16th Stop - Evansville IN (Z's bday with friends!)

Blog Post #23 - Written July 9, 2025

Stay: June 8-10, 2025


For Z's birthday, we surprised him with a visit to see old friends who had moved from Cleveland a couple years before we did! To say he was ecstatically overjoyed is an understatement :)   It was a reminder that our relationships, with family and friends, are what bring us true joy and happiness. All of our epic cross-country adventures can't compete with a few days hanging out with good friends!

All the cool kids ;)                                                                                   Launching birthday boy sky high!


It was so cute to see how easily and quickly Z and his friend T picked up where they left off, even though it had been 1/3 of their lives ago since they'd last seen each other. And even more adorable were Q and their 3rd (T), instantly smitten with each other haha 😍   Q would carry her around, or she'd grab his hand and they'd walk around. Ah, young love. Megan and I decided with our friends, Ryan and Sharlisa, to arrange their future marriage, so we can be in-laws and hang out even more!



Shar is an artist, so she helped all the kids do some watercolor. And then it was our turn after the kids went to bed. It was really fun! Even if Megan and Shar totally blew us out of the water! 


The rest of our time was spent on the trampoline, water balloon fights, at a cool church that has a huge indoor play area they open to the public, playing pickleball, and playing board/card games each night. Good times. It was a couple hours out of our originally planned route, but we wouldn't change it for anything, it was so fun and nice to stay with friends! 



And celebrating Z's birthday of course! He asked for a watermelon cake and pizza. Megan went above and beyond with the cake (of course), and I contributed by buying a bunch of bacon pizza from Domino's haha 😋



Bonus: Family Photos! Shar is a photographer and was kind enough to take some great pics of us one of our nights there!







 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why Are We Doing This?

Image
Blog Post #1 - Written: April 20, 2025 Why Are We Doing This? Hi there, my name is Gary. My wife, Megan, and I are embarking on a 12-15 month (we think) adventure around these United States with our 3 young children: Z - 6 yo, Q - 4 yo, D - almost 2 yo. The first question people usually ask when we tell them our plans is “Why? How did you come to this [crazy] decision?” To answer that, I need to take you back in time a bit. Megan grew up in CA and I grew up in CA. We met and married in UT and then moved out here to OH for work after graduating college. We’ve lived here for 8 years, which was longer than we expected. But for good reasons! We’ve truly enjoyed our time here; my work/company/coworkers are awesome, the weather is nice (besides the gray winter), the people are good, and it’s so GREEN! Coming from the desert out west, we were blown away by the never ending forest and little rivers and streams everywhere! But all that said, for reasons I can’t fully explain (although likely du...
Read more

Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us

Image
Blog Post #7 - Written May 3, 2025 I don't have a great selection of photos for this 'misc' post, but here's one from the de-winterization process. Not pictured is the hour I wasted trying to figure out why the outdoor kitchen sink (above) wasn't draining...only to finally realize the strainer was also a plug and even after you take it out, it drains slowly... Final Preparations…They Almost Killed Us The thing about uprooting your entire lives to become nomads and live the relaxing nomadic life is, it takes a lot of planning and work!  Our lives for the 4 months of January to April were so incredibly busy and exhausting, I felt like this trip wasn’t worth it many times.  Even before January, Megan was spending a couple hours every night researching where we wanted to go and planning routes and finding costs and details of like 700 places of interest. Mind, we’re only doing this for 12-15 months haha, so she then also spent hours paring down her list (with some input...
Read more

Choosing Our Ride - Trucks

Image
Blog Post #3 - Written April 20, 2025 Choosing Our Ride - Trucks Megan and I have never owned a truck before and our only experience driving one was driving a 26’ U-Haul truck towing our old Toyota Corolla from UT to OH in 2017. And the only time I tried backing that up I immediately jack-knifed and had to unhitch the car haha.  So when we told the RV dealer that we would buy a truck later, he understandably laughed and shook his head. But we figured, as we always do, that we’d figure it out along the way, like we always do. I talked to my boss (a big truck guy with lots of experience towing heavy boats and stuff) and a couple others and basically learned that we’d need a F-250 or bigger. They recommended we look for 3 things: Towing capacity: Our trailer has a dry weight of about 9,000 lbs, so once fully packed we estimated it would be about 11,000 lbs. So we needed something with a minimum of 12,500 lbs towing capacity to have a little breathing room. And the more breathing room ...
Read more