We often hear compliments from friends, family and readers that come with a side of envy. Yes, we’re definitely living the dream in our RV on the road, but there’s also the occasional nightmare. That’s life, right?

To offer a full portrait of Our Grand Tour (instagram.com/ourgrandtour), we’re serving up a day-in-the-life look at our typical schedule. We’ll try to keep the descriptions of the chores to a minimum! 

Good morning: Leslie is the early riser, and she does her best not to make too much of a racket in the dawn’s early light. There’s chai to be made and sipped while scrolling through social media and the latest headlines. If we have connectivity, that is. We’re still trying to figure out the best way to get online while on the road. Adding our mobile devices as hot spots before taking off on this trip helped, but it’s not foolproof.

When John wakes up, he’s laser-focused on making coffee and catching up on the news, later reporting any intriguing sports stories to Leslie.

After a semi-chill start to the day, we enter the action-packed portion. Those hikes, bike rides and swims are a fine way to work up an appetite. But more about dinner later.

We’ve enjoyed some memorable workouts lately, including an 8-mile hike in Indian Canyons Nature Preserve near Palm Springs. The West Fork loop involves some serious uphill, but the huffing and puffing is rewarded with incredible views.

TCB: In the afternoons, there’s time for taking care of business. That might mean laundry or grocery shopping or some deep cleaning. Each and every day, there’s several sessions of sweeping. No matter how hard you try to keep dirt out, it’s hard to accomplish when you’re camping.

If those tasks sound kind of boring, they certainly are. But the daily routines help keep us grounded. We’re not on vacation, after all. This is our life and sometimes you just have to sweep.

Dinner time: Leslie usually starts thinking about what she’s going to cook right after breakfast. Working in the teeny space has become the best kind of challenge and she’s successfully set up an outdoor kitchen with the nifty George Foreman Smokeless Grill as the MVP.

But successfully putting together a meal is all about the provisioning and that’s mostly a pleasure for the resident cook. On a recent Saturday, she was in heaven, wandering the farmers market in Palm Springs, picking up citrus, dates and all kinds of fresh produce. Those purchases helped make a veggie-centric ramen later that evening, a meal we ate outside by the fire.

The evening’s entertainment: After cleaning the kitchen and putting on some music – we usually stream some of our fave stations including WWOZ in New Orleans and WEVL in Memphis – cards are shuffled for our nightly cribbage battle. Leslie’s currently crushing it during the winter season, but John’s not far behind.

Winner of the game decides what we’re going to watch from our stack of DVDs. Call us luddites, we've never been able to figure out how to get our TVs to stream Netflix or Hulu or HBO Max. You’re probably going to laugh or groan or both, but we’re currently working our way through Season 1 of “The OC,” the early 2000s soap opera. It’s pure cheese and sometimes that’s what you want after dinner.

Good night! We’ll be back at it again tomorrow.

Moving day is an entirely different matter, of course. We’ll run down our hit-the-road check list on the Going Mobile blog (spokesman.com/blogs/going-mobile).

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