Month: January 2021

Tonight marks the end of the first of two weeks at Thousand trails Orlando (TTO). I thought it appropriate to look back on our first several weeks both for posterity and for a bit of a post mortem. I would add for anyone trying to plan or recall your RV travel itinerary that RVTripWizard is the single greatest thing on the internet in this regard. But, I’ll leave the details of that for another post.

We spent our last few nights in Wilmington at the Ogden KOA as most of our essentials had migrated to the fifth wheel. So it was scramble all day to pack or throw away our final remaining possessions and then return to the camper in the evening to try and figure out where to store all the (way too much!) stuff that we kept. It was exhausting to say the least.

On January 11 we brought in the slides and headed to Orlando with reservations for a two night layover in Savannah. We stayed at the beautiful Creekfire Motor Ranch. It was cold and rainy the entire time we were there but the pool was heated and the facilities looked awesome through our rain soaked windows. We took the two nights in Savannah to (Andrew) rest after the washboard that is I95 South through South Carolina, (Summer) work, (Summer and Andrew) organize the camper and provision the fridge and freezer, and (kids) play video games and whine about there being a heated pool while it rained buckets.

We left Savannah on the 13th and arrived in Orlando for a 6 night stay at the Orlando Southwest KOA while waiting to get into TTO. It is your standard KOA with passable playground and pool where you are stacked together pretty tight.

We fit. Barely.

The cell service was passable at best. We did work and school and swam in the heated pool. But we finally had a chance to sit still with nowhere to go and to start to really figure out how we were going to live in this thing. With (free!) dumpsters nearby we threw out and replaced and organized our way into something towards functional. There’s still a basket of “we need this stuff but I have no earthly idea where to put it” that needs attention. And let’s not start on toys. But we are getting there.

Entering TTO on January 19th was a whole new ballgame. We were lucky enough to land in B Loop with tons of other Fulltime Families with tons of kids. Needless to say, ours are in heaven. The rear of our Fifth Wheel looks out over an almost football field-sized opening surrounded by campers full of kids. It has been great for them. The Fulltime Families group here is awesome and I’ll do a whole post on them at some point. But, we’ve finally been able to settle in and actually figure out how we are going to live.

The natural ebb and flow of your day to day life kind of develops over the years and even if you move or change jobs there’s still the constant of you living in a sticks and bricks home somewhere. A home where you don’t have to figure out how to keep the coffee maker on the counter while you roll down the road (it stays all on it’s own!) and where you don’t have to dump black tanks (if you don’t know, use your imagination) and worry about how much all your stuff weighs (too much!). That change takes a while to get used to but we are getting there. Being able to sit still for a week now has been nice. And knowing we have another week in front of us to slow down for a while is nice too. Tonight I sat outside and watched my first Carolina Basketball of the month while sipping a drink. It was 71 and clear with an almost full moon overhead. I can get used to that.

So we’ve been at this road life for about two weeks and we’re already finding a few things that are working fine and a few that are not working at all. We know it will be a constant learning experience with this many living things in a tiny space, but it can be done!

WIN: One major thing that has really worked out well is the pop up dog kennel. At the house, all 3 dogs had their own wire kennels to sleep at night or when we’re gone. We knew we wouldn’t have room for that on the camper so we looked for a new solution. I may have mentioned it before, but we settled on a soft-sided pop up play pen structure. We put a washable potty pad along the bottom just in case (the dogs are all elderly and have varying grasps on their bladders), put in a no spill water bowl and a big cushion dog bed. They go right in and can still move around and go right back to sleep! During the day it folds up and tucks neatly between the couch and the wall and they can still use the dog bed to lay around. (BONUS: due to the dogs’ potty issues, these dog diaper bands and the on board washer/dryer have been a life saver ! Throw them in the wash with a squirt of this stuff and it helps keep the small space from smelling like one big bathroom and we have less stress letting the dogs roam around. I don’t think we could have brought them along without either of them.)

Fail: In a short period of time we have already gone through the kids’ stuff at least twice to pare it down even more. Even so, there was still way more than we comfortably had room for them to keep. After tripping over several of them for a week at the Orlando KOA, we decided something was going to have to change. Thanks to Less Junk < More Journey’s latest video, the kids’ saw the storage they used in their midbunk and wanted some cubes of their own. We talked about it and ultimately decided that the chances of needing the sleeper sofa in David’s room were a lot smaller than the need to be able to actually organize and move around. We are living in here after all, so as soon as we rolled into Thousand Trails Orlando, another full time family met us at our site and graciously took the couch to its new home down the street. We picked up two sets of 6 cube shelves, and these cute wood front cube baskets and voila! With 2 beanbags thrown in for the kids to sit and watch tv, you can actually move around in there again with the added bonus of getting mom’s set of plastic craft/exercise filled drawers from the side of her bed and tucked into the corner by the cubes. The kids love it because now they can keep their stuff together and have an actual hangout place. For now, the main couch is still a queen sofa, but they may eventually disappear too and be replaced with a Home Reserve storage couch. Only time will tell.