We played cross-country blackout Bingo from California to Massachusetts
For Summer to Remember this year, we opted out of our usual challenges to hike and/or ebike 100 miles from Memorial Day to Labor Day Weekends. We learned our lesson from previous years and didn't want to end up resenting our outdoor time, which was supposed to be fun. Instead, we came up with a less intensive challenge that we felt would serve as entertainment as we traveled across the country. After all, this was our first year of full-time travel where a cross-country trip would happen during the summer season. On May 23, the Friday of Memorial Day Weekend, we woke up in Lassen National Forest in northern California and ended the day in Carson City, Nevada. The plan was to be back in Massachusetts by the last weekend in July. We decided to create a Bingo card for this date range, aiming to get single Bingo, double Bingo, and then blackout Bingo before reaching our home-base south of Boston.
We first used a Bingo app on our phone for inspiration. The app already had a summer themed card, so we jotted down the items that would make good boxes for us. Then we added a few of our own that we thought would be plausible to capture during an RV road trip. After coming up with 24 items (the 25th was our "free" space), we brought them into a randomizer and generated the order for our Bingo card. This was the result:
The rules were simple:
- We could only check off boxes from the dates of May 23 to July 26/27 (whichever date we arrived back to our home-base).
- We must capture a still photo - not a video or screenshot - of the item in order to check it off.
- The captures can be at any point, whether that's at a campground, out on excursions, or on the road.
- If we capture more than one photo of a certain item, we can choose which one is the "official" photo based on interest, accuracy, and sentimentality.
And with that, our Bingo challenge was set.
We had no real way of knowing how difficult some of these boxes would be. We did our best to give ourselves a good variety, with some boxes being basically a guarantee, while others we'd need to search for. Some we would likely need to plan an activity around, while others could elude us altogether. However, as we waited for May 23, we wondered if we made our Bingo card entirely too easy. We already had multiple boxes about to be checked off just from our campground in Lassen! What are the chances that our little 24-site campground would yield us 2 of the 3 RV models we chose for our card?! The days leading up to May 23, both an Airstream and a Tiffin Allegro pulled into the surrounding sites. However, we couldn't capture their photos until the morning of the 23rd, which meant all we could do was hope that these neighbs would be sticking around for a while. We were also scheduled to leave on the 23rd, so we'd need to quickly get photos of these rigs while we packed up. As luck would have it, both rigs remained on the 23rd, though the Allegro did leave the same time as us, so we captured that pic just in time. And just like that, we had checked off an Airstream and a Tiffin Allegro. To add to our luck, our next-site neighb decided to extend his awning, despite being completely shaded by trees. Another box for us, and a good one too because it was in a corner!
The rest of May 23 brought ample opportunities for more captures. We checked out of our Lassen campground and made our way to Olde Life Alpacas, a Harvest Host in Carson City, NV. We entered a new state and got a shot of the Nevada welcome sign. We saw tons of birds along the drive, but decided that the Olde Life Alpacas chicken pooping had a rather unique appeal. We also checked off both a sign in a foreign language and a purple flower, thanks to a stop at Olive Garden during an errands run in Reno late that afternoon. And on our way back from Reno, we spotted a side-by-side being towed along the interstate.
With 8 boxes already checked in the first day, we weren't finding our Bingo challenge very challenging. Surely one of the items would trip us up somehow! We had our eye on the top left corner, our truck thermometer reaching at least 110°F. We wondered if our journey through Nevada would be hot and sunny enough, or if this capture would be a holdout. By the end of Memorial Day Weekend, we had checked off Grand Design Reflection, making the thermometer our only remaining box before getting single Bingo. We actually went slightly out of our way to get this shot, venturing into Carson RV Resort after spotting a Reflection from the freeway. This would have been our choice campground had we not decided on a Harvest Host instead, so we did a little scouting to see what could have been. The RV park was nice. Olde Life Alpacas was better.
Our journey along America's Loneliest Road would be telling. The temperatures weren't looking hot enough to grant us our thermometer shot, which we were thankful for because we planned on having limited hookups. And so we focused on checking off other boxes. By May 28, we already had our single Bingo!
We checked off "quirky roadside attraction" with the Shoe Tree in Fallon, NV. Later, the Nevada Northern Railway gave us the closest train sighting we could have gotten. We rode on it! Other boxes we checked off during the Loneliest Road trip were graffiti and a collapsible "clam" style shelter, both of which we found at Spencer Hot Springs.
Read our Loneliest Road Series:
Nicole Anderson
Nicole Anderson
Nicole Anderson
After that, things started slowing down a bit. We finished our trek along the Loneliest Road, adding a photo of this very scenic wind farm.
Then we made our way into Utah, where I replaced our state welcome sign with this one, because we have very few welcome signs photos that include our rig. And also because Utah.
Utah brought us a displacement into an Airbnb, a gorgeous waterfront state park stay, and adventures in the Wasatch Mountains. It also gave us double Bingo!
"Something out of order" by definition could have been something not functioning, or something out of order sequence-wise, like out of alphabetical or numeric order. Our first photo capture was of a gas pump at the Walmart in Payson, but we replaced it with the out of order water fountain at the Timpanogos Cave Visitor Center. This was an interesting situation, because technically this water fountain could have also satisfied our requirement to see a fountain, and this would have also given us a Bingo, completing the bottom row of boxes. We didn't have a rule specifying that we could only use a picture once, nor did we specify what type of fountain we were referring to. But, considering our Bingo challenge had been way too easy thus far, we decided to keep "fountain" open and find a decorative water feature – ideally one that was in working order.
The busted water fountain wasn't the only disappointment at Timpanogos Cave...
Nicole Anderson
At this point, more holdouts were coming to light. We had seen numerous butterflies and deer, but so far they had all been too quick to capture photos of them. Or in the case of the deer, too dead. While we hadn't specified that the deer must be alive, we thought a photo of roadkill would also kill the mood of our game. So many dead deer, though. We think this year is the most we've ever seen.
We also hit an impasse when we made the choice to skip Yellowstone and the Black Hills and book our way east. By skipping these destinations, we practically eliminated our chances of seeing bison in the wild. Since we didn't say they needed to be wild, we decided that seeing the bison at Terry Bison Ranch would count. We're glad we made the stop because these ended up being our only photos of bison during our trip east. We also stayed at Blue Mounds State Park in Minnesota, which has a bison herd, but when we toured the prairie, the bison were too far away to get a clear photo. Blue Mounds did finally grant us our butterfly shot, though.
One other animal we spotted at Terry Bison Ranch was a cat. 2 cats, actually. The ranch has a few that roam the property. One was hanging out in the office and the other scurried across the road at the farm. We chose to mark our Bingo box with the more "wild" of the two cats, the one actually running around outside. We felt like we earned that shot more. But then, later in the summer, the "wildness" of the cats no longer mattered, and all that mattered were ours. We swapped out our farm cat photo with one we took of our kitties in the shelter, after we already had a hold to fosterdopt them. When we put "cat" on our Bingo card, we had no idea we'd be rescuing our own this summer. My, how quickly things can change!
Speaking of swaps, the pooping chicken from Olde Life Alpacas didn't quite make the cut. When one of the peacocks at Terry Bison Ranch displayed his wondrous tail, we knew this had to be our bird picture, or "bird box," if you will. We also found another "out of order" item, but we stuck with our Timpanogos water fountain as our official picture.
By the time we got to Indiana, this was our card:
It might look like we were about to get blackout bingo any day now, but we weren't feeling confident. Because we had left the West earlier than anticipated, we couldn't rely on hot desert heat to help us reach over 110°F on our truck thermometer. We had been battling a heatwave through the Midwest and still had barely broken 100°F. Then we had our deer box, which was incredibly surprising and a bit frustrating. We had seen at least half a dozen (alive) deer, but they had all scurried into the woods by the time I managed to get out my camera. Then we had the fountain holdout, which was also surprising, but we also had a loophole if we needed it. We could always put the out of order water fountain in this box, and if we didn't want repeats, we had 2 other "out of order" photos we could use in a pinch.
Our swap wasn't needed because after Indiana, we ventured into Ohio, land of manmade ponds. Seriously, what is up with that?! It seems like every third house has a small manmade pond in the middle of the yard. Nevertheless, we went from seeing no fountains to seeing several. The first capture was a blue fountain at a park up the street from the cat shelter. We appreciated the sentiment of this fountain being in the same town where we met our kitties, but it wasn't a great photo since it was taken through the windshield while moving. We kept a lookout for a better shot.
This was our first visit of 3 to the shelter, and it was HOT out. In fact, our whole stay in Ohio was really hot, and we even tried positioning our truck in the sun to see if we could get its temperature to rise. Unfortunately for Bingo and fortunately for us, our campsite was in the shade, but this meant we couldn't get our truck thermometer high enough.
All that changed during our shelter visit, though. We parked Clyde on the blacktop parking lot, and during the couple of hours we were there, he baked in the sun. We couldn't believe our eyes when we turned on the ignition. After weeks of barely seeing the triple digits, this was our truck temperature:
Now that's what we call a Clyde well done!
We expected this to be our trickiest box to check, so we were relieved. But we never wanted to see temperatures this high ever again. For the record, the real outside temperature was in the high 90s/low 100s. The truck thermometer always reads a bit high, especially when the truck has been sitting in the sun.
We call it the "luck of the cats," where we checked boxes that we might not have otherwise accomplished, had it not been for the events that led us to the shelter.
This is probably a good time to clarify our route through the Midwest, because we kept our bouncing from Indiana to Ohio a secret. We hadn't announced that we were looking at cats, and since we ended up fostering them first, we didn't make the news public until the cats were officially ours. This led us to be very discreet about where we were when.
We first stopped in Indiana for just 1 night, our overnight in Shipshewana. Then we immediately went to Ohio and stayed there for 10 days so we could visit the shelter a few times. By the end of our second visit to the shelter, we had a foster hold on our cats, but before picking them up, we needed to head back to Indiana for our repairs at ATC. We visited the cats one more time before leaving the area, and then we headed back to Indiana the Wednesday before 4th of July weekend. We stayed in Elkhart through that weekend, and then on Monday, dropped the trailer off at ATC until Friday, July 11. As soon as we picked up the trailer, we went back to Ohio and set up camp for 9 days. We picked up the cats on July 12 and spent the rest of the week at our campsite getting them adjusted.
This was why we hit Ohio before our repairs in Indiana. We did a little bit of ping pong. Anyway, while we were in Indiana the second time, we visited the RV/Motorhome Hall of Fame and Museum. They have some beautiful fountains outside the museum, one of which took the spot on our Bingo card.
During 4th of July weekend in Elkhart, we did see fireworks. Civilians were setting them off many of the nights that weekend. We, however, opted out of watching the official Elkhart spectacle because 1, it was late and hot and we didn't want to, and 2, we had already checked our box two weeks before! Our official photo became one of the shots we got from Elkhart Campground, but our first photo was actually taken during an overnight at a Harvest Host in Wisconsin. It was a Saturday night and someone was getting a pre-Fourth practice run in. We could only see the tops of the fireworks, but the pics were clear enough to check the box. Same with the Elkhart photos. All were dinky and terrible quality, but they serve a purpose.
Left: Distant fireworks that we could barely see. Right: Civilian fireworks on the 4th of July, taken from our campsite.
So there we were with just one box left to check off, and we couldn't believe that "deer" was the last holdout. We had traveled from California to Ohio, back to Indiana, and then to Ohio again, without getting a photo of one. If the rule had been to just spy with our little eye, we would have checked off deer many miles prior, but this was photo Bingo – pics or it doesn't count! 7 weeks had passed and we had just over 2 left. Our chances were dwindling fast.
Then, the "luck of the cats" emerged again. On July 12, we headed back to the shelter to pick up the kitties. The forecast was saying storms later that afternoon, but we thought we'd be home well before they started. Not so much. They rolled in early, and our drive home was a dicey one. We hit downpours that made visibility extremely poor, and the backroads that already had ruts now had flash floods. This was not the stress-free drive we hoped for! The poor kitties had no idea where they were going and now had to also contend with the sights and sounds of storms.
We tried our best to keep them calm, playing some soothing music and driving slow over bumps and through puddles. But then in the distance, we saw a bunch of animals scurrying through the mist. DEER! About 5 or 6 of them, running across the street and into one of the corn fields. I quickly fumbled for my phone and tried to snap a picture out my window, but the window was covered in fog and raindrops. I rolled down the window, which caused the rain to blow into the passenger side of the truck, soaking me and Piccolo's carrier behind me. I raised my camera to the crack in the window and blindly snapped 2 photos, before quickly rolling the window back up and profusely apologizing to Piccolo in the backseat. Anthony asked, "Did you get it?!" I looked, but saw nothing. One of the photos was blurry and the other showed the field shrouded in mist.
But then, wait. Upon scanning the photo, I saw a figure on the right side of the frame. I zoomed in, and what did my hopeful eyes see, but one of the deer, running next to the field.
And that was how we got blackout bingo on the day we rescued Mac and Piccolo. Suddenly, it all made sense. "Deer" was the last holdout so we could have this story to tell! The kitties helped us complete our Bingo challenge.
How exciting that we got to experience some of Summer to Remember with the newest members of our family, but it turns out that we didn't need a checklist or a Bingo game to remember this summer. Getting our cats was the best memory we could have made this season.