fulltime vandwelling

Everything Rolls: Lessons From the Road

Living on the road full time has proven to be even more drastically different from “real life” than we’d anticipated when we began this adventure almost two years ago. We assert that it’s waaaaaay better (for us), but there definitely have been a whole lot of lessons we’ve gradually been learning along the way. These are all things that we’d never had to consider when our house didn’t move, and it’s funny when we find that our new behaviors are now so deeply ingrained that when visiting friends in their stationary houses, we still anticipate things falling out of cabinets whenever we open them, for example.

I thought I’d list a few of the funnier lessons we’ve learned in the last year and a half.

Never trust the flatness of any surface, no matter how level it may look. Everything rolls. Put that egg on the counter without hovering your hand above it for a second first, and you’ve got a cleanup job in between you and breakfast! It’s not a matter of will it roll, it’s what direction, and you better be ready.
Always open liquid containers slowly, because you’ve more than likely changed altitude since you last closed it. I mopped up a whole lot of wasted sunscreen, shampoo, and ketchup before learning this lesson. You can’t trust a bottle on the road.
You can’t take people’s recommendations for the “best food in town” unless you’re in your home state, or at least a neighboring state. Regional tastes vary so much that Yelp has been rendered useless to us. You just don’t know what the ideal flavor profile is. We’ve gotten tips from locals about where to go for dinner for the “most amazing Mexican food we’ll ever have” only to discover that in that state, sweet marinara-flavored salsa is the standard, among other atrocities.
If you see a sign for a free dump station and potable water that’s right on your way, it’s going to be a good day.
There are loads of great places to park when boondocking downtown. One of them is not the local newspaper office. At 3:30 a.m. the trucks pull up and idle while metal doors are flung open, and the workers chat loudly while tossing heavy piles of paper into their trucks. This all happens six feet away from your face. Newspaper offices may seem harmless, but they’re hazardous to your sleep.
Never assume that the mess you don’t feel like cleaning up right now is your secret. A house tour could happen at any time. We vandwellers just love to check out each other’s setups, and if you meet some fun fulltimers and you slacked on clean-up duty that day, you’d better just come to terms with them being in close quarters with your dirty dishes and sandy dog cushions, because you just can’t forfeit the tour swap!
Let yourself wake up enough in the morning to realize where you are before opening the back door and hopping out. Just because your back yard has been the woods for a week doesn’t mean that you won’t step out—in your pajamas and —into the middle of some town’s morning commute.
We also just recently learned that we are Napa Blue. You really do learn something new every day!

Let’s Refurbish a Van – Part 7: Our Batteries Phase 1 (By Andy)

A Post by Andy

{Note: The work detailed in this part of the post was completed over the summer of 2015, before we moved into the Turtle. I am just getting to writing the post now.}

So, we like to have our computers run, have lights, have the controls for our fridge work, have a charged Wi-Fi hotspot, and have our furnace fan powered to keep us warm. For all this we need electricity, and since we want to be off-grid, we need batteries. We started with this:

If you are familiar with the Turtle, this compartment is behind the largest access door on the passenger side- the door with the vent in it. In the following photo, I put in a dotted line where the plane of the floor on the inside intersects the compartment.

The walls of the compartment above the floor line are plywood, and bump up under the couch inside. The sides and bottom below the line are made of heavy steel. I have deduced the compartment was originally designed for a generator, as there was old 120V AC wiring running to it, an unconnected fuel line that ran into the back, and the door vent.

I had a hard time figuring out what all the wires were hooked to, as it was a bit haphazard in the compartment. In the above picture, (1) is a port that goes outside, below the floor of the Turtle. The wires there threaded out of the box, ran a short distance under the Turtle’s floor, then threaded up through the floor to the old inverter. There is a second hole (2) that the wires from the old 100W solar panel and the wires between the battery and main 12V distribution panel were run. (3) is the unused electrical box that had 120V AC wires run to the compartment where the shore power cable is housed.

Maybe I should back up a bit and throw out a few concepts and definitions and explanations for the terms we will be using.

Battery: A thing that stores electricity in chemical bonds. Here, we are just referring to 12V lead-acid batteries.
12V/12VDC/DC: 12 Volt Direct Current (DC). This is what cars use for their electricity for headlights, the radio, starting, etc. It is the kind of power all the batteries we talk about will produce.
120v: 120V Alternating Current (AC). This is what is in your house and in businesses you know, the typical wall plug Amy and I look for at restaurants to plug our computers into. It’s generally 120, 121, or whatever it takes.
Current: The flow rate of electricity.
Voltage: The force pushing the electricity through the wires.
Inverter: An electrical box that changes 12VDC to 120VAC. It changes car electricity to house-hold electricity. This is so we can plug our AC computer cords into our DC batteries.
Converter: An electrical box that changes 120VAC to 12VDC. The opposite of the above—pretty much a garage battery charger that you use to get your car started after you leave the lights on.
Charge Controller: An electrical box that changes the output of the solar panels into DC voltage, hopefully charging the house batteries.
House Battery: Now, I probably use this too freely. When I talk about house batteries, and I mean batteries dedicated to our living compartment. If I say house (or household) electricity, I mean 120 V AC. Got to figure this out… but, house batteries are 12V batteries separated from the car system, and dedicated to lights and heat and powering the inverter in the house part of a van. One should be able to run these dead flat, and the car will still start, as they are fully independent circuits.
Starting Battery: The batteries under the hood, used for starting the car, sparking the gas when the engine is running, running a radio (if you had a functional one), and lighting the headlights.
Shore power: Kind of a boat term, but a source of 120V AC electricity you can plug into. When you pull up at a friend’s house, and pull out your extension cord, and plug into their electricity, they are your “shore power”. (Thanks Alex and Julie, Kari and David, Connie, Mag and John, Dave and Ryanne, Mike and Becky, Blake and Martha, Roger and Mary, Chris, Dad…)

Now, back to the good stuff! To start the battery box rebuilt and modification, I first labeled the wires and removed the old battery. I then cleaned the compartment with baking soda and water to neutralize the sulfuric acid and prevent further corrosion. Lucky, the metal compartment is super stout, so it was still in great shape. As usual, after a final thorough cleaning, I caulked the seams and painted the compartment with black Rustoleum. I can’t find a picture of the completely empty, cleaned and freshly painted compartment, but trust me, it looked good!

After getting the compartment beautified, I cut and painted a plywood plate to fit into the bottom, bolted and glued it to the metal base of the box, and mounted battery trays to it. I painted up everything with oil-based paint and used stainless steel hardware to affix everything.

Since we had just gotten the Interlux blue boat paint, I practiced the painting technique on the top surface of the plywood base, so it is the same shiny blue as the Turtle exterior. In the following photos, you can see the two new Fullriver 115Ah 12V DC sealed AGM batteries that we started with in there, but just patched into the cleaned up existing wiring we are reusing at this point.

I decided to go with Absorbed Glass Matt (AGM) batteries. They cost a bit more than flooded batteries, but they do not spill, they will not develop corrosion at the terminals, and can be mounted sideways, if that configuration seems important. Additionally, they do not require venting, so they can be safely installed inside the living compartment, if that is necessary. Here is the site. We have been happy with this choice, and as you will find out in future posts, choosing AGM sealed batteries will allow us to make some future cold-weather modifications.

As to wiring, I was just starting to adopt the boat convention for new circuits and runs I would rewire. The convention is as follows: For 12VDC, yellow is ground, and red is positive. For 120V AC, the wires are white, black, and green for ground. Examples of the wires are here:

The reason behind adopting this convention is that at a glance, you can tell which circuit they are supposed to be wired to. Additionally, the boat 120V cable is stranded, as opposed to the household solid copper wire. Stranded wires should always be used in a vibration environment. Logically, then, a van should have no solid copper wires (though most RV builders do actually use cheaper solid copper for the 120V runs). As you might have observed, we have concluded that one should think of their van as a boat, and look to boat paints, wires, latches, and hardware for the upgrades and work. Though the boat cable is a little more expensive, it is paired and tinned for corrosion resistance, and gives a real nice finished look. Additionally, it can be purchased in any gauge.

So, at the end of our Phase 1 battery configuration we had our two new AGM batteries with a combined storage of 230Ah at 12V installed and secured, with the connections cleaned up. With this battery pack, we simply used the old converter to charge them when we were connected to shore power, and the old inverter to make our 120V for our computers when off-grid. At this point in our journey I also had just finished the install of our 300W of solar to charge the batteries (we will cover the panels and solar charging and solar controller in a different post).

That’s Phase 1 for you!

Our New Favorite Places: The Million Dollar Highway & Ouray, CO

We left Durango the next day and drove toward Silverton, CO which was a very exciting drive considering the elevation was greater than the Turtle had ever attempted.

We passed the 10,000′ elevation sign and cheered!

Then we got to the 10,640′ elevation sign and cheered!

Then we got to the 10,910′ elevation sign and cheered!

We made it all the way up with no issues, but there were definitely some “Little Engine That Could” moments. Especially once it started to snow.

That’s right, everyone who doesn’t live in Montana—snow in May!

We were not prepared to see it, but it was very lovely up there in the mountains. As the road got more windy and the snow fell harder, I was glad Andy was in the driver’s seat. Especially considering the previous post about our break-downs! 🙂

We made it to Silverton, which I pronounced The Cutest Town I’ve Seen All Year, and then on to the Million Dollar Highway. Our friend Rob told us about this route, which is the reason we went this way. It’s a very twisty-turny road at high elevations and sheer drop-offs on the side with no guard rails. Rocks fall from the cliffs above regularly, and when it’s rainy, the road gets fully washed out. Andy was sold.

So we traversed the Million Dollar Highway, and toward the end of the trek we saw why this route got its nickname. Holy moly.

Oh, and we just upgraded the WordPress account, so now we can post videos! This just got twice as fun.

Our surprise to encounter snow and freezing temps is evidenced in this photo of Andy changing from flip flops to boots at the viewpoint.

At the end of the Million Dollar Highway sits the new title-holder for Cutest Town I’ve Seen All Year, and also my top pick for a town to live for a little while in the future. It’s Ouray, CO and it’s so charming that words can’t describe it. It reminds me of my other favorite little town, Wallace, ID, in that it’s a sweet little town tucked into the mountains, but the mountains surrounding Ouray are even closer on all sides and so dramatic. It was even cold, foggy and overcast and still I was fully in love.

And dirt roads downtown, you guys.

Also dramatic? The weather. As we sat at the brewery our first day there, we looked outside to see the snow storm had reached us down in Ouray! (If you’re wondering about pronunciation, all I can tell you is that we heard locals say both “yer-ay” and “oo-ray” and we landed on “yer-ay” as our favorite. I think I like it best because it rhymes with “hurray” and that’s how I felt the whole time we were there.)

We camped out for the next few days out a Forest Service road by a river. We found the spot with a new app recommended to us by our new friends Gary and Kiki, called iOverlander. A great new tool in our arsenal! Everyone had a lovely time. All our winterizing gear was up in the attic, so we buttoned up the Turtle against the cold the best we could and got cozy!

We also spent a fair amount of time working away on our computers at Mouse’s cafe and sweets shop downtown, which is how I finally got caught up on our adventures here on the blog.

We’d planned on staying just two days in Ouray, as we were waiting to have some ballots sent to us from Andy’s mom in Montana.

By the way, fellow full-time travelers, we’ve discovered how easy it is to receive mail on the road—just have the sender address it to Your Name, General Delivery, Town, State, Zipcode, and the mail will make it to the main branch of the Post Office in the town you’ll be in! You just go to the post office and tell them you have mail waiting in General Delivery and there it is! Andy’s mom has sent us mail twice now, and we’re pleased that we can receive important letters even while on the move.

The delivery was delayed this time, though we couldn’t have been more excited to have an excuse to stick around town. Ouray is so darling, and everyone we met was welcoming and friendly that we felt right at home there for four days.

The morning of our third day there, the sun came out in full force, and we played outside and then spent the day in town.

On the fourth day, our mail arrived and it was time to continue down the road. We would have loved to stay longer (and get jobs and become locals), but our goal to make it to see family in Portland in a few weeks and then make it to Alaska by July compels us to move a little more quickly than our usual Turtle Time dictates. So on to Salt Lake City.

But we’ll see you again soon, Ouray!

A Busy Few Weeks: The VLA, ABQ, Boise, The Bisti Badlands, Four Corners, & Mesa Verde NP

Our current location is generally a mystery to anyone trying to keep track of us—including us—mostly due to the fact that we’re so busy having fun that I forget how long it’s been since I last updated the blog or Instagram! I promise that by the end of the next post both you and I will be completely caught up.

As I type this, I’m sitting at an adorable cafe and sweets shop in a town that, I announced immediately before consulting anyone else in the Turtle, we will one day live, even if just for a season. This place is a dream. But we’ll get to that next time. We have so much to cover right now!

We left our last story outside the Very Large Array near Socorro, NM, having a delicious evening treat of a pie sampler from Pie Town. We found a great pull-out to stay the night just a few minutes from the VLA. That night before bed, we watched Contact with a view of the VLA right outside our window! It was awesome. In the movie, the VLA plays a prominent role in Jodie Foster’s research and makes a really dramatic background. And it’s just as impressive in person.

The VLA is an astronomical radio observatory made up of 27 antennas that are each 82′ in diameter. They’ve helped with the investigation of black holes, quasars, pulsars, planets, and loads more. It’s astonishing to see them up close.

(Not quite sure what I was up to in this photo, but it’s the only one I’ve got, so you’re stuck with my unexplainable dance number.)

After getting our science on, we made our way back to Albuquerque where I had a flight to catch in a few days to Boise to visit my girlfriends Beth and Lexie.

But first, Andy and I had a mission: to get poolside as soon as possible. I’m not sure how we got the idea in our heads, but suddenly we couldn’t live without a swim. So we headed to the only RV park in Albuquerque that had their pool open before Memorial Day—American RV Park.

We came for the pool and stayed for the lovely park, yummy continental breakfast, clean showers and laundromat, and beyond-friendly staff. We really did stay another day. It’s a great park that I can’t recommend highly enough! We realized that it had been over a year since we had stayed in an RV park, which was fun because we’ve really gotten the hang of boondocking and have saved lots of money by not going to parks unless we need to take advantage of their amenities. Turtle power!

We stayed two nights, and the next day I left this guy:

To hang out with these guys:

It was a bunch of fun. We painted the town red, and even got dressed up to go watch the Kentucky Derby.

After a whirlwind few days, I was back in Albuquerque and the four of us were back on the road. Andy and I went to a fantastic mining museum in Grants called the New Mexico Mining Museum, which has a replica uranium mine underground. The man at the front desk had worked in mining for about 35 years, and had worked his way up from the bottom to be the head of his mine and even got an award for safety, with the longest time without a death in the mine or serious injuries. He had lots of information, was adorable, and gave me a goldstone to remember the mine by.

Outside of Grants, we stayed at the Joe Skeen campground near El Malpais.

I was happy to be reunited with this guy:

And this guy:

We drove to the Bisti Badlands wilderness, where you can stay overnight in the parking area for free! It was especially appreciated that we got to stay after we climbed for hours over the crazy hills that changed in appearance every few minutes. It felt like a walking tour of 10 different planets.

It was a hot day, and when we got back to the parking lot, we relaxed in our chairs and read books with Scout and Gracie. Gracie has become a real champ with her harness and leash these days. I think she’s figured out that sometimes it’s her only ticket outside, so she wears it without any problem, and even comes to my feet meowing when she hears me get it out.

The next day we made it to Four Corners with beautiful skies above us.

Then we drove on toward Mesa Verde National Park. The landscape on the way to the park was a destination unto itself. I swear this is not a painting.

In the last year, we’ve been to two other cliff dwellings sites: Bandelier NM and Gila Cliff Dwellings NM. We really enjoyed both, but agreed once we made it to Mesa Verde that this is our favorite site so far.

In the park are 600 beautifully preserved cliff dwellings of the Ancestral Pueblo people, many of which you can tour or see clearly from various vistas. Depending on the site, the tours are just $5 or $10 each, which gets you 1-2 hours of information and a walk right through the dwellings. You can see petroglyphs and pictographs, the different styles of construction each group used, and the actual tools they used to grind corn and make food. And the views are so vast and unreal that we both said more than once that we’d pay just to hike the trails on the mesa! There are also self-guided tours you can take, so we did all of those too.

Our second day there, as we parked at Balcony House for our tour we noticed another van that could be the Turtle’s long-lost cousin, so we parked by it as we often do when we see a van we like. After traveling around for the last year and a half, we’ve found that we can usually tell by someone’s van if they are kindred spirits, and our track record is pretty good so far. This time was no exception! We ran into Gary and Kiki as we returned from our tour, and found out that they’re just starting out on their full-time vandwelling adventure (though they’ve already been on many, many adventures of other sorts). We’d all already purchased tickets for the same tour the following day, so we got to hang out even more during the Long House tour.

We super enjoyed getting to know you guys, and I’m certain that our paths will cross down the road. (When they do, we’ll let you know what Turtle theme song we came up with; hopefully one as cool as Birdy’s.) You guys were a pleasure to hang out with. Stay in touch! 🙂

After the tour, we did a quick 6-mile loop on top of the mesa to check out the other cliff dwelling overlooks.

We would have loved to stay and visit (both the park and the new friends) longer, but the storm clouds were rolling in and the skies were getting darker. Our first rule of overlanding is “Never Drive at Night”, which is comparable to driving in terrible weather, so we hit the road to make it to Durango, CO to find a spot before the weather hit.

We hung out in Durango for the evening, a town that I already loved and knew Andy would too. The weather was unfortunate, with frigid winds and constant cloud cover, but we had a great time anyway. If you can involve pizza in the plans, Andy is a happy camper.

If you can also include a free trip to the coolest railroad museum ever, Durango and Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum, he will be even happier.

And if you really want to make his day, cap it all off with a little performance testing at the highest altitudes the Turtle has ever attempted. . .

Which, unbeknownst to us, was the next leg of the trip. And one that would bring us to where I sit now, in my new very favorite town of all time! But that’s up next.

A Broken Turtle Tale: Reserve, NM

In the last post, Andy itemized all our break-downs, according to the definition of breaking down that we’ve agreed upon. The final line item in that list was a break-down in Reserve, New Mexico which we mentioned we’d discuss further later. It’s not so much a story about what went wrong, though that’s exciting too, but about a lucky break in where we broke down and how wonderful it is to be reminded of how kind people are.

The story begins as we left Silver City from the Gila Cliff Dwellings. It was a stunning drive.

Andy had woken up that morning from delicious dreams of pizza, so we made it the daily goal to find ourselves a slice. As we passed through Reserve, NM we saw The Adobe Cafe had a flying banner advertising pizza, so we took it as a sign and went in. The pizza did not disappoint!

We wrapped up our remaining slices and got back in the Turtle, started it up. . . and that starter just kept starting and turning over and making crazy sounds, and continuing to start even after Andy pulled the keys out. It was probably three minutes we spent panicking and looking at each other with saucer eyes and running around trying to figure out what to do, but both of us agree it felt like twenty before the starter finally died. We got out, and I popped the hood and began investigating. (Yeah, just kidding of course—Andy did that.) My job was to chat with the friendly locals who came over to make sure everything was all right.

Andy here. What I suspected was happening, and what we finally concluded happened was this: When you turn the key to start, a little electrical current is fed to the started solenoid. The solenoid is a switch that then supplies a large current from fat wires from the battery to the starter (an electric motor), that then turns over the engine. The little solenoid switch got stuck in the connected position, so even after turning the key back, it was still making the connection to supply power to the starter. Starters are not designed to run for long, so the starter overheated, something important inside melted, and it died. To fix the problem, we then needed a new solenoid switch, and a new starter. Took less that 30 minutes to fix, once we got the right parts. We actually carry a spare starter and solenoid with us now…

And I’m telling you, the whole town of Reserve rallied together to help us out! People were driving home to see if they had spare starters, directing us to the auto shop down the road, checking back on us after attending the elementary school play their kids/grandkids were in that evening, and generally just offering any assistance they could. It was really encouraging. Because it was Friday, the shop wouldn’t be able to get parts in until Monday, so we thought we might be marooned for a few days. As a last resort, Andy did his best to revive the patient inside out of the rain, but the thing was D.O.A.

In the meantime, Gracie kept us apprised of the goings-on in the neighborhood.

We met a local who coincidentally is from my hometown of Billings, MT. He offered to take Andy to the nearest town the following day to pick up a starter in Springerville, about an hour away. We were saved! We joined him at the local tavern for a beer and had a great time. Everyone there expressed concern for our stranded state and offered whatever help they could provide for us. But luckily, we had Craig. The next day he arrived to pick up Andy, and the two of them got the part, Andy installed it, and we were all set to go. Thanks Craig! You really saved the day!

We’d also like to thank the entire town of Reserve who made us feel welcome and not at all up that proverbial creek. At any given moment we had a handful of people on call, doing whatever they could to help us out. We had a lovely stay, and if we’re ever in the area we’ll definitely be back!

A Postscript Involving Pie:

Due to the delay, we knew we were cutting it close if we were going to make it to the destination I’d pinned on our calendar three months ago and had been talking about ever since: an actual town called Pie Town, NM. Can you believe it? It’s a tiny little town with just a few shops, three of the four of them pie shops. And if you’ve met me you know how much I looooooove pie. I couldn’t wait.

Unfortunately by the time we reached Pie Town, all the shops had just closed. I was pretty bummed out. As we drove through town, we noticed that Pie-O-Neer Pies had cars parked out front, so we pulled in, but the Closed sign was in the door and I was re-bummed. Then just as we began to back out, a petite smiling woman in a stylish hat popped out of the door and shouted to us, “Do you want pie?” We said YES! She said they only had three slices left, but we could come take a look. We said we’d take the lot, and they even threw in an extra slice for us. It was a very glorious day for me. We took them to go, and I waited impatiently for us to reach our evening destination outside of the Very Large Array. We found a perfect spot at a turn-out right by the entrance road.

If you look in this picture, you can barely make out the VLA on the horizon. (It looked much closer in person.)

Then we ate pie!

We ate them sampler-style, and loved all three. We had enough leftovers to enjoy two more dessert occasions as well. We’ll definitely drive out of our way to return to Pie-O-Neer Pies in the future. What a treat!

So although reading the list that Andy put together may seem like a series of unfortunate events, they all make for great stories, and some of those stories even end in pie.

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