My Special Assignment

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.