The Other Side of our Adventures – Ups and Downs while Traveling

Everybody whom we are telling, that we are traveling for around one year, is very excited to hear this and openly comments that their jealous. It definitively is an absolute privilege that we are able to do this and it has of course all the positive sites of an exciting adventure and all the positive sites you will think of… and we do not need to get up early every morning 🙈.

Neither the less, it’s not all pure sunshine all the time and we thought we give you for once a bit a more personal glimpse into our travel and what the downsides are. So, for the ones, who like to look at our pictures of our adventures, they can stop reading now, as here is just text. For the others, the ones who always wanted to hear about the downsides and have more personal blogs (request accomplished :-))..  this is it:

1. Time Management
   Never before in our life’s we were thinking about how much time we need for the ordinary things, such as cooking, dish washing, cleaning, laundry, buying food etc. until now. We cook three times a day.. that means we wash dishes by hand three times a day, because there is no dishwasher in a RV. This quickly sums up to 2.5 hours per day. As you live much more outdoorsy (and there is definitively much more wind in the US than we know from Switzerland), there is dirt, sand and dust everywhere/everyday (Eyra surely doesn’t help there either). In Switzerland, there is practically no risk of ugly bugs in your home.. here you definitively want to be very very clean, otherwise you get all kind of little animals within your RV.. and never out anymore. So, another 30 minutes daily of cleaning and once a week the big clean for several hours. The same is with clothes. You need everyday so many clothes as they’ll get dirty all the time.. you wouldn’t believe how quickly. So you definitively do laundry much more, than you’ve ever expected. Buying food is fun too. These markets here are so big and you may choose from a 100 different sorts of oats, 100 different sort of whatever.. so we usually need a good 2-3 hours just to shop for some simple food (in every region the shops are different too) and whatever we need for the RV (whatever always breaks all the time and needs some sealer or glue). So there are the little RV repairs. And trying to find out where to do them or how to do them yourselves. Then there are the pictures.. Sometimes Sarah hates herself for taking so many pictures. To do one blog entry, takes quickly 3-4 hours, if a video is included up to 6 hours. And what we completely under estimated: Planning! Planning of where to go next and what to do there – that’s the easy part. But are you able to drive this road with a RV? Is it possible now, or is there still some snow? How are the winds for the day of traveling. Can you go there with a dog, what are you doing with the dog in the meantime? Safety topics, such as what kind of wildlife can you encounter (especially if you travel with a dog). Then searching for a campground to stay.. a nightmare! See point 2. For three days of traveling you can count one day of planning ahead. We do not need to say, that we are not accustomed to waiting in Switzerland.. and in the US, you just wait for everything, as you probably have realized in our blogs so far. Every time we needed to go to the doctor’s (you need a prescription for lots of medical products), we waited easily 2-4 hours although we had an appointment. When you get the prescription you go to the pharmacy and wait again 30 minutes to get your drugs.  You wait in the Bank, you wait at the laundry, you wait to get into National Parks and even you wait sometimes to park for hiking 😂. So, in your planning you always need to plan in some waiting time..
   And of course you need time to set up your RV for travel (sewer flush, putting everything at a place that it doesn’t break while traveling etc.). This usually takes 1 hour before you go and 45 minutes to set up when you’re installing yourself at a new place. And then you travel.. you need time to come from one end to the other and of course to see things and do things. And we never thought of that, but you don’t have a weekend. Every day is a normal day, there is never a day, where you do nothing but just relax. So, to sum up.. We do not remember, when we have watched a film or our favorite Netflix series in the last weeks (which was a typical no brainer while working in the evening), or when we had time to read a book etc. We definitively need to do some changes in our travel planning! We will skip some things on our list, so that we have more time for all the things and to be able to see the hidden gems of this country. One year is just not enough to see all of America..
2. Flexibility?
   In the beginning of our travel, we did not see a lot of other people traveling, respectively not in the same places as we did (out of season). Since some weeks/months, everybody seems to be on the road and we did hear from other campers, that the closer we come to the summer months, the worse it gets. Trying to find a suitable campground is quite a challenge. Whenever you find an area you want to stay/see you’ll try to find a campground nearby. There are about five Apps we know, so we go through all of them to find 2-3 good spots to stay. Then you start calling. Usually the best ones are already booked.. so you restart the search for the less good campgrounds or you go further away from your place you want to visit or you end up boondocking. When we planned this road trip at home, we always thought, we will have so much flexibility! If you like a place you stay longer.. if not, you just go further.. bla bla.. the reality is, that there are places (like the well-known National Parks), where you need to book 6 months in advance! And for the good other campgrounds we realized, that we need to book about 1 month in advance as well. So, we come to the point 1 again.. planning and nope.. no flexibility – no spontaneity, you fix everything up for one month through at least (irrespectively of the weather.. which always is sometimes a point, especially when you travel with Sarah 😉). So you end up at a place for just one day and it rains all day through or there is a storm.. then you just do the hike while the storm is bursting around you or you haven’t seen that place at all. Funny decisions.. And let’s say, you’re ill, as we both were the some weeks ago.. some fever, running nose etc. you cannot just stop working and go to bed and relax for several days until you’re back on track as we did at home.. the travel and whatever comes with it just goes further. The campgrounds are booked. And you just go with it..
3. Costs
   Lots of things got quite expensive in the last years. When we travelled in 2010 everything was still much cheaper. Campgrounds for example, the price is about 25-50% up to what we paid at that time. Even worse are medical costs (human and pets). Doctor’s treatments are horrendously expensive compared with Switzerland. One short visit with our Eyra and some checks and a drug: 600 USD! We nearly got a heart attack. And for us, at lot of places didn’t even accept our Global Care Insurance from Swica Switzerland. So you are a self-payer, which can be quite expensive. Food got more expensive too.. especially if you like to buy organic food. Restaurants are either very cheap (more fast food style) or if you want to have very high quality, prices are the same as in Switzerland. Only the meat is cheaper.. that’s why we eat so much meat 🥩 Haha..!So, you need to calculate a little more than expected…

    

4. To sum up..
   We of course still love to travel and enjoy to see new things every day. You need to be able to process the travel, what’s not as easy as we though. We had some downs while traveling.. but we had lots of up’s by seeing things which we have never seen in our life’s. It’s such a privilege to be able to do this. It’s wonderful to experience all this the three together and it’s definitively a relief to have not every day an alarm clock ringing oddly.
   So, you’ll definitively see further adventures from our side in our blog. We hope you do enjoy it, as you have learned now, it takes us quite some crucial time. We always enjoy when people comment or like a blog, that gives us important feedback to what we do and values our work. We’re of course are also very open to proposals to the blog or to Tips & Tricks of travel places etc. If you haven’t officially followed our blog yet.. please use the follow-us button and stay with THREE ON THE ROADS on the road.

   Thank you for reading our blog and.. see you soon!