12 in a 5th wheel - how we make it all work...

Hi Dana ~

My name is ___. I found your site via the FOTR site.

My family of 7 are planning on selling our stuff and moving onto traveling for a couple of years (and who knows if that ends up being longer). My children are ages 10-2. We want to begin by traveling around the United States. As of now we are planning on getting a motor home.

I was wondering if I could "pick your brain" about what I should happen in preparations for this new lifestyle? Absolutely - as long as you aren't in any big hurry for a reply! LOL!

Some of my thoughts/questions:

What kind of dishware do you use? plastic vs glass

In our house, we had a big set of Correlle. Loved and hated the stuff - practically indestructible, so while it was nice that it never broke, I also never had a reason to replace it (bummer if you want a new pattern...). Taking those on the road was not even considered. They are very heavy! And for us, it's not a place setting of 4 - it's at least 13, and we like to have a few extras for company or serving...
At first we just did with our lightweight plastic divided dishes that were in the trailer for camping. Then, when we got down south, I found some cute melamine plates and bowls at one of the grocery stores and replaced the plastic. I like them because they are more sturdy than the plastic, but not heavy like house dishes. For cups, we have a set of Tupperware cups that have lids with straw slots; we use them some, but we also drink a lot of water. We have found that it is worth it, even in our little tiny fridge, to make room for water bottles - the kids each have their own CamelBaks or SIGGs, and we store them in the door of the fridge. Bottled water gets expensive, plus it's a pain to save them for recycling (I'm not a recycling guru, but if you saw the amount of plastic disposable water bottles my fam can go through in a day, you'd think you were on the set of WALL-E. LOL! (yeah, I know there wasn't really a set... ;)
We do keep paper plates, cups, and bowls onhand. We usually only use them if we are parked without hookups and have to be frugal with our water usage, or if we are having something extra messy (no garbage disposal in the RV!).

Do you have the bare minimum for cooking? pans, bowls, ...

I do keep just the bare minimum - much less than in the house, and smaller sizes also now that I don't have room for leftovers. I have one small saucepan that I use for making cheese sauces or heating up small amounts of leftovers..., one large skillet, one large pot, and a stockpot. I keep 4 large plastic bowls for serving and popcorn, and also a cake pan, one bread pan, a cassarole dish, and 2 cookie sheets... the cookie sheets are one of the hardest for me - they are those little 1/4 cake pans that will only fit a measly 6 cookies - takes forever to bake cookies around here! LOL! I try not to keep more of anything than I would use at one time since it's much different than the house - in the house I'd wash dishes when I was good and done with cooking, or when the dishwasher was completely full - in the rv I have to wash them as I go, or I don't have any room to work! So, 2 cookie sheets is all I can use anyway - no sense in having more... and that goes for everything in the kitchen.
When we started out, this was only supposed to be a one winter vacation, so we just took what was already in our camping travel trailer, and went with it. When we got home that spring, and knew we wanted to keep traveling, I went through my kitchen stuff in storage and pulled out the nice stuff that I would have been using in the house. After all, this was now my home. I wanted my nice serving spoons and hand mixer... some things still didn't come tho, like my KithenAid 6qt. mixer, or the dehydrator, or (at first) the VitaMix - the VitaMix was one thing that I had my hubby dig through storage and get tho once we moved into the 5th wheel since I had a bit more room!
I didn't start out with, but have made room for, my crockpot and for a rice cooker (works like a second crockpot). If you are camping with hookups, these are great for use in an RV since they don't use propane like the camper stove and oven do.
Sure, there are other things that I would love to have in my kitchen, but can't due to space and weight; and they aren't worth giving up traveling for ;)

What clothes are good to bring? How much?

Clothes are a hard call. Depends on if you will have a w/d on board, and/or if you let your kids wear their clothes more than one day :)
For us, the boys have (at most) 4 pairs of pants (and 2 pr of shorts - my boys aren't big shorts wearers), 2 weeks worth of undergarments and socks (just in case mom's tardy getting to the laundrymat), and 7 t-shirts and 4 long sleeve Ts. The boys wear their pants for a couple of days (or a week if you forget to tell Joel he MUST change his jeans)... some will wear their shirts for multiple days, and if we are just riding in the van, I don't really mind, but usually they get filthy... 3 or 4 pr of pjs.
The littles have more clothes since they dirty them faster, plus theirs don't take up as much space...
For us, I aspire to get to the laundry mat about every 5 days otherwise the dirty clothes start to take over the back room. 5 days doesn't always happen. It's not always convenient to find a nice, big, clean, safe laundry mat when you are traveling. When we get to about 10 days, some of the kids start running out of clean socks, and I HAVE to go, like it or not!
Some families do with way less clothes for their kids - this is just how we roll...

We are hoping to avoid any extreme winter conditions. We are in Utah and will leave her in June making it to NY around August/September. Then head down to Florida and run along the bottom states to California during the winter months.
One mistake that we made that first year was to think that the south didn't get winter at all. Being from Montana, where we have extreme winter temps, we thought that visiting the south meant that we could put away our winter clothes (which you never bother to do back home...). I packed light jackets for the kids and all light clothing, such as we would wear in the summer at home. Sure, we used those summer clothes more than the winter clothes, but I was surprised at how many times we needed warmer clothes (like when we awoke to snow on Christmas in Texas). We now have a box of hats and light gloves, and bring medium jackets. We don't pack parkas (tho a few somehow have made it along the last 2 years...). We have learned to layer, and make do with what we have along, but we also pack for cooler temps even tho we hope we are hitting all nice weather :)
The kids each have 2 jackets, one pair of gloves and one hat (quite a change from a mud room full of baskets of outerwear!). It's funny how if I have 5 pairs of gloves I don't keep very good track of them because I assume that I will always be able to find at least some of them... if I only have one pair, I keep tabs on them, putting them away every time so that I know where they will be should I need them... It's been a challenge training the kids to keep tabs on their stuff better (being meticulous about putting their stuff, every piece of it, in it's right place), and it's something we are always working on since we have littles, but i think that it's a great practice in self-control.

Living in an RV, with it's limitations on space and weight, has been a real eye opener.
We are acutely aware of how blessed we are with what we do have, and how little we could get by on if we needed to. (which is much less than what we have with us!)
It's been very freeing to shed so many material possessions, and live with less - and we STILL have so much more than we need. We spend so much less time maintaining all the stuff - we do not have to spend time to constantly organize the garage or rotate all the toothpaste or clean out 3 chest freezers. Sure there are trade-offs - I can no longer buy a year's worth of butter or diapers when I find them on a great sale... but overall, living and traveling in our rv has been an incredible experience for us, one that we hope we are able to continue!

~And, since this is already pretty long, I'll continue to answer the rest of the questions in another post.
Hope that this is giving you some small glimpse of how we make this lifestyle work for us :)