Category Archives: Vanlife

June in Pennsylvania

04 Sunday Jun 2017

Posted by 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:

Fields and trees

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.

unripe blueberries

Merritt Island

20 Thursday Apr 2017

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

≈ 3 Comments

sunrise on Merritt Island

I read an article about #vanlife in The New Yorker today and it made me resolve to take more pictures of flowers and sunsets. I’m much better at sunrises, though — at sunset, I somehow rarely have the patience to sit and watch the sky, the way I do at sunrise.

This morning’s sunrise was spectacular. I’m drivewaysurfing again, this time at my friend Lynda’s in Merritt Island. She’s a writer friend, so when I invited myself to stay for a couple of days, I told her we would do lots of writing. Hours of writing! Many sprints! Words, words, words!!

Instead we sat and chatted, then went to the grocery store and bought delicious food for dinner. She got to do all the cooking because the dogs were not happy about being left on the porch by themselves and it’s too hot to leave them in the van, but it was lovely to sit outside on the patio as the sky grew dark and talk about life, the universe, and everything. She’s one of those friends that I can talk to for hours without ever feeling like the topics of conversation are running dry. #Vanlife – at least an authentic representation of #vanlife, for a solo traveler – includes a lot of silence, so it’s not a surprise that given the chance to talk endlessly I’m taking it. But we’re still going to get some writing done today!

I’m still waiting to hear from the dealer about Serenity‘s two final fixes. When I called them on Monday, they said the parts should be coming in next week sometime, so I’ve given up on getting out of Florida for now. When the days are hot and we’re trapped in the van, I regret that enormously — listening to the generator rumble while the sun blasts down on the van is not my favorite activity. But sitting here on Lynda’s porch, two sleeping dogs next to me, a view of the canal before me, listening to the sounds of drifting water and trilling birds, feeling the light wisp of a breeze… well, Florida doesn’t seem so bad.

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Wekiwa Springs

17 Monday Apr 2017

Posted by in Campground, Vanlife

≈ 4 Comments

the moon over wekiwa springsI wasn’t planning on writing about Wekiwa Springs because a) I’m only spending one night here, mostly so that I could dump the tanks, and b) I’ve been here before, years ago, so I figured it would be familiar, nothing much to say about it.

On the tanks, for future reference for myself, ten days without dumping worked okay, largely because I avoided washing dishes or taking a shower in the van, but I was starting to get occasional whiffs of latrine. Seven days, as long as I shower elsewhere and am cautious with dishwater, is no problem at all.

On the familiarity, ha. I have been here before, years ago, and I have reasonably clear memories of it. My parents camped here with their motor home and R & I came and spent time in the campground with them. We swam in the springs, cooked on the grill, ate dinner outside at the picnic table. I remember it as scrub pine forest with sparse trees and sandy ground covered in brown pine needles. Somewhat desolate and barren — nice enough, but very different from the lush green vegetation around the springs.

Duh. It had recently burned back then. The landscape along the road was still blackened with dead plants and ashes. Fast forward a decade or so and it’s all lush and green and beautiful. But walking along the road this morning I kept being struck by the clear demarkations between one type of green and the next, as if the universe had drawn sharp lines between one terrain and another, instead of letting them smoothly blend together. It wasn’t the universe acting capriciously, though, it was fire — a long-ago fire, now.

That said, in other ways, it’s still much like I remembered. Sitting outside the camper, enjoying the breeze, the loudest sound I hear are some crows yelling at one another, but the second loudest and far more continuous is the traffic. From where I’m sitting, I can see the trucks passing by on the road. And when I got here yesterday afternoon, the park itself was closed due to overcrowding. The springs are a popular destination. Deservedly so — they’re a great place to swim, with water that’s refreshingly cold in Florida’s heat. But it’s the kind of park that you will be enjoying with lots of other people.

The campground, though, isn’t a parking lot. There’s lots of room & lots of vegetation between sites. Sure there are plenty of people here, but it still feels peaceful. If the weather wasn’t so hot — it’s supposed to be in the 90s by the weekend — I could see being perfectly happy to settle in here for the next few weeks. I saw wild turkeys this morning while walking Zelda, and I bet if I stayed long enough we might see a black bear. The warnings about them are prominent and I’m guessing one might have gotten into a nearby dumpster last night, based on the morning’s scattered trash, which looked a little too widely scattered to be raccoon mess.

I was disappointed with the results of my morning’s photo efforts, though. My dad thought I ought to be getting a camera instead of a zoom lens for my phone and now that I’ve had a chance to play with the zoom lens, I’m thinking he was probably right. (You were right, Dad!) The lens is part of this set: CamKix 9 Piece Camera Lens Kit for iPhone 5. (That is an affiliate link, so if you buy it from that link, something like $1 of your purchase price will come to me. On the other hand, you’re probably not going to buy it after I keep writing about it, so don’t worry that I’m getting rich. :))

The zoom lens is very nice if you have lots of time to set up your shot, use the tripod, can focus evenly, and don’t mind using the case that the lens attaches to, which both prevents you from using other cases and doesn’t look like it would offer any protection at all to your phone. All of my photos this morning came out so unusably blurry that I just threw them away as soon as I had a chance to look at them, even the ones of the wild turkeys. The photo at the top of the post was actually taken without the zoom lens.

And before I left for our walk this morning, I had to take off my phone’s case and put the phone into the lens case. The chance that I am actually going to remember and be willing to do that at 6:30 most mornings is… nonexistent, really. I’d be far more likely to remember to hang a camera around my neck.

Of course, the lens was a lot less expensive than a good camera would be and it is fun to play with. But unless I turn into the kind of person who wants to carry around a mini-tripod and patiently set up for long-distance photos, I suspect it’s mostly going to sit in its box. It’s just not convenient enough to work for me. If it came with a better case, one with some cushioning to protect my phone when I drop it and a cover for the screen, I’d probably get much more use out of it. As it is, I suspect mostly I will use it to try to take pictures of birds right outside Serenity’s windows. And that will be fun, but it wasn’t what I was imagining.

Bah, somehow it is almost 10AM and I have to get moving. My one morning at Wekiwa is rapidly slipping away from me! I’m still trying to figure out my next plans, but I am also determined to get some words written on Grace this week. Fortunately, I’m going to spend the next couple of nights parked in a writing friend’s driveway and I know she’ll encourage me!

Lake Medina

26 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Campground, Travel, Vanlife

≈ 5 Comments

deer at Lake MedinaI’m thinking of trying to find a telephoto lens for my phone. I seem to be taking a lot of pictures where the thing I wanted a picture of is just a dark blur in the distance, mostly of birds, of course. When I was at Dauphin Island, another visitor to the bird sanctuary pointed out a peregrine falcon to me. I have now learned enough to know how cool that was — they’re rare — but in my photo, the falcon is just a brown blur at the top of a tree, not discernible as a bird.

This morning, Zelda and I set off on our walk. We’re at Lake Medina, at a Thousand Trails campground, and I was headed up through the campground. There’s a nature trail that I was headed to, but I wasn’t sure how far away it was. But we were barely down our own block when I spotted a deer. I gasped, holding my breath with delight and surprise. And then I fumbled for my phone — fumbled, because Zelda was very interested and tugging at her leash — but before I could get it out, the deer bounded away.

I sighed with disappointment, but then shrugged, resigned. It’s not like the picture would have turned out, anyway. The deer would have been a brown blur against trees. Zooming just makes it blurry. I kept walking. And then gasped again. Two deer! So cool!! And then I opened my eyes a lot wider — way, way more than two deer. There were six. No, eight. No, ten.

I’d never seen so many deer in one place (outside of a zoo) in my life. So I took some pictures of blurry brown spots and we kept walking. More deer. More walking. More deer. More walking. More deer! At one point, I could see fifteen of them, all females of different sizes. At another point, I could see three males, all with small antlers. Zelda and I wandered for a couple of miles, up to the top of the campground and back down again. We never did go on the nature trail, but then, the nature was right there, so we didn’t really need it.

I’m parked by the side of the lake and the view in front of me is dusty ochre rocks and scrub for probably five hundred feet, then blue lake, then in the distance low dark green hills. The day is gray and cool, possibly going up to 68, pretty clearly so overcast that the sun is not going to shine. And my weather app just let me know that it’s raining within ten miles of me. Not a surprise. I have to say, Texas is really just a lot wetter than I ever imagined it would be. Of course, if I wanted sun and heat, I could have stayed home in Florida, so that’s not complaining, it’s just… noticing.

Yesterday I broke my fiction-writing streak. For 12 weeks, I managed to write 1000 words a day, six days a week. 74 days total of writing. But this week I missed two days. And on a third day, I really didn’t make 1000 — I was more like 850 when I finally gave up. There’s a part of me that wants to write 3000 words today and count them retroactively but I don’t know, it seems like lying to myself, and why bother? I’ve written 74,000 words in the past three months and I’d like to give myself credit for that, without making myself feel like a failure for not having written 76,000.

I can’t remember if I’ve written about goals vs systems here yet  — well, I know I have written about it, more than once, but I can’t remember if I’ve posted anything about it — but it feels like keeping a streak going is more of a goal than a system. In other words, a negative approach to life instead of a positive one. In my positive, system-based approach to life, the system is to write 1000 words a day and I can be successful today without caring about whether I met yesterday’s goal. That feels much healthier.

I’m still going to continue using Streaks, because tracking my activity is helping me push to do more. When I started, one of my “tasks” was to walk 3000 steps a day. That’s not a lot of steps — about a mile and a half — and I often walked twice that. But sometimes I walked less, too. Since I started using Streaks, 83 days ago, I’ve walked at least 3000 steps every day, gradually upping the task to 4K, then 5K, and now 6K. This past week, I broke 10,000 (4.3 miles) three times. I’m pleased, of course, that my streak is 83 days strong, but I’m more pleased that I’m steadily going farther distances, and tracking lets me see that improvement. Of course, now that I’m considering this, it’s possible that my multiple long walks had something to do with the early bedtimes that interfered with my writing and that’s not a good trade-off. But whatever, I’m not giving up on Streaks. I’m just acknowledging that I broke my writing streak and I’m going to start a new one. Today.

Right now, in fact.