It’s amazing to me that you can live within one hour of family for years and only see them occasionally. Then when you hit the road, you end up spending more quality time with family than ever before. That was the case with us anyway. With freedom of time and location, we can have extended visits with family. It is way better to spend a few days with them, than an hour here and there. We had so much fun visiting family in Utah over the next several weeks as we slowly made our way up the state.
We headed to central Utah for a visit to my brother. He and his wife had just had a new addition to their family. I like to call her Sweetie Punks because she is so sweet. We stayed for almost one week. And got to visit with my brother and my sister-in-law, one of their sons who is a teenager and their new little baby girl. It was great to see them. They had moved in January to a small, rural community. Their home was on 10 acres of land which meant plenty of room to park Beast. They were working to be as self-sufficient as possible on their new piece of property and that meant lots of projects which kept my brother very busy after work and on weekends. So fun to hear of their plans for the place and see some of them already taking shape.
My brother said when we called to see if we could visit that he had just put in a new RV pad (gravel) that we could park on and it had hook-ups and everything. However, he didn’t understand that our rig weighs just under 32,000 pounds and it was just too heavy for his newly laid gravel pad. So we parked between the RV pad (which had his fifth wheel trailer on it, which happened to previously have been our trailer), and his shed. It was a great spot to park.
Mike was able to work from here and I had the joy of helping to take care of Sweetie Punks (twist our arms a little more). She is such a good natured baby. I don’t really remember her crying at all. We got to hold her, play with her and spoil her. I took her for a walk in her stroller and Mike loved playing with her. We also got to help prep her soon to be bedroom for painting. We left before the painting was started, so I am excited to see what it looks like when we visit again.
Mike also had the experience of moving sprinkler pipe out in the field for the first time, when my brother had to move the water. Mike offered to help so they both were out moving the 20-30 foot pipe around. We “helped” plant some trees and a few other jobs.
They live near to a beautiful mountain range, so on Sunday afternoon my brother came out and asked if we wanted to go out off-roading with he and his teenage son. His son was going to do the driving of their side-by-side and we could follow in the Jeep. So we did. We headed out on what proved to be a very beautiful drive in the mountains. We drove to the top of the mountain where we had an amazing view of the valley below.
This was such a great visit and so much fun to spend a chunk of time with them. I got to know my sister-in-law so much better than I ever had or could have in short little visits here and there. It was awesome! But all good things come to and end and we were off to my sister’s house—our next family visit.
My sister lives in the town I grew up in. When we visit her we park on the street in front of her house. I had promised her that I would come and help her go through all of our parents genealogy stuff. When we were getting ready for our parents house to be sold after they passed away, we took a file cabinet and piles of photo albums and books of remembrance and genealogy files and a lot of other things and just took it to my sister’s new home and put it in one of the rooms to get to it later. We had come up in May with just Beauty, while Beast sat at Mike’s parents house with projects still being worked on, to get started on going through all of mom’s stuff. We had gotten a lot done then, but we had a few things to finish up. Mike had time to go into the office in Salt Lake and get some work done and I had time to work with my sister and finish off almost all of what needed to be done. It was awesome to get through it all.
It is always good to see my sister. She is the sister closest in age to me and we are a lot alike. When we get together, we have a really good time and this time was not different. But this was a short couple of day visit and we headed further north to the Salt Lake Valley and Mike’s brother’s house.
At his house we parked on the RV pad to the side of his house. It worked out pretty good. It was hot because it was July and we could only run one of our ACs at a time because of being plugged into 15 amp regular household plug power. We enjoyed a short but sweet visit with them. We cooked a meal for them one of the days and enjoyed playing a new game they introduced me to–Cover Your Assets. It is a really fun game for a group to play. Their kids are really growing up fast, so it was great to see them. Their oldest daughter will be a senior this next year, so she will soon be off to college. It was just nice to reconnect with them.
While we were parked next to Mike’s brother’s house, we also paid a visit to my brother and his family who live in the Salt Lake Valley as well. We visited for a few hours with them. That is one of the visits that helped me recognize how much better it is when you can park the rig at a family members home and stay for a few days. A few hours just isn’t enough time. But some family members don’t have a place for the RV to park, so we have to be happy with a shorter visit. It was really good to see them and reconnect for a little bit.
Then off again to northern Utah (almost Idaho) to visit Mike’s sister for a couple of days while we helped them do some work on their RV and got ready to go camping together. We were working on the solar and electrical in their RV. Mike’s parents came up too because they were going camping with us too. While northern Utah was a bit cooler than central and southern, it was still unseasonably hot and we couldn’t run the AC here because of the electrical situation, but that was OK because at night things tended to cool down enough with a bit of a breeze so we could sleep.
One of the days some of us piled into my in-laws truck and we went looking for a place to camp. Mike’s sister had scoped out a place, but when we got there, we realized that the Beast was not going to be able to go to that location. Part of the road was washed out a bit and it made the angles all wrong. So we decided that for this trip, we would be Jeep camping. So we spent a week camping with Mike’s sister and her family and his parents.
We moved near Ketchum Idaho and found a really nice place, my sister whom I had visited in my hometown came to be with us for about one week when we were in Idaho. We did Jeep rides, bike rides, games and lots of other fun. More on these in a later post.
Also, while in Idaho, near Ketchum, we decided to drive to the Boise area and visit my niece and her cute family. We got up nice and early and drove for about three hours to visit them. We got to spend all Saturday with them at a water park. That was a welcome break because it was seriously hot, even in Idaho. Then we went to their home afterwards and had dinner with them. Their four children are super cute and even the youngest little girl loved her Uncle Mike. We stayed entirely too late because dinner was great, company was great and the boys had to share all the tricks they had just learned on their new jungle gym. We had to drive three hours back to where Beast was parked near Ketchum, Idaho, afterwards but we arrived safely. It is always hard to leave the ones you love!!!
Family–the best thing we have in this life. I love this new lifestyle because I have spent more quality and quantity of time with family in the last four months since beginning this lifestyle than I would have done in a few years before. I love having time and being mobile so we can visit those we love. More to come in the future for sure.