Category Archives: Vanlife

Homolovi Ruins State Park

25 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Campground, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 2 Comments

sunrise facing west at Homolovi Ruins State Park

Sunrise facing west

This morning’s sunrise was un-photographable facing east. Or rather, the photograph was dull — black ground, then a line of bright yellow and gold, then blue above. It didn’t convey at all how pure and clear and bright the morning was. The above photograph was facing to the west, with the sun directly behind me. At, I believe, 6:09 AM.

At least my phone thinks it was 6:09. Maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t. Arizona is in a very confusing time zone that I think translates to “whatever time we want it to be and probably not the time you think it is.” (They claim it’s Mountain Time without Daylight Savings, but are we saving the daylight when we spring forward or when we fall back? I know I should be able to figure this out but it feels too much like rocket science. Maybe after some more caffeine.)

I wanted to write more about the Grand Canyon yesterday and I just did not feel well enough. I spent most of the day in that state of recovery from stomach misery where I was hungry but not hungry enough to risk eating and then when I finally did risk eating regretted it.

I also have had a sequence of refrigerator screw-ups that make me really sad: first, I accidentally shoved the fridge up to 7, its coldest level. I’ve done that before — it’s easy to do when stuffing the fridge too full — and it’s so annoying. Everything on the top shelf freezes solid, everything in the middle comes close. Sometimes some of the produce survives but not the most delicate things. Cucumbers and salad greens really don’t like being frozen.

But then, just to really screw up my food supply, when following the instructions to get my generator going again, I turned the fridge off. Not a big deal. If I had just remembered to turn it back on again. Gah. I was miserably sick if that counts as a stupidity defense. But everything in the fridge has first frozen and now defrosted. I’m trying to save what can be saved and acknowledge reality on what can’t, but it means my food choices are more limited than usual. Fortunately, I’ve got plenty of rice, which is probably the only thing I ought to be eating right now anyway.

But back to the Grand Canyon! On Friday morning, I went and found propane, and then took the dogs on a scenic drive. It was a beautiful winding road and a beautiful day. I looked at the Grand Canyon and was awed. And then I moved on to the next spot and looked at it again and was… well, a little less awed. And then I moved on to the next spot and looked again and thought, yep, canyon. Big hole in the ground. And then I moved on to the next spot and started looking at the people around me and wondering what their stories were and making up stories for them and glanced at the canyon. Yep, beautiful. By the time I finished the scenic drive, I was over the canyon. It is quite spectacular and you have to admire it, but once you’ve seen it, it’s seen. It was what I expected it to be.

I was feeling sort of sad about that as I returned to the campground. Here is this amazing, incredible spot — truly, one of the wonders of the world — and I’m already jaded about it. I’ve seen it in so many pictures, read about it in books, viewed it on television — there is no mystery. No wonder.

And then, when I was waiting for the ranger so I could check back in (I’d had to move campsites), I saw this squirrel. Weirdest squirrel ever. It was the second time I’d seen it (or its cousin). The first time had been from a distance and I hadn’t even been sure it was a squirrel. I thought maybe it was a tiny skunk. It was black, with a pure white fluffy tail. And from up close, it had the funniest ears. Not quite rabbit ears, not even close to the rabbit ears on some of the jackrabbits I’ve seen out here, but big ears, much too big for a squirrel. What the heck? I couldn’t get a picture of it, because Zelda was with me and the squirrel was not dumb enough to stand still to let Zelda investigate, but I asked the ranger.

Me: “That squirrel with the white tail, is it some kind of genetic fluke? Part albino? Or do you have special squirrels here?”

He didn’t laugh at me, but he did smile. Yep, they have special squirrels. It’s the Kaibab squirrel, found only at the North Rim. (The Wikipedia pictures are not as cute as the real thing: if you’re really interested, try a google image search for much better shots.)

That brought back every bit of the sense of wonder that I had when I first saw the canyon in the morning light. R was animal-obsessed when he was little. We watched vast quantities of Animal Planet, plus Zoboomafoo every day — I actually got a TiVo, one of the first DVRs, because not making it home in time for Zoboomafoo stressed us both out so much. And yet here was an animal that I’d never heard of, never seen, in my own country. In a major tourist destination in my own country. It was so satisfying. It felt magical.

So, Grand Canyon, two thumbs up. Worth the drive.

Homolovi Ruins State Park, also two thumbs up. I haven’t seen the ruins yet, because I have not been up for much in the way of long walks. Z and I headed in that direction this morning, but I cut it short when I started feeling tired. Total walk was a mile and a half, so not nothing, but I’m really not interested in pushing myself. I will, however, have a second chance and maybe a third, because… well, because I’m not interested in pushing myself. This is a nice, peaceful, quiet campground — big sites, reasonable showers, excellent internet signals, electricity — and so my big plan for the day has turned into “drive back to the ranger station and pay for another couple of nights.” The weather has been lovely, daytime temps in the 70s, nighttime temps in the 30s, and at night, the stars go on forever. I know this because both of the dogs seem to be as confused about what time zone they’re in as I am and have decided that 4AM is the appropriate time to go out. I’m not terribly happy about that, but at least it’s meant seeing some beautiful nighttime skies.

Worst day of the past 14 months…

24 Sunday Sep 2017

Posted by in Personal, Randomness, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 9 Comments

Today has been, without a doubt, without even a close contender, the worst day of my journey so far. I’m not sure I even want to write about it, because I don’t feel well enough yet to feel like it’s over. But I’m safely camped at a nice campground, staying here for two nights, plugged into electricity, and it’s only 4PM, so maybe I should just be counting my blessings instead of mourning my misery.

I woke up in the night to stomach pain. Indigestive-type stomach pain. At first it wasn’t so bad, I wondered what I’d eaten. But it got steadily worse and worse until I was tossing and turning and trying to figure out how I could possibly have given myself food poisoning. I was going down the list of every food I’d eaten, trying to think how it could have been contaminated. Was the pesto too old? Did I not wash the radishes well enough? Was the water in my tank — which I don’t drink but did use to wash the vegetables — contaminated somehow?

At various points through my entirely sleepless night, I wondered whether I could be having a heart attack, whether I was dehydrated, whether it was my gall bladder, whether I had a kidney stone, whether I needed an emergency room, whether I should be calling a ranger for help. I checked my own medicine cabinet for something, anything, that would relieve some of the pain and found, unsurprisingly, nothing.

The dogs were, of course, as restless as I was. My squirming around trying to find something like a comfortable position kept them on the move, trying to get back into their own formerly comfortable positions. Eventually B wanted to go out — still dark and temperatures in the 20s. I didn’t even care. I was awake anyway and thought maybe the cold air would help. It didn’t.

Then, of course, Z wanted to go for her walk. Really wanted it. We’d had a terrific walk yesterday and she loved the cold weather. She was bouncy and energetic and all ready for morning to begin. I eventually wound up literally snarling at her, because I was face-down, knees to chest, some sort of modified child’s pose, trying my best to breathe, and she kept sticking her nose under my arms and trying to lick my face. But even the sweetest dog understands a snarl; after that she curled up on the dog bed and watched me attentively, trying to decide what I was doing and if I was ever going to take her for a walk.

Answer: no. I wasn’t sure I had walking in me.

But I did let her out on a tie-out, while I tried to decide what to do. I was pretty sure at that point that I had food poisoning. I didn’t know how I could have food poisoning and it was obvious that I was just going to have to throw away everything in my fridge because I had no idea what had gone bad, but what else could it be? And there’s no cure for food poisoning. You ride it out and stay hydrated. Not fun, but it’d be over eventually. Unfortunately, my reservation at the North Rim was over and the campground was completely full, so I needed to move on. But there were other campgrounds nearby — maybe one of them would have room.

I did one thing at a time. One item put away, one job done, punctuated with sitting on the floor and rocking. It hurt. It really, seriously, fucking hurt. It felt like my intestines were tying themselves in knots. Not to be too graphic, but my system had completely cleaned itself out except for copious amounts of gas. Ridiculous amounts of gas. I could have won a belching contest against a world contender, but it only ever alleviated the pain for a moment or two.

And then I realized — yesterday, my bag of gluten-free crackers had inflated. It was really strange. I had to pop it to open it. And the top popped off my plastic container of balsamic vinegar as if expelled by an invisible force. Gas, in other words.

Could I have altitude sickness? In what is not irony, because it is not funny, I’d worried about R facing altitude sickness when he went to Colorado, but it had never even occurred to me that I might get it. Was the Grand Canyon even high enough to get altitude sickness?

Unfortunately, I had no internet and no cell service to find out. Also unfortunately, my generator refused to start when I’d tried to use it to make coffee the previous day and my computer was totally out of charge. But if my problem was altitude sickness, then finding the nearest campground wasn’t going to be useful: I needed to get to a lower elevation.

I started driving. After an hour, I stopped and took a nap, because yes, the pain eased off some. Not entirely. I feel like someone punched me in the stomach a bunch of times and food is unfortunately still not an option. (I tried. Bad idea.)

And then I kept driving. Because the generator wasn’t working, I didn’t want to stop until I’d found a place with electric hook-ups, so I could charge the computer. And I definitely wanted a place with some decent cell reception so I could look up generator repair & altitude sickness & elevations of my projected destinations. And I also kind of really wanted a pharmacy to get something, anything, that might help me feel better. Plus, I was having a caffeine withdrawal headache, which only added to my misery.

Exhausted, aching, nauseous, I kept driving and driving. Watching the odometer. One mile at a time, that’s all I needed to do. And then another mile. And then another. I kept checking my cell phone as I drove for a Verizon signal that didn’t show up. I hate the No Service message. I get it less often with Verizon than I do with T-Mobile, but it’s still awful.

It was the longest drive through pretty scenery ever.

I wound up driving straight past Flagstaff — at 6900 feet, I could tell from how much it hurt that I wouldn’t be sleeping there. I’m now at Homolovi Ruins State Park and it’s still a little too high. At 4900 feet, it’s exactly where elevation sickness can start. I think I’d probably be better off a few hundred feet lower. But there’s electricity and a cool breeze and hot showers and I was seriously wiped out. I just couldn’t keep driving.

I still feel worried about eating any of my food — maybe this is food poisoning? — but I’m pretty sure from the way my body responded to the hills and valleys during the drive that nope, it’s altitude sickness. It really, really sucks. I thought altitude sickness was a headache, but wikipedia assures me that nausea and “excessive flatulation” can go along with the headache.

And you know, I know I should count my blessings: the worst day of my journey did not include an emergency room, a morgue, the police… it could have been so much worse. But it still sucks and I still feel miserable and I really wish someone would miraculously show up and deliver some soup and painkillers.

On the good news front, though, the Winnebago Travato Facebook Owners and Wannabees Group totally came through for me on the generator. Turns out the generator also suffers from altitude sickness, which is fine, because I am never going near a mountain again. (Probably not true. Probably a situational exaggeration. But I’ve definitely lost all my Colorado enthusiasm for now. Maybe I’ll be taking the southern route back east.) Ten minutes of reading old posts and I found exact instructions for how to get it going again. (Thanks again, Jake!)

I really want to write more about the Grand Canyon, but there is a bee buzzing around the van. Seriously, universe? Seriously? But I am going to go help it find freedom or else mercilessly slay it, ideally without getting stung. And maybe tomorrow I’ll try to write some more.

Sand Hollow State Park, Utah

20 Wednesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Campground, Vanlife

≈ 4 Comments

When I left off, I was driving around, grouchy and frustrated. Also hungry, confused about what time it was, and too damn hot. Both dogs were panting from the heat, even with the AC running as high as it could go. Finding a campground with electric hook-ups felt like a good idea. I’d passed a couple of signs for state parks on my way to Zion and according to the Allstays app, one of them — Sand Hollow State Park — had some sites with electricity. I couldn’t make a same-day reservation and it was already after five, but it was close enough that I figured it was worth a try.

Total, total score.

Campsite picture

The ranger who assigned me my campsite asked if I was okay backing in. Ha. This site is huge and paved and the easiest parking job I think I’ve ever had.

Sand Hollow is a newer park, I think. The sites in the westside campground are spacious. They include water, electric and sewer hook-ups, a shelter, a picnic table, a grill and a fire pit, plus plenty of room, both to park and have loads of stuff or loads of people. Seriously, there’s room around the fire pit for a twenty-person party, easily.

And the view is unbelievable. My site is at the top of a low hill, surrounded by mountains, a lake to one side. At night, the stars are amazing, but there’s also a town in the distance, so a sparkling necklace of house and traffic lights. Darkness here is beautiful. And the sunrise went on forever.

panoramic sunrise

Sunrise at Sand Hollow

Also, it’s been months since I had a water hook-up and it feels incredibly luxurious. I was pouring the requisite two inches of rinsing water into my dishpan yesterday and thought, oh, wait, I can use the sink. I actually laughed at myself because turning on the faucet and watching water come out made me so delighted. Running water! How exciting! But I haven’t had a water hook-up for most of the summer, so I’ve gotten used to using water jugs and being really conservative with my water use. I’m not being wasteful, of course — it’s still a desert, despite the big lake within walking distance — but it was nice to just thoroughly wash the dishes.

It’s also nice to sit still for a couple of days. It’s amazing that I’ve been doing this for over a year and I still haven’t figured out the best travel pattern for me. Maybe that’s because it changes? But I really don’t want to travel multiple days in a row if I don’t have to. Even if the drive is only a couple of hours, it’s tiring.

And no drive is ever only a couple of hours — packing up to move, then setting up at the destination, plus usually errands in the middle — always turns a drive into a day’s adventure. My shortest drive of this current journey was from Fossil Falls to Calico Ghost Town. I knew where I wanted to go in the morning, so wasn’t spending time along the way figuring it out, and the drive was under three hours and yet somehow, at the end of the day, all I felt like I’d accomplished was the move.

I also have to remind myself that I am not on an extended vacation. I read blog posts from fellow RVers who are visiting attractions and restaurants, hiking and kayaking and adventuring, and I feel like I should be doing more, more, more. But that’s not my version of #vanlife and not even the life I want to be living. Today’s adventure — taking a leisurely walk with Zelda around the campground, sitting in the sun while I ate my granola and yogurt, trying to meditate, looking at photos, writing a blog post — this is a good adventure. A really good adventure. If it includes some good words on Grace (yesterday I was seriously and maddeningly stuck, Max would not behave the way I wanted him to, grrr…), then it’s a great adventure.

And a great campground. If I didn’t have Grand Canyon reservations and a yearning to be back in Florida by the holidays, I would wander up to the front office and extend my reservation for a few more days. But tomorrow will be laundry and groceries (including buying new leashes for the dogs because somehow I mysteriously lost them between Calico Ghost Town and here), and then the North Rim.

All the gory details

19 Tuesday Sep 2017

Posted by in Campground, Randomness, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 2 Comments

I woke up yesterday morning and thought, wow, this looks like the scene of a crime. If I mysteriously disappeared, I wonder what the police would think when they investigated? It would have been a perfect location for it, too: the campground at Calico Ghost Town, a little east of Barstow, CA.

Calico cemetery sign

The cemetery would be an excellent spot to discover a dead body. Or rather to have a character discover a dead body. In real life, I’d really rather not stumble across any corpses.

At a busy time, the campground would have been the kind of place I hate: sites close together, basically a parking lot, with minimal outside room between one site and the next. But on a Sunday/Monday in September with no special events at the ghost town, there was plenty of room. I think there were about six campers/tents total in a campground with room to accommodate a couple of hundred. Perfectly comfortable.

And a deserted desert campground next to a ghost town? It’d be an excellent paranormal/horror setting. Or even a mystery/thriller. The town is cute enough that you could even do it as a cozy.

Or course, the real story of my personal crime scene was nothing so interesting (or depressing, I guess, depending on how you look at it.) As pretty much everyone I spend time with discovers, I am prone to bloody noses. Generally, my nose just starts dripping blood, a little gentle trickle. I feel a hint of wet, touch it with a suspicious finger or two, and yep, blood. It’s happened in stores, in restaurants, in friends’ cars, anywhere, everywhere. FYI, if you start dripping blood all over the floor in a public place, otherwise lackadaisical sales clerks will run to get you tissues or paper towels. It’s usually not a big deal — a couple tissues and it quickly stops.

Exception: the night before last. I think it might have been because the air was very, very dry in southern CA, but in the middle of the night, the blood just started gushing. Of course, it was dark and I couldn’t find the tissues and I was camped at a place where the van wasn’t connected to water, so I couldn’t just turn the sink on, and the dogs were underfoot — I wasn’t worried about it in the middle of the night, but in the morning… yeah, it was gross.

It really would have made a good fake crime scene, though. Especially because I also had my vacuum sealer out to store some chicken for later sous vide cooking. Vacuum sealers are great for storing food and really handy for sous vide cooking, but as I learned in Arcata, they’re also an essential tool for major drug dealers. Ha.

But I cleaned it up, of course, then took a shower (with much gratitude at being in a place where I could easily take a shower!) and dumped the trash with its excessive quantity of bloody tissues and paper towels, then headed out. We started with a visit to the ghost town, Calico. I’d arrived the afternoon of the previous day but it had been so hot that I just plugged into the electricity, turned on the AC and waited for it to cool down. A metal box is not a good place to be when the temps are in the 90s. But pets are allowed in the ghost town, so before moving on, we went and wandered around a little. It didn’t feel very ghostly. Mostly because even early on a Monday morning in September, it was filled with tourists — two busloads of them beat me there!

By 10 AM, I was in the van, ready to move. Suzanne and I had mapped out a route to the Grand Canyon back in Arcata. At the time, it sounded fun to take the scenic routes. And I’d thoroughly enjoyed at least some of said scenic routes — 89 around Lake Tahoe was well worth driving. But I was starting to get really tired of spending days behind the wheel. And I was also seriously mourning gas prices. It was over $4/gallon at places in CA as I drove south: in a vehicle that gets about 15-17 mpg, that starts to add up fast.

Plus, it occurred to me as I looked at my GPS, if I gave in and let the GPS take me where it wanted to go, I’d drive through Nevada and Utah, adding two more states to Serenity’s total. That’s a silly reason, I know, but… well, it amuses me. I’m up to 36 states as of yesterday. By the time I make it back to the east coast, I’ll only have 6 left in the continental United States that I haven’t driven though in Serenity: Delaware, Rhode Island, North Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and Michigan.

So, in the interest of gas prices, less driving time, and a meaningless checkmark on a list of states, I took 15 up through Las Vegas and across to Utah. In St. George, I started trying to figure out where I should stay. Alas, I fell for some wishful thinking. The Reserve America app, my favorite app for finding cool campgrounds, said that walk-ins might be available at the campground inside Zion National Park. I took a chance that they were right, had an absolutely beautiful drive, but gave up before I even made it to the campground.

The park was packed with people. It was Mt. Rushmore all over again, not quite so kitschy, but definitely an absolutely thriving population of tourist attractions. Nice ones — in a different life, one that included more money, cooler temperatures, and an assurance of dog safety, I would have loved to wander around the town that leads into the park. As it was, I stayed stuck in traffic long enough for all my appreciation of the incredible beauty to turn into grouchy annoyance and tired frustration. Then I made a u-turn and drove back to Hurricane, Utah, trying to figure out a good place to spend the night.

A good place to spend the night when the temperatures were in the high 80s needed to include enough privacy that I could run the generator to keep the dogs cool without feeling guilty about my neighbors or an electric hook-up.

Long story short, I found it. Electricity and more! But I will write about it tomorrow, because somehow it has already become mid-afternoon. Where do the hours go?!

Grace Lake

23 Wednesday Aug 2017

Posted by in Bartleby, Food, Randomness, Travel, Vanlife, Zelda

≈ 1 Comment

So we were walking along, climbing a hill, on our way to a trail that would lead us to a place called Grace Lake, which I wanted to go to purely because it was going to amuse me to write about visiting Grace Lake instead of writing Grace. I was planning the blog post in my head, about how even though I’m being a terrible writer, I’m having lots of fun experiences.

We’d just seen the eclipse and even though we weren’t in totality, it was pretty damn cool. It hadn’t gotten dark, but the light had definitely changed and there’d been a noticeable drop in temperature. But it was warming up already and the sun was beautifully golden. Nothing like an eclipse for making one appreciate sunshine. There was no real path to where we were going, so we were making our way along rocky ground, through scrubby bushes.

Blueberry bushes, in fact.

I’d gotten out in front with the dogs (three of them, all off-leash), probably because they didn’t care about blueberries and I, having spent hours already this summer picking blueberries, wasn’t all that excited about discovering the random leftover ripe berry on bushes that were mostly over for the season.

I turned and looked back. It was so incredibly beautiful — the mountains, the clear sky, the pine trees — that I pulled out my phone and took the above picture.

And then Reino (in the red shirt in said photo) straightened up. In an absolutely casual voice, he said, “Bear.”

I waited for him to continue the sentence. Bare what?

And then I followed his gaze, out across the hill in the other direction.

Oh. Right. Bear.

No, no, I mean, BEAR!

I did not take a picture. It didn’t even occur to me until later, actually.

Instead, I dropped to a crouch and put a hand on Zelda’s collar. She, of course, was right next to me. I held out a hand for Bartleby, who, upon the indication that a treat might be in store, promptly joined me. He wasn’t overly put-out by the fact that instead of giving him a treat, I grabbed his collar, too.

And then I realized that I didn’t have their leashes. I’d been carrying B up the hill before I set him down to take a picture, so P had my bag with their leashes inside.

So I waited. It felt like a very long time before P made it up the hill to me, but I’m sure it was about a minute. I think we were all torn between wanting to watch the bear and wanting to get the hell out of its way. If it had been going in another direction, we probably would have stood there and admired it, just like we’d been admiring the eclipse. An incredible feat of nature, right? But since it was trundling toward us, or rather toward the blueberry bushes that we were standing among, getting out of its way seemed like a very good idea.

It wasn’t until we were moving away that I realized I was maybe a little scared. I didn’t feel scared, but I know you’re supposed to make noise when you’re around a bear — they don’t want to run into us anymore than we want to run into them. And with three people and three dogs, there was no way a bear would approach us if it realized we were there. All we needed to do was make sure it was as aware of us as we were of it and our encounter would get no closer.

In other words, we needed to sing.

But I could not think of a single song lyric. Seriously, not a one. No Christmas melodies, no hymns, no pop ear worms, nothing. I had nothing. Total adrenaline brain fog.

Fortunately, my singing was not required. But we never did make it to Grace Lake.

Other things I want to remember:

Last Saturday, I met up with some internet friends and played games. (Betrayal At House On The Hill and Fluxx, specifically). It was very fun. I had the occasional moment of thinking that I really didn’t know the people I was with, but actually it felt like I’d known them forever, that I was a casual friend who lived around the corner and dropped in for games all the time, instead of being a real-life stranger.

On Sunday, we drove up to Stevens Pass. P is volunteering at Stevens Lodge this week, basically a hostel-like place for Pacific Crest Trail hikers to stay. It’s the first time it’s been open in the summer — usually it’s a ski lodge — so she didn’t really expect anyone to show up. Reino and I came up to keep her company and watch the eclipse. But some hikers did show up, so we got to meet some people hiking the trail, which was cool. I don’t really understand the desire, personally. But it’s always fun to talk to people who are in the midst of an adventure.

Before the hikers showed up, I was wondering if I could make eggs Benedict in the hostel-style kitchen. Many, many years ago, it was the thing that I wanted to make — the reason I wanted to learn to cook. I spent several months trying, with some moderate successes, but eventually decided it was just too much of a pain. Hollandaise sauce is hard to get right, and poaching eggs is a pain, and the timing of getting a warm toasted English muffin, plus the sauce, plus Canadian bacon, plus the egg, all right at the same time — it was just too challenging. But I’d brought some gluten-free English muffins at a store in Seattle and I was… well, just wondering whether I could get it right now.

Answer: eh, not exactly. My Hollandaise was a little thick, because I didn’t have enough butter, and my eggs kept rolling off the muffins, which I think means they were not quite done enough. And I didn’t have Canadian bacon, so I used prosciutto. Also the gluten-free English muffins were terrible, so bad that I threw away the leftovers. And I dropped one egg on the floor (literally) and destroyed another one, so that it was more like an egg drop soup egg instead of a poached egg.

But! If you want an appreciative audience for non-successful cooking experiments, you should definitely find some PCT hikers. One was a vegetarian so he got spinach with his muffin and egg and hollandaise, and another was gluten-free and very tolerant about the horribleness of the English muffins. Both were perfectly happy with my rather messy Eggs Benedict.

And it was close enough to good that I’m definitely going to keep trying. The Hollandaise is a bit of a problem — how often do I really want to make something that requires an entire stick of butter? It’s not like I want to use eight tablespoons of sauce. But maybe I can figure out how to make it and freeze it.

And this has turned into a very random blog post, downright disjointed, but I am posting it anyway and then getting on with my day. I feel like I have much to do and not nearly enough hours in the day. Today’s plan includes another sous vide experiment, some room organizing, an attempt at a new screen door — possibly very simplified, because my complicated screen door plans have not been working at all, and yes, some time on Grace. Oh, and also publishing a short story. I made a cover for it yesterday and I’m posting it to Amazon today. Hmm, that’s what they call burying the lede. But yeah, I’ll write more about that when it’s actually available. 🙂

How did it get to be Wednesday already?

Year Two Begins With a Splash

27 Thursday Jul 2017

Posted by in Serenity, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 5 Comments

Yesterday, July 25th, was the one-year anniversary of the day I said good-bye to my house and hello to life on the road. It started auspiciously enough in a Walmart parking lot in Minnesota.

Yep, my first Walmart parking lot. It was fine. Better than fine, really. The night before I’d spent in a Flying J parking lot in Indiana, and although I hadn’t slept as horribly as on my very first parking lot night, it wasn’t exactly relaxing, either. At the Walmart, I was out of the way, in a quiet corner, facing a field. I put the window covers up and slept as well as I ever do. Maybe it was Minnesota, too. While I’m sure Minnesota has its problems, the Walmart was the kind of place that had a trash can at every single cart rack and no trash visible outside the cans. Go, Minnesota.

Although I’d decided I was going to try to get to Mount Rushmore, when I looked at the map I realized that if I did, I’d miss the Badlands entirely. My plan had been to dry camp, aka boondock, in a primitive campground in the Badlands for a couple of days but I hadn’t realized how far west Mount Rushmore was. But, I figured, no problem — Mount Rushmore had been waiting for a year, it could wait a couple of days more.

I started off on a relaxed drive out of Minnesota and across South Dakota. I had plenty of time, so I took it slow, pausing at rest stops, reading, writing, checking email. Unfortunately, it just kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter. At one point, my outside temperature gauge read 103, and even with the air-conditioning running full blast, my temperature monitor was sending me alerts that it was over 80 in the van. Both dogs huddled under the AC vents.

When we got to the Badlands, I paid the $20 to enter — my first national park, yay! — and drove slowly through. I’d given up on the idea of boondocking at the cool primitive (i.e., no electricity) campground. Space was probably available, but we would have been miserable. And when I drove past the campground with electricity, I gave up on it, too. It was reasonably crowded so there might not have been space, but even if there was, it was in unrelenting sun.

But it wasn’t just the sun — it was windy, with that kind of dry wind that pounds at your ears and makes you immediately want to lick your lips again and again and again. If I had been a pioneer woman in South Dakota, I would have been one of the ones driven crazy by the isolation and the wind. I would have been hallucinating monsters and terrified to leave the house in no time.

So I kept driving. I’d been reading signs for Wall Drugs all the way across South Dakota — either billboards are cheap in SD or Wall Drugs has a lot of money to spend on them. Maybe both. Anyway, it sounded fun in a seriously kitschy kind of way so instead of the Badlands, I figured I’d find a place to stay in Wall and explore the town. Except when we got there, late afternoon, it was still so hot that I would never have been willing to leave the dogs alone in the van.

New plan: back to the old plan.

Mount Rushmore!

I checked online and Mount Rushmore is open until 11, so I headed that way. Between stops to feed and walk the dogs and dinner for me, it was after 8 when I got there. It was… interesting. Smaller than I thought it would be, but also more impressive in a way. From a distance, the faces are very high up on the mountain.

Mount Rushmore through a car window

Look close. The gray hills in the distance have the faces of the presidents on them.

I thought it would be good to see it in the evening, less populated, and that it would make me feel patriotic on some level. Instead it felt a lot like I had secretly drifted into a universe where Disney had taken over America. There’s a ton of stuff around Mount Rushmore, all aimed at tourists. I could see having fun there, if I had lots of money to spend on silly things, a kid to enjoy looking at random stuff with, and didn’t have to worry about dogs/heat. As it was, though, I decided against spending $10 to park, and did a literal drive-by.

I then went back the way I came, driving about another 45 minutes, until I reached the highway and a Flying J truck-stop that I’d passed earlier. My third night in a row in a parking lot! But it was by far the worst — busy, crowded, with a casino nearby and a ton of trucks. People wandered by the van until late at night, and I was awake until after midnight, then up at 5:30.

When I woke up, I just got behind the wheel and started driving, thinking that we’d do the morning routine — clean clothes, coffee, dog walks, food — at the first rest stop. Reasonable plan, except somehow — sleepiness, I assume — I missed the first rest stop and it wasn’t until after 8 that we finally reached one. Poor Z had been staring at me earnestly, the way she tells me that it’s time to go for a walk, for about forty minutes by then.

And the bathroom floor was sopping wet. I had a fleeting second of wondering if a dog had given up on me but it was clean water. Clean water, unfortunately, coming from behind the toilet. Yeah, a pipe broke. I then spent all day — the first day of Year Two — trying to deal with it.

If it wasn’t so damn hot and if I hadn’t been driving all day and into the night for the past couple of days and if I hadn’t slept in parking lots for three nights in a row, I think I’d be dealing with it a lot worse than I am. I think I’d have the energy to be really pissed off about how many things have gone wrong with this tiny house on wheels and how Winnebago’s approved repair place wants $150 just for agreeing to see it, plus $175/hour to work on it. I feel like fury and frustration are reasonable responses, but I’m just not feeling them. It’s tedious, but it is what it is.

On the other hand, if I weren’t so tired, maybe I’d be making better choices for how to deal with it, too. But it definitely feels like Year Two has started with a whimper, not a bang. Or maybe that should be a splash and a sinking feeling? At any rate, before I discovered the water, I drove out of South Dakota, through a tiny (beautiful!) corner of Wyoming, and into Montana, so I am now hanging out in yet another parking lot, this one in Billings, Montana, hoping to fix some broken plumbing before moving on, and wishing T-Mobile had coverage in Montana, which apparently it does not.

Updated: no internet, so couldn’t post, and it is now Thursday morning. I’m still feeling fine about the plumbing problem, maybe better than fine. It’s annoying, but it is what it is. I found a place in Billings able to take a look at it this afternoon, so it might be resolved soon, and if not, I’ll use bottled water. The lovely Facebook Travato Owners group has given me lots of advice and help about trying to fix it myself, but it feels ambitious to try to remove the toilet on my own. In 90+ degree heat. In a random parking lot. Yeah, not optimistic about that. But hey, at least the leak sprays water into a room with a drain in the floor. And a plastic floor, too. It could be worse!

Caesar Creek State Park, Wilmington, OH

24 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in Campground, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 2 Comments

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 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.

salmon and salad

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…

Happy Birthday, Serenity

29 Thursday Jun 2017

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

≈ 6 Comments

A Winnebago Travato

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 in Grace, Randomness, Vanlife, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Blueberries

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.