Month: March 2017

Glampers Beware

It is amazing to me that living in California for nearly 20 years we had never been to Joshua Tree.  This made it the obvious first national park stop on our way out of SoCal.  The added benefit was that it was only a few hours away from San Clemente, so we could get a few miles under our belt pulling the fully loaded airstream without taking on a whole day of driving.  As Martha would say “this is a good thing”.

We had only done one practice trip of any significant distance prior to going all in on this 24/7 journey.  I know that sounds a bit crazy, but that trip was smooth as silk.  Our towing set up was perfect and everything rode great! The optimists that we are high fived ourselves in our minds and thought of course we nailed it and we can do this!  During the journey to Joshua Tree we quickly learned that there is a difference between doing a weekend vacation in an RV versus towing everything you own in one.  There are many different adjustments to make to get it “just right” and you can’t do that going 65 on the highway.  So, we stopped more times to make adjustments than people traveling with kids stop for bathroom breaks.  Still a majority of the time Gary was white knuckling it behind the wheel!

I don’t know if we were crazy or brave (probably both), but we were also going to take our first crack at “dry camping”.  That means no hookups at all.  No electricity. No water. No sewer. Let me make this clear WE ARE NOT CAMPERS.  We are people who love to travel and being able to bring our home (and our creature comforts) with us.  I guess that makes us glampers, but you have to admit we are fully committed glampers!

We wanted to take advantage of amazing park scenery and stay inside Joshua Tree National Park.  That meant we had to bring in our own water with us and leave if we filled our tanks and had to empty.  We also would get to test out our shiny new generator.  We weren’t exactly roughing it 🙂

Little did we know that the Joshua Tree campgrounds get packed on the weekends.  There are two campgrounds in the park that take reservations, but the rest are first come first serve.  Since we were too late to get reservations we decided to take a shot on the first come first serve spots.  We quickly learned for those spots you either get super lucky or come in on a Monday/Tuesday instead of Thursday/Friday to get a spot ahead of the weekend campers.  After grilling the Park Rangers and waiting it out a bit like stalkers at the ranger office we ended up in the super lucky category and got a great spot in Indian Cove Campground.

Once we got settled we realized it was the first time we felt like we were experiencing exactly what we envisioned for our journey: national parks, amazing scenery, and being right smack in the middle of nature outside the matrix.

  

Best thing we did? 

Hiking of course!  We did a few short hikes on our own and saw the obligatory Skull Rock and Arch Rock (a teaser before heading to Arches National Park).

  

But, the best hike was spending time with friends Ziv & Jackie when they came to visit us from Pasadena for the day.  We hiked to Barker Dam…it was a short hike with a beautiful oasis at the end to reward us.

The best part though was how Jackie & I can still be as silly as five year olds.  We wanted to take a fun pic of us jumping above the giant boulders, which in hindsight required a coordination we did not possess.  At least we made ourselves laugh with our gagillion attempts to get the perfect posed jump.

        

Thankfully our hubbies have patience for us and Gary was able to capture at least one perfect pic:

Best thing we ate?

This is easy…we are persimmon lovers and have even planted our own tree (when we had a house that wasn’t on wheels of course).  While checking out the local farmers market in town with our friends before lunch, we got to try wonderful artisan bars made by Greyback Granola with ingredients sourced from local farms.  The Persimmon Pecan Raisin was redonkulous! We bought a quite a few of them to keep us going during our airstream adventures.  But, I have to say the Apple Lemon Clove was surprisingly good too.

What we learned?

Visiting National Parks is expensive!  Investment in the America the Beautiful annual pass is 100% worth it.   It is $25 -$30 to get in to most national parks and the pass is only $80 and is good for all national parks.  Best money we spent so far!

Another important learning was those old school paper manuals are important when you don’t have Google at your fingertips!

Since we had no electricity at our campground, our fridge should have been running on propane.  Well, apparently that is only if the connection is working!  Day one we were too busy/exhausted to notice, but the morning of day two it was obvious all of the food we just bought was getting warm.  Sure enough our fridge was not working.  This was something we should have thought to test on our practice run…no wonder it went so smoothly!  After multiple trips into town to get wifi and YouTube potential fixes, we finally got our fridge up and running.  Too bad it was two days too late!

The last thing we learned on this stop was to be aware of the generator use windows and use them every time you can!  Saving water was easy for us, but we didn’t realize how quickly we could use up our battery power.  One night we were in the dark with our iPhone flashlights trying to get ready for bed.  Thank goodness we had those charged otherwise we would have been like cave people trying to see with actual fire!

Next Stop:  Detour…East Coast bound

Taking the Red Pill…

Our adventure begins in San Clemente.  Not far from “home” in miles, but light-years away in lifestyle.  Our goal is to exit the matrix – take the red pill with gusto and never look back.

This idea started last year when we decided we needed to do something extraordinary while also making our day to day life simple – we first thought about moving to Italy and restoring a house (love) and we still may do this later.  However, the more we thought about it, we hadn’t even really seen the country we live in yet.  Also, at heart we wanted to find a place where we could eventually settle down (that wouldn’t cost an arm and a leg like so cal!), enjoy things we have always dreamed of doing when we had more time like gardening, woodworking, etc. and have a base to travel the world.

Gary, the researcher that he is, came across YouTube videos, blogs and all sorts of information on people in RVs traveling the country and living full time. Some favs are The More We Explore, Mortons On The Move, and Gone With The Wynns  We didn’t even know this was a thing, but it checked so many boxes for us…

√ adventure

√ travel

√ eas(ier) than figuring out the visa situation for traveling out of country

√ a way to figure out where we wanted to settle down (eventually)

For some reason this living full time in an RV didn’t sound crazy to us…it sounded amazing.  The lifestyle seemed to fit us…we don’t have a lot of material things (we tend to buy houses vs household stuff).  Also, since we have worked together from a home office over the last five or so years we knew we could be together for a crazy amount of hours and not drive each other (too) crazy.  It was a quick decision because it just felt right.

So, we spent a few months prepping:  finding an airstream and truck to pull it with as well as paring down everything we had and moving into storage what we wanted to keep.  We (mostly Gary) worked on planning the route we were going to start out taking (West Coast first, then East Coast) and come February 6th of this year we kicked off our journey.

First Stop: San Clemente State Beach, California

This stop was more strategic than anything else.  We needed to be close enough to load everything into the airstream and finish up anything else we needed to do in the OC.  The first feeling we had was relief…finally after months of planning and what felt like we were waiting for so long, we were finally out of our boring apartment and living in the airstream for real!  This initial week was very exciting because we actually did it, but it was also still stressful at times as we were running around trying to get everything done before leaving this place forever (or at least until we come back to move our storage stuff to our forever home).

Our intent on this adventure is to learn and grow through our experiences.  We will use a few questions at each stop to take a breath and reflect so we can document our travels to be able to look back and remember what we did and how we felt.

Best thing we did?

Saying goodbye to friends.  We spent time having dinner and catching up with friends before we left.  During our time in Southern California we learned and grew so much and we appreciate the friends we met along the way.  Even though we were saying our goodbyes knowing that we wouldn’t see them anytime soon, we know we are lucky to have technology to keep connected along the way.

Best thing we ate?

This is easy – our first night full time living in the airstream we of course had to have a celebratory toast with something fizzy.  Queue the Prosecco and charcuterie.  Somehow it tasted better in our 200 sq ft space than in a fancy restaurant.  Plus we had an ocean view from our spot! We hope to bring out our inner foodies as we go through different towns and get a chance to try local specialties.

What we learned?

First of all, we learned we were still in the matrix.  Even though we were physically living in the airstream, we were still packing in every minute of every day driving in traffic, doing errands, and basically stuffing a week’s worth of tasks into every day.  Slowing down will be a process and we have to recognize that and set the intention to do so.

Some more practical tidbits we learned:

  • While rain is soothing to sleep to, it creates wet sand and mud which tracks everywhere in this small space.  A good doormat and swiffer wipes will be key!
  • We thought we were making great decisions about paring down and what we were taking…we tried to utilize space the best we could with collapsible bowls and spices in magnetic jars, but how did we end up with a 5 lb bag of rice and an espresso machine that takes up the entire kitchen counter??? We were able to let go of the rice (otherwise I was going to have to use it as a pillow), but the espresso machine stayed.  We will either make new friends with it by offering coffee shop quality espresso in the remote national parks or make enemies by frothing milk at 6 am and waking everyone up!

Next Stop: Joshua Tree