How I Live Aboard

Usually the consideration of how to live in a vehicle revolves around the type of vehicle required and a great many people who ponder becoming van dwellers, voluntarily at least, ponder the machinery of this way of life. Imagine sticking this Lance 650 on the back of your four wheel drive pick up, for $35,000 you could go anywhere. 

Or if you would like to set up camp in the wilderness and drive your four by four into town for supplies you might prefer this:

Pretty cool eh? The variations are endless and in summer you’ll see a thousand identical all wheel drive Sprinter vans trundling down the highways to the hip locations, quarter million dollar machines factory built to feed the imagination of young wealthy new generation campers. You can spend a lifetime watching YouTube and going to Overland shows figuring out what you need, or want or wish you could afford. Or you can get on with it. Go to South America and buy a van for $12,000 ready to go in Chile:

Our van was designed by us to do two things, be a home and take us on the road avoiding campgrounds and plug ins most of the time. We knew our goal was Patagonia but we also knew we weren’t looking for a vehicle dedicated to just one journey. 

This meant we had to plan ahead to live and travel in places where RV facilities are rare or non existent and where repairs could at best be bodged. So we skipped hot running water, a built in toilet and complex electronics. 

We wanted a separate toilet compartment. A home isn’t a home if it doesn’t have a toilet, or worse yet if you have to pull the toilet into the middle of the living room floor to take a shit. Even married couples need time alone. And I am not going to join the composting toilet fad because it is complex and to my mind unsatisfactory. 

We put baking soda, cheap and found everywhere in the world,  in the toilet for the smell as RV fancy chemicals aren’t available in Latin America. We put our used toilet paper in a separate trash can so our chemical-free sewage can be emptied anywhere, pit toilets, public baños, cat holes without fear of ruining enzymes and cesspools and so forth. Or leaving a toilet paper trail in pristine woods. Don’t like dealing with your waste? You’ll get used to it which is easy for me to say as it doesn’t bother me at all and never has. 

RV shows will display the latest fancy inline water filters and ultra violet water cleaning systems but you better believe they don’t sell them or repair them south of the Rio Grande…

…so we use a Berkey filter which is said to be good for years and thousands of gallons. Naturally their proprietary filters were copied and sold online for a fraction of the price (and this system isn’t cheap) and smart alecs who saved money found they were cheated and sued Berkey! We carry a spare set of filters and buy purified water for our tank when we can which is always in Latin America and even Layne’s compromised immune system has had no problems. But again, it isn’t automatic and you have to be prepared to go through the steps to use it. 

In Mexico we siphon purified water but in the US we plug in our hose which is too easy.

I have become so used to traveling in GANNET2 I find myself wondering where my amenities are when I’m in a car. In the van I can make a cup of tea waiting for Layne to shop, I can use the toilet parked on a street and I do, and as we cruise the freeway my co-pilot can bring me a cold drink from the fridge or make a sandwich. With a comfortable range of 350 miles on a tank full of regular I have been known to drive half a day without stopping. Alternatively we pull over and take a nap on our queen sized bed.

I suppose the question is do I miss the roominess of a house or the convenience of unlimited instant hot running water and the answer must be obvious. The freedom from maintenance and repair, the absence of bills the ease of using a laundromat and leaving it far behind works for me. 

In my opinion the true measure of whether or not an RV is a home is when the weather turns bad and a day indoors makes you crazy or not. RV life is weather dependent it when that goes wrong your tin box has to be a capable space to live without driving you mad. So far we pass that test. 

The fashion nowadays is to describe driving in dirt as “overlanding” where I think of that term describing foreign travel. I can’t imagine living in a tent and making that home with a wife and dog. Some adventurers do it and enjoy it. To me the thing is to be on the road.  As a callow youth I took a motorcycle and a tent and went to Africa and felt like I was fully equipped. All it takes is wanting to go and the rest will follow along. The years of sitting at a desk and working overtime were all part of the plan which sees us now living debt free and saving money every month. 

I do not feel deprived. 

Living In A Van

“I understand your life in a van,” Webb laughed as we prepared to say goodbye.

Not everyone does but he has done more with a smaller space than I shall ever do. Not everyone gets nomad life on four wheels, not even some of the people who themselves choose to live in vehicles. 

I am without doubt the happiest I have ever been living in a van and I can’t speak for Layne but she says she is enjoying it too. We will probably have to or want to settle down done where one day (St Petersburg is my preferred Florida location) but there is no date set for such an eventuality. There is always the chance we shall die in the road and we have made provision for Rusty to be rescued should that happen.

When I was young in the 1980s the opportunities for wild camping and living in a vehicle were limited compared to the massive array of machinery and tools on sale today. In that respect a boat offered a much more self sufficient traveling home and we sailed Central America for two years and a dozen countries with two dogs and no hookups. 

All of which combined with more conventional travel adds up to a lifetime devoted to the complex yet fundamental act of going away. I grew up being absent, I was always a temporary fixture in other people’s lives. I spent most of my time in boarding school and vacations came and went in a blur of travel between home in England and home in Italy and back to school. Thus to find myself merely a smear in the passing days of other people’s daily lives is normal for me.

I enjoy (and Layne says she does too so we should take that as given) looking for parking, for services, for changes in latitude each day on the road. There is no slipping into a routine here, no getting to know the pizza guy’s name  or watching the plumber’s kids grow up. There is no Norman Rockwell community to conform to and for most people especially youngsters that’s not easy. 

My lazy boy is the driver’s seat turned to face backwards at a small folding desk where I eat, fiddle with my cameras, read and write. My toilet is two steps away and my bed three. You could say I live in a prison cell. 

Except for the open road, the absence of routine and supervision my prison cell sized home is a ticket to anywhere.  For me van life is as freeing as sailing is for Webb. 

But there is no need to get so extreme. An RV is a useful tool for a vacation, to visit a national park, to see grandchildren grow. A boat is a weekend escape, a tool to improve by checking the West Marine catalogue for gadgets not imagined. 

The vehicle is simply the means of motion. What gets you going is the desire to go. A thought sent to me from Webb before we had lunch together yesterday:

You will like this quote from Robert Lewis Stevenson:  'I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move.'

That’s the foundation of my life and always has been. 

The World’s Biggest Truck Stop

Two years ago we met Ron and his Ford F150 camper van in San Carlos, Sonora. We met him again last year and we traveled with him on and off down the Pacific Coast of Mexico. 

He lives in Iowa in a tight knit mid western family but he is a traveler by inclination and he takes off at the drop of a hat. He also invites us to visit him in his home near Kalona about as central to the center of Iowa as you can get. 

Some excellent cheddar cheese and some Belizeans trotting by in a horse and buggy as though we were back in Spanish Prospect last winter. Life in Kalona. 

We got to sleep in an actual Iowa soy bean field. Ron’s parents are as sweet and patient as you might imagine but Ron’s capacity for mezcal has not diminished. We went to bed after setting the world to rights. (Layne and Rusty gave up early). 

There was some consternation between Kalona and Richmond as live music was not heard Tuesday night at the Bridge. It turns out excessive heat was to blame, Iowans wilt in one hundred degrees (as do we in point of fact).  

It’s as though you walked into a Hollywood set, the river flowing and the cicadas creaking and Clint Eastwood either as a thwarted lover or as a steely eyed lawman could have popped out of the shrubbery. 

I am sorry to say not all of Iowa is lyrical, pastoral and dreamy. There is a hard reality underpinning it all and that starts with Interstate 80 the great connector and truck route a couple of dozen miles from Kalona. 

We stopped in Iowa city for cheap gas at Costco, thirty five cents less than the average $3:69 price around the state. I notice no difference with fifteen percent ethanol but the subsidized price (thank you fellow tax payers) is pretty low in some gas stations. 

Iowa 80 bills itself as the biggest truck stop in the world. 

Upstairs there is a barber a chiropractor and a tooth cleaner among other services. It’s a pity this place isn’t in Nevada because god knows what else might be on offer to make it really interesting.  

Rusty probably wished this place was a long way west and out of his life. 

He got as long a walk as he wanted but he paid for it later. We are going moochdocking in Chicago so this seemed just the spot for smelly dog:

And it’s right next to the truck wash though all Rusty wanted to do was escape as he waited while we rummaged for a five dollar bill in the van, as the credit card machine wasn’t working. It was a slow execution for our water phobic dog. 

Seven minutes later he was fine scampering and shaking off the moisture the hair dryer (!) failed to remove. We put him aboard GANNET2, turned on the roof top air and went for a walk. 

I know I sound like an idiot but it was your average truck stop writ large. I don’t know what I expected. 

We got an Orange Julius for old times’ sake and wandered around looking at truck parts, and $3,000 in-cab refrigerators and microwaves sold as a kit for self sufficient truckers. 

The bored trucker can check out 1953 Internationals and 1979 Petersons on sale where a conventional market might offer news of the weird. 

We got some cleaning supplies and pressed on. 

The parking lot was a vast burning desert with the car half of the lot  packed,

while the truck half was…

…half empty at lunch time. 

Been there, done that. Got the dashboard cleaner to prove it. Oh and the ice cream headache from the giant Orange Julius! 

Nebraska East

Charles Edwin Bessey,1845-1915, American botanist. 

Bessey worked at the University of Nebraska where he ended up as Chancellor. His claim to fame is helping develop the method of naming flowering plants - taxonomy they call it. But what attracted my interest was the naming of this park, campground and plant nursery after him. 

Bessey’s advocacy created a place where plants are grown to reforest Nebraska’s Sand Hills to create what these tough plains people call wind breaks. Furthermore this place supplies trees to reforest national forests. 

And we got to camp here for ten bucks a night with our senior national parks pass. Pretty snug it was with hot showers and an electrical hook up which we wanted to run the air conditioning all night. The  summer heat is still fierce across the plains, more than a hundred degrees by day and only a bit cooler at night. 

Rusty rather enjoyed this wooded oasis and we walked a lot of it in the morning as the heat index rose in preparation for another over heated day.

I peeked into the pit toilet and saw what looked very much like one of the brooms made at the Territorial Prison Museum in Laramie. I wonder… 

I should have liked to stop and stay but we have moochdocking appointments in and around Chicago  which is not nearly as scenic as the places we have been. More sand hills for instance: 

Anselmo Nebraska has a population of 107 and lies in Custer county if that helps. The village made the news last week when a nasty wreck killed the driver of a pickup. 

A semi transporting cows clipped the back of a tractor traveling on the main highway and the semi tipped over killing three cows. An oncoming pick up couldn’t stop and the driver was killed. 

I had an inkling I might like to stop and walk but it was still early and we had some driving to do. 

So we drove on through. 

And here beginneth the corn and soy fields. We’d started to leave the sand hills behind. 

Albion Nebraska is full of churches and banks but surprisingly not many people were walking the burning sidewalks after lunch. 

1600 people live here and at a cooler time of day one might imagine it bustling. 

The three of us huddled under the rooftop air conditioning and took a nap. The heat was enervating. 

Cows standing suffering in the heat. We had Chinese style tofu for dinner. 

School is back in session which makes this the best time for pensioners to travel, no crowding no families no reservations needed. 

We stopped in Omaha to get cheap gas ($3:30) and then some P.F. Chang’s to celebrate our 29th anniversary. On the way out of the box chain store part of town we tripped into a neighborhood called Benson and that is where Ted had Wally sell some excellent ice cream. 

Actor Nick Nolte used to live in this historic neighborhood, and I bought ice cream there. That’s enough for anybody’s neck of the woods. But then Bruce reminded me Warren Buffett lives in some modest tract house somewhere in this city of half a million people. So there’s that too. 

We ended up in Iowa for the night across (“acrost” in the local dialect) the mighty Missouri and we were plugged in again to stay cool in this powerful heat wave. Not a bad day’s work and the ice cream was very good.