Glamping with the Giesens

Fun post...things you should do and things you shouldn't do when glamping. From the perspective of the Giesen's - you'll get a glimpse of some of the mistakes we made in the beginning. Note: one of these things was something we observed, not something we did. Can you guess which one? ;) _____________________________________________________________________________ DON'T forget to fill up your propane tanks before you leave home. If you run out of heat at night, you'll get cold. You trailer is basically a big tin can and it gets cold fast. DON'T buy a fancy rainforest shower head for your RV. It will use up your entire hot water supply and although that tank fills up fast, your family will hate you while they sit there waiting, dirty. DO remember to purchase the following before you go: marshmallows, firewood, and RV toilet paper. No trip is fun without these things. Especially the toilet paper. Regular TP will not do. DO wear gloves when d...

In August 2013, because Kira was begging us to try RVing, we rented a unit from a company we'd heard of many times. I will not mention their name here, but PM me if you want to know who NOT to rent from. I won't go into details, but suffice it to say I spent half-a-day cleaning it. OK, one detail - hair in the shower. Not ours. Yech. Anyway, we couldn't even get outta the driveway without incident because the steering wheel locked up. Spent an hour trying to move it again. When we finally got going, on the drive, things kept flying out of the cupboards, so I had to keep getting out of my seat and risking my life to put things back in place. Ever try to walk in a moving motor home? Add to that, I'm a bit of a klutz and you can imagine how crazy that was. I had to get up every 20 mins or so to close cupboards or to catch our coffee maker before it hit the filthy floor. I'd be trying to keep my balance while wrangling our heavy coffee maker back into place, when a cupb...

Two summers ago, we bought our first travel trailer. We had never owned one before and had JUST gone camping for the first time as a family. That first experience is one for the books. Our 9-yr old daughter (at the time), Kira, had somehow gotten it in her head that we should buy a trailer. I remember saying, "Me?!?! YOUR mother?!?! Can you really see ME in a trailer?!?!" Everyone knows me as a particular-kind of girl, a little high strung about dirt and germs and very uncomfortable with dirty clothes. 5-star resorts with room service and laundry service are my thing. However, Kira kept talking about it - nagging really. So, we had some extra time off that summer and we thought we'd try this camping thing and rent an RV. I will post snippets of that experience in later posts. Suffice it to say, that RV was a filthy, broken down piece of crap and I hated every moment in it. But I LOVED every moment OUT of it. To my surprise, I enjoyed the campfire, cooking outdoors, the lo...