Prologue
As the secretary-treasurer of FJUS, the US class association for the International FJ sailboats, I felt an obligation to attend the National Championship regatta that was planned for August 14-17 at Carter Lake in Colorado. Carter Lake is located just west of Loveland, about an hour north of Denver. Since we would have to trailer a boat and not taking the kids was not an option, I thought that renting an RV would be the best way to go.
FJUS had planned a mid-week regatta so that people could take some time getting to the regatta and only take one week off from work. This would give us the opportunity to take our first extended family-only vacation, plus see a part of the country that we had only flown over before. Renting an RV would allow us to not have every meal in a restaurant and to prevent the trauma of having left something of great importance in a hotel room. So in the spring, we began to plan our big adventure.
We made arrangements to rent an RV, take time off from work, and planned our route. Reservations were made at RV parks along the way. Our original plan was to try and drive either early in the morning or in the late afternoon/evening and visit places during the day, however, the distances between the places we wanted to see dictated the driving schedule more than we would have preferred. Plans were made, changed, and then never implemented up until the day we planned to leave.
FJUS had planned a mid-week regatta so that people could take some time getting to the regatta and only take one week off from work. This would give us the opportunity to take our first extended family-only vacation, plus see a part of the country that we had only flown over before. Renting an RV would allow us to not have every meal in a restaurant and to prevent the trauma of having left something of great importance in a hotel room. So in the spring, we began to plan our big adventure.
We made arrangements to rent an RV, take time off from work, and planned our route. Reservations were made at RV parks along the way. Our original plan was to try and drive either early in the morning or in the late afternoon/evening and visit places during the day, however, the distances between the places we wanted to see dictated the driving schedule more than we would have preferred. Plans were made, changed, and then never implemented up until the day we planned to leave.