Juggling Act: An epic RV adventure, the Wild West and channeling Laura Ingalls Wilder

Suction-cupped to my daughter’s side trying to siphon her warmth in the back end of a freezing RV in the middle of the night deep in South Dakota's Black Hills earlier this summer, I asked myself: Why are we doing this again?

When I write “again,” I mean more travel (and you, dear readers, have read so many of my family’s crazy travel adventures over the last few years). And not just any kind of travel but epic travel. Travel kicked up a notch.

Renting an RV to travel with our kids has long been on my bucket list. I did it once in my early 20s (and only drove the RV once because I was too nervous to drive that big of a rig) and knew it would be a great way to see some of our nation’s national parks but also a potentially easier way to travel with my 15-year-old with special needs. I knew it would especially be helpful with bathroom breaks.

Bathroom access is serious stuff when you have a disabled child who isn't toilet trained. I know special needs families who plan entire trips around accessible restrooms because you can’t just change a 130-pound teenager in any rest stop. It isn’t pretty.

Still, my husband was skeptical at first. Rent an RV? Drive thousands of miles? Stay in campgrounds all along the way? He’s used to what he calls my “harebrained schemes” — plans that I may call adventurous but others may consider insane, like when I drove our family to an animal safari in 90-degree weather in a minivan with broken air conditioning and we had to keep our windows up. Not my brightest plan (we abandoned ship about 30 minutes in).

Eventually, he warmed to the idea. We found a site that rents RVs like Airbnb and started making plans in December. Mount Rushmore, here we come!

So there we were: me, attempting to siphon all of my sweet daughter’s heat while she slept. Temperatures hovered in the 40s outside. And I couldn’t figure out why the RV’s furnace wouldn’t kick in.

I eventually turned to the tech Gods: Google. I plugged in the make and model of the RV in an internet search on my phone and asked about the furnace. And I found the answer: I needed to open the RV’s built-in propane tank.

I slipped out the RVs door, opened the propane tank and within seconds, the heat was on. I did a silent happy dance.

But even for someone drawn to adventure, our RV trip was a super-sized portion of adventure even for me. In eight days, we traveled more than 2,600 miles. We visited four national landmarks, including the Badlands and Devil’s Tower. When we arrived at Mount Rushmore, it was completely clouded over. We waited an hour and could finally see Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson and Roosevelt etched in granite.

Driving through the winding roads of the Black Hills and into Wyoming, as rain pelted us, I gripped the RV’s steering wheel so hard my fingers ached. And every time I had to back up the RV or even pull into gas stations, my husband would jump out to guide me (a lesson we learned the hard way).

But it’s always the small moments that are the most grand. In Custer, South Dakota, we pulled into a grocery store parking lot and made lunch. At one campground not far from Mount Rushmore, I whipped out my blender to make my daughter some food (she eats a pureed diet). Around the campfire, I watched the sun set behind a stand of tall pine trees.

“This is how the pioneers did it, right?” I asked my husband.

As a kid, I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder books and her childhood on the frontier. I loved reading about Pa playing his fiddle in some cabin or how they once lived in a dugout home on the banks of Plum Creek. And the landscape to this day feels raw, rugged, remote and untamed. It may not be the wild west anymore but in some ways, it still feels like it.

We went as far west as Wyoming to see Devil’s Tower — an incredible tableau that juts out of the landscape — and then started our trek back. Over two days, we drove through more than six states, navigating rain, Chicago traffic in a 29-foot RV, and frayed nerves at times. And what you don’t realize about driving a house on wheels is how loud it is. Items slide on counters and stove burners clank when you hit a bump. It didn’t feel like a car. It felt like a rig. All I needed was a CB radio.

When we finally pulled into our driveway, I was so grateful to be home safely. I may have an adventurous spirit but even I have my limits. We saw beautiful parts of our country, jutting finger-like spires in South Dakota, but there was nowhere else I wanted to be but home. I’m not sure I’m ready for full-time RV life any time soon — or ever.

Maybe the best adventures are the ones that fill you with wonder but also make you even more grateful for home. That is, until the next adventure beckons.

mfeighan@detroitnews.com