Family Roadtrip (in January?!) / Alternate title: Meet Pearl!

My family and I just got back from a nine-day road trip. (This post will take almost as long to read.)

I’m the first to admit that road tripping through the American Midwest during a continental cold snap isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when you think vacation. It was a trip of necessity, but, being the creative weirdos that we are, it morphed into a pretty epic getaway that we will not soon forget.

Our road trip story began sometime around LAST January, when, facing down a second year of pandemic life, Zach and I decided that our family camping trips needed an upgrade. We’ve been tent camping a lot as a family for 4-5 years now, and we wanted to be able to go farther away, and stay for longer. We decided that a good camper was exactly what we needed. After lots of research, Zach settled on the Casita as our ideal getaway vehicle. Casita makes their campers to order, and the waitlist was no joke. We ordered our camper in February of 2021, and our projected pick up date was January of 2022. Sheesh! We spent the whole year day-dreaming about where we wanted to go and what we wanted to see. In the time warp that is pandemic life, the wait was both long and nothing at all.

Washington DC to Rice, Texas, is about 20 hours on the road no matter how you slice it. Because of a historic snow storm bearing down on the South and headed for DC, we took a northerly route instead of the slightly shorter, southerly one. On Saturday, January 15th, we headed out! We crossed the Appalachian mountains in West Virginia and Pennsylvania, and spent our first night in a hotel in Richmond, Indiana - just a stones throw over the Ohio-Indiana border. It was 17 degrees out … but all the snow and ice were passing south of us.

Del loves hotel rooms.

Del also loves truck stops.

Our second day was miles and miles (and miles!) of flat beige Breadbasket through Indiana and Illinois. We crossed the Mississippi River in St. Louis. I advocated for a stop at the Gateway Arch. We only planned to stop for fifteen minutes or so, stretch our legs and take a look, then get back on the road. But Del’s 10-year old logic won the day: “Guys, we are here now. We might never be here again. We need to do this.” So we paid the money and spent the hour and took to ride up to the top. Worth it!!

The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, rises over 600 feet in the air along the banks of the Mississippi River.

Once we were on the other side of the Gateway to the West, the landscape changed to gorgeous craggy Ozark mountains, and rolling farmland blanketed in yesterday’s snow.

Day three was a short drive to Bartlesville, Oklahoma, which is not quite “on route” but we had a special stop planned there. The only Frank Lloyd Wright building with a hotel in it is the Price Tower in Bartlesville. The 19-story Price Tower in Bartlesville was originally designed to be half offices, and half quintessential midcentury modern apartments. Now, it’s a mix of office space, art gallery, museum, and hotel. My husband Zach had learned about this gem a whopping nine years ago, and the minute we had a reason to be anywhere near it, he booked us a room!

Detail of the Price Tower, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, in Bartlesville, Oklahoma.

Interior of the restaurant (temporarily closed for renovation) inside the Price Tower. This room was originally an apartment, with two story high windows facing west for those Oklahoma sunsets.

Copper and stained glass mural in the lobby of the Price Tower.

One little snag: the combination of MLK holiday and an incident with building’s boiler resulted in the building having no heat. It happened to be a 50 degree day, so the hotel offered to either change our reservation to another time, or provide a space heater and a reduced rate. We didn’t have “another time” … but we did have warm clothes and a history of saying Yes to crazy things. So we stayed in the chilly Price Tower as it’s SOLE guests, and they basically told us, “roam the whole place, you’re the only ones here, have fun!” So we did! The three of us rode the tiny old elevator up and down, looking at every nook and cranny that wasn’t behind a locked door. That night we fired up the space heater and slept snugly in our mid-mod 7th floor room overlooking Bartlesville in style.

Day four, Tuesday, was a quick jaunt down to Oklahoma City for a few hours hanging out with my wonderful Grammy, who we had not seen in almost 4 years. We had a terrific time with her - hearts warmed all the way around.

Three generations: Del, Katie, and my Grammy, Phyllis.

Del and Grammy make root beer floats and good memories.

We drove late that night to get close to Rice, Texas, where we were due to pick up the camper on Thursday. That left us a day to kill, in Texas. Obviously, that meant one thing: find tacos. Our mission was accomplished at Birrieria Aguiñaga in Ennis. Keeping up our magic streak of “the only people here”, we had the place to ourselves so indulged in our first indoor dining in ages. The tacos were superb. I mean, killer. We practically rolled ourselves back to our hotel room and metabolized the rest of the night. Overnight, the wind picked up and the temperature went from 60s to 20s!

Red, white & green for the Mexican flag, best tacos I ever ate are in Ennis, Texas.

And finally, day six, we reach the Casita factory for our 10am appointment to pick up, hook up, and get orientation on our sweet new little camper. We named her Pearl. Once she was hooked up and ready to go, we stared back east, as hardy winter camper people! We ended day six with our first night of camping, at Lake Catherine State Park near Hot Springs, Arkansas. Pearl has electric and propane heat so while it was 19 degrees outside, we stayed cozy inside all night.

Picking up Pearl in Rice, Texas. (The wind chill here was around 12 degrees!!)

A cold morning at Lake Catherine State Park, Arkansas.

Day seven on the road we hauled our little house on wheels across the Mississippi at Memphis, Tennessee, and spent the night in Cedars of Lebanon State Park just east of Nashville. Still a frosty thirty degrees or so.

Pearl at Cedars of Lebanon State Park near Nashville, Tennessee.

A chilly night doesn’t stop us.

On day eight we were aiming to reach Clayton Lake State Park in Virginia. We loved the climb back into the Appalachian mountains and the gorgeous views as we crossed into North Carolina. There was snow on the ground in Virginia. That’s pretty normal in the VA mountains.. which is why, we learned too late, that state parks in VA aren’t open for camping in winter. So… that cold night we had to decide if we wanted to roam around to some of the private campgrounds we found in Apple Maps, or use Pearl’s “boondocking” capabilities to overnight at a rest stop. Again, we’re in the habit of saying Yes to new experiences, and didn’t feel much like going too far off course. We parked in a rest stop along 1-81 and settled in for the night. Turns out, rest stops are LOUD at night. Our little Pearl was surrounded by a couple dozen idling big rigs. Those suckers can really rumble.

That loud night left us a little ragged starting day nine, our final leg back to Northern Virginia where Pearl has a spot in a secure boat/camper storage lot. There’s not much to say about day nine other than that: we made it!

I’ll end this with explaining Pearl’s name. Zach picked it for her, and it’s pretty perfect. In Pirates of the Caribbean, Jack Sparrow explains, “Wherever we want to go, we go. That's what a ship is, you know. It's not just a keel and a hull and sails; that's what a ship needs. Not what a ship is. What the Black Pearl really is, is freedom.”

Many more adventures await.

Waking up to the wilderness