Southern States Adventure Part 1

 

Okay I know it’s been a while since my last blog.  We’ve had a busy summer so far so I’m going to share with anyone interested in knowing what we’ve been up to.  This will be more like a diary style blog as it moves on, but I’ll explain how it all began.  As this will be an extended blog, I will be breaking it up with new sections every couple of days or so. 

The kids finished up school on May 27 this year-the earliest ever.  I scheduled it that way to coordinate with Leah’s college courses, but also for traveling purposes. Our family has been travelling with our travel trailer since the kids were small, but much more extensively the last few summers.  As a family we have travelled to many of the United States together and we each have a map with the states we’ve visited colored in.  In order to be able to color a state on your map, you have to have seen more than the airport and spent at least 2 hours in it. For this summer, we have been planning a southern states trip for almost a year. 

The weekend after Mother’s Day, Scott and Nolan attended a men’s retreat in Tahoe with our church.  I was going to surprise Scott with a trailer “face-lift” thinking I could get it completed ina  weekend.  I was very motivated, but my ideas were a bit too ambitious for one person to complete in a weekend and it was NOT complete when he got home, but I asked him to stay out of the trailer and don’t ask questions.  It took me almost an entire week, but I managed to transform the inside of our trailer in preparation for our summer travels.  Here are the before pictures before my renovation:

And here are my pictures after pics:

In late May, Leah took her first solo flight to Colorado Springs to attend the 2^nd session of the Summit Ministries conference.  I’d heard about this conference for the first time at a SCOPE homeschool conference when Leah was starting kindergarten.  The keynote speaker of the conference was the President of Summit Ministries.  Fast forward to 2021 and our church hosted a World View Weekend conference with Summit Ministries and both Leah and I attended the conference at our church.  After that weekend, Leah was determined to attend one of Summit’s 2-week conferences that occur during the summer and so when registration opened in December for this summer’s sessions-I booked her spot and a 1-way plane ticket.  The thought was that we would pick her up in Colorado in route to the beginning of our Southern States tour.  

At the beginning of 2022, Scott and I began routing our tour of the states and I booked campgrounds & Harvest Host locations along our journey, as well as some highlighted attractions that we all wanted to see.  We planned to camp at campgrounds with hook ups to charge our batteries and dump if needed, as well as occasional laundry facilities in between some of our Harvest Host stays.  Our Harvest Host membership allows us to camp boondock style (no hookups of any kind) at member wineries, breweries, farms, distilleries and attractions. This trip has been in preliminary discussions and planning stages for almost a year. 

After we got Leah to Colorado, we began prepping the trailer for our almost month-long adventure, getting our house situated and instructing our house/pet sitters aka: Mema & Grandpa what need to be done.  

Nolan, Scott and I left California on June 8^th with our first destination for the night in Wells, Nevada.  Our first two days were just driving through states we’d already been through, on roads we’d already travelled and attractions we’d already seen.  

On our second night we used our Harvest Host membership and camped at a winery called Sauvage Spectrum in Palisade, CO.  Nolan was a huge help in getting the trailer situated at each of our nightly stops with leveling the trailer, so we left him to set up while Scott and I sat on the patio and did some wine tasting.  We were pleasantly surprised at how tasty many of the wines were and purchased a few bottles to take on our trip. 

Our next destination was just outside of Colorado Springs in a campground on Friday June 9.  I also made sure to book a campground with laundry facilities because I figured Leah may have some laundry to do since it will have been 2 weeks since we saw her.  (She did have laundry facilities at Summit as well).  We got settled at the campground, changed clothes and headed to the Summit Conference center for the student’s graduation and dinner. 

Some highlights from Leah's time at Summit (Only missing her white water rafting adventure!):

Highlights from Graduation:

We were able to tour the facilities where Leah had been the last 2 weeks, listen to some of the speakers she’d enjoyed, ate dinner in the dining hall and attending the graduation ceremony where the President of Summit Ministries-Jeff Myers- spoke, the same president at the homeschool conference in 2011.  Below is a brief clip showing Leah "graduate".  Her session had approximately 180 students from ages 16-22.  

Leah's Summit Graduation

After the ceremony, Leah took me to tour her dorm room/floor (only I could go as each floor was gender specific).  The 3 of us departed for the evening so Leah could finish the student graduation festivities which included an ice cream social and a dance.  She spent her last night with her new friends and we picked her up on Saturday morning and toured Manitou Springs.  We bumped into a couple of her friends and their families from the Summit conference and the exuberance the students had for their time at Summit and each other was palpable.  I am so pleased Leah had this experience. 

If you want more information about Summit Ministries-check out their website:  Summit Ministries

We went back to the campground in the late afternoon and Scott and I did laundry while Leah & Nolan relaxed and caught up. 

Our next destination was a Harvest Host in Canyon, Texas,.  However, we made sure to travel via New Mexico to mark that state off our list.  As I looked ahead at our next destination and its weather, Scott and I made the decision to book a campground and cancel the Harvest Host so we could have power to run our air conditioning.  There was a heat wave in Texas as we were traveling through and it was too hot in the trailer to be able to get a good night’s sleep if we weren’t able to run the air conditioning.  

Basically, from home to Colorado Springs our only goal was to drive to our next night’s destination.  Since we all have travelled and toured the Colorado Springs area on previous trips, we didn’t spend much time there except to tour the town of Manitou Springs and the Summit Conference Center.  We then blasted through New Mexico into Texas.  We had one night in Texas before heading to our 1^st major attraction on our to do list. 

Since this is already pretty long-I’ll save the next portion of the blog until Wednesday.  Stay tuned….