Preparation

Hello Everyone!

For those of you who do not know me or do not know what honey popping is about, please allow me explain.

My name is Robyn Monckton Koeppen. I recently married Greg Koeppen, 3 months ago. He is the love of my life, and my partner for all of life’s amazing adventures.

We did not go on a honeymoon immediately, because we had an exceptional replacement in the works. When brainstorming honeymoon ideas, we decided to wait until after I graduated from my fellowship to go on a honeymoon. This meant waiting about three months after the wedding but would allow us more freedom in our destination. We were debating Costa Rica for a while, and getting pretty excited about it, however it didn’t quite feel right. Then we looked down at our sweet dog, Mocha.

 We wished we could take her camping and have her experience all the national parks the way we planned to do when we retired. But we knew, unfortunately, that she won’t live forever; so if we wanted to show her the world we would have to get started. This inspired us to consider camping as a honeymoon option. Then we considered, what if we took longer than 2 weeks, what if we took 4 weeks, 6 weeks, 8 weeks, or even 10 weeks…

Obviously once we thought about going on a 10 week honeymoon, we were sold! Overall it would cost about the same as a 2 week luxury honeymoon (minus the lack of income) and we would never get the opportunity to anything like this in the near future. So I found a job after graduation that would let me start October 1st and we started planning.

We started looking into a route that would take us to all of the places we were most excited to visit: Yellowstone, Glacier, Crater Lake, Yosemite, Zion Canyon. Then we started filling in the rest.

It will be a whirlwind honeymoon/vacation/trip of a lifetime/National Park epic tour. We start by visiting family and end with visiting friends, with lots of state parks, national parks, state forests, national forests in between. We have a total of 23 stops planned, so far.

We are currently in the process of preparing the camper, and packing our life into a 12 ft box. It is crunch time! Only 4 days left.

We will be traveling with Greg’s 4 Runner and a 2001 Rockwood Premier Pop-up Trailer.

 

We bought the camper about 4 years ago so Greg and his friends could use it on a 2 week road trip (RTA as they call it). We have enjoyed using it over the years, but have never spent more than a week in it together. So we are looking forward to this trip with excitement and a little bit of nervousness.

In order to make everything go as smoothly as possible we have had to make some adjustments and upgrades to our camper.

#1 – Solar panels: Greg already installed the solar panels which we tested out a couple of weeks ago. Solar panels were a necessity because many parks we are visiting do not have electric hook ups. We refuse to use a generator as it is essentially the antithesis of enjoying nature to pour gasoline into a generator making horrific noise so we can enjoy air conditioning inside of a camper. So we have solar panels; 3 cheers for renewable (and quiet) energy! The panels are connected to a battery which stores the energy. This then goes an inverter to change it into current we can use with the normal plugs in our camper. At least this is my understanding of it. I’m not the brains of this operation. We trialed this out while camping a couple of weeks ago, and it worked like a charm!

This particular breakfast was brought to you by the sun!

#2 – We are pulling out the mattress to make room for rock climbing gear.

#3 – We had to patch a hole in the floor leftover from the previous owners.

#4 – We removed all of the caulk, and re-caulked the whole camper. This was tedious but overall should be well worth it

#5 – We replaced all of the lights with LED bulbs. Including the outdoor light.

#6 – Greg built a new cutting/prep board. Greg loves woodworking, and is very talented at it.

 

#7 – Rebuild some damage drawers.

#8 – Install new drawers catches

#9 – Upgrade the king bed with anti-fatigue mats and a mattress pad. Thanks pinterest for that idea.

#10 – Purchase outdoor shower privacy pop-up wall for times when campground doesn’t have running water.

Now all we have to do is pack up, wrap things up at home, and we will be ready to go!

Our first stop if Buffalo NY and Niagara Falls. This is where my grandfather lives. He has never met Greg and it was important to me that he does, so he gets the coveted first stop!

Now I have to get back to studying for my CAQ exam which I take in 2 days!

Talk to you from New York.