The photo below shows a snapshot of my sons, then-nine-year-old Luke and then-eight-year-old Jesse, at the excellent Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. It’s certainly one of the top children’s museums in the country, full of all sorts of surprises – from a fully-restored 1918 carousel and an indoor butterfly garden to Reading Adventureland (Jack’s beanstalk, Harry Potter’s Nimbus 2000, a Wonka Bar) and the National Toy Hall of Fame (Slinky, Silly Putty, Mr. Potato Head, the Big Wheel).

One of my favorite spots, seen below, was the Room with a Viewpoint. In the photo, Jesse – who is 18 months younger and smaller than his brother – looks quite a bit bigger. It’s all about perspective (and backgrounds and angles and such).

So let’s muse on that notion of perspective for a moment. It is probably the most important baggage you’ll take along with you on an RV journey. Your perceptions about where you are can be profoundly influenced by where you’re coming from. This is true both spiritually and emotionally, of course. Your mood, your capacity for wonder at any given moment, certainly determines how you’ll react to any sight you see. Even the weather plays a role. A gray mood on a gray day… well, that’s not the best timing if you want to gasp at the otherworldly wonder of a Bryce Canyon or the mystical vibe of a redwood forest.

But I want to focus on a more literal example – where you’re coming from geographically.

Where have you just been, and how does that color your perspective of the scenery you’re now encountering? If you just spent a week driving through the Rockies, the Appalachians might seem… less impressive. But if you’re making your way north from Florida and into the Blue Ridge Mountains, they might seem a lush wonderland of breathtaking views.

I recall a trip a few years ago, while researching one of my travel memoirs, that took me through the barren landscape of eastern Montana and the flatlands of North Dakota. When I finally arrived in Minnesota and encountered serene mountain lakes fringed with countless pines, it was a moment of epiphany for me. I had spent every summer of my childhood in northern Wisconsin, surrounded by such a scene. But I’m not sure I truly appreciated its beauty until then.

So when I’m designing an RV voyage, I try to keep this in mind. For instance, consider the first house-on-wheels excursion that Amy and I ever took – a magical 314-day journey through 48 states in 1996. We saw everything – at least that’s what I always used to say, until I realized that 100,000-plus miles later we still haven’t come close to doing that. But we certainly did our best – everything from the Blue Ridge to the Black Hills to Yellowstone, from Savannah to San Diego to Spokane, from the Washington Monument to the Gateway Arch to the Space Needle.

But I designed our itinerary so that one of the very last things we would see would be the Grand Canyon. As much as I rave about sequoia trees and the Tetons and Utah’s vistas and Vermont’s picturesque drives, I must admit that nothing quite compares to the Big Daddy of American wonders. The Grand Canyon almost defies description – the vibrant colors, the sheer magnitude…it is awesome, in the truest sense of the word.

And we had never seen it. So I wanted to essentially leave it for last.

Oddly enough, I tend to do that when I eat, too. I’ll have a plate full of three or four elements of a meal, and one of those elements will inevitably be the one I’m looking forward to most. But I’ll save it for the end. I’m not sure why. I guess I just figure it’ll taste that much better. Delayed gratification and all that.

So it was with the Grand Canyon. We arrived there at the end of September – an absolute perfect time of year to view it because the aspen trees that surround it are turning a vivid yellow gold. And it was the end of the day, so we could time our visit to coincide with the setting sun’s ability to infuse magic into any landscape. And it took our breath away.

Granted, had it been one of the first national parks we visited during that journey, it might have seemed equally spectacular. But would it have possibly muted our reactions to other attractions? Wasn’t there something special about the fact that – after all we had seen over the previous ten months – we still found ourselves grinning stupidly at a big hole in the ground toward the end of the journey?

I mean, dessert comes last for a reason.

The photo below shows a collection of tie-dyed shirts for sale about 14 months ago at the Quechee Balloon Festival in Vermont. We stopped there during our 2010 summer RV trip, and it was a gas (pun intended). Anyway, I’m thinking one of those shirts might quality as a pretty good metaphor for the RV experience.

Consider how you create a tie-dyed T-shirt. I’m simplifying a somewhat more complex process, but basically you crumple up a shirt, tie it tight with rubber bands, squirt some dye on it and let it rest for a while. When it dries, you untie it to reveal… whatever it is you made.

Maybe you get spirals or pleats or stripes or rosettes. Maybe the blue bleeds into the yellow to make green. Maybe one part of the shirt is entirely different from the other. It can be a masterpiece or a mish-mosh. But either way, it’s probably memorable.

Of course, tie-dye experts can actually maneuver to create specific designs, mix and match colors meticulously, remove the unpredictability. Or at least, most of it. But you never know for sure. And for the rest of us amateurs, it’s sort of a trial by error process.

I’d say that well describes an RV excursion: Careful planning can set you on the right path, but you never quite know what’s going to happen. The tiniest little decisions can loom large in the end. Even the slightest alterations – a change in moods or goals or the dynamics of the traveling group – can color the journey. And you learn as you go.

So as I create the itinerary for each Herzog Family Summer RV Extravaganza, I find myself planning meticulously. I try not to leave any “T” uncrossed in the hopes of maximizing the experience. But I also find myself eagerly anticipating the unexpected – surprises, detours, spur-of-the-moment changes in the Grand Plan.

And that kind of spontaneity is a lot easier when you’re in charge of where you’re going, when you’re not at the mercy of airline tickets or hotel reservations or rental car limitations or the simple need to locate food and shelter.

That flexibility is probably the most significant aspect of the RV experience, and I contend that it allows the traveler to reach a new level of relaxation. To some extent, like a T-shirt being tie-dyed, you don’t want to be too tightly wound. You want to let the magic happen on its own, and you might find you’ve created a masterpiece.

History is full of misquotes that have become enduring myths. Consider the following, all of it true (you could look it up):