Before the Facelift

Eco is our 18' travel trailer that takes us on adventures far and wide. After 2 years of vacationing with her, we realized that she needed some modifications. Every time we took her out, we came up with more and more ways to organize, change, modify, and generally rearrange her guts to make our trips more comfortable. Follow her journey here.


Wayfarer to lands unseen


Original interior - forward


Original interior - rearward

She is small inside, measuring 15' long and 7' wide. But she has everything we need. Stove, sink, microwave, furnace, toilet, shower, tv, bed. Just like home, only smaller! Much smaller.

Immediately after joining our family, we knew she needed changes. Some of them have been minor, some have been fairly dramatic. And some are subjects of ongoing discussion about how far we can push the envelope of long-term livability with her.

We are just finishing some major overhauls this weekend, prior to our trip to the Russian River after Labor Day, so I will take a bunch of photos and detail all of the modifications in my next post.

Home on Wheels

Eco

That's what we call our RV. You can see a picture of Eco to the right, and more detail on her own page at the top. She's an 18' micro-light travel trailer, and we have had her since July of 2008. In that time, we have been on several trips with her, and have been modifying her for more extended use.

See, I grew up camping, mainly in the woods of Minnesota and Wisconsin. Boy Scouts and all. And in my early 20's, I took an extended solo camping trip around the west. So after Anja and I married, I wanted to get her involved in something I enjoy so much. She had never been tent camping before, and I quickly got her hooked on the great outdoors. Most of it.

Several years ago, we bought all kinds of camping gear. OK, I bought the stuff. I love gadgets, and I especially love gadgets designed for things I like to do. New lightweight tent. Sleeping bags. Cooking gear. Boots. All the cool stuff I thought you needed to enjoy the outdoors.

We headed up to Sequoia National Forest, and spent a weekend. See Sequoia Hangover for that particular episode of hilarity. A month later we took our youngest son Dylan with us. Had a blast, went hiking, saw deer wander right into our campsite, had a bear snuffle around our tents at night, saw tons of stars sitting around the campfire. But there was a problem. An age-old problem. Old age.

Our backs just couldn't take the abuse of sleeping on the ground. We had fun, but we never really relaxed. Everything ached, and everything felt dirty. This bothers Anja more than me since I am a guy, but I was sort of miserable too, and I couldn't figure out why.

On the trip home from Sequoia, Anja got to daydreaming about being able to camp more comfortably, and the possibility of getting a boat. Her daydreaming usually involves talking things out. My son and I quickly disabused her of this notion, both of us realizing how much work and money a boat can be. As the discussion wound down on that subject, she spotted an RV. And then she noticed all kinds of them being pulled, driven, towed, and everything short of flown, down the highway that holiday weekend. I could smell the gears turning and burning in her head, my back started to ache like the living room was going to be rearranged again, and my wallet suddenly felt a whole bunch lighter.

2 weeks later we were driving off with Eco. We didn't know the first thing about RVs, but we have learned more than I ever thought possible, and have had some great times. Our trips to Zion, Sedona, and Yellowstone have been some of the best times we have had, and we always look forward to the next trip in Eco.

When we lived in the north part of San Diego, we stored Eco at a lot that was close by, but had some restrictions about hours they were open. We like to leave for a trip early in the morning, and they were only open from 7-7. So often we had to wait around to get Eco, then spend time hitching up. This would seriously cut into the plans for the trip. And we had to plan to make it back into town with enough time to drop her off before they closed. And they were also closed on holidays, which was a major pain, since that is when most people have vacation. Sure it was cheap, but once we downsized and moved closer to work (see earlier post), it became a hassle to drive all the way up north to get Eco, especially for short trips. So, didn't take her out for months at a time. She sat idle, unused, a little lonely I think.

We finally decided to move her closer to home. Now she is in a 24-hour a day lot 10 minutes from home. A bit more expensive, but much easier for us to get to. And planning our next trip seems so much easier. We can pick her up any time we want and hit the road. We can stop by and check in on her. She sits out in the hot sun all day, never complaining, just waiting for our next adventure together.

The drawback? As we have used her more and more, for longer periods than a weekend, we have come to the realization that Eco needed some adjusting. For that ongoing saga, check out Eco's very own page at the top of the blog here. And for the legendary trips she has mostly been a part of, see Adventures up there too.

Less Stuff

My wife and I are in the process of radically changing the way we live, along with the how and the why.

Our kids are grown, and once we started banging around the mostly empty 3 bedroom condo we were living in, we decided that we needed less. Less space, less clutter, less hassle. So, we moved to a 1 bedroom apartment much closer to work. The commute is down to 15 minutes, rather than 60+. And we have gotten rid of stuff. Lots of stuff.

We started out with a garage at the new place, but a couple of months ago we decided to get rid of it, and all the junk in it. Because that's what was in there. Junk. And $75/month was coming out of the checking account to store stuff that we just didn't need. We had already downsized quite a bit, but this was the final push. We felt like if we could live in this 800 sq. ft. apartment, things would be better.

Some things were donated. Some things the kids took. Some things were sold. And some things went straight to the trash. In the end, only a few things ended up back in the apartment.

I don't know if everything is better, but the less stuff we have, the better we feel. True, it takes some getting used to, having less stuff. We're still working on it. Just looking around the kitchen, I think I need to do a better job of sticking to the "one in, one out" philosophy. Nothing new comes into the house without something else going out. Not sure exactly where I heard that idea, but it is making more and more sense.

See, the kitchen is a hard room for me. I love to cook, and I love cooking gadgets. Not that I need an avocado slicer. Or an olive grabber. They're just fun to have. The olive grabber especially, because it's sort of like those coin claw games where you try to get a stuffed animal or other cool prize. Sometimes you just don't know what kind of olive you are going to come up with. Now that I think about it, I can't remember the last time we used it for grabbing olives. Anja uses it to get the cherries out for her vodka collins. Maybe we do need it.

Anyway, we've continued to examine what we need vs. what we want. A lot of this is tied up in our desire to be debt-free. But I will talk about that some other time. So here we are, crowded into our little apartment, and what do we decide to do, but get a dog. Anja convinced me that a Miniature Schnauzer would be perfect. So Sasha entered our lives. Now, dogs are not necessarily considered stuff, but they do take up space. And all their stuff becomes your stuff, and you have to find a place to put that stuff. Looking back, I don't think we got rid of anything when the dog came in. That may have been a mistake. At 4:30 in the morning, when Sasha needs to go out to pee, I can think of something that should have gone out, but then Anja gets up and makes coffee, so I decide the trade-off is ok.

Having Sasha has made us even more aware of how much stuff we have. Like how many objects we have that have cords that dangle off of them. Or how many pairs of shoes I have. It's easy to count them when they all get pulled into the living room and chewed.

Several people we know have started following our example of downsizing their lives once their kids are grown, and they all seem pretty pleased with the results. Once you step out of the mindset about your supposed obligation to own a home that this country crams down your throat, it's pretty easy to get small in your life. You learn want vs. need. You place a value on things that hadn't been there before.

Over the next couple of months, we are going to be carefully looking at everything we own, and seeing what we can get rid of. We want less stuff. Because with less stuff, the stuff you keep becomes more important. With less stuff, you stop focusing on stuff, and start focusing on what's around you, the people, the relationships, the time spent together. The important stuff.

So, what am I doing here?

By "here", I sort of mean in the existential sense, but more in the blog sense. I have started this blog to chronicle the second half of my life (maybe longer if I reach my goal of living to 100).

I am a creative person by nature, and without some sort of creative outlet, I start to go nuts. Not locked up nuts, but mope around the house nuts. Can't sit still nuts. Take up a new hobby that costs too much nuts.

I am a graphic designer by profession, but in the back of my mind I have always wanted to be a writer. Fiddling around with a blog seems like a good way to satisfy a little of both urges.

That's what I want to write about.

I want to write about a lot of things, explore a lot of ideas. Some would say I want to expound on topics just to hear myself think. I'm not sure if that's entirely bad. The unexamined life and all. I want to talk about my passions in life, like traveling, photography, and my cute little dog. Sappy, but true. I want to explore some of the ideas that percolate around in my head, some new, some old, some obviously insane. I want to grab a current topic and wrestle it into submission, look at it from as many angles as I can, and then let it go, without the referee stepping in. I want to try my hand at some creative writing, and suffer the internal struggle everyone who creates goes through.

But mostly I want to have fun. Oh, and live to 100.