A few days ago, Esme asked when we are leaving for our trip out West. I told her “in about a month”. Her response was, “But we haven’t even packed yet!”. I said that we still have time and she reminded me that we were already packed by this time to go to France.

The truth is, I’m a hardcore planner and it does feel like time is slipping away and we won’t be ready. But then I remember that we over-packed for France (even though we each only brought a backpack) and anything we needed that we forgot, we picked up along the way.

What we do need to work on soon is preparing the van and camper for the trip. We need need to replace the camper battery because we let it die over winter and to get a spare tire for the camper. I want to get some maintenance done on the van to prevent issues on the road. I’m also hoping for a couple of warm days where I can pop-up the camper and make sure everything is okay in there (no mice, etc). I purposely left March pretty open to make time to do our final preparations.

Related to that, I gave up my administration position at work and am returning to float pool. Around December I cut back to 4 days per week and now I’ll be working about 3 days a week. Besides the fact that I want to travel and choose my own hours, working 2nd shift meant I also missed family dinners (I love to cook) and spending the evenings with Nole.

Since there’s nothing picture worthy in any of that rambling above, I’ll end with pictures of the castle Esme build for an online class she is taking through Outschool. She is a very creative person and is way better at Minecraft than me so it’s been very interesting watching the castle develop over the past few weeks. Her last class is today.