Campschooling
Good morning!
Coming to you live today from Winding River Campground in Mays Landing, New Jersey. N had a dance competition not far from here last weekend, and we decided to just stay in town at our campsite that we booked for the weekend, since M also had business travel this week not too far from here (closer to NYC). So he is at his hotel room in northern NJ attending his company retreat, and the girls and I are hanging out here and campschooling!
I alluded to the fact that we had purchased an RV, but never really went into detail. I haven't even really told you the story of our Delaware house yet, let alone the story of our "second home" (RV) purchase... a lot has happened in this last year!
There isn't too much to tell, I suppose, about the RV, since M did most of the work researching and making the actual purchase... but... I guess I'll give you the basic gist real quick before we start our school day here!
Along with our decision to move and homeschool, we had a side benefit dream of using some of the profit we made on our home sale in Massachusetts to purchase an RV for the family. When we sold our home we weren't sure where we would end up; we had a goal of being close to my family but that could have meant any location in Delaware, Maryland, or northern Virginia. When we happened to find a home close to my parents and signs seemed to be pointing to us living in Delaware, we were happy to discover that we could get about the same size house that we had in Massachusetts for about half the price. And so, a few months later, M began the process of making our dream a reality by researching and purchasing the RV.
I wish I had been able to help him more in the process, but as you can see by the sporadic blogging here, I have been struggling to keep ahead this whole year. I'm trying to be patient with myself as we have had a a huge life adjustment. In my mind, quitting one's full time job plus part time job should yield oodles of free time, but that has definitely not been the case. More on that later, perhaps.
Anyway, we purchased the RV in mid-March... we can't park it in our neighborhood due to HOA rules, so we keep it at a storage facility nearby. If you don't know, there's a lot to learn about RV operation and hookup at campsites and maintenance. Because of that, and knowing M's and my busyness and slowness to work on research projects like this, I think the RV would have stayed in that storage facility for quite a while before we had felt fully comfortable hauling and operating it, had fate not prompted us to take a trip almost immediately after our purchase.
As I was searching for a hotel that still had space available for N's dance competition in early April, I happened to notice a campground right across the road from her dance competition venue! I knew that camping could save us several hundred dollars rather than staying at a hotel, so I asked M if he thought we could be ready to camp for real a mere week and a half after purchasing our RV. Kudos to him, he was game to do the needed research and purchase the needed supplies, and we decided to go for it!
I'm glad it worked out this way, because we ended up sort of doing the research and supplies-purchasing in stages. For example, on our first camping adventure we didn't have the necessary hoses to hook up the sewer, so we just didn't use our RV bathroom and walked to the campsite bathroom (we are used to doing that while camping anyway!). So we have been able to "learn as we go" which helped us travel sooner... win win!
Well, that's all I have time for this morning... I'll leave you with some pictures of the past few days.
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