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The numbers speak for themselves: two parents, 13-year old twin daughters, three dogs, 180 square feet of living space in an RV, 34 states visited, 6,378 photos taken, and more than 14,000 miles traveled.
Of course, if Jamie and Diana Clements had been that worried about squinting at digits, they wouldn't have made their daughters Karolina and Noe into Open Road Scholars.
The Clements, who lived in Chevy Chase from 1994 to 1995 and again from 2000 to 2001, decided that before their twin daughters entered high school, they wanted to give them a different kind of education.
Instead of reading about the Rocky Mountains, the hypersaline Mono Lake and downtown Boston at a desk, they wanted Karolina and Noe to get to know them up close.
"We got more hands-on," Noe said.
And rather than solving word problems, Noe and Carolina worked out a travel route and all its attendant pit stops and complications. It was a real-life course in logistics, even if Noe did point out to her dad: "Your grading system is not real!" And it allowed them to have once-in-a-lifetime experiences.
"They learned the exhilaration of the open road," Jamie Clements said, sitting at the kitchen table of his former Chevy Chase neighbor Cheryl Kurss. The Clements, who currently live in Santa Fe, N.M. when they aren't traveling the country, decided to stop in their former neighborhood on Election Day to be close to Washington, D.C.
"They always threatened to come back in an RV, and nobody believed them," Kurss said, laughing.
After an RV trip about 10 years ago that included their three older daughters, the Clements thought they'd never want to set foot in an RV again. But only five years later, they began rethinking their distaste for such a journey.
Over the course of a year, the Clements eventually settled on a roughly clockwise course. Beginning on Aug. 18, it took them through California, the Pacific Northwest, the Plains and the Midwest. They plan to swing through the Northeast and the Southeast before traveling across Texas back home. The trip is scheduled to last 18 weeks, about as long as a school semester, and end back in Santa Fe on Dec. 15. Every state except Hawaii will have hosted the Clements by the end of the journey.
The plan was to home-school Carolina and Noe while on the road, but the textbooks quickly took a backseat to places like Forks in Olympic National Park in the state of Washington, which is reported to be the wettest part of the United States and side excursions like a helicopter ride over Glacier National Park in Montana.
The Open Road Scholars also took a ferry to Alaska, saw the fall leaves turn in Colorado, and had to deal with a dog's liver biopsy in St. Louis that delayed their trip for a week.
After doing laundry outside at RV campgrounds, setting off the carbon monoxide detector whenever she cooked, and experiencing living quarters that simply could not be kept clean, Noe Clements appreciates the special experience she has had when she talks with her friends.
"They could never imagine living in an RV," she said.
"There's definitely an RV culture that we didn't understand," Diana said.
Jamie Clements, meanwhile, managed to maintain his work as a fundraiser for art museums, with the help of a finely-tuned meeting schedule with clients in places like a Niagara Falls gift shop. Diana Clements kept up her career as a sculptor and collected 100 pounds of rocks to use in future projects.
The family can't yet imagine getting home to Santa Fe, sitting on the couch and watching TV, although a holiday cram session to catch up on school work may be in order. Diana and Jamie are already planning a custom-designed 45-foot RV that they can ride around the country after they retire. They may also write a book about their travels.
"There's so much more. We've scratched the surface," Jamie Clements said.
The foursome has also formed unique parent-child and sibling bonds that can only come through sharing such intimate spaces over so many miles.
"I think it's made us stronger," Diana said. "…there are no secrets in an RV."
