When the twins turned 1 year old, we decided to take a trip to San Diego with them for their birthday. That started a yearly tradition of birthday vacation trips. Instead of parties and gifts, we try to spend as much quality family time together as we can. Memories instead of stuff.

We’ve been extremely lucky since then. The twin’s 15th birthday is rapidly approaching and we’re now starting our 14th birthday vacation.

We’re in the middle of selling our home, so lots of things are changing right now. Our home sale slipped a bit from the original plan, so even our plans are changing. We originally planned to start a 6-12 month RV-around-North-America road trip a few weeks ago. The linchpin for starting that was selling the house. Things were on track for that to happen, but, you know. It’s all good though – we’re practicing a little flexibility and we’re still going to have an amazing time.

So, this is a birthday vacation instead of a massive many-month road trip. We still have a big trip planned, but we started today off easy. We left home this afternoon and made it to Clanton, AL where we’re staying at YellowHammer RV Resort for the night.

As with many of our previous birthday vacations, we’re making it with our travel trailer that we’ve had since late 2014. It’s been great to us. We’ve done lots of work to it over the years, including a complete interior remodel by Tanya. Unfortunately, the twins’ beds are now smaller than they are. It’s nearly time to let another family take it on the road as their own. Not until we’re done with this trip though.

For all of that time, my Tundra pickup has been our tow vehicle and family vacation-mobile. It’s been great. Looking forward, my truck doesn’t have the towing capacity for what travel trailer we’ll likely get next. (Maybe…flexibility is still in progress.) It now has nearly 210,000 miles too and while that’s still not geriatric for a Toyota, it’s not exactly a spring chicken either. We planned on waiting until the house sold to get a new tow truck, but we’re betting a little that it’ll all work out and decided to grab something before this trip.

Yeah, so we now have a new-to-us F-450. The difference in towing feel between it and my Tundra is, well, hilarious. Our travel trailer is at the top end of what the Tundra can tow. It’s right at the bottom end of what the F-450 can tow. This truck is way too big. Monstrosity. Seemingly useless outside of towing. It sure can tow though. (Official Day 1 towing report: it’s amazing.)

We’re all tucked in for the night. Tomorrow should get us close to our main-event destination. We have lots of fun on tap over the next <we don’t quite know exactly how long>. Here we go!