Together again

We used to make trips to Kansas every so often to visit Steph’s grandparents, aunt, uncle and cousins and one thing you could always count on was Grandpa Merl to walk into the living room full of his kids, his grandkids and great grandkids and sing a little bit of Buck Owens’ Together Again. Well, when I got Ava hitched up to the Beast and we began to pull away from the Ryplewski’s shop I rolled down the windows and belted out a bit of the song myself…together again!! But it isn’t just the togetherness of Ava and the Beast that brings me joy…it is the family togetherness. We’re together a lot at home too but its nice to get away from the hustle and bustle of our routines to spend more focused and intentional time together.  And that is what we are about to embark upon. An adventure to…well, before I get there let me back up a bit.

We had planned all along to do one more trip with our set up. And we had our eyes set on the Pacific northwest. We had all kinds of intentions to plan out every step of the way far in advance so there would be no stress trying to find places to stay in popular locations at the peak of tourist season. Yeah, we didn’t do that. We kept putting it off until 5 days before our trip when Steph did a marathon planning session and got our first week planned and booked. Whew!

Meanwhile I was doing some work on the rig. Replaced a leaky propane hose, installed a new bathroom faucet (old one had a broken handle), and replaced a dead battery. Putting out the slides had always required 1 person to push the button while someone else pushed the master bed out as it had come loose from the wall. I decided to fix this and disassembled the bed to find the only things used to attach the bed to the wall was a few drywall screws into some thin wall paneling. So I set about fixing it and probably way over engineered it, but putting the slides out is now a one person job! While I had the bed apart I installed a pair of USB ports on each side of the bed for charging phones at night without having to run extension cords across the floor. I also ended up finding a bad tire on the truck so had to replace all four (super long story, but the short version is it cost a lot of money). The front brakes were in need of replacing so I dropped some change on that too. An oil change in the Beast and 2 full tanks of propane for Ava and we were ready to roll.

With the family all piled into the truck we pulled away from our house and prayed for safety and amazing experience. We are together again!