Wandering By Van

Something happened about ten days into our vacation.  We stopped worrying, we stopped thinking about whether or not this van thing was a good idea and I for one stopped thinking about our home life and my wife later said she stopped thinking about whether we should take a hotel room for a night for a change... We had adapted to van living.

We had known we would, from our experience of living on a. boat, a space about three times larger at least than the 72 square feet offered by the van. We had talked about the likelihood of mixed emotions and regret and buyer's remorse and adapting, and we knew before we picked up the van we would adapt. Nevertheless when everything clicked and we started having fun we both felt a sense of relief.

Parked one night at a Harvest Host in a field we heard a neighbor shooting in a nearby wood. Rusty, chased and shot at when a stray in the Redlands of Homestead, stuck it out for a while but in the end the volleys wouldn't stop and he crept...into the van. The reluctant van dog found safety in our mobile home. All three of us were adapting.

I think it's safe to say we would keep going if we could. I find the van easy to drive and cruising down the highway at 63 miles per hour is something I can do at my advanced age for twelve hours a day no problem. We have found our routines, washing up brushing our teeth emptying our trash and adapting to heat and cold as we go.

We are learning to cope in the van and trust our judgement, to find spaces to park and be unobtrusive. We have ordered some "stealth shades" which should be delivered by the time we get home. With them in place our windows will be an impenetrable black allowing us to park in plain sight no lights showing. We have no bicycles or boxes or anything obtruding and our future plans, post virus are for street parking and urban exploration, museums, art galleries, restaurants all within easy reach one fine day.

This bridge incidentally is what I would like to see across North Roosevelt, with a winding ramp at each end to allow strollers and bicycles to cross the Boulevard in safety...Way too controversial I'm sure for a town with 23,000 residents and 25,000 opinions.

Once you are aware of camper vans they become obvious and I see them around Key West. I find the Promaster easy to park among cars.  On this occasion we were at the laundry which is an operation that doesn't bother us as it does some people. We came away clean and ready for everything.

Rusty likes getting to enjoy the outdoors like he does at home. However at home he has a dog door in the sliding French windows so he comes and goes at will. Here we have to let him out but every time we can he gets to do what he wants. One night he was outside and we closed th sliding door to keep mosquitoes out. He seemed to take it badly when we went looking for him at bedtime and we had to spend time reassuring him he wasn't being left behind.

You get to see views traveling like this that get repetitive but never less pretty. I love the change from my everyday life, woods streams hills and different flowers.

This orange beauty was all curled up and closed next morning. The flower that sleeps at night apparently.

I guess this is why we enjoy the van and actually might prefer it to  -gasp! - to a boat.  Driving a small box gives you access to places never seen from the beach. A friend who traveled a piece of the Mexican coast with us on our boat twenty years ago pointed out the limitation of that style of travel making it difficult to go inland. We now notice it too as we pull into whatever attractions we find roadside still permitted by the coronavirus limitations.

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan offers its own foods including pasties which are pastry meat pies traditionally speaking.  Originally they were developed in Cornwall in southwest England where tin miners took pasties to work for lunch. They are supposed to be portable and filling with meat and rutabagas potatoes and carrots in a portable wrapper. These hit the spot:

I learned a short while ago of a Northern English variation called clangers which are half pasty and half set pie to give you main course and dessert in one pastry! Not yet found in the U.P.  They had excellent jams though alongside their road food:

Rusty is getting better at treating the van as home and enjoying the access our road life gives him. He seems to enjoy northern woods with different smells and cooler temperatures. Why he prefers puddles to our clean filtered water I cannot say. But here’s the proof:

The hard part about going into retirement and shrinking your life to a van is to wonder what next? Traditionally old age is the time to settle down and be an elder, to share wisdom and to live close to a first class hospital...Old age on the road smacks of being a tramp not an elder.  And yet it seems to my rational self to be a time to settle some questions, to see those things not yet seen, to accomplish a few last things before the curtains close forever. It would be a shame to not go for fear of not having a place in the ER when the time comes.

And then there are the options made available by a monthly income, as, in point of fact we are going to be retired with our government pensions. When we were younger we rented our home, sold our stuff and took off with $15,000 we raised from the sale of our California convertible...Every dollar we spent was a buck we never made back. In two years if all goes well we slip off the working routine but the checks keep getting deposited. Yay!

That opens other possibilities for us peripatetic old timers: renting. We looked around Michigan on a. summer vacation and wondered how pleasant would it be to rent a modest summer dwelling and settle for a few weeks. We didn't pursue the fantasy of course as we only had a few days but the possibility and the allure of staying in one place to learn more about that place was definitely there. The leaves change color, the mood fades, and off we go to check out a winter beach in Mexico where outdoor living may not require a winter rental. We may lack many survival skills but flexibility isn't one shortcoming we suffer from.

You can adapt a van to whatever you want. I saw parks and trails that deserve more attention, lakeshores that could be a place to stop for a while in a state park perhaps. The possibilities are endless.

On this trip we have had to focus on the outside wonders of this great country, the woods, the hills, the views while ignoring the art and culture of the cities which make a much too comfortable home for coronavirus. Our dog has not been sorry to see pine forest and thick leaf mold and shaggy shrubs. For a dog brought up in South Florida and abandoned in Homestead Rusty has been learning a lot of new stuff.

Just like on a boat there is a certain deep seated pleasure in making your home mobile. To walk the woods and come back to the familiar space filled with your own memories, your own artworks, your books and music and clothes is quite special.  As I write this at my little desk behind the driver's seat sitting in a field miles from anywhere familiar an afternoon thunderstorm is bucketing down water. Rusty is snoozing on the bed and my wife is reading and the van is drumming to the sound of water hitting the metal sides and roof. Gannet 2 inside is dry and not just warm, perhaps even stuffy so well is the Golden Van insulated.

Layne likes to cook and with 600 amps of lithium batteries onboard we can run all her induction burners, convection oven, fridge/freezer and 3 quart instapot without giving the power consumption a second thought. The twin alternators recharge the batteries in less than three hours of driving if we have run them down with prolonged use of the rooftop air conditioner... Such power resources combined with a huge water tank give the van the feeling of being  a home not a camp. Fans and lights and water pump work as we want them without concerns about consumption and that feels luxurious.

It has been an enormous privilege to be able to go off the map, to make our own routes, to see if not visit properly small towns in woods never seen by tourists. You may not want to sleep alone in the woods but a van even less over equipped than our traveler could offer a sports fan a comfortable space to go to a game, a hunter a comfortable secure retreat, a family a place to put not just a toilet but toys to take to the beach or the lake.

The subject no one wants to talk about is the toilet and that reticence cracks me up. Skip this if you are easily scared by your own bodily functions. I love having my own toilet and my wife and I have often been made grateful by easy access to bladder relief.  Modern RVs and boats have several choices for toilets onboard and we spent our share of time trying to figure what might be best for us. 

We went with the humble porta-potty, a moulded toilet seat clipped to a tank with a sealed opening between the two. Some manufacturers try to make their toilets resemble home toilets with extra doodads to make disposal easier but I like a simple tough and leak free toilet.  Emptying the toilet is my job and it has never bothered me. I've had shitty disasters on. my boats and I find it easy to get the seals changed and wash up and forget the whole mess. For other people emptying  that darned porta-potty would be traumatic. 

For some the idea of a fixed toilet with electric flush and a fixed tank which you empty only occasionally using a hose to pour out the contents into a "sanitation station" might be a better answer. Composting toilets are fashionable but I'm not a fan. You need to do your own YouTube research if that solution interests you. I have considered a dry toilet where you line a bucket with a bag, throw in some kitty litter and toss the bag in a dumpster when it's time. That is my back up solution but so far we stick with what we have. The sink and shower drains we have flow to a "gray water" tank with means we don't have to dump anything on the ground when we are using the toilet or the kitchen sink onboard. Leave no trace. 

The reality is that whether you live on a boat or in a. van you live life much more intensely. Yes you deal intimately with your waste, but you also feel the weather much more intimately. You can't retreat to your den or the game room on a wet afternoon.You can go to the library or stay on the beach till sunset if you don't have to drive home. You do tend to live publicly and that's something you need to consider.  I had a lot of worries about that as I am by nature fairly private in real life and I had no desire to act out the scenes of my life in front of an audience of passing strangers. Oddly enough, like so many fears, that one has yet to materialize.

To my surprise the van offers more privacy than you would think looking at it parked in a car space in front of Trader Joe's in Evanston Illinois (above). Layne was shopping and I was sitting at the table in the Great Cabin writing up my blog while I had a Verizon signal. People were walking by and  I found the insulation built into the van, the smoked windows and the comfort I felt being in my home, separated me from the world outside in a way I had not thought possible. Living on the road is possible, just as easy as I found living on a boat separated from people by a body of water and my anchor.

America is a funny old place, full of contradictions dictated by a difficult cultural past full of compromise and learning to live together. Van life is in my opinion a totally American phenomenon. Not only is this the land of different lifestyles but this also the land of wide open spaces, public land and endless possibilities. Live in a van? Why? Why not? There, figure that out and cheer the next non conformist you see sitting on the street.  It might be you!

Smiling Bear Dunes

My wife the master of the malapropism was telling a friend of hers over the phone about her latest achievement..." I climbed the dune at Smiling Bear in Michigan" and that image hasn't left my head.

To be a tourist in Michigan means you to visit the Sleeping Bear Dunes on the western lakeshore and we dutifully pointed the nose of the Promaster in the direction of the Sleeping Bear which may or may not have been smiling.

Access is wide open and free and easy so we got there as fast as I could wake up and get our camper van in gear. It was light at 5:30 so we were off with sleepers in bed and me alone at the wheel. That was when I passed a construction site and saw a rosy dawn colored opening across the water and snagged the first picture at the top.

Dogs are not permitted on the dune climb, and I can only imagine the inconsiderate among us have failed one too many times to pick up after their animals in that giant sand pit in the sky. So instead Rusty and I took off on a cross country ski trail(!). That was a first for both of us however as it is summer the temperatures even in the frigid north didn't allow for actual snow just yet so we walked like normal people while my wife made her way to the top of the first dune.

It looked steep but at that hour the dew was still heavy and I suspect the sand was glissading less than it might at noon which apparently makes the walk to the lake a two hour feat of endurance.

The van I parked in a quiet part of the vast spacious parking lot which dd not stop a youthful berk from parking right next door as we returned so I had Rusty paused while the mask free dope faffed around preparing for his epic hike. 

Rusty didn't think much of the pet prohibition as he is always perfectly behaved, mostly, but he took it in stride.

Evidence that Herself made it to the top and with no great difficulty she reported. All those hours of watching work out tapes in quarantine. She misses the gym but she has favorite trainers on video in this modern and messed up era.

Hordes of coronavirus fanatics clumping together on the main part of the dune.

Me being slick with the reflection in the side window of the van:

You might ask yourself who cares about a sand dune but I have to say that aside from the incongruity of the location, a geological accident left behind by a careless retreating glacier millennia ago, the size of the thing, the purity of the sand and the steepness of the slopes are quite fascinating.

I hope my pictures give some idea of the grandeur of the spot, and if they don't you need to trust me that this place is worth a visit.

And if not the dune then the Pierce Stocking scenic drive just a few miles south of the main dune climb.

A local fellow who worked as a woodsman and came to love the forests of Michigan built a seven mile loop through the woods and let people pay to drive between 1966 and his death ten years later. 

The road, here overlooking Glen Lake said to be the most beautiful of all, was added to the Sleeping Bear Dunes Lakeshore in 1976. I heard a run they charge $25 to drive the loop which seems a bit steep.

When we drove into the road a new entry station appeared to be under construction but the road was open and unattended. So we drove. Here's the man responsible:

We stopped along the drive at a scenic overview and once again congratulated ourselves on being able to park our long van, 21 feet overall, in car parking...

The views were worth the drive of course and the stop.

The information board from the National Parks Service invited the viewer to imagine stepping up here 8,000 years ago, the first human to see this countryside...

It was, I have to say an evocative thought. My wife has a national parks passport now she is 65 and I always appreciate these spaces preserved forever (I hope).

I noticed no No Pet signs and without thinking too hard about it we walked up the trail and found ourselves on yet another dune with An Awful Warning. Don't get stuck at the bottom because to rescue you from the cling will cost $3,000 and put rescuers in danger. Made sense to me and Rusty showed no inclination to take a downhill slide. 

I hope the pictures speak for themselves. Visibility was gorgeous. Temperatures were warm, near 80 degrees I think but not such that you burst out sweating. There was a cool breeze off the water. As a visitor who was on her third visit to the dunes remarked, conditions were perfect.

She said, from a. safe distance, that it was worth while being here on a cloudy drizzly day, though for myself a bright crisp sunny day added markedly to the experience.

It was a place fit for contemplation.

And relaxation.

I did not go close to the edge. Apparently some young adults had made the trip to the bottom to try to beat their record back up of 25 minutes.  I just found the whole drop off creepy and at age 62 I am happy not risking my new improved pelvis in another pointless adventure.

I am grateful to the positive chorus of voices telling us to visit the dunes and make the scenic drive.

If Michigan with its beauty hasn't impressed you nothing will in my opinion.

We spent several days and Harvest Host nights in the Traverse City area, a circle about an hour's Dave from the city and we would have stayed longer. My wife is form that the soonest I retire is 2022 and she has a point, more money etc... but were it up to me I am close enough I'd just as soon kept going, aiming south only with the onset of winter. These parts really are that pure.

Harvest Hosts

While I appreciate the notion of stopping in rest areas may sound a little odd but easy free stopping is valuable for us when we are driving between areas we want to visit in depth. Interstate freeways get a bad rap as they deny the traveler the ability to experience the places they are driving through and I can't disagree, however the ability to get somewhere is also useful I find, and rest areas are much easier to deal with than motel check ins. We pull in and walk Rusty, brush our teeth (the sink drains to a holding tank thus no mess) and go to sleep. In the time it takes to unload your luggage in the room and find the soap we are snoring.

And then for those times that you aren't rushing hither and yon there is Harvest Host. Layne the navigator runs through the app which includes a map to pinpoint the locations. Harvest Host is an adventure and it's not meant to be the equivalent of KOA, the sort of corporate experience that guarantees the same service and identical facilities at each stop. The philosophy here is the total antithesis of the franchise  plan and it is truly amazing, an overused word that I try to avoid. Amazing. Consider me amazed.

Beer, ribs and fried chicken. That was our fee to stay at a ski resort.  A ski resort?? Yup, in the ever astonishing Upper Peninsula of Michigan (thinking we were still in Wisconsin - idiots loose on the road) we stayed at Indianhead Mountain Ski Resort.  If you wanted to participate in corn hole tossing, or whatever it's called that was an option. The family participating eight feet away did a lot of laughing as you do in these situations. The views were spectacular as you might expect at a mountain resort.

The thing about Harvest Host is any outdoor activity with room to park a few RVs is qualified to participate. In low season pack in four or five campers and you get a few extra sales at the bar and at dinner time. The black beer was 5% (my maximum bitterness) and flavorful and delicious and I had two because all we had to do was walk Rusty across a field to find our own beds. No driving required after imbibing at Harvest Host.

We find some Harvest Hosts are more to our taste than others and you will too. Some are free with dogs and others require leashes. We got a shower at one but only because they mentioned it. You can only stay one night unless they offer you a second one. Never ever ask. Some might offer electricity but most offer spaces to park and you are expected to be completely self sufficient. Generators are frowned upon which is okay as we don't have one but if you must use it that say do it briefly to get your charge up. The rules are obvious for grown ups.

One Harvest Host offered a shower, another offered us popcorn along with a dog to help consume it. Rusty watched and waited his turn...in between playing with the other dog. No leashes required obviously.

Harvest Hosts can be goofballs or quiet and reserved. One farm we parked at had seen an RV sink into a mud patch and required towing out. If that sort of thing throws you out of gear then maybe you need organized camping or state parks and nothing wrong with that. This is what I like:

Rusty and I got up at dawn and I soaked my sneakers in dew because I was too stupid to put my Crocs on, but we had an excellent walk through the vineyards, more or less together. This stuff is very nostalgic for a man who spent his young summers on a farm in central Italy. Let me say right now I have no regrets about emigrating because this work is hard. My sisters still do it, farming and hosting and I know it's not an easy life.

It's easy though to pay $79 a year and become a Harvest Host member. Want to stay at a distillery? They've got that. The restaurant and tasting area was so crowded we called a Coronavirus Veto and didn't visit. Oh well, next time once we are vaccinated...

The rules for these places are simple: you can't sleep in a car, in a tent or in a tent on a car (Overlander-style). Be neat tidy quiet and unobtrusive and plan to spend some money. The idea is to support a small business and we are all ready to do that. Taste some wine, buy a gift, a meal or food to go. At one place we got several pounds of home cured pork in various forms. We tasted and bought wine, we ate breakfast served at our van:

We have parked in fields, alongside woods, alone and alongside strangers who thanks to Coronavirus remained strangers, but we have also parked in parking lots. I also swam in Lake Michigan at one host's private beach. No seriously.

While there Rusty met a local whose owner told us stories of growing up in Michigan while we stood in the lake and she watched her (human) child dipping in the Great Lake.  These I assure you are magical memories. Rusty learning to drink the ocean was a crack up.

If you like Thai food I know a Harvest Host who is Phillipina and travels with her husband to Thailand and brings back extraordinary recipes. I'd rather stuff my face on organic vegetable green curry with flounder than pay for a cement pad with hookups in a row of RVs. The cost is the same, the only difference is the RV park will let you stay as long as you want and Harvest Host keeps you moving. Your choice, your needs. I Love America.

These fabulous people actually want you to stay. It's weird but I am getting over the feeling that I am intruding or taking advantage. Harvest Host shows you the America we all fear is disappearing.  It's alive and well and quite visible from your RV.

Gratuitous Rusty picture: