Adventure Van Travels: Home Sweet Home

Well, we made it back to home sweet home! After 12,800 miles, 21 U.S. National Parks, 5 National Monuments, 6 State Parks, Dozens of National Forests, and 5 Canadian National Parks, we arrived safe and sound back in Cincinnati just in time to send Sophie off to college at Ohio State. We have been home for about three weeks, and while the kids are back in school, the laundry has been done, our gear is put away and things have certainly settled down, I still am immersed in memories of our summer adventures. It was a road trip I will NEVER forget.I spent some time today organizing upcoming posts because I have a lot of writing to catch up on! In the coming weeks, I will be posting about how best to visit each National Park, State Park and Monument that we experienced this summer. I will also be writing about how we built and organized the inside of our Adventure Van, Bessie. And since many of you have requested, I will also be blogging about how to plan a long road trip like the one we just finished, including building an itinerary, budgeting, meal prep and planning, nightly camp set up, what to pack and other road trip tips we figured out along the way. Hopefully you can learn from our successes as well as from our (many!) mistakes when planning your own adventures.
We also have a few upcoming adventures in the works that I will be sharing with you including a backpacking trip in Virginia’s Grayson Highlands, a road trip to New Orleans and Dave and I taking on the Dopey Challenge at Walt Disney World (wish us luck on that last one! We definitely need it!).No doubt, I will never feel like I have traveled enough or been to every place I want to visit. But for now, we are very much enjoying home sweet home and all the little luxuries we didn’t have access to while on the road. I will try not to take showers, laundry or my coffee maker for granted again! I’m looking forward to catching up. As always, Happy Travels!