Our Packing List for Long Road Trips
Nancy and I love long road trips and we spend a lot of time planning out the details of where we are going. To quickly launch one of our journeys and to make living on the road as hassle free as possible, we have devoted a lot of time to honing what items to pack and how to organize them. Getting these items sorted and grouped helps us to transition from location to location as quick as possible. If you read our post "How we decided our approach to retirement travel", you know we travel in a Toyota Tundra Crew Max with a Cap we have nick-named the "Brown Beast". We talk about our strong preference for staying in Airbnb's, Regular BnB's, historical hotels, extended stay hotels with a dash of tent camping if the right opportunity presents itself. You can think of this type of travel as "camping" with the big difference being the type of "camp site" we are leveraging. So just like our old tent and RV camping days and our old days of "fly and drive a car rental", we need to think about what we take with us. The Brown Beast Packing for [...]
How we decided our approach to retirement road tripping
We often get asked the question " Where are you going on your next trip?". When we describe an upcoming road trip, almost without fail, given the length of our trips, the next question we hear is "Do you have an RV?". We must have answered this questions at least 50 times in the last few months. The short answer to this is, of course, "no". However, the journey behind how we settled into our current travel approach evolved over the course of about 10 years. The Tent Camping Years One of our group camping trips at Lake Anna, Virginia Nancy and I have been campers since we were teenagers. In fact one of the Coleman camp stoves we still have and use is the one I got when I was in my late teens. When our kids were young it wasn't unusual for us to go on 6 or more camping trips a summer. In this phase of life we were "tent" campers and typically took with us a least one large tent for the kids and a smaller one for us. All of our camping boxes and gear was targeted towards camping with large groups. Typically, [...]