Episode 86: Adventuring in an RV (Personal Update)

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Hey everyone, this is Julie. What's up? I'm finally getting around to a little bit more of a personal podcast episode. Today. I wanted to talk to you about my big adventure across the country and sort of how that came about, what I thought, some of my takeaways from it all. And it was really my first trip since March when this whole coronavirus quarantine thing hit. So I thought I would just kind of give you a little behind the scenes what's been going on in my world. And it's also sort of my excuse for why I haven't been podcasting. So back in the summer, my digital insiders were really hankering for an in person visit. The coronavirus had kind of waned a little bit, sort of in certain parts of the country, and I started to think, okay, maybe we could get together safely. But as luck would have it, of course we saw that summer surge and that just wasn't going to happen. So I was really thinking hard, well, how, how can we safely meet? What, what can we do? And I knew immediately that whatever we had to do would have to be outside. And in order to be outside together for multiple days, you'd need to have great weather. I didn't want to have a lot of rain and bugs and heat, humidity or super, super cold. So. So I started looking around for climates that have very little rain and great temperatures. And sure enough, the only one that works in October is the high desert. So basically a million miles from my house here in Connecticut. So I reached out to Julia, who is in Digital Insiders, and I asked her about the area because she's in Colorado, only a couple hours away from that high desert area. And I said, is this a great place? And she said, oh my gosh, yes, I've been here. She actually traveled in an RV and lived on the road for two years, so she knew everything there was to know about that area. So before I had too much time to talk myself out of It I had booked this giant group campsite in Moab and it is 33 hours from my house driving time. And not only that, but it was going to be a dry camping experience. There would be no water, no showers, no electricity. There would be drop toilets, so that's a plus. And here's the kicker, no cell service. So I booked it. I didn't really think much about it and I told everybody and everybody was super excited. And we had about 45 people reserve immediately. And I said, bring your own food, bring your own shelter, we will be outside the entire time so that it is a safe, you know, venture for everyone and no one feels at risk. And that was that. I really didn't think about it much until about two weeks before the trip. Thankfully, thank God my husband was thinking about it because he had all the tools, the camping tools. But about two weeks before I thought, this is nuts. Like I was a little scared. We had never, Alex and I had never driven an rv, rented an rv, nothing. I mean, I've done some dry camping, but man, we were going to bring William, who is, you know, my five year old, and we were going to try to, I was going to try to work on the road and school on the road and I just started to get a little nervous and I made the mistake of, you know, googling to kind of get some RV tips and realized that pretty quickly that we had been extremely over ambitious in our estimates of how far we could drive. And so we decided we'd leave on a Wednesday, we'd arrive in Utah on Sunday, we would camp from Sunday to Thursday, and then we would drive home Thursday and be home by Sunday, which makes it about a 12 day trip, round trip. So it was crazy. And I'm here and alive to tell the tale. If you follow me on Instagram, you probably saw a lot of the highlights, I'm not gonna lie. About three hours into the trip, realizing that an RV is nothing like a plane, I had all these grand visions of being able to work and school and cut vegetables. And about three hours in I realized, oh no, no, this is not that. This is like a ride at Disney World and I am about to vomit all over my son because I'm so car sick. So thankfully I figured it out and I didn't vomit and I also didn't work. I mean, I did my boxers, but I really wasn't able to do much else. And so it was kind of an unintended consequence of 66 hours of driving over eight days was that I had a Lot of time to think and it was glorious. Now I don't, I don't think I would have willingly put myself in that situation ahead of time, but it was what it was and it ended up being the best thing for me. And so one of the advantages I say that I've found out about RVing is that especially when you get car sick and you can't really do much is that it gives you an incredible amount of time to reflect. There's nothing to do. You're on the open road, look out the window, talk to the people you're with. And it was so good for my mental health. In fact, despite the fact that it was an incredibly exhausting trip, I came back more emotionally and mentally refreshed and calm than I have in a long time. Four days in Moab with Digital Insiders was incredible. We had a fantastic time. Basically we all hung out in the early morning hours. It was chilly in the desert, but it was amazing. Had tea, coffee, talked, and we all sort of scattered, did our own thing, whether it was hiking or crazy life, risking UTV drives along, Hell's Revenge. And then we'd all get back together in the evening, have our dinner, be around the campfire, talk, sing, hang out. And we did that for four days with no cell phone service. So it was just a lot of connecting with the people you're with. And I really, I do recommend that if you've never gone off the grid, that you try. I will say that I did drive five, six miles each day to go get my Twitter updates, but that was just because we were, we were in Moab right as the President was getting sick. And so it was very hard not to know what was going on. The drive home was crazy. And if you decide to take a road trip, do not do what we did, which was think that we could do a 12 hour drive in one day. 12 hour drive is actually a 16 hour drive when you include stops. Sanity stops. So that day was brutal. We left on the way back. We left Moab on Thursday at 10:00am we arrived in Kansas around 9:00pm the next morning. We left at 5:30 in the morning. Around yeah, 5:30 or 6. We left good. I think it was Goodland, Kansas and, and we made it all the way across Kansas, all the way across Missouri, all the way across Illinois and into Indiana. We arrived into Indiana at 1:30 in the morning. We also had two, we lost two hours because of two time zones. So it was really like 11:30, but still it was about 12. It was, it was A long time. And then we woke up in Terre Haute. I think that's how you say it. Indiana. We stayed there in the morning just to try to get our bearings and we drove till 9pm to get to Pennsylvania, slept at a truck stop for about five hours, got up at three in the morning and went from Pennsylvania home. It was crazy. So the moral of the story is that you should go off the grid. You should try RVing. You should not try RVing across the country as your first RV trip thinking you can do 12 hour days. That is nuts. That's where I've been. And I would encourage you, if you are a leader in any kind of group community, look out for your people. It has been a very, very hard year. It is hard to not see people figure out ways in which you can do it safely and ways in which you can still get that much needed connection. Because we desperately need it and we're heading into a rough fall and winter, there's no doubt about it. And so whatever you can do in the next several weeks to connect with the people that you serve and connect with your students, go ahead and do it. Because even though it's hard and crazy and very inconvenient, it is always worth it. Talk to you soon.

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