Prep School

So, I said earlier that we didn't quite plan as much as we might have.  It's not that we didn't plan.  Although what we did was primarily to ask what kind of vehicle might work and where we would go, we have a little more in terms of preparation.

We knew that we had to go to Oshkosh WI for the 16th of July (for my brother Bob's wedding to the Lovely Linda) and we knew that we couldn't leave until July 2.  We also knew that we needed to be back in Portland, OR, at the end of July for Tallis' allergy shot.  Okay, that's not planning, that's constraints.  I'll acknowledge that but, when you have little preparation, you want to include the constraints.

Our planning pretty much consisted of looking at a map, trying to figure out how to do both Glacier and Yellowstone, throw in a couple of kid requests -- Devils Tower (yes, they saw the movie) and Mankato, MN (Home of book characters whom Ailsa likes in a series of books I like to think of as "Little Suburb on the Prairie") and then trying to figure out how to drive about 5 hours a day, always stopping at something interesting, and observing all of our constraints.  (I'll get to the return trip constraints in a later posting.)

However, we did do a bit of retail in lieu of planning.  I bought a talking GPS (which I'd always wanted), a couple of waypoint packages for the GPS (Jane and Michael Stern's RoadFood (www.roadfood.com) and Roadside America (www.roadsideamerica.com)).  The GPS is great for directing you to where you want to go but, with the packages, it's even better.  When you think you have a few minutes to play with and you are driving for five hours, it can be nice to discover that you're near the Giant Bull on Wheels or to discover that you just missed the fairgrounds for the Testicle Festival.  Knowing that there's an interesting road food place on your way is a good thing, too.  I have to admit, I never found any way to show these spots on a map so that we could really plan but knowing that something is 41 miles SW of you can be sort of helpful.   Besides, we're not real big on planning.

I may mention some of the things we find from these packages in later postings.  If I do, I'll try to remember to say where we heard about them.

On the retail side, we also got a power inverter to try to run 110 V equipment off of the car battery (it won't charge this computer but works on handhelds and phones).  I managed to dig out a little FM broadcast module for playing the iPod through the car radio.  We got more camping gear, not much really, just a hatchet, a table, and a canopy (which we got instead of an awning) which brings us to our largest purchase for the trip -- a 2002 VW Eurovan Westphalia Weekender (which came without an awning).

A Westphalia is a tricky bit of tech.  It's a van with a pop-top so that some people can sleep up on a full size bed up top and some can sleep below on a foldout bed that's nearly queen size.  Tallis and Ailsa, at 7 and 9, are the perfect age for sharing the top bunk.  The lower bed is about 6 inches shorter than a US queen and is apparently the size of an Aussie queen (Anyone know how Peter Allen measured up?).  Oh, Olivia and I also got a bed pad for the lower bunk as the fold down seat (that makes up about 2/3s of the bunk) is kind of lumpy.  We should have gotten a thicker one.  Westphalias also come with a fridge that runs off a second battery that disconnects from the main system when the van is turned off (so it won't drain the battery for starting).

A Westphalia is a tricky bit of tech but a Eurovan can be a fussy bit of tech.  Apparently, the engineering is good but the execution left something to be desired.  For example, on one of the big Westphalia web sites (www.gowesty.com), they say that if you buy a used Eurovan, you should get one that's got over 100K miles because the transmissions have a high probability of failure between 50 and 100K.  Once they've passed that threshold, you can guess that the execution was fine and the tranny will last for some time.  Several mechanics suggested buying something else but we really wanted a Eurovan.

We wanted it badly enough that I took the Amtrak Empire Builder from Portland to Whitefish, Montana (with Dan Teibel) to buy one with 116K miles.  Odd that two months later we planned to drive it back to Montana and even drove past the garage that we had do the pre-purchase inspection.

Our preparation then, included plenty of constraints and shopping.  If you can consider constraints and shopping to be good planning, we were pretty good planners.

Oh yeah, we also bought a bunch of boxes like huge Tupperwear containers to fit in the back and then filled them with things until they were full.  That could also be considered planning.