Entry two: The Big Trip: the plan is planned

25 Jun 2022

If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s entry one

Once we had an agreement with all parties that we were, in fact, ready to undertake this, I needed to get our stops planned out and reservations reserved. As I said in the last entry, I wanted this to be a structured as possible and still fun. I’m not for one second claiming to be the best at any of the following: planning, parenting, spouse-ing, recreating, or traveling in general. BUT, I can tell you: when you can tell everyone in your party where you’ll be stopping for the night and you know that where you’re stopping is safe, clean, paid-for, and has electricity so you can run the air conditioner during a historic heatwave, everyone relaxes by a factor of about 1000.

It’s hard to beat state parks, just in general. And I know, it’s not “real camping”, but it’s been my experience, here in Oregon at least, that state park campgrounds are thoughtfully constructed to give campers some privacy, convenience, and interesting natural features. Again, it’s not like packing your stuff into the wilderness for two weeks, but it’s usually better than a parking lot by a country mile.¹

I had to work for a bit to come up with what felt like a winning strategy for choosing stops. My criteria eventually became this: no more than about five or six hours of driving between stops, must have reservations for each stop, and a short drive on either front or back end of a recreation area so that we can actually enjoy some time there.

Once that criteria was nailed down, it was just a matter of tracking along the route in Google Maps and looking for state parks that were about where we needed them. When there weren’t state parks that were close enough to where we needed them or if the ones that were there were poorly reviewed, I fell back to private campgrounds. One of the more challenging parts of this process was how connected every stop became to the others. Several times I had to re-shuffle the entire list of stops because one stop turned out not to be ideal for one reason or another.

Organization is not necessarily my strong suit but I figured it would be wise to make some effort to track my work as I went. Spreadsheet to the rescue. A list of campgrounds and dates that we’d be staying + the date that the reservation for each was confirmed and the reservation number made a reassuring resource. I was doing this in early February and not every park was open for reservations at that point. Keeping track of what I’d reserved and what I hadn’t and when certain reservation windows would open was fairly important. Places like Custer State Park (near Mt. Rushmore) and the private campgrounds around west Glacier fill up very fast and I didn’t want to have to stay in third rate places a million miles away from the stuff that we wanted to see.

By the end of March we had all of our reservations made and the route and schedule was finalized. Considering that we hadn’t yet used the camper on the “new” truck, it seemed prudent to try out that combo. Our first test camp was on May 1st at nearby Silver Falls State Park, about 20 miles east of our house. The shakedown was mostly successful with all appliances working and the truck performing well. Typical Oregon weather for that time of year- a little rain and unfortunately a little water intrusion at the front left corner of the cabover bed from a failed marker light seal.

When it was time for our next shakedown trip to LaPine State Park in Central Oregon on June 5th, the camper had 14 new LED marker lights all sealed up and new striping painted (on one side, at least…) to replace the crusty factory decal work. I had the truck “dressed” as it would be for our trip with racks in the front and rear receiver hitches, spare tire on the front, and locked totes strapped on the back. While briefly pulling a hill in second gear the check engine light came on and went out. My scan tool said “EGR valve”, one of the only components I didn’t replace when rebuilding the engine. Reset the light and it returned on the trip home. Replaced it at home and it was good to go.

After returning home and seeing the hot weather forecast for our first leg of the trip, I decided to add an additional transmission cooler, external filter, and transmission temp gauge. The transmission in that truck is about as tough as you can get for overdrive automatic transmissions in that era but I also knew it was a real show-stopper if it were to fail and there are some sizable grades on the way through Idaho and Montana. More details on that in the Equipment entry.

With itinerary finalized and equipment passing the final tests, I took the time to finish a Google Doc I’d been working on that had a page of details for each stop on the trip as well as printed directions between each stop for when the digital map inevitably failed. Katey printed it and put it in a binder to keep in the truck, and she also modified it for Henry to use as a trip journal which worked really well. (You want this lady as your kid’s kindergarten teacher.)

As the departure date drew closer we worked hard to come up with a packing list. We resigned ourselves to traveling heavy: lots of clothes, food, toys, bike, barbecue, tools, etc. Better to have it. Katey and I were both still working our jobs until a few days before lift-off so we had to be as efficient with our time as possible.

Part of our work for departure was getting the house ready for guests after we’d been home for basically a solid year. In that process we noticed that the house toilet was not flushing well (we are a not-at-all proud one bathroom household). Green Goblin flushable drain cleaner, toilet snake, Drano down the other drains- I threw everything I had at it and got it to useable, if not 100%. My brother, his girlfriend, and my parents all agreed to take turn house / chicken sitting for us, a move they would all regret in one way or another before too long.

Two days before departure I washed the truck outside and detailed it inside then got the camper mounted up. We started packing and mostly had the camper loaded with a day left before departure. The day before was spent doing the last minute things a person does on the day before a long trip. The forecast for the 26th was an agonizing (for the Willamette Valley) 110 degrees so we were eager to get on the road earlier than later.

The next day at about 9:30 we locked the doors, locked the camper, and we were on the road.