I’d like for you to imagine, if you will, two grown people who have just purchased an RV and are behaving more like kids in a candy store then responsible, level headed adults.  In early September of 2015, that was where we found ourselves.

We had just taken Harvey on his inaugural run to camp with family over labor day weekend.  If we had not already been convinced of how much we loved RVing when we cut a giant check to buy the thing, we certainly were convinced now!

So now, I take you now to our living room couch in September 2015:

Melanie: Where else can we go!?!!?  Let’s plan as many trips as humanly possible in the next few months.  Cool? I was thinking DC over Thanksgiving Break.  It’ll be dead!  No one sight sees over Thanksgiving!  They are home with their families!* Then, how about Savannah the week after Christmas?  The kids will still be out of school.  Perfect!  I’ve always heard it’s beautiful there! And then, why not take advantage of MLK day and this optional conference day to go to DisneyWorld and stay at their campground!  We’ve never stayed on resort before and the kids will only miss 3 days of school!  I’m so excited!  What do you think?

Zac: Huh?  Um, yeah. Book it.  Sounds good.

Melanie: Oh, good!  Because I already did. 

And thus began the series of trips that had all of our friend’s eyes rolling pretty much perpetually.  It became a bit of a joke that the Novaks go on vacation every other week.  I was quick to point out to them that it was once a month, thank you very much!

The DC trip was a… success.  You know how right after you have a baby (stay with me guys) and you forget about the pain immediately after the fact while you’re holding your new little one?  That may have been what the DC trip was like for us.  We had all these awesome memories to hold on to that we forgot how many kinks we had ironed out on that trip.  We would probably forget about this moment too if it weren’t preserved forever on digital hard drive:

Good times.

So, with the first big trip to DC under our belts, we were ready to venture on to our next even bigger trip: Savannah, GA.  People kept asking, “Why Savannah”, and I had no better answer than, “I feel like I’ve heard a lot of people say it’s really pretty”.  I could not think of a specific person who had said those words to me, but they seemed to be floating around in the back of my brain as though it were a widely recognized fact that Savannah was beautiful.

And those vague whispers of faded memories were not wrong.  I am not the type of person who likes to go to the same place twice.  I figure, I’ve been there!  Why would I want to go back?  Lets move on to the next place!  But I am telling you, people.  I would go back to Savannah over and over again in a heartbeat.  The stone streets, the quaint parks, the spanish moss, the historic homes, river street shopping… I could go on and on.  It is a stunningly beautiful city with so must history, it’s bursting at the seams.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was the historic trolley (I use the term trolley loosely.  It was a bus made to look like a trolley.  but it was open air!) ride through the city with the knowledgeable driver.  You drove all around the city while the driver gave you nuggets of knowledge ranging from the civil war and Sherman’s march, to movie history and where Forrest Gump was filmed.  Every so often an actor in full character and costume would jump on at one of the stops and give you a lively monologue about who they were and where they lived.  We heard from a rich woman who may or may not have poisoned her husband and from an old air

force pilot!  It was probably my favorite part of the whole trip.  And look at how much the kids enjoyed it!  In fact they just couldn’t stop talking the whole ride about how not boring it was and they kept mentioning that they just wished it would go on forever and never end.  Or wait, maybe it was just the opposite of that…. but who can remember!

One thing the kids truly did enjoy was the Georgia State Railroad Museum.  They had old cars that you could walk through, a working turntable, a handcart that you can operate yourselves, and lots of cool old engines.  We spent the better part of the day here even though it was a little dreary and drizzly.

And, I would highly recommend going to the Savannah National Wildlife Refuge.  We did a drive through section and saw about a dozen alligators!  And it was really fun because sometimes the kids would spot them without our help and they would get so excited. It was hard to get good pictures because they were so far away, but this refuge will not disappoint!

And the yummy treats were a fun part of Savannah, too!  We went to Wicked Cupcakes, Leopold’s Ice Cream, and Paula Dean’s Restaurant, The Lady and Sons.  All of which were delish!  Plan out plenty of time to go to Leopold’s though.  We stood in line for an hour and that wasn’t even the longest line that we’d seen while we were there.  And it’s extra fun to stand in line for all that time just to have one of your more clumsy children drop their cone immediately after it’s placed in their hand.  Said child then immediately broke down into tears before being handed a fresh cone.  This story is a regular in our household and I’ll let you guess which child it was.  Here are the usual suspects:

Remember my awesome plan that I mentioned earlier?  You know.  The one where I planned three amazing vacations in the RV spanning over less than three months time?  Yes, that one.  The one where Zac wasn’t really thinking it through and stopping my crazy ideas before they get, well, unreasonable.  Well, here’s where it came to bite me in the butt.  The entire time we were in Savannah, Zac was trying to devise a way in which we could leave the RV there, and then fly down and pick it up in a mere ten days when we’d be back that direction for Disney.  It anguished his logical soul to even entertain the thought that in less than two weeks, we’d be driving back through the exact same route.  Ah, yes.  In my haste, I hadn’t thought of that small detail.  After coming up with a plan to park the RV, fly back (without any suitcases, mind you.  That was a major flaw in his plan) to Ohio and then fly back to pick up the RV and drive it the remaining six hours to Disney, I finally convinced him that the journey was half of the fun of the trip and we drove the ten hours home to North East Ohio.  And as soon as we pulled in the driveway, it was time to start prepping for our trip to Disney…

 

 

*See this post as to how that was NOT the case at all.