Morning Walk

 Rusty and I walked yesterday  morning, our last in Brazil, round the neighborhood where we slept in Santa Vitória as we awaited the vet papers.

We stopped by the vet yesterday to check in and thought what the hell this is a quiet neighborhood let’s just sleep here, so we did.

The joy of the self contained camper means we can drive park and step into our home in a vehicle no bigger than a delivery van without having to step outside. 

We had a modest dinner of cheese and crackers after our large midday buffet, watched some tv and that was that. 

The odd thing is with Starlink on the roof and an iPad combined with a virtual private network (VPN) set to Miami for sentimental reasons, we stream Prime and Netflix just as you do at home. Modern electronics combined with a comfortable van home make long term travel relatively effortless.

Vacation travel is limited by time not money and experience is the value yielded by the money spent and the precious  time away from work. 

So on vacation you take the tours, march up the mountains, eat exotic foods and spend money as this slice of your life is an experience. People we know used to say to us “I love being cut off from the Internet when I’m on vacation..”

Then I would ask if they had Internet access at home and they said of course. Obviously my point is that we aren’t on vacation and the way we pull that off is by making our van our home. 

It’s our home aboard GANNET2 because we have what we need plus we have what we want. We aren’t staying in rented accommodation explaining ourselves to the staff, expressing our pleasure with our wonderful trip and so forth as you do when you check in to a hotel in Latin America where automation is more expensive than hiring minimum wage workers to welcome you. 

We close the door and Brazil fades into the background. Layne cooks, I wash up the dishes, we talk about our day, we watch tv, we watch Rusty sleep on our bed. It’s just a matter of being home. 

The best attribute a van dweller can have in my opinion is curiosity followed of course by adaptability. You need to enjoy driving too and I read the words of people who find driving to be a drag yet they have chosen (excluding those forced by circumstances) to live a life on wheels. 

GANNET2 is very well insulated, thanks to Custom Coach Creations in DeLand who built our interior. That’s a good thing when it comes to coping with heat and cold but the other benefit is sound insulation, making street parking or truck stop parking or rest area parking no bother at all where noises can be loud. 

If you like to drive and have curiosity combined with a well insulated camper you have the foundation for a happy life on the road. I’m not suggesting anyone could or should become a nomad, those are the baseline attributes of a happy life on the road. In my opinion. 

When we paid $92,000 in 2020, roughly $38,000 for the Promaster and the rest for the conversion and taxes, we knew we were building a home for retirement most likely including extended foreign travel.

And we had a pretty good idea it would work. We had both traveled a great deal including spending years  on a sailboat cruising Central America and the Caribbean so we knew the small space shouldn’t be a problem for us . 

We also had requirements, a separate toilet  compartment with a door, a full kitchen, lots of water in a built-in tank as we wanted to live as we used to at  home on Cudjoe Key.

In other words I didn’t want to be plugging in battery banks or shuffling jugs of water. We have outlets, a water faucet and a full electrical system that we don’t have to deal with all the time especially now we have powerful solar panels on the roof to charge it automatically. 

Of course we have limitations one being I wanted no hot water to create more mechanical things that could fail and after living in a boat Layne is content without a full shower. We use campgrounds and truck stops and we carry a solar shower for outdoor use and of course lots of wipes.

Consequently when we close the doors at night we are tucked into our own world at home. We aren’t unpacking suitcases or out on the streets looking for dinner. We are at home. 

And that is what makes long term travel not only possible but enjoyable. Some days are aggravating just as they are for anyone. 

Then you walk the dog and come home to a plate of cold cuts and a glass of wine and talk it out, curse the Brazilian officials or the mechanic or the overlanders who acted weird and you move on. At home you recharge your batteries. 

If you are camping in a messy disorganized home pushing stuff aside to find your phone charger or forced to clear a space to boil water it won’t feel like home. At least that’s how I feel about it. 

The question then becomes how you pay for it and in the States these days how do you live in a vehicle without drawing negative attention from neighbors or the law? 

I suppose a small unobtrusive mini van might be best but for me, old and no longer so limber living crouched is not fun. Webb Chiles is heroic in his ability to live in a fiberglass tube on bouncing ocean waves but me? No chance. 

So that’s how we live, scrunched in a van by the standards of people living in normal homes referred to derisively as  “sticks and bricks” by people determined to be heroic nomads.

However those same people who take refuge in vans to avoid catastrophic homelessness sometimes view us as snobs in an unnecessarily expensive upper class van. For some reason there is a human need to classify all of us by type and genus. And not always positively. 

The same thing happens among overlanders. There are the cyclists and motorcyclists in their own camps, the four wheel drive fanatics who think driving paved roads is boring and so forth. And there’s us, the cotton tops in an expensive delivery van.  

I find the fun of travel overcomes the irritants of daily living. Mostly. Layne is much better than I am about taking things as they come. I wonder if we should worry about what we’ll do when we are too infirm to manage being nomads. She shrugs and says we’ll cope when that happens. I suppress my natural urge to overthink. 

And then there’s me always trying to figure stuff out because I’m curious. Check out this Chevrolet the like of which you’ve never seen. Chevy has deals with Chinese car companies to build tiny cars, give them an American badge for prestige and they sell a ton of Chevys you will never drive to the levee. 

People look at our Promaster and whisper “Ram!” in awe. I tell them it’s the cheapest modern van sold in the US, a Frankenstein of a van, the chassis from the Fiat Ducato with the engine of a Jeep. They know better: it’s a Ram 3500. They nod knowingly when I confess it’s a V6 with 3600 ccs. And just to make it unique it runs on gasoline. I must be a Rockefeller to be able to afford a gasoline powered van. I point out gas is cheaper than diesel in the US but disbelief is written all over their faces. 

Thats what makes travel interesting. But that’s also what makes being able to shut the door and be at home refreshing. No explanations are needed. 

Then there’s Rusty. He’s learned to get along with local dogs. In Mexico he’d see street dogs and run for the safety of GANNET2 but he has learned how to travel as well. 

Sometimes the barking overwhelms him but he has learned the nuances of life on the street. 

He confronts them now and calls their bluff. He snarls and they back down, he asserts his dominance and they stalk off. 

They don’t fight, no one wants to get hurt, he makes his temporary presence known and they walk away. 

And people do feed the street dogs. They aren’t starving like they are in Mexico. 

But they scavenge and patrol their neighborhoods and find this intruder in their midst. They check him out and move on.

The ones that bark are the trapped dogs defending their turf. They aren’t starving but bored and they’re yapping gets boring too. Rusty ignores them mostly. 

We’re walking and suddenly he stiffens, his tail goes up. I have no idea why but sure enough, in the distance…

If he gets a bad vibe he might cross the street or even turn back but these days that almost never happens. 

The entire crew of GANNET2 is on a cross cultural journey.  For as long as we can.