Day 1: Kansas City to Oakley, KS – expected drive time: 5 hours (with stops), actual drive time: 8 hours (with planned and unplanned stops)
Today was the first day of our 3-week RV vacation. For the first part of our trip, we plan on traveling across western Kansas, to eastern Colorado (Fort Collins), into Wyoming and Grand Teton National Park.
We rented an RV frrom a really nice couple in rural Kansas and drove him home Friday in order to start the loading process.
Since the boys slept on the RV overnight, we woke to the sounds of the doorbell ringing as the “morning person” in our family, our youngest, realized he couldn’t get in through the garage and wanted to get everyone up.
After finishing the load, we reached our first decision point. The RV storage compartments are not large enough to accommodate of the things we were planning on taking, like this pavilion, or my beloved paddleboard (purchased at REI, similar here), or our 4 bikes. We debated leaving them behind, especially the paddleboard, but decided that part of what we realized we loved in our “test” RV trip was cycling around and I absolutely adored paddleboarding in the early morning by myself. So, we decided they would go inside the RV.
After getting Dennis’ Prius loaded, we were on our way. If only we’d known that “on our way” was a lot shorter than we expected.
First of all, Dennis had a really hard time driving the RV with Kansas winds whipping our sides and semis roaring by. That was a while-knuckle situation on its own. Secondly, about 2 hours in, the car started vibrating unnaturally and we decided to stop on a tiny gas station in the middle of nowhere. We thought the tire was unbalanced and called the Outdoorsy customer service who promised to send someone to help. We parked on the side of the gas station and hunkered down to wait. The boys and I played Uno and I took the opportunity to take some pictures of the beautiful wind farms.
About an hour in, the cavalry arrived, and told us the drive shaft was loose, a much more serious issues. They tightened it up and we got on the road, having lost about 2 1/2 hours with 2 more hours to go, but happy to have it behind it.
Well, not so fast.
About 30 minutes into our 2 hour drive, we started hearing a screeching sound from the motor, like a belt rubbing on something. Everytime we were about to stop, it would stop screeching so we thought it would be safe to head to the RV in Oakley KS we were going to stay at.
Finally, at 8:20pm, we rolled into the High Plains RV Camping site which was very nice. The check-in was contactless so we grabbed our paperwork and headed to our site to set up. As we were walking outside to let the dogs relieve themselves we saw something wonderful, a rainbow!! Maybe that was a sign that everything would be ok, even with our rocky start.
By 9:30 pm all of us fell exhausted into bed and I was very thankful to have a safe place to sleep and excited about getting up early to head to Fort Collins, CO.