One Minnesota family uprooted their lives to go on a year-long adventure to national parks, building an educational curriculum around the public lands on their trip, and getting a taste of the joys and challenges of “roadschooling.”
Have you ever dreamed of living on the road and exploring national parks for months at a time? One Minnesota couple uprooted their lives to go on a year-long adventure with their twin daughters, building a curriculum for their girls’ education at public lands around the country.
How did they do it? This episode, we explore some of the joys and challenges of “roadschooling.”
Host Jennifer Errick speaks with Jen Goepfert, Travis Pedersen, and their daughters Aela and Eva. From the seed of the idea to their first taste of living in a 42-foot trailer together, this adventurous and creative family shares why they spent years planning their trip and some of their hopes and concerns for their year on wheels.
The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
This episode was produced by Jennifer Errick with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to NPCA Upper Midwest Campaign Director Chris Goepfert, Jen Goepfert’s sister, for sharing this adventure with our team.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Goepfert-Pedersen family and follow their blog at thebigfunrv.com
Read the National Parks magazine story that first inspired Jen at npca.org/articles/1865-lessons-in-motion
Learn about the Every Kid Outdoors program at everykidoutdoors.gov
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America’s national parks for present and future generations. With more than 1.6 million members and supporters, NPCA is the nation’s only independent, nonpartisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we’re proud of it, too.
You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org
Episode 36
A School Year on Wheels
Jennifer Errick: Have you ever dreamed of living on the road and exploring national parks for months at a time? One Minnesota couple uprooted their lives to go on a year-long adventure with their twin daughters, building a curriculum for their girls' education at public lands around the country.
How did they do it? This episode, we explore some of the joys and challenges of roadschooling.
I'm Jennifer Errick and this is The Secret Lives of Parks.
[Break]
It's Election Day and here in Washington D.C., it often feels like there are two kinds of people, those who want to follow every minute of reporting on early voting and exit polling, and those who would like to take their minds as far away from the election as humanly possible.
I'm here for everyone in the second category, even if this is the only non-political podcast in your feed all day. National parks are ideal settings for escapism, no matter what we need to escape and these inspirational places make up so many of the bucket lists we hang our pipe dreams on.
Over the summer, I had the opportunity to speak with a fun-loving, creative family that made their pipe dream of road tripping for an entire year a reality. Mom, Jen Goepfert, dad, Travis Pedersen and twin 9-year-old daughters Aela and Eva rearranged their lives to be able to explore winding back roads, remote campgrounds and scenic vistas around the country from their new home on wheels, which the girls affectionately named the Big Fun RV.
In early September, the four left their hometown of Saint Paul, Minnesota, on their way to dozens of national parks, museums, natural sites, and yes, even Disney World, making plans to see family and earn numerous junior ranger badges along the way. Jen and Travis hoped the trip would provide the kind of family bonding they would all remember for a lifetime, but at its heart, they designed the adventure with the girls' education as a primary focus.
When I spoke with them in late August, they were just days away from leaving.
Jen Goepfert: So at the end of the month we're going to pack up our family and we're going to jump in an RV, a 42 foot. It's literally a building, it's an entire house. We're going to be dragging a building down the road. We are going to travel around the country to visit our national parks and we're taking the girls out of school for the year and going to roadschool them.
Jennifer Errick: That's Jen. She's an educational consultant by profession and she's enthusiastic about hands-on learning. For those unfamiliar with roadschooling, she explains the concept.
Jen Goepfert: It's a term that kind of mashes up homeschooling and road tripping. So, we're going to school them while we're exploring, so they'll be learning as we go. So, we're going to go around and visit national parks and national monuments and lake shores and we're going to do a lot of place-based education, a lot of experiential learning, get them out to see and explore and do and that's how we're going to learn.
Jennifer Errick: She brought the idea to her family more than six years ago after reading an article in National Parks Magazine. The story was about a family of five that sold their home and transitioned to a nomadic lifestyle, living and exploring full-time from an Airstream trailer.
Jen Goepfert: It was like 2018, I remember, and I got the summer issue and there was a great article about folks who road school and the girls were tiny. They were two or three years old, three at the time. And the article talked a lot about folks like us who had pretty traditional lives and then just realized that that isn't what they wanted, and they had something sparked an idea of to get their kids out like we want to, get out there and explore and approach learning in a different way. So they did what we're going to do. They jumped into an RV and they started to explore. And I read this article, and I was like, "I want to do this."
Jennifer Errick: Jen started dreaming about how she could integrate some of these ideas into her own life. She didn't want to sell her home, but she was motivated by a similar desire to live with less while giving her children richer life experiences. When she started sharing these ideas with Travis, she found he was not only supportive, but also that they were a good team.
Jen Goepfert: He didn't look at me like I was crazy, and he didn't say, "Oh yeah, that's great," and just ignore me. He embraced it. But he also put the brakes on, because I would've been like, all right, let's just throw the kids in the van and go. And I promise, we would've been back here in three weeks crying because we would've been poorly planned. We wouldn't have had money. We wouldn't have had no idea what we were doing. So, he was like, "Yes, this is a brilliant idea, but now we have to do it the right way."
Jennifer Errick: Travis is not only less impulsive by nature, but also more experienced with what it's like to live on the road.
Travis Pedersen: I traveled a lot growing up, ever since I was little. We had family in Colorado, so even from a young age, we would travel out there and visit relatives. She came up with this idea of, like, "Hey, can we get on the road and travel with the girls?" And I was just all in on that. I said, "Yes, let's do this."
We've traveled lot through Europe and around the world. There's a lot overseas, but with little kids, sometimes it's hard to travel overseas, and there's so much to see in the US. Can we take them on an adventure and see the United States without having to leave our country?
Jennifer Errick: As it turns out, they already had a little experience spending time in an RV as a family too.
Travis Pedersen: About a year before that question came up, we actually took out my parents RV on a trip around Minnesota just to test it, just to see what it was like, and that thing rocked and shaked going down the road.
Jen Goepfert: Oh God, it was awful.
Travis Pedersen: Everything made tons of noises, but what was great about it, our girls were probably, what, a year and a half old maybe?
Jen Goepfert: Yeah, just about two.
Travis Pedersen: And we went to Itasca, and I just remember being in the parking lot, and our girls needed to take a nap, and I thought, "Oh my gosh, we're in an RV. We can go into the parking lot and take a nap right there. Our home is where we're at right now." And so that was part of it. It was just the sense of security, having that traveling around with you. So when she brought this up as an option, I was reflecting on all these things that we had already done with it. I'm like, yeah, that totally makes sense. This aligns with all that stuff we talked about when we went on that first trip.
Jennifer Errick: Fortunately, Aela and Eva were also enthusiastic about the idea. And because both girls are in fourth grade, they're able to get free passes to enter all federal public lands with their family through the Every Kid Outdoors program. What do you think it's going to be like traveling for so long?
Aela: I don't know. I feel like it'll just be a regular house on wheels.
Eva: I think it'll be like camping every single day and it'll be really long, but probably really short. It'll probably feel really short since we're going to go on a lot of adventures.
Aela: Probably like camping on the road.
Jennifer Errick: So have you had a lot of fun camping in the past?
Aela: Yeah, I have.
Eva: I love camping.
Aela: I love camping with daddy.
Jennifer Errick: What do you love about camping?
Aela: It's just the wilderness, finding bugs and...
Eva: I like camping because of the smells, the sounds, just the feeling. I just like everything about it. It's just really calming.
Jennifer Errick: Jen and Travis spent six years plotting out the practical aspects of what a long-term road trip would entail, including, first and foremost, how they'd be able to afford it.
Jen Goepfert: He really wanted us to be financially prepared and he really wanted us to be in a place where we had all of our ducks in a row. The challenge for me was if we did this in six years, it was never going to happen, that this wasn't going to come to fruition. It was going to be one of these things where it just kept getting talked about. But I also know Travis and he is a person who doesn't give up and when he decides to do something and he puts his mind to it, it gets done. So, I kept holding on to that. I don't know. What was your challenge in six years?
Travis Pedersen: What was my challenge in six years? I guess just making sure that all those ducks were in a row and making sure that our planning was happening in the time that we had set to make sure that we were stable enough to be able to do this. I think we're very fortunate that we have this opportunity to do this and financially that's huge.
Jen Goepfert: We set an arbitrary number in our mind at the beginning of the six years, we said we want to reach that number, and then we just started working towards that number.
Jennifer Errick: And did that number end up working out?
Jen Goepfert: Yes.
Travis Pedersen: We'll tell you when we get back.
Jennifer Errick: During that time, the world changed, and the couple adapted their plans in ways that ultimately helped them afford their journey.
Jen Goepfert: We got super lucky because we originally were going to take the entire year off. And we had in our minds that we wanted to take this whole six years to save up so that we could both take a leave of absence for a year. And Trav is an architect and I'm an education consultant. I actually have been working from home for a long time since well before COVID. I knew I could work from the road, but I also wasn't really established in my career enough to think that I could support us. He worked in a career that was kind of like, working from home? We don't do that. They were not on board with that.
Travis Pedersen: We weren't even set up technologically, we just didn't have that.
Jen Goepfert: So we were just definitely going to take the year off. We were going to save up enough to live on the road for a year, be able to pay our bills at home. I mean, this was a massive undertaking to be able to save all this kind of money up and then also buy a rig and whatever else that entailed. And then COVID happened and COVID was terrible and awful and I never want to make light of this or act like this is some great thing that happened in the world, but it did change things and one of those things is it changed the way people work and it made Trav's workplace environment re-look at how they do work and he is able now to work from home and he started thinking maybe I could work from the road.
Jennifer Errick: Are you thinking about how you'll be able to kind of separate your job from your day-to-day routines?
Travis Pedersen: I think the way I've approached it in my mind was as if I was home. This is our home. This is going to be our home for a year, right? We go to work during the week, at least I do. Some people have different routines, but we go to the work during the week and on the weekends we play.
Jennifer Errick: Jen was also able to arrange a bit of flexible part-time remote work in addition to her plans to serve as Aela and Eva's primary teacher. The couple mapped out their itinerary to stay in one place each week so that Travis can work in the RV while Jen and the girls go on park and museum trips, exploring and creating lesson plans around their experiences. Then on the weekends they'll travel to the next spot and bring Travis along on their adventures. This change in plans allowed the family more freedom to afford their dream, but it also required an emotional adjustment.
Jen Goepfert: When we first decided to do this, it was going to be the four of us out there exploring. And I think back to that magazine article and everybody was out just smiling and happy, these beautiful pictures of this lovely family in these fields of gold and I just thought that was going to be us. And it's lovely that he gets to work from home. It's absolutely the most beautiful privilege that we could have because now we thought about that big money dollar sign that we had at the end of our six year road. That pressure's not on us as much anymore, but now he's going to be missing out on four days a week of us exploring because I am going to take the kids out while he's working. And that for me was a really hard change in our plan.
Jennifer Errick: How is that feeling for you, Travis?
Travis Pedersen: I'm okay with that if I know that my girls are getting that experience and if it's something that's really important, I'm hoping that I can experience it too. Maybe we have to go back to some of those places. But what I told Jen was I'm really doing this for my girls and I want them to have the experience that is once in a lifetime, I think.
Jen Goepfert: See, this is why I say he's a better person than me because I was like, "I'd be so mad at..." I'd be so jealous. I'd have the worst FOMO.
Jennifer Errick: After hearing some of their plans, I had a little fear of missing out too. Jen and the girls seem to know about a few places in the park system that I didn't.
Eva: I want to see rabbits and deer.
Aela: I want to hopefully see a whale.
Jen Goepfert: A whale?
Aela: A whale.
Eva: I want to see a unicorn.
Jen Goepfert: They going to look for the magical creatures.
Eva: I want to see mermaids.
Aela: Yeah, definitely.
Jen Goepfert: Hopefully there's a national park full of magical creatures and mermaids.
Eva: I want to see bigfoot.
Jennifer Errick: Coming up after the break. The family takes a trial run in their new RV and nothing goes the way they planned.
Jen Goepfert: Everything went sideways. Everything, from the time we went and picked it up. We flooded our entire bathroom.
Jennifer Errick: Oh my goodness.
[Break]
Learn about some of the mishaps and challenges they faced after this short message.
At NPCA, we bring you stories from behind the scenes at national parks because we want you to feel the excitement and exhilaration of being part of these wild landscapes and turning points in history. We believe if you learn about a park, you'll want to visit it. If you visit it, you'll fall in love with it. And if you love it, you'll want to defend it. If you are already hooked on your public lands and the incredible stories they tell, you can help share this wonder by subscribing to this podcast. And if you're moved, leaving us a positive review, it really does help us reach more people with our advocacy for America's most inspirational places, our national parks. Thank you as always for listening.
[Break]
Park ranger: As a junior ranger.
Aela: As a junior ranger.
Eva: As a junior ranger.
Park ranger: I will protect this park from danger.
Aela: I will protect this park from danger.
Eva: I will protect this park from danger.
Jennifer Errick: That's Aela and Eva taking their junior ranger pledge at Cuyahoga Valley National Park in Ohio, one of the first stops on their trip. The family graciously sent me a handful of recordings that they took during their first couple of weeks on the road, exploring places like Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.
Eva: Manganese is black, which I see. There's also iron, which is orange. And green, which is copper.
Jennifer Errick: And the North Country Scenic Trail.
Jen Goepfert: It's a long walk, isn't it?
Aela: It's really uphill.
Jen Goepfert: It's really uphill.
Jennifer Errick: And Niagara Falls.
Eva: Is that all evaporation or just mist?
Travis Pedersen: Mist.
Jennifer Errick: Jen and Travis planned their trip in a clockwise circle around the country.
Travis Pedersen: The route we chose was based on the time we were leaving and the weather. Our first target was Acadia for fall.
Jennifer Errick: Oh, beautiful.
Travis Pedersen: So that's mid-October. And then because of the cooling of the temperatures as winter comes on, we're just going to be driving south until we hit the bottom part of Florida around New Year's and then the coldest part of the year we're going to be skirting across all of the southern states and then we'll hopefully hit California in the spring and as it warms up, we're going to make our way north up to Washington and then try to get across the Rocky Mountains when the snow melts and it becomes acceptable to drive across.
Jen Goepfert: That summer, June.
Travis Pedersen: So we kind of generally knew the pattern that we wanted and then within that we needed to find routes and then what was in between those routes. And so we looked at the timing of all of this and how much we could get in. And we actually did a Gantt chart.
Jen Goepfert: That's Travis.
Travis Pedersen: That's me, planning. But we knew, okay, if we're going to roughly spend a week in each place, how long can we get from point A to point B and what's in between there and how much can we see? And oh, we've got an extra week here, so let's add that national park. And we had to do that in California because we realized we had an extra week on the schedule. We're like, "Well, we got to get all the national parks in California."
Jen Goepfert: It's pretty flexible though.
Travis Pedersen: It is flexible.
Jen Goepfert: We have some dates locked in, like Acadia is locked in because peak season in Acadia you get that reserved. We have Christmas and New Year's locked in because we have family coming to visit us and one of those weeks is Disney. And then outside of that we are pretty flexible.
Travis Pedersen: We are.
Jen Goepfert: If something comes up that we love, we're going to explore it and if something comes up that is not working for our family, we'll move on.
Jennifer Errick: Are there parks you're especially looking forward to going to, either for the first time or to revisit?
Jen Goepfert: Well, Acadia obviously. I am really looking forward to the Everglades, Zion, some of the big names, but then you know what? I’m really wanting to get out to the Emmett Till Memorial. We're going to have to have some hard conversations on the road with our children, and I'm ready for those. And we're going to have to have some talks about some of the ugly things that happened in our past and have some reckonings with those. And I think that's one of the other reasons we're leaving the safety and comfort of our little bubble here.
Travis Pedersen: When she was telling me about some of these places like that, I was getting excited about it, too, because last year we went down to Chicago.
Jen Goepfert: Oh, the Pullman, went down to Pullman.
Travis Pedersen: The Pullman. Yeah, the national monument down there. Was it monument or a historic site?
Jen Goepfert: It's a national historic site.
Jennifer Errick: Established as a national monument in 2015, the site was re-designated a national historical park in 2022.
Travis Pedersen: I love history and once we went there we're like, this is on our list too, to go to places like this all over the nation.
Jen Goepfert: I think people just get this idea in their minds that the national parks are Zion, Yosemite, Yellowstone, all the big names, and they forget that our country is so rich in these monuments to our history, to our culture, and wow, we get to bring our kids there right where they happened.
Jennifer Errick: This is especially handy if you're pulling double duty as a parent and a teacher.
Jen Goepfert: I really am fortunate that my background is in place-based and experiential education and my approach to education is very non-traditional. I believe that learning happens while you're out there exploring. And so a lot of the curriculum is going to be organic. Most of the places we're going have curriculum. There's the junior ranger program a lot of the places. There's curriculum online for a lot of other parks that we're going to be visiting that aren't national parks. A lot of even smaller places, nature centers, places like that have curriculum. I do have some of the curriculum planned. I'm a teacher. I've printed out all of the standards. I've got my little binder, I've got all of the things printed, but a lot of it's just going to organically happen and I'm way less stressed about this than I would ever be getting ready for a traditional school year coming up.
Jennifer Errick: The girls were excited too. Here's Eva.
Eva: I like having mommy as a teacher because at school, I kind of get nervous to ask teachers random questions, but mom, I feel like I won't get as nervous, and I'll be asking her a thousand questions every day.
Jennifer Errick: But before they could leave, they needed to do a test run to make sure they had the know-how to live on the road for months on their own, especially since the longest trip they'd taken together prior to this was only about 10 days. Their RV was one of the most significant considerations and largest expenses of the trip, but they had only had their rig for a matter of months and had never had to learn how to use it on the fly in real-world situations.
Jen Goepfert: I had no idea what it was going to be like to be in an RV. We didn't have even an idea of what kind of RV. We were completely in the dark. I mean you had ridden in the stereotypical kind you think of where you sit with the big, huge steering wheel and everybody's walking around behind you while you're driving down the road and the huge bus kind of thing. That's kind of what I had visualized that we would get. And then we had this dream that we'd drag a car behind us. And we created in our own mind this vision of some kind of vehicle that I don't even think exists. We actually were budgeting and financing for something that we didn't actually know what we were budgeting or financing for.
Jennifer Errick: Ultimately the couple got a 42-foot trailer that hitches to the back of their truck. The larger than standard size gives the four of them more room to live in but can be much trickier to maneuver. And they were totally new to the maintenance.
I know a few months ago you took a little test trip. Is it officially called a shakedown or was that your term for it? It's officially called that.
Travis Pedersen: We learned that term.
Jen Goepfert: It's the actual term.
Jennifer Errick: I didn't know that. And it shook you up.
Jen Goepfert: Really shook us up. That's actually an RV community term. The shakedown trip is where you take your rig someplace close by, close to home and you try everything and you test it all and you'd make sure that everything works. And you're close to civilization so if something goes wrong, you can run to town. If you need to buy something, you need to replace something, you need to fix something.
Jennifer Errick: And so you'd spent months reading the manuals, looking at YouTube, practicing things, but then when you put it all together, a lot of things went wrong, right?
Jen Goepfert: Well, when we bought the thing, so an RV tech, well they kind of unload all this information on you all at once. And I had an iPad, and I videoed all of it so we could look at it later and they just tell you, they walk you through. Here's how you do your water, here's how you do sewer, here's how you do electric. And then you're just, like, deer in the headlights, glazed over as they're walking you through.
Travis Pedersen: We'll watch this later because we don't understand anything that they’re saying.
Jennifer Errick: Right, because you're not ready for it yet. You haven't even left the lot.
Jen Goepfert: Do you have any idea what he just said?
Travis Pedersen: No.
Jen Goepfert: No. None. Not at all. We had practiced hooking up quite a few times and we thought we knew what we were doing, but when we went to get it that day, everything went sideways. Everything, from the time we went and picked it up. We didn't open the RV hitch clamp. We went to hook it up and we had forgotten to open the thing. So Trav's just smashing the truck into the RV over and over and we're like, "Why isn't it hooking up?"
Travis Pedersen: I don't know.
Jen Goepfert: It's not even open. We started out really bad and everything was going sideways. We had to de-winterize it, and that's a thing that we've never done, didn't know we had to do. So we got down there, set up and I realized I had left that handy dandy video that we had made at home.
Jennifer Errick: Of course.
Travis Pedersen: Of course.
Jen Goepfert: We ended up having to Google.
Travis Pedersen: YouTube, lots of YouTube.
Jen Goepfert: Lots of YouTube. I was out there with a paper manual. It was raining by the way, the entire weekend. So we're out there with the paper manual in the rain trying to de-winterize, which means that you're trying to flush out all of the—
Travis Pedersen: Antifreeze.
Jen Goepfert: —the antifreeze out of the lines before you can ever use it. So that's a long process. Yeah, we flooded our entire bathroom.
Jennifer Errick: Oh my goodness.
Jen Goepfert: We flooded our hot water heater and then we had to bleach all of our water lines. We couldn't use the water for the first day. And it was one of those things where we were swearing at each other and we were swearing at the rig and we look over and our kids are just sitting in the rain on the playground, sadly swinging.
Jennifer Errick: Oh, no.
Jen Goepfert: Looking all depressed far away from us.
Travis Pedersen: Probably thinking, "Is this going to be our life for a whole year?"
Jen Goepfert: Yeah. But we got through that first night and the guy who worked at the campground actually came the next day and was like, "What's going on over here? Do you need some help?" And we were like, "Oh God, yes, we need so much help." He sorted us out. And we did find that people in the campgrounds are really, really eager to give you all of their input. So, the guy walked us through, he really gave me a whole on-site class. We had to run into Fleet Farm and pick up 27 new pieces, but we got it. We got it all figured out.
Jennifer Errick: And you still want to do it?
Jen Goepfert: I had a moment. I'm not going to lie, I had a little moment where I was thinking, after six years of planning, what are we doing? Why? Well, and I thought, we have a really nice life. I love our life here. And I worked really hard to get to the spot. I was a single mom before I met Trav. I raised a daughter on my own and it was not easy. Everything was hard. And I love my daughter dearly. My oldest daughter Sarah, she's my best friend in the world now. But we struggled so much and I got to this point now where things are so easy and I remember having a moment that night where I was like, what am I doing? I'm intentionally choosing hard.
And then I realized, but this isn't real hard. This isn't, like, can't pay my bills hard. This is, like, my bathroom flooded. That's not hard.
Travis Pedersen: It's like home ownership. We have to have the attitude things are going to break down. We're going to have trouble with the truck. If I was living here and I had a vehicle, I would have trouble with that vehicle occasionally. Our house, we have things go wrong and we have to fix it. That stuff's going to happen. We have to prepare for that. Everything's not going to be perfect.
Jen Goepfert: It's not. We get so used to seeing these beautiful Instagram photos and these cute TikToks of these RV influencers. They open their door and it's a beautiful, majestic mountainside and they're sitting there with their cute cup of coffee and their dogs running around and that's lovely and all, but I know that's not what it's going to be. We've done a handful of test trips and every single one of them has been rain, thunderstorms, hail, flooding bathrooms, crying children who do not sleep at night. We've already had our RV in twice to the shop because we have a tire that keeps losing air. The whole year is going to be things like this.
Travis Pedersen: But we're also going to have those beautiful moments too.
Jen Goepfert: It's going to be, yeah, it's going to be Instagram.
Travis Pedersen: It might not be every day.
Jen Goepfert: I'm excited for the hard and I'm excited for the beautiful both.
Jennifer Errick: Jen is also quick to point out that they have an army of helpers supporting them in their dream.
Jen Goepfert: We couldn't do this without a village. We have a massive, massive support network. I have five sisters, his mom's close by. My mom is going to live in our house while we're gone. My sister's going to take care of the yard. Our next-door neighbors are doing snow removal. We have people checking on all of our stuff. I mean, there's no way we could do this without our people.
Jennifer Errick: I know I said earlier that we weren't going to get political in this episode, but the truth is, even if you've been driving for weeks through the countryside, staying as far away from the news as you can, it's hard to leave everything behind. And the several times we spoke, it was clearly on Jen's mind.
Jen Goepfert: I've been thinking a lot about traveling in an election season and the idea of traveling to different parts of the country during a time when we've gone through so much in the last eight years when it comes to not being able to see each other as community members or neighbors.
To me it's so important to kind of get out from behind your computer or whatever news channel you're tuned into and go talk to people because I feel like, and I'm guilty of this, we're sitting in our kind of bubbles of whatever beliefs that we have and we've surrounded ourselves with people who believe much the same as we do. And I know that that has contributed to how we're kind of approaching the world. And when we first started having this conversation this year, I'm not going to lie, I was a little bit worried and a little bit scared of traveling to some parts of the country that might not hold the same beliefs that our family does because of the divisiveness that's been drummed up and spread via the media.
And so going out and taking them to places and getting out and talking to people is the antidote. And having conversations with folks who don't necessarily do the same thing as we do is the only way that we're going to be able to pull those walls down.
One guy said to me, "What are you doing with this rig?" And I said, "Oh, we're going to be traveling around and checking out all the national parks." And he said, "I hate national parks."
Jennifer Errick: I saw that on your blog.
Jen Goepfert: How do you... What?
Jennifer Errick: But he helped you and he was nice.
Jen Goepfert: He was so helpful. And I'm like, okay. I understand that we are never going to see eye to eye, but at the end of the day, we're all just people trying to do our best here. So, it's the monuments, it's the parks, but it's also the people.
Eva: Are we going down there?
Jen Goepfert: Well, that's the lake that we will be going on the ferry.
Aela: Will we be swimming on it?
Jennifer Errick: I followed up with the family a few weeks into their journey, and they joined a video call with me from a campground in Vermont where the four of them sat around their computer from the back of the Big Fun RV. Our connection was unstable, and a recording we attempted to make of the conversation unfortunately didn't come through. But I did get to hear about some of the ups and downs from their first taste of living their dream.
Jen Goepfert: We're looking for all the colors of the rainbow right now.
Aela: We're on blue. Look up.
Eva: Green was not that hard.
Aela: Look up. Don't even have to be flowers.
Jennifer Errick: They led the conversation with a variety of frustrations. They had accidentally hit the taillight of another camper while parking their rig one evening. They had broken their bike rack in the fender bender and were waiting on a part. They'd gotten stranded for a while at a gas station too, because their rig is so tricky to turn around. Some of the campgrounds were really tight to navigate as were the steep mountain roads. And they needed to use special apps to make sure they didn't take their rig on a road or under a bridge that was too small to accommodate it. There were a number of stresses they hadn't anticipated, and I could hear in their voices that reality had caught up to the dream and the challenges of what they had done were hitting them all at once.
So, it was affirming, if not totally surprising, when I asked if they were glad they'd done it, and the four overwhelmingly answered yes.
"Every day I'm grateful," Jen told me. "Even when it's hard, it still feels like vacation," she added. “It hasn't really sunk in yet.”
The girls had their moments of exhaustion for sure, but had settled into a routine with their lessons and they were all looking forward to their first big stop, leaf peeping at Acadia.
And while they didn't report seeing any unicorns or mermaids, at least not yet, they did send rare footage of Aela in an encounter with one magical creature they discovered on the road.
Aela: Thank you. Thank you very much. I'm Elvis disguised as Aela.
[End theme]
Jennifer Errick: The Secret Lives of Parks is a production of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Episode 36: A School Year on Wheels was produced by me, Jennifer Errick, with help from Todd Christopher, Bev Stanton and Linda Coutant.
Special thanks to NPCA Upper Midwest Campaign Director Chris Goepfert, Jen Goepfert's sister.
Original theme music by Chad Fischer.
Learn more about the Geopfert-Pedersen family and follow their blog at thebigfunrv.com
Learn about the Every Kid Outdoors program at everykidoutdoors.gov
Learn more about this podcast and listen to the rest of our stories at thesecretlivesofparks.org
For more than a century, the National Parks Conservation Association has been protecting and enhancing America's national parks for present and future generations, with more than 1.6 million members and supporters. NPCA is the nation's only independent, non-partisan advocacy organization dedicated to protecting national parks.
And we're proud of it too. You can join the fight to preserve our national parks. Learn more and join us at npca.org.
Eva: I'm excited for all the national parks. That's just going to be really amazing to see all of them.