It’s been a long, cold and wet spring in Minnesota, not exactly conducive to camping OR family road trips.  But that doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting idle!  Some of you may know that last summer we wrote a book called Investing in Your 401k Kid: From Zero to Little Financial Genius in Five Easy Steps.  Well, there’s been a bit of attention around the book the past few months and it’s kept us quite busy!  We’ve even moved our financial conversations, which used to be housed here, over to a new site.  If you’re interested, we’d love to have you join us at http://401kKid.com!

The First Family Road Trip of 2013!

With everything that has been going on here, including the bad weather, we found ourselves finally taking our first venture out with Lewis and Clark last weekend for our annual shakedown trip.

While the idea of the shakedown is that we take an easy trip so that we can make notes of things forgotten and go in to town if necessary, the reality is that this trip pretty consistently becomes a “For crying out loud, why on earth would mice want to hang out there?”   No matter how hard we try, every winter we seem to get mice in the trailer.

There was the year they grabbed birdseed from a sealed container in the barn and carried it INTO the trailer to have a winter-long party.  Never mind that the barn is heated and warm, these mice wanted comfort and the trailer was where they found it!  Birdseed was still rolling out from under things when we reached Southern Utah!

There was the year we found evidence of mice having spent the winter chewing on our cast iron kabob skewers to get little tiny bits of food off of them.  Cast iron!  It does make me feel better to visualize a family of mice sitting around their living room toothless and wondering where they went wrong.

And then there was this year.  In an attempt to remove all temptation, in the fall we took everything out of the trailer that could be even remotely appealing to a mouse.  Blankets, sheets, pillows, dishes, clothing, shoes, laundry soap, I removed any and all temptations.  This year they found plastic wrapped Ace bandages.  And boy, did they have fun!  The real upside to this “leave no temptation” idea was that when we actually got to our campsite we were missing about half of our gear.

So, we’re reloading and regrouping before our next family road trip.  And we’re already thinking of micey torture  for next winter.  We’ve tried traps, we’ve tried poison, we’ve tried plugging holes and removing temptation.  Any other ideas?  Complicated is fine, we’ve got four whole months to devise our plan!