Caesar Creek State Park, Wilmington, OH

24 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by wyndes in Campground, Travel, Vanlife

I have so very many things I want to blog about. So very many!

Random thoughts:

Highway rest stops must be like art galleries for dogs: so many interesting smells, such fascinating traces of other dogs and people, so rich with the canine version of color. And possibly over-stimulating? B has to stop every two inches for the first ten feet and then he’s all, “No more, no more, I must take a nap. Immediately.” And Z wants to smell ALL the smells, every last inch of grass. It does not make for fun walks.

Illinois has a seriously annoying toll system. Every ten miles or so, you have to pay another $1.50 or $2 or even $3. I’m sure it’s fine for the people who live there and whizz through on their e-passes, but at 5AM, only one cash booth was open at every stop and it always had a line of five or six cars in it. It was actually sort of stressful to be hunting for money in that line, knowing that the people behind me just wanted to get going.

Wisconsin has gorgeous wildflowers happening right now. Lovely and colorful, deep yellows, light blues, waves of lavender. Not literal lavender, I don’t think, but that color of light purple. I, of course, can’t tell you what any of them are, but I think some of the deep yellows were brown-eyed Susans.

Ending the random thoughts:

I spent the weekend at Caesar Creek State Park in Wilmington, OH. It is not a park that I will be returning to. It contains the dubious distinction of having the worst showers of any that I actually used within my first year of van life. Apart from that, I think it’s probably a really nice place to stay if you have big water toys to play with — motor boats, wave runners, that kind of thing. For me, it was just a vaguely pleasant, grassy parking lot near a place where my friend E was visiting for work. But the trails were too muddy to appreciate; the weather was either sweltering hot or raining; and the sites didn’t have water hook-ups, which was inconvenient — especially because the showers were not cool. Literally, in the case of one of them, which was jammed on a temp of “fill the entire bathroom with steam.”

Due to circumstances beyond our control, our time together was cut a little short and E was without a car, so instead of most of a weekend with easy and flexible transportation, we had 24 hours in Serenity. It was much fun nonetheless, but mostly revolved around food. And washing dishes. And then more food. And more washing dishes. The effort of washing dishes is much more noticeable when you’re carrying the water from a faucet several campsites away.

Anyway, Saturday night was grilled asparagus with lime, and sous vide steak, followed by spice cake with pecans. Sunday: blueberries, bananas, and chocolate granola; spicy sweet potato hash with poached eggs; arugula and mixed greens salad with cold shrimp, pea pods, radishes, cucumbers, avocado, and a spicy chili-garlic salad dressing.

The sous vide steak was good, but maybe not as good as I expected it to be — perhaps a fault of the cook, I will definitely try again. The asparagus was great; the hash was yum; and the spicy salad dressing was delicious. I’m going to make an appetizer of a radish slice, topped with a thin slice of avocado, a cold shrimp, and a drizzle of chili garlic sauce, because those bites of salad were so very, very good. And I do wonder why the world doesn’t contain more spicy salad dressings? It really worked so well with all the cold crunchy things, i.e. the pea pods and radishes and shrimp.

Anyway, due to said circumstances, I wound up giving E a ride to her hotel around 6 Sunday evening. Of course, moving Serenity means packing up and because the rain had been on and off, but it was temporarily dry, I decided to pack everything up rather than risk it getting wet again. But then on the drive I realized that I was headed 35 minutes west of the campground. Did it really make sense to go east again, to spend the night at Caesar Creek? My plan had been to leave early this morning, starting at 8 or so, and drive as long as I could last. Destination, the Badlands of South Dakota, 18 hours away.

I worried at the thought for most of the drive, then while E went into Target to pick up some stuff she needed, I consulted my map. And after I dropped her off at her hotel, I started driving.

Last night — the second-to-last night of Year One in Serenity, I slept at a Flying J gas station in Indiana, adding one more state to my total — 19 states, 74 places, and 3 parking lots.

Tonight — the very last night of Year One in Serenity, I will either be sleeping in Minnesota or South Dakota, adding another state to the total. I suspect it’s going to be in Minnesota, because instead of driving, I’m sitting in a highway rest stop on the Wisconsin – Minnesota border, writing a blog post. It would take me 4.5 hours or so to get across Minnesota, I think, and given that I started driving at 5, I think I’m probably not going to make it that far. My goal, though, is to get the total driving time to Mount Rushmore to be under 6 hours. And I’m not quite sure, but I think it might be perfectly do-able. Which would mean tomorrow, on the actual anniversary of the day I closed on my house and started driving north, I’ll finally be at one of the destinations I was aiming for. And it only took a year!

The Mississippi River, as seen from Minnesota

Sous vide spicy sockeye salmon

22 Saturday Jul 2017

Posted by wyndes in Food, Seafood, Spicy, Vanlife

≈ 2 Comments

I was texting a friend recently, making plans to meet up with her in August to go camping together, and she wrote, “I can practice my cast iron pot campfire skills.”

I responded, “Or we can use my perfectly good propane stove. Or my microwave.”

Or my grill.

Or my induction cooktop.

Or my InstaPot.

Or, now, my new favorite toy, my sous vide precision cooker.

And yes, I do think it’s a little crazy that I live in a van and carry more cooking devices than outlets to power them. (Not literally true, by the way, Serenity has plenty of outlets!) But more cooking devices than surface areas to put them, maybe? Certainly more kitchen stuff than room to store it all: over the past year, the kitchen and pantry have gradually crept from the obvious space — the compartments over the stove and the drawers under the microwave — to take up almost the entire wall of compartments on the driver’s side, plus some room under the bed, plus some room in the space over the cab, plus some floor space, too.

No regrets, though. Last night’s dinner was a spicy wild sockeye salmon over brown rice with a salad of arugula, avocado, fresh peas, radish, and cucumber with balsamic.

Not the greatest picture, but it was dark and rainy, so the light wasn’t great.

The salmon was sous vide cooked at 115 for 30 minutes, which felt a little underdone to me, but tasted incredible. When I was done, I used the warm water from the sous vide pan — completely clean, since the food was cooked in a ziplock bag — to wash the dishes. This morning (and last night, too) there was no smell of fish in the van, despite the fact that rain meant that I’d had to keep the van closed up during the night. YAY!

The recipe I read from the Anova app (where I got the timing and temp) said not to use acidic or chunky ingredients, because they would damage the shape and texture of the fish. I read that and promptly ignored it, putting about a tablespoon of chili garlic sauce into the bag with the fish. It was not as pretty as it might have been if I’d gone with the suggested dill, but wow, it tasted great. Sous vide cooking is supposed to infuse the food with flavor and yeah, it works.

The salmon was on sale at CostCo, which means I’ll be having lots more opportunities to practice my sous vide cooking skills this week, but that’s not a problem. I’m writing this at 9:20 AM and already looking forward to my lunch leftovers. And fortunately, salmon is thin enough to easily fit into Serenity’s freezer.

I do look at that picture and think, “you’re eating sockeye salmon and arugula, no wonder your grocery budget is out of control.” But the salmon cost about $3.50/serving, the arugula probably .50, the other ingredients in total maybe $1.50/serving, which all adds up to a cheaper meal than a Chipotle burrito or a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s. (I had to google the latter — it’s been so long!)

In other news, I’m in Ohio. It’s rainy. I’m starting to wonder if life in Florida and California has just really skewed my perceptions of how often it’s supposed to rain. Maybe the rest of the world really does have rain every day? Campgrounds in PA and OH don’t seem to include water hook-ups with their electric sites — maybe that’s because they think you can just stick a bucket outside and have it fill up overnight? But the grass is very green and pretty, and it’s so hot that the rain feels nice.

Lesson learned this morning, though: if you’re enjoying walking in the rain with the hood of your jacket down, perhaps roll the hood up or tuck it inside the coat to prevent it from filling with water? I wouldn’t call it an unpleasant surprise, exactly, but when I decided I’d had enough of the rain on my head and pulled my hood up, I splashed myself with all the water that had filled the hood while it was down. Ha.

Last night I reread everything I’d written on Grace so far and decided it was all an incoherent mess. Before I threw the whole thing away, though, I decided that maybe I was just tired. Reread it this morning and yep, I was just tired. Whew. For a lot of reasons, what I should really be doing right now is finding myself a place to sit and write without any distractions at all — no family or friends to visit, no beaches to roam, no interesting meals to cook. Actually, “a lot of reasons” boils down to “finances.”

But I’m not going to. The aforementioned friend is a single parent with a real job, and limited time. I’ve got a chance to go camping with her and I’m going to take it. Which means I’m about to embark on an epic cross-country drive to get to Seattle by early August. I might be making poor life choices. But when I run out of savings, maybe I can find a job as a cook. Although if I did that, I suppose I’d have to care about whether the salmon looked as pretty as it would with dill…

Serenity’s First Year in Numbers

21 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by wyndes in Boring, Randomness, Serenity, Travel

≈ 5 Comments

In 18 states and two territories (one American and one British), I stayed in 73 different places:

I definitely got my money’s worth from my Thousand Trails membership. I think my total spent is currently about $550 for about 80 days, so roughly $7/night. But I’m not going to be renewing it when it expires next year: those campgrounds seem like good places for families with small kids and people who are looking for stable bases for extended periods, but that’s not how I want to travel or live.

My KOA membership was not worth the money. Again, great for families with kids and I definitely enjoyed my really nice showers at the KOA in Bellefonte, PA, but I don’t need the amenities they offer and even with the reduced membership rate, they were some of the most expensive places I stayed.

My one night at a Harvest Host site was lovely and I remember it fondly. But I don’t tend to want to drop in to places for a single night. If that changes in the future, I might think about trying out Harvest Hosts again, but for the moment, I’ll let that membership lapse.

Passport America costs around $45/year and I bought a three-year membership, so I’ve got plenty of time for it to pay off. In fact, the park at which I’m currently staying is both a state park and a Passport America park, and I saved $14 on an upcoming night’s stay because of my PA membership, so yay. But I’ve got a pretty long way to go before that membership pays for itself and two of the parks on the PA list were among my least favorite of the places I’ve stayed so I don’t seek out the PA parks. I should check out more of them, though, because it’s a nice discount when the park is okay.

Generally speaking, the only worthwhile memberships for me were the state parks. I’ve got a Texas State Park pass and a Georgia State Park pass and they were very much worth the money, might even be more so, since I’ve got months left on both. Live and learn, right?

I can’t believe I haven’t stayed in a single national park — what kind of camper am I??? — but they’re typically more restrictive about dogs than state parks, and I’ve really quite enjoyed discovering the state parks. Still, that might be a goal for Year Two. 🙂

I budgeted $900/month for campground charges, figuring an average of $30/night. If I stayed at KOAs and independent campgrounds or even some of the more expensive state parks, I’d be breaking that budget on a regular basis. As it is, however, my blend of campgrounds and driveways kept me under budget every month. The closest I came was $826 in April, from paying for my two week stay at Cedar Key in May.

I budgeted $400/month for gas and fuel (propane, too) and I came in under budget on that, as well. My grocery budget, though… yeah, not so good. Eating the way I eat — heavy on vegetables and protein, almost non-existent on breads, pasta, grains — is not cheap. Now that I can’t buy in bulk and store leftovers in my freezer, I’m spending more on food than I want to.

The dogs were also way over budget. No surprise, there, but ouch. Having two aging dogs is not the kind of thing where you want to look at the dollars. Even hiding some of their food costs in my grocery budget, I spent over $300/month on the dogs. I’d budgeted $90. Yep, the dogs cost $10/day.

Health insurance and care, internet, auto and RV insurance, the storage unit, taxes… none of those were surprising numbers to me, although they do add up. Life in the van is definitely less expensive than it was in my house, but I really had hoped I’d have a book or two released by now, though, so that’s not so good.

But there, another goal for Year Two — publish books! And visit national parks. And continue spending ridiculous amounts of money on the dogs, because really, the only way that number goes down is bad, so the positive side of breaking my budget on pet care is definitely that I have two dogs that I adore still and that’s good news.

Speaking of which, I am out of dog food, so need to make a run to a grocery store, unfortunately half an hour away. Time to get going!

Duck, North Carolina

07 Friday Jul 2017

Posted by wyndes in Food, Personal, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

I’ve been meaning to blog every day this week. In fact, I think I’ve started a post every morning! But something always gets in the way and the something is always really nice. That’s because I’m currently on a family vacation in Duck, North Carolina, with my brother, SIL, niece, nephew, and SIL’s aunt and uncle. My SIL’s sister is supposed to be here, too, but she hasn’t made it yet. Maybe later today. Plus, my stepsister and her family live nearby, and my dad and stepmom are staying with them, so I’m being very sociable.

The house we’re staying at is easy walking distance to a very nice beach and equally easy walking distance to an extremely cute town with a great boardwalk. It has a swimming pool, plus three sides with sometimes-sunny balconies. I’ve got about a zillion pictures of gorgeous beach skies that I could post, plus almost as many appealing food photos. Well, okay, maybe not a zillion food photos.

And if you’re not interested in food, you can probably skip the rest of this post! I’ve been doing the cooking, which has, of course, been very fun for me. I was going to just write about my favorite meal, but then I couldn’t decide which one it was. But for my own future reference, here’s what we ate:

On our first night, I grilled chicken marinated in yogurt and garlic and honey, and served it with quinoa mixed with goat cheese and green onion. We also had a raw veggie tray that included red, yellow, and orange peppers, radishes, broccoli, carrots, pea pods, and cherry tomatoes.

On our second night, we had flank steak, corn-on-the-cob, roasted potatoes, and green salad. I also made two appetizers: quinoa cheese puffs, served with sour cream; and caprese skewers, i.e. a cherry tomato, basil, and mozzarella on a toothpick, topped with a balsamic reduction.

On the 4th of July, we went to my stepsister’s house for burgers and hot dogs. I brought a chick pea salad with cherry tomatoes, parsley, and a honey vinaigrette; a quinoa salad with red onion, black beans, corn, cilantro, and a yogurt-based dressing; deviled eggs; and some more of the caprese skewers. Oh, and a blueberry-covered goat cheese, with gluten-free crackers.

On Wednesday, we ate grilled pork chops with a garlic-mint-salt rub; roasted potatoes; salad of mixed greens, tomato, cucumber, and goat cheese with a balsamic fig vinaigrette; and the leftover quinoa and chickpea salads. Appetizer of crackers, goat cheese, and fig spread.

Thursday night, we had make-your-own tacos with possible fillings of shredded chicken cooked with salsa, flank steak, grilled pork, black beans, red onions, guacamole, salsa, lettuce, tomatoes, green onions, cilantro, sour cream, and shredded cheese. Oh, and I made a salad of tomatoes, mozzarella and a reduction of the balsamic fig vinaigrette. And I made a tray of nachos, too. That was meant to be an appetizer, but it didn’t really work out that way.

Today I’ll be making some vegan chili and some gluten-free cornbread and we’ll finish off some of the salads. And I think maybe I’ll make the quinoa cheese puffs again, although we’re out of shredded cheese. But I’d like some shredded cheese for the chili, so I guess I’m headed off to the store.

Every day has been busy. I’ve gone to the beach every day, most often with Zelda, but once with both dogs, and once entirely sans dogs, which was fun because I got to actually go swimming and the water was perfect. There was a parade on the 4th, live music last night, outings for ice cream more than once. I’ve wandered around the town with my brother, my father, and my SIL, all on separate occasions. I’ve floated in the pool, and I’ve also played in the pool. My nephew and I were having float races yesterday, including one where we were each holding a dog and I laughed so hard I almost fell into the water. Lots of walking, lots of water, lots of sun, lots of cooking, lots of family. Not a lot of time for blogging or writing, but that’s okay — next week I’ll be back at it!

This week has been golden, glorious summer. And now it’s time to go swim!

Happy Birthday, Serenity

29 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by wyndes in Personal, RV, Serenity, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 6 Comments

Serenity at the garden house

Technically, of course, the van’s birthday must be a couple months ago. She would have been built in Iowa, shipped to Florida, and she sat on the dealer’s lot for at least a couple of weeks before I signed the papers. But one year ago today was the day she came home with me.

Of course, pretty much the very next day, I brought her straight back to the dealer and said, “Um, I don’t think water is supposed to pour in through the roof when it rains,” but that’s neither here nor there.

It would still be close to another month before I closed on my house and started traveling, but here’s what I’ve learned in my first year of #vanlife.

1) Temperature control is a perpetual challenge. It easily gets about ten degrees hotter inside the van than it is outside, which is lovely when it’s 60 degrees outside and not fun at all when it’s 80 degrees outside. I’ve learned some tricks — always put the window covers up and the shades down, close the bathroom doors when the AC is on — but long-term, I also need to invest in some curtains to close off the cab and some USB fans to improve air flow. And I need to plan my travels better so I can avoid places/times where the heat is dangerous for the dogs.

2) Campgrounds are dirty. The dogs don’t care. I do. I’m getting better at acceptance, but clean sheets have become a luxurious treat.

3) I don’t need much stuff, but the stuff I do own grows to fill the available room. It feels like a continual process of pruning. I did expect by this time that all the vintage china I was traveling with would have broken and I’d be needing new dishes, but not so much. I think I broke one plate and a bowl, and I definitely gave away a few dishes to empty out the cupboards, but the china has worked out otherwise. I like it very much.

4) I also expected that my eating habits would change, but I didn’t know how. It turns out that I eat a lot of cold, fairly simple food — roast beef rolled up with arugula, turkey topped with artichoke spread, that kind of thing. Also, a lot more eggs. But the longer I live in the van, the less limited I feel about what I can cook. I’m not sure I could do a Thanksgiving dinner — it would have to be a pretty small turkey, and the scheduling involved in serving all the food hot would be tough to pull off — but short of that, I could probably cook some serious meals. If I wasn’t worried about heating up the van, that is.

5) Time flies by when you’re living in a van. I really can’t believe it’s been a year. I thought back then that by now I might have figured out where I want to live and be ready to settle down somewhere — a year sounds like plenty of time to be living on the road, doesn’t it? — but I’m nowhere close. I’ve enjoyed my month of mostly sitting still, but I’m looking forward to many more of my cautious adventures.

I guess I don’t have any particularly profound insights. A few more: birds are cool and worth watching; I like sunrises better than sunsets; grocery stores are pretty much the same across the country; and I should stop waiting to do things (like put up curtains) with the idea that I’ll do them when I get “home” because I am home.

Okay, one insight (still not terribly profound, I expect): a year ago, I plunged into the unknown. I was excited and I was scared. I scurried around with lists and to-do items and schedules and structure to try to cope with the vast looming uncertainties. I avoided thinking too far ahead even as I contemplated destinations like the Grand Canyon and Mount Rushmore. I was sure that there would be good parts and bad parts, and I tried not to focus too much on the possibility of the bad parts. In fact, when I made the decision, I wrote, “But ten years from now, I want to look back and think, “Wow, you might have been crazy, but you sure were brave.”

I wasn’t crazy. This journey, this life, this year has been amazing. It’s not always comfortable and it’s not always easy and yes, stuff has gone wrong and there have been some bad days along the way, but the good has so outweighed the bad.

My aunt sent me a quote this week with a note that said, “This is you.” The quote was from Howard Thurman, who wrote: Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and go out and do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.

Yes.

I didn’t know a year ago that that’s what I was doing, and that this journey would be as much about celebrating my breakfast every morning and walking three miles a day as it would be about visiting national parks — well, actually more about the former, since I have yet to set foot in a single national park, ha — but yes. Letting go of my house and my stuff and my routine has been like waking up to a life of wonder and appreciation.

It wasn’t the best decision of my life (which is an honor forever and always reserved to my response when faced with an unplanned, terribly-timed pregnancy), but it comes really, really close.

So, yeah, Happy Birthday, Serenity! May we celebrate many more together.

Pennsylvania summer

19 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by wyndes in Grace, Randomness, Vanlife, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

The fireflies were out last night. I had that moment of blinking disbelief — what was that light? was I really seeing what I was seeing? — and then I realized what they were. Tiny yellow sparks in shadowy darkness, flickering in and out, in a warm summer breeze. Such a magical element of a Pennsylvania summer.

Some of the blueberries are ripe. So are the blackberries. So are the red raspberries. So are the yellow raspberries. The gooseberries and the grapes are not. It’s really interesting to watch the berries ripen — the blueberries, in particular, grow in a cluster, all of which get ripe at different times, so the cluster has berries ranging from deep blue to green. We can go back to the same bush, day after day, and pick more berries from it. And the blackberries — they get ripe so fast! Seriously, I could pick berries from a vine in the morning and then go back a few hours later and pick more. I can’t quite see them changing color, but I bet if I set up a time-lapse camera, I could.

Unfortunately, it’s also hot and sticky. I really love camping here, but I keep looking at the house and contemplating how much work it would take to make it livable. Do you suppose it’s possible to put central air-conditioning into a stone farmhouse? I guess anything’s possible if you have enough money, which means I should definitely not be wasting my time imagining renovating the house, and instead should be writing, writing, writing.

The writing… yeah. Not going well. I have discovered two characterization issues that I need to solve. I have partially figured out how to solve one of them, but the other… sigh. I guess I can be happy that I have at least figured out why I’m stuck again and what needs to change to get me unstuck, but I wish I could just write until I was done and stop caring about things like agency and motivation. And consistency. I guess that’s the one I care about the most. But I will solve these problems, and meanwhile, I will eat blueberries and blackberries and appreciate summer.

NYC Weekend and Blueberries

13 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by wyndes in Travel

≈ 3 Comments

I picked my first blueberries this morning, yay! Ate some, too, of course, and they were delicious. I’m currently not parked at the garden, because it is seriously hot, so I’m actually staying in the guest bedroom at my brother’s real house. Poor Serenity is just baking in the sun. But I’m hoping for cooler weather later this week and mornings that include walking the dog to the blueberry patch, picking some blueberries, and then eating fresh blueberries for breakfast. When that happens, which it will, I will post pictures. Today’s pictures, though, have to be of my NYC weekend.

Unsurprisingly, my college cohort are all having big birthdays this year. A friend that I’ve stayed in touch with was headed to NY to attend the party of a friend that I’d completely lost touch with, and invited me along. We decided to turn it into a real NYC adventure, not just a long drive to a nice dinner. So on Friday, I took a bus into New York.

Five minutes after disembarking, I was sure I’d made a huge mistake. The Port Authority Bus Terminal followed by 42nd Street on a Friday afternoon in June could have been a universe away from my quiet green garden house mood — stimulating, chaotic, colorful, and completely overwhelming. Fortunately, I kept walking, got to a quieter area of Chelsea, took an ibuprofen, drank some water, and found our hotel, which had a nice peaceful patio. I say fortunately because after that initial shock of entry, I had a really great time being a tourist in the big city.

We walked along the Highline, went to the Whitney Museum, saw The Book of Mormon on Broadway, took a Circle Line landmarks cruise around Manhattan, sat on the grass in Central Park, ate fancy breakfasts and low-key other meals, and eventually went to our friend’s party, followed by drinks at a rooftop bar in Chelsea.

The view from the roof.

I don’t think I could pick a highlight. I had a bagel — a gluten-free bagel with smoked salmon cream cheese — that actually tasted like a real bagel. We ate fantastic gelato our first night (favorite flavor: lime-basil) and really good ice cream on Sunday. Walking through the Highline was beautiful but getting to look at art and think about art in the Whitney was somehow deeply gratifying. It felt like using a part of my brain that has been sleeping for a while. My favorite piece was Pittsburgh by an artist I’d never heard of from a school of art I’d never heard of, but there were other things that inspired fun story ideas for a story that I can’t write until after I finish the dozen other things lined up before it. The Book of Mormon was great, but so was the incredibly rushed walk to get to it, through NYC on a Saturday evening.

And it was good to see old friends again. Strange, but good. This particular friend group belonged to my best friend, not me, so I was peripheral in their world, but watching them felt so familiar. I was particularly delighted to finally ask one of them about a memory I have of a time when we did a 360 in a truck on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago — probably my clearest near-death experience ever. I’ve remembered that moment forever, but lost all the details around it — how did we wind up in a truck together on a highway in the midwest? Alas, she had no answers for me, although she remembered the moment, too.

It was a great weekend. Still, I took a deep breath when I got off the bus in PA yesterday and was happy, happy to be here. Time to get back to Grace and eat some blueberries!

A view from a hotel window, with the Empire State Building on the right.

More photos from the BVI

07 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by wyndes in Photography, Travel

≈ 2 Comments

My SIL and niece were the first people forced to sit through my slideshow of my 100 favorite photos. Well, forced is a strong word. But I didn’t really give them a choice. They were very tolerant, however!

These are the images (not previously posted) that made them say “Ooh,” or “Ahh,” or “Wow.”

June in Pennsylvania

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by wyndes in Personal, Randomness, Vanlife

≈ 5 Comments

The Best. Vacation. Ever. ended a week ago: we got back to the States around 10PM Saturday night and by 10AM Sunday morning, I was on the road, headed north.

It was the same drive that I made on July 25th of last year, with my house closing behind me, driving to PA with Serenity overflowing with stuff. This time the stuff was everything left from my storage unit: a cedar chest, a chair, plastic crates holding my mom’s china and R’s childhood. And overflowing was no exaggeration. A leg on the cedar chest broke when we were moving it into the van, so its contents were in another plastic crate and the bed was piled high with stuff. I had a sliver of bed on which to sleep, small enough that rolling over meant bumping into a crate.

But my attitude was not at all the same. Last year, I was still running down checklists in my head, still tight with tension and uncertainty about what I was doing. I was excited, but even finding a campground for the night felt like a challenge. I vividly remember stopping at a rest stop and having that, “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” feeling because the air smelled different. Ten(-ish) months later, it felt familiar. And I didn’t bother with a campground: I drove until it was almost dark, then found myself a quiet corner of a Flying J parking lot and settled in for the night.

It was actually only my second night in a real parking lot, and my first night on a highway parking lot, but I’ve spent enough time camped in driveways and on streets now that it didn’t faze me. My first parking lot night, sometime last August, was almost sleepless, jolting awake at every flickering light, but this time, I just crawled into bed, apologized to B, who had to sleep on the floor, and crashed. At 5AM Monday, I woke up and started driving again.

My destination:

The view from Serenity’s door.

Several years ago, the Best Brother Ever bought an old stone farmhouse for the sake of the land around it. It’s in a strange location, not exactly rural, not exactly suburban. Costco and Whole Foods are a mile away, across a highway, and it’s on a road simultaneously too busy and too narrow to feel safe for walking. The house is not really livable, although it could be lovely with a lot of work and probably a ton of money. But the gardens… well, expect to see a lot of pictures of them over the next few weeks. I intend to stay here until I finish writing Grace. Probably with some interruptions — I’ve got some fun weekends planned, spending time with friends and relatives — but mostly, I am going to sit here and write.

And watch the blueberries get ripe.

1500 Photos

02 Friday Jun 2017

Posted by wyndes in Randomness, Travel

≈ 6 Comments

I took over 1500 photos. Seriously. For a person who didn’t use to like taking photos, I may have gone a little overboard. (Ha. Yes, pun intended.) After some reasonable amount of sorting, these are my favorite ten, not including the ones I already posted. In no particular order!