'll let you know how it goes!