Successful Spring Break!

We have been enjoying spring break this week through a variety of different activities. We traveled to a nearby town to ride our e-bikes, started some DIY projects, and added more content to our YouTube channel.

On Monday, we packed up our e-bikes in our transit van and headed out for Lakeland Park in Canton, IL. The park has several lakes, making for a day well spent! You can hike, run, walk, and bicycle on nearly 4 miles of well paved paths. We thought this would be an excellent adventure to take our e-bikes on, and our first longer ride with the new bikes. To add to our adventure, we added in some extra stops throughout Canton such as Big Creek Park and the athletic fields. These stops in combination with the trails at Lakeland Park created a nearly 12 mile round trip bike ride. This was excellent practice for our upcoming trip this summer to Zion! Overall the trip went very well! We had worked out most of the kinks on our around town rides at home, but this ride included several inclines/declines which helped us rein in our pedal assist usage. As mentioned earlier, the initial decision to purchase our e-bikes is for use at Zion. Throughout the park at Zion only shuttles or bicycling is allowed on the main road as this reduces vehicle traffic in a very busy national park. We plan to return to the park this spring/summer to practice some more!

Monday's adventure led into our mid-week DIY work. When we say DIY projects, what we should say is, the project we encountered when uncovering more than we bargained for. Over the winter we found a GREAT deal on a pop up camper. We had been in the market for a camper to upgrade our current tent camping/camper van combo. While we enjoyed the camper van and tent, a pop up would allow some more room for all of us to camp together, and would free up some room for cargo in the van! When we purchased the pop up, the previous owners told us there had been a leak but it was repaired. With any purchases that have been repaired, it is always a possibility the repair was unsuccessful, or incomplete. Especially with pop ups and campers. When we popped up our camper after purchasing there were no visible signs of leaking/damage and we stored it away until this week. We saw the roof collecting water/sagging, so we knew we were in for some repairs! When we popped it up and began to investigate this week, we found that nearly the entire roof was rotten and needing replaced. No problem! Our family loves adventures, right? After some research and YouTube studying, we drafted an idea on what to do next. This week we tore out the old roof, framed up the new roof, insulated the roof, and applied some thin sheets of plywood to protect those layers. Next up will be waterproofing to ensure durability and longevity! So far the project has had some ups and downs as with any project but has gone very well and faster than anticipated!

Around the time spent traveling to ride e-bike trails and DIY pop up roof building, we have enjoyed a wonderful week of weather in Illinois. It may be a false spring, but I will enjoy any nice weather our way! We deconstructed our camper van set up to prepare for travel with e-bikes, installed a hitch on our transit to haul our pop up, spent many hours outdoors with our kids, and filmed some new videos for our YouTube channel. All in all, we could not have asked for a better spring break week!

How did you enjoy the nice weather?