Leaving Indiana, we finally felt like our adventure was underway. The house in Valparaiso was completely empty and under contract. We had our major list of to-do’s for the Rig tackled. Roadschool had officially started for the kids and we had a little more than a week under our belt as RVers. Time to get this show on the road!
In prepping for this journey, after going through a ton of blogs and forums and youtube videos, we opted to sign up for a Harvest Hosts membership. Essentially, for a very reasonable yearly fee, you get access to stay with no nightly fee at a huge variety of wineries, breweries, museums and other amazing places for free. There typically aren’t hookups and you can only stay for one night (unless the host invites you to stay longer), but as a stop along the way – this program sounded almost too good to be true. They only ask that you patronize the facility in some way, typically spending $20-ish. Sounded heavenly to us! Since much of our original intent in this journey was around experiencing new things and meeting new people, joining this program seemed like a no-brainer.
The first leg of our trip essentially took us from Richmond, IN to Maple Grove, MN (from one set of grandparents to the next). As a straight shot, this is about a 10 hour drive. We knew we needed at least one stopover along the way. Since it was simply a one-nighter, we thought it was a perfect time for the inaugural Harvest Hosts Stay. The location we found couldn’t have been any more perfect for our first time.
SkyDive Chicago is located in Ottawa, IL. We really had no idea what to expect going into it. We called to make sure that they had space for and found out that they actually had electric hookups for a nominal fee – excellent! Since we definitely weren’t planning on skydiving while we were there, we weren’t sure how else to patronize the place. Paying for electric sounded perfect. We rolled in a little late (This was still early in the adventure before we realized how foolish even a 5-hour travel day could be), but the space was still incredibly easy to set up, even in the dark.
It was when we woke the next morning that we realized just how cool this place actually was. The kids literally woke to the sound of the planes coming out of the hangar. There was a perfect view of the hangar from the window in their room. They ate breakfast watching jumpers fall from the sky through the dining room windows. (Added bonus: there was a cafe at the hanger that had awesome breakfast burritos).
This was that morning that it all started to sink in – we weren’t in any rush. There was no set agenda. This was exactly the experience we were hoping for. We all went outside and realized that the main landing area for all of the jumpers was only about 100 feet from where we were parked. We got to be right in the mix of things as incredibly experienced skydivers landed one after the other. Minds were blown.
It was simply a beautiful way to really get the trip rolling (and consequently, sell us forever on the Harvest Hosts program).
