1. Our travel dates are August 24, 2009 to September 14, 2009. This is a total of 21 days, three weeks. By being more expedient in our cross-country trek, we could reduce this to 17 days.

2. Andrew will have enough days off. Depending on when he recieves his third-year vacation increase, he may be barely squeaking by or he may have plenty of wiggle room. Either way, its doable.

3. It is very improbable that the boy’s principles are going to give thier blessing on missing the first three weeks of school. We will officially remove the boys from the public school system at the end of the 08-09 school year, and homeschool them for the first nine weeks of the 09-10 school year.

4. We will be driving, utilizing a truck/SUV and trailer combo.

5. We will plan the roadtrip portion of our journey first, then start making plans for the Burning Man week.

6. We need to make short road trips on a regular basis throughout the next year in order to test our ideas for feasability and just generally to get everybody used to traveling together.

After that we had a brainstorming session about the roadtrip planning, and came up with the followng issues that need to be considered:

1. I need to price rental and leasing options for the vehicle.

2. We need to explore scenic routes and sight-seeing opportunities.

3. We can’t afford to stay in hotels. We need to explore available hostels, roomshares, campgrounds, squats, and communes.

4. We can’t afford to eat out along the way, so we need to plan our food strategy. Non-perishable staples and portable cooking techniques are important aspects.

5. Everybody generally seems more comfortable with the idea of bringing a gun than making the journey without one. I need to research state gun laws along the route, and find a dealer near the festival that I can leave the gun with during Burning Man.

6. We need to look at the issues of clothes and laundry. What type of clothes should we pack, how much should we bring, where and when do we plan laundry stops, etc.

7. Everybody needs to plan activities to keep them occupied on the road.

8. If possible I would like to have a wireless internet card by then so that I can blog the trip. May have to settle for a travel journal and transcription when I get home.

We will mull over, research and explore these issues over the next week. This is a big chunk of planning, it may take us more than a week to process it.

In our initial brainstorming session on the 2009 trip, we both thought it would be pretty cool to get a temporary satellite uplink for the week, so we could blog and stream video live from the site, and share the love with a wi-fi hotspot.

Despite some marginal improvements in the technology since then, the plausibility survey on this idea has just come back with a resounding “No”.

Reasons we won’t be getting a satellite Internet uplink for the week:

• The latency is too high for streaming
• The bandwidth is too low for sharing
• Requires a $50/month, 24-month, non-terminable commitment
• They traffic shape

We decided that the very first thing we need to do is arrange to take the time off from school and work. In order to do that we have to know how long the trip is going to take, and in order to figure that out we have to decide what mode of travel we will employ.

The official first question is “How will we get there and how long will it take?” The second official question is “How much time can Andrew spend away from work and the boys spend away from school?” These questions are closely related. Cost is also a factor.

We’re considering two possible modes of travel.

A) We roadtrip across America and back, hauling our camp with us. We can sleep at KOA campgrounds, pack our own food, and might be able to borrow my father-in-law’s truck and trailer, leaving only gas as our primary expense. We calculated this approach at 17 days (5 days getting there, 7 days at Black Rock City, 5 days back)

B) We could all fly into Reno, NV. We would have to pack up our camp and ship it by train, then arrange to have it stored somewhere until we fly in, rent a truck and maybe a trailer, pick up our camp, and then make the drive out to the desert. This will cost a bajillion bucks. We calculated this approach at 13 days (1 day flying there, 1 day packing the camp, 1 day driving to the desert, 7 days at Black Rock City, 1 day driving back, I day unloading, 1 day flying)

Obviously option A is preferable and the only way we would use Option B is if for some reason those four days would make the difference in whether we could go or not.

It seems that we won’t have any problems with getting the time off from Andrew’s work. He gets two weeks paid vacation, plus personal and sick days. As of April 2009 he’ll pass his three year mark and get an extra week of vacation, but we’re not sure if that will actually be available to him in 09 because of tricky calendar periods the company uses. He’ll either just squeak by or have plenty of extra time off for other stuff during the year, depending on which way the cookie crumbles. But he definitely has enough vacation time for the road trip.

The kid’s time off from school will be trickier. School starts back August 25, 2009 which is the same day that Burning Man will be starting. They will miss the first two weeks of school, with September 8th being thier first day back. The attendance policy states that they can’t have more than 10 unexcused absences, and that they are considered truant after three consecutive days of unexcused absence. Since there is not a medical reason for the trip, the only way the trip can be considered excused is if the principal will allow it. Which means we have to go beg.

I am wondering if we should bring this up now, and just go ahead and get the begging and the approval out of the way. Alternately, we could wait until the end of the 2008-2009 school year and do the begging then. Our third alternative would be to withdraw the kids from public school at the end of the 2008-2009 school year, homeschool them throughout the summer so that they would be ahead of the other kids when they got back, and then re-enroll them when we returned.

I think I will ask my mother for advice. She used to be a school teacher and now she homeschools my little brother, so she should be able to steer me in the right direction….