I had to write an assignment on my RV adventures for Mrs. Walker, a teacher at Eagle Ridge Academy. The plan is to have her tutor me. This is the assignment she wanted me to write.
Erin’s
Adventures
In
May of 2016, my family and I started traveling around the western
half of the United States. This essay will discuss how we spent that
time, things we saw, and family and friends we visited. I will
discuss traveling to national parks, museums, memorials and other
highlights. We traveled roughly half of the United States. This essay
concerns the adventures we had. I hope to give the reader a sense of
what it’s like to live in an RV. I also want to give the reader
suggestions for places to visit.
My
daily schedule is fairly consistent. For my morning routine, I
usually get up at around 7:40. I usually play on my tablet until
around 8:00-8:30, unless we have to leave early. On normal days, I
start homework. I do math, logic puzzles, reading and typing. I use
the following programs online to do this work: Khan Academy for math
and history, Puzzle Baron for logic puzzles, ReadTheory for reading
and vocabulary, FreeRice for vocabulary, DuoLingo for Spanish, and
Typing Adventures for typing. Around 10:30, I have an early lunch. By
11:00, I’m usually done with my solo work. I then play until my dad
calls me for history and science. We cover these topics with my
brother. When we finish that, my mom sometimes has some more work for
me, like a book report or essay. On days where we have to leave the
campground, we usually just do math, reading, and Spanish. Sometimes
we leave early to drive to a museum or historical site. I usually
spend the rest of my day playing. I do math occasionally during the
day. Between 5:30-6:30, we eat dinner. At 8:00 or 8:30, we go to
bed.
There
are a few downsides to the RV, and not seeing my friends is one of
them. I still talk with them through email and postcards, so I am
still in contact. I also see them on Hangouts. Hangouts is a chat
application that allows you to see the person face to face and chat
with them. We managed to make a few appointments with some of my
mom’s friends. Her friends live all over the United States, so it
was interesting to see them. It was fun to hear their accents and
pronunciations. Also, I have family in California! I saw my grandpa
Bill and my grandma Joy. I had never seen their house in California
before! They have two Boston Terriers, George and Rosie. We’ve seen
my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Even though I don’t
get to see my friends in real life, I do get to see family all over
the country. Since we've returned to Minnesota, we have seen some of
my friends already!
One
of the upsides to the RV is that we get to see so many animal and
nature encounters. Two of my favorite hikes were to bodies of water.
The first was with my cousin, Jake. We hiked one and a half miles to
some gorgeous hot springs, with a small cave under a waterfall. The
second hike was to Punch Bowl Falls in Oregon. We hiked to a
waterfall with a wide but shallow stream. It had a hollow tunnel, and
we were able to walk into it. On a different day, my mother and I
went to the San Diego Safari Park and Zoo. We bought tickets for the
“meet and greet” at the cheetah run. The cheetah run is a program
where you watch a cheetah and its dog friend chase after their
favorite toy. The meet and greet was where the cheetah comes into the
enclosure that we were in with two leashes on. The cheetah was only
about a foot away from me! We got to take our picture with the
cheetah and the dog. It was looking straight at me! We also saw the
ringtail lemurs active, which is apparently pretty rare. They came
out on the path very close to us. They dug in the bushes rapidly,
with their tiny paws scratching at the dirt. One of them even climbed
the wall to look over at the other lemurs in a separate enclosure.
In
addition to outdoor activity, we've been visiting many museums and
memorials. My top two museums are the mustard museum and the
technology museum. The mustard museum talked about the history of
mustard and showed all the mustards made by different states and
countries. It was silly, because it was more like a shop than a
museum. The tech museum is an interactive museum in San Jose. There
was an earthquake simulator, a jetpack simulator, spy missions,
password testers, and other awesome gadgets. We built a robot that
you could customize with lights and hats. That was my favorite
museum! My favorite memorial was the Oklahoma Bombing Museum. I hated
the actual story of how everyone died, but I liked how willing people
were to help. The outside area had the memorial with 901 and 903. 901
represented innocence. 903 represented healing. In the middle, 902
was a lake where the bomb hit.
We've
worked pretty hard at some of our activities. We went on an 11 mile
hike to the Dungeness Lighthouse in Washington. It took almost 3
hours each way! It was on sand, so that made it worse. We also went
on a 12 mile bike ride, 6 miles each way. We hiked up to see the top
of Mt. Rainier in Washington. Mt. Rainier is the tallest mountain in
the Cascade Mt. Range But it turned out to be really foggy! I drank
ice water out of a stream there.
That
was my essay on some of the adventures that I had. I hope to have
given the reader a sense of what it's like to live in an RV. I hope
to have given the reader suggestions for places to visit. I hope to
have pleased the reader.
