11 Aug How We Pick a Home Base for a Month-Long Family Trip
When we started this 50-state journey, we didn’t know exactly what our trips would look like. Originally we thought a year-long RV adventure was the move. We knew we wanted to actually live in the places we visited, not just pass through them. Then we realized what RV logistics actually looked like and changed our minds. We decided that breaking the trip up into regions and taking it a little slower was a better idea for us. Boys could still be active in all of their sports, they wouldn’t be away from friends and family for a whole year, and the logistics of what to do with our house was pretty overwhelming in itself. This trip, a full month based out of Black Mountain, North Carolina, is the first time we’re putting the idea of a “home base” fully into practice, and it’s already reshaping how we think about family travel.
Here’s how we landed on Black Mountain, and how we think about picking a home base in general.
Why a Home Base, Not a Road Trip Itinerary
Our first instinct, honestly, was to do what a lot of families do: pick a region, book a string of hotels or short-term rentals, and move every few days to hit as many spots as possible.
We tried that math on paper and it just didn’t add up, not just in miles, but in energy. Packing and unpacking every two or three nights is not my ideal for sure. It’s hard to keep any kind of school rhythm going when you’re constantly resetting. Even if you’re only concentrating on core subjects, a routine is necessary for our sanity. And a month of hotel-hopping gets expensive fast, in a way that a single monthly rental usually doesn’t.
So instead, we flipped the model: one home base, and everything else becomes a day trip. We unpack once. We build a school routine around mornings at “home” and afternoons exploring. And instead of driving between destinations, we drive out and back, which is an entirely different experience.
Why Black Mountain, Specifically
Once we knew we wanted a home base, the next question was where. A few things pulled us toward Black Mountain over the other towns we considered.
It has an actual downtown. This mattered more than we expected going in. Black Mountain has a genuine small-town Main Street, walkable from where we’re staying, with local shops and restaurants we can wander into on a low-key afternoon without needing to drive anywhere. After a big hiking or waterfall day, being able to just walk into town instead of getting back in the car is exactly the kind of built-in rest day we wanted. And, we love a small beach town… thinking we’ll love a small mountain town just as much!
The geography is almost absurdly central. Black Mountain sits close enough to the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Great Smoky Mountains, and a stretch of state parks and waterfalls across North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, Kentucky, Virginia, and Georgia that we can reach all of it without spending a whole day just driving. For a month-long stay, that range is what makes the home-base model genius, if I do say so myself. We’re not sacrificing variety for stability, we’re getting both.
The learning opportunities are almost endless. This is the part that sealed it for us as a homeschool family. This one region alone gives us a real, hands-on curriculum: geology at Chimney Rock and Linville Gorge, Appalachian history and craft traditions in Asheville’s River Arts District, wildlife biology watching elk during the rut in the Smokies, and, a completely unique and maybe once in a lifetime experience… an actual moonbow at Cumberland Falls, a genuinely rare natural phenomenon most people never get to see in person. You can’t fake that kind of education with a textbook, pictures, and memorizing facts.
What’s Actually Planned
I am not really a figure-it-out-as-we-go kind of gal… I already have a full day-by-day itinerary already built out, all 39 days, mapped across all 7 states. We know where we’re sleeping every night, what we’re doing most days, and we’ve already got a few big-ticket moments locked in, including that moonbow night and a day with the wild ponies at Grayson Highlands.
We’ll be sharing the full itinerary and real-time updates as we go, but we wanted to start here, with the why behind how this trip came together, before we hit the road and take you with us!
Follow Along
We leave for Black Mountain in September, and we’ll be documenting the whole month here on the blog, plus daily moments on Instagram, Facebook, and Pinterest. If you don’t want to miss any of it, this is also a good time to sign up for our newsletter, we’ll be sending trip updates and behind-the-scenes details there that don’t always make it to social media.
We can’t wait to bring you along for this one!
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