Our Nest on Wheels

 Here's the route:


Then back to Illinois.  This means driving the miserable 80/94 through northwest Indiana and the Chicago area.  We came through it just fine, as we now have 4 days of experience.  We even got ourselves weighed so we know that we are within our gross vehicle weight limits.
Now we're home.  And the work of selling, disposing, choosing, and packing begins again.

Another first: fueling our RV.

I fear I may never go camping again.

The view from our bedroom window

Is it possible to become spoiled in just two nights? 

Our first two nights on the road we spent at French Creek State Park in Pennsylvania. Wednesday night was cool and drizzly with occasional spells of fairly heavy rain. Here’s what I kept thinking about:
Tent camping: Find a couple of trees the right distance apart to hang your tarp, then try to move the picnic table (if it’s not chained in place) underneath the tarp and get it level enough to set up the camp stove on it. Prep, cook, and eat dinner under the tarp; avoid the water running off the edges of the tarp. Heat water on the stove and wash dishes. Pack up stove and food; haul cooler to the car and stow in trunk. Then decide whether to sit on the damp picnic bench until bedtime or crawl into the tent to stay warm and dry. At bedtime, visit campground bathroom and brush teeth. Crawl into tent, remembering to leave shoes outside but under the rainfly where they will stay dry and be available in case of a midnight visit to the bathroom. Change into pajamas while in a crouched or supine position and crawl into sleeping bag. In the morning, try to avoid the muddiest areas when you crawl out of the tent.

Of course, we had to get there first.

All this nature—and interesting people, too!

A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

A journey in a new RV begins with a 2 ½-hour orientation.

• After 36 years of marriage, we still have to work on our communication. (This will come as no surprise to our children.) I thought Steve was loading the box of dishes to take along; he thought I was. The result is that, despite my aversion to disposable paper goods, we are dining with cloth napkins and . . . paper plates. And two of those styrofoamy coffee cups you get at takeout places.
• Cardboard will work as a cutting board if you happen to have forgotten that, too.
• We really do need a rug on our first trip. We’d decided not to buy one because we couldn’t really remember how much floor space there is by the door; we figured we’d wait till we got the rig and see whether we really needed one. We really needed one. Like, after about an hour. Tuesday was a rainy day, and what with going in and out to move stuff in (bedding, clothes, no dishes) and the various people who came in to fix and adjust things, the floor was pretty puddly in short order. Newbie tip: get a rug for inside the door. 
• Sleeping in the parking lot of an RV dealership isn’t as weird as you might think—but showering there, even in the privacy of your own motorhome, is just a little too creepy. 

Next post: Day 1—The Adventure Begins!

But more than that, I still like a real telephone handset, not a computer tablet that you rest next to your head and hope to hear. I like the convenience of having a phone in every room so you can just answer wherever you are.  I like the convenience of a phone that doesn't need to spend 2 hours a day on a charger.  So when we started thinking about traveling full-time in an RV, I had to plan out what we would use for phone service.  The simplest answer is to just use a cellphone.  But if you know me, you know that I like to explore all my options.

And I found a way to have my landline in my motorhome.  What?  How do you do that?  Well, it's not actually a landline, of course, it just appears to be one, and our setup uses all the normal landline phone handsets that we currently have in our house.  The trick to this is something called a "home base".  This is a small base unit that takes a cellphone SIM card and creates a connection to a cellular network.  But on the back of it, you plug in your normal typical home phone. Or multiple home phones.  Or a wireless home phone.


I've been using mine for about a year now, and I have my entire house plugged into it.  So all my home phones, and I have a bunch of them - wired and wireless, all work just like they did with a landline.  When we move into the motorhome, the homebase will come along and we'll take a few wireless handsets.  The nice thing is that you can continue to call us using our normal home phone number, the number we've had for 29 years, and it will find us in our new home, no matter where we are in the US.

Most of us have become accustomed to having high speed internet access in our homes. So much of what we do now involves a connection to the internet. We, like many of you, have "cut the cord" to our cable TV and now use the cable company only for internet access; we stream most of our video entertainment from Netflix, Roku, or SlingTV, and we use over-the-air TV for things like the local new broadcast. And of course we'll be communicating via email, looking up new locations on google maps, paying bills and doing banking online. This means that a reliable internet connection while traveling in a motorhome is a need, not a want.


So, how do you do it? As it turns out, the cable company is unwilling to provide a hardwired connection to a moving vehicle. Who knew? The same is true for ATT DSL or U-verse. And satellite internet, which can be useful for remote locations where cable isn't available, does not really work for the mobile community, as the setup is specific to your geographic location.

So most RVers use a combination of a couple of types of access—typically campground-provided Wi-Fi and a cellular "hotspot" or MiFi device. We will do that also, but with an added component to make life easier. As you can imagine, setting up your PC, smartphone, tablets, etc., to use every different Wi-Fi setup you use as you travel would be a pain. And then switching them over to your MiFi device when Wi-Fi doesn't work would be another pain. But there is a class of routers that is made just for this type of setup.

The type of router that we will get can use a cellular hotspot (or MiFi) as the internet connection and then create a local network within the motorhome for all our devices to connect to. So far this is very much similar to a cable internet connection in a house, except that the internet part is via a cellular hotspot. But the added feature that these routers have is the ability to create their internet connection via available Wi-Fi. This is called Wi-Fi as WAN, or WAW. And the router is smart enough to use the Wi-Fi connection first; it will switch over to the more expensive cellular connection only if the Wi-Fi isn't very good. The benefit of this is that we should never need to change the connection on our devices (PC, tablets, smartphones, etc.). They just connect to our local network, and the router takes care of the rest. If the camp Wi-Fi isn't very strong, we can add an antenna and pull in the signal from a long distance away, sometimes as far as half a mile.

So, that's the plan. We'll see how it plays out and how well it works. But there are a lot of people who do work online and travel full-time in their RV, so we know that it can be done . . . for a price.  More on that later.