{"id":2027,"date":"2017-04-12T17:08:12","date_gmt":"2017-04-12T15:08:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/?p=2027"},"modified":"2021-01-03T11:23:10","modified_gmt":"2021-01-03T10:23:10","slug":"planning-and-preparation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/?p=2027","title":{"rendered":"Planning and preparation&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the last couple of weeks I heard a lot of people say: &#8222;Your planning must have been crazy!&#8220; To them we can only say &#8222;You have no idea&#8220; \ud83d\ude42 During our planning we got lots of inspiration from\u00a0other families and what they wrote on their blogs. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve decided to write something about that, too. Maybe it&#8217;s gonna help someone else.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>At the beginning we looked at the map and tried to find out on which campgrounds we wanted to stay at. The following\u00a0websites helped a us lot with our decision where to stay:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.womo-abenteuer.de\">www.womo-abenteuer.de<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.campsitephotos.com\">www.campsitephotos.com<\/a>\u00a0and also\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.campendium.com\">www.campendium.com<\/a>. That\u00a0made\u00a0our route more specific. (That being\u00a0said, we just changed something last week). But for most campgrounds it is important to make an early decision (up to 6 months ahead). There&#8217;s a time when you can start booking your Campground for a specific day. That means you go online the second the booking window opens. Maybe even try using several computers. You might have a better chance of getting a (good) spot.<\/p>\n<p>We also thought a lot about the topic of sleeping. I have no clue about how it&#8217;s gonna look like in the end. I can just tell you about the thoughts we have right now. We bought a travel bed for Noam. (<strong>Phil &amp; Teds Traveller<\/strong>). It can get packed pretty small and doesn&#8217;t weight much so that we can put it in our suitcases. For Nate we ordered an air mattress, so that he won&#8217;t fall out of his bed. (<strong>Kidz Traveller Bed<\/strong>) We plan on putting both on one of the beds. At least that&#8217;s our plan for now. Let&#8217;s see how it works out. Throughout our trip we&#8217;ll have temperatures between 0 and 25 degrees Celsius. That&#8217;s why we also had to find suitable\u00a0sleeping bags for the kids. They shouldn&#8217;t feel too cold and also not too warm. In Germany there are no sleeping bags for toddlers specifically for Camping. That&#8217;s why we started looking for it online and we found something. It&#8217;s a <strong>down feather sleeping bag<\/strong> for babies up until they are 3 years old. It comes from the US and you can find it here:<strong>\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.themilkandhoneyco.com\">www.themilkandhoneyco.com<\/a><\/strong>. We&#8217;ve been using it for a few months now and Noam loves it. It&#8217;s so fluffy and we even think it\u00a0helped him to sleep\u00a0through the night. For the top part we got our boys some <strong>Patagonia Down Sweater Jackets<\/strong> in which they can also sleep in. And if it&#8217;ll get really cold at night they can wear\u00a0some <strong>merino onesies<\/strong> underneath. This ought to\u00a0be enough for them to be comfortable\u00a0for when it&#8217;s cold. Nate is getting a sleeping bag called <strong>Rei Kindercone<\/strong>. You can pull it together at the end so that he cannot slip into it. For when it&#8217;s warm they have their regular sleeping bags from <strong>Slumbersac<\/strong>. They are not expensive and you can get them either thicker or thinner (TOG).<\/p>\n<p>Another big topic we thought about was hiking with 2 kids. For Nate we got a child carrier. We tried several child carriers and found this to be the best suiting: <strong>Vaude Premium Shuttle\u00a0<\/strong>(YMMV, be sure to test them yourself and don&#8217;t rely on tests alone &#8211; we didn&#8217;t like the often-praised Deuter Kid-Comfort). We&#8217;re gonna use the <strong>Cool Air 360 Ergo Baby<\/strong> for Noam. On the left side of it we&#8217;ll attach the <strong>bottle holder from OneTigris<\/strong>. We decided to order two of the <strong>Nalgene N-gen bottles<\/strong> and one <strong>Camelbak Chute<\/strong> (unfortunately this one is leaking a bit when you hold it up side down). But because we&#8217;ll probably also spend some time in hotter areas as the Death Valley we need to carry lots of water. We found out about some foldable water bottles such as\u00a0the <strong>Evernew Water Carry<\/strong>. That&#8217;s what we got. Thank god there&#8217;s such an easy way to carry water and we found it online. For hiking poles we decided to get the <strong>Black Diamond Trail for Women<\/strong> (they are a little bit shorter and therefore lighter) and the <strong>Leki Photosystem<\/strong> (good recommendation for every photographer cause there&#8217;s a tripod screw attached in the handle so you can use it like a monopod).<\/p>\n<p>For those who want to know about our child seats, we decided to get the following: <strong>Evenflo Embrace<\/strong> (We bought this one in Germany. A family who just got back from their trip in the US sold it to us) and the <strong>Britax Roundabout<\/strong> (we will ship this one to our first hotel in LA, where we will stay before we&#8217;ll get our RV. And before we had back we&#8217;ll sell it to another family that we meet at the Los Angeles Airport. Very convenient!)<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately I can&#8217;t say much about the electronic stuff we got. I know it was a lot to think about and it wasn&#8217;t easy to figure out what we need and where we can get it but I can&#8217;t tell you in detail, because Mike did most of that \ud83d\ude09 Maybe he&#8217;s gonna write something about that later. This was a part of the stuff we had to plan and do some research on. Of course, the things I wrote about\u00a0were only a small part of it. So, only a couple more day until we say Goodbye and let the adventure begin&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the last couple of weeks I heard a lot of people say: &#8222;Your planning must have been crazy!&#8220; To them we can only say &#8222;You have no idea&#8220; \ud83d\ude42 During our planning we got lots of inspiration from\u00a0other families and what they wrote on their blogs. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;ve decided to write something about &hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2040,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[149],"tags":[62],"class_list":["post-2027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-usa-en","tag-preparation","latest_post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2027"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2044,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2027\/revisions\/2044"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2040"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journeys.saltoftheearth.de\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}