After our first three nights in the lower 48, we were greeted by another uniform. He proceeded to tell us that he really didn’t care about it, but he had to come and check up on us because one of the locals called the station and complained. We had stayed the night. The officer was as cool as he could be about it (well, other than telling the caller that it wasn’t against the law or their business). He didn’t say that we couldn’t stay or that there were any laws against it. But, it was obvious that it was time to move, and he chatted with us until we said that we were.

This is the first time in one and a half years of boondocking that we have ever had anyone knock on the door.  We hadn’t even been in the spot for 24hrs. There weren’t any signs stating that you couldn’t park or camp overnight. Heck, it was expected that you were going to park overnight as it was a large parking area, tucked in the woods, for a trailhead to two campgrounds. Are people in truck campers not allowed to park and hike in with their tents? I wonder what he would have done if we weren’t in the camper.

I know it sounds like I am ranting. I am not really. I don’t want to be where I am not wanted, nor does there have to be a law to keep me from those places (which there obviously wasn’t in this case). We knew we were only going to stay one night regardless as the area was quite residential. Its just that its the first time and I felt like writing about it.

And, after what we saw at the Bellingham Walmart……. well, you have to see it for yourself.

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I guess we’re starting to see the ‘real’ Washington weather. Our first week in the state was pretty dry, but the past week has been rather damp or perhaps moist. In fact, you could say it has been downright soggy.

Last Sunday, we headed towards Mt. Rainier National Park from the north side. The park is still closed, but there is a lot of forestry land around the park which allows dispersed camping. We spotted at least one exceptionally nice boondocking spot on the main road into the park, but as it was a fairly well traveled road, any and all turnouts were occupied. Near the park entrance, we crossed a rather long one lane bridge across the Carbon River.

Immediately, the road turned to gravel and around the first bend, the road was constricted by a fallen tree and a couple of large boulders on the opposite side. This particular section of road was more mud, boulders and tree roots than gravel. We had around 18 inches of clearance between the jacks and the obstacles. Not too bad, but the angle of attack required getting rather close to the edge of the road. Normally, this wouldn’t be a large concern, but we’d already seen the edge of a couple roads washed away that morning.

With Jenn’s help in the form of ambiguous hand signals (does anyone know what two crooked fingers forming a ‘U’ means?), we managed to get through the constriction without any new dings or scratches. Not too far up the road, we found a somewhat obscured pullout that would be our home for the next week.

I think we had one sunny day, on Monday, followed by four rainy ones. We then figured we might as well stick around through the weekend since Washingtonians seem to enjoy camping and grabbed all the good spots on the weekends. Anyway, it seemed like a good idea to let that hairy bit of road dry out some as there was a drainage culvert right above it.

So, how did we amuse ourselves for a week when we were rained in without internet? Better than you might expect two people to do while cooped up in the back of a truck. It turned out we were able to tune in an HD channel that played nothing but older movies and we managed to tolerate the commercials fairly well. There was also a good selection of radio stations, one of which happened to play both kinds of music – jazz and blues.

One thing I made sure to pack when we left was four decks of cards, which we actually used for the first time at Patrick’s party. I don’t think Jenn and I have ever played cards together, but we played a bit of gin rummy and I taught Jenn to play UNO using two decks of cards. We’re going to have to get a real deck some day! At one point, the house rules got downright silly: we were using poker chips, two decks of cards and a made up ’spinner’ for random number generation. The game was alternating between UNO and gin, with the winner of a hand allowed to spin for poker chips which could be spent to make up a temporary rule for the next game. Silly, yes. But, I won!

Jenn spent a lot of time being constructive as well. She’s been knitting me a pair of socks. So far, they cover about half of my foot. I think we’re going to have to get back out in the middle of nowhere before I can expect the other half. She enjoyed bragging about how all of her half-finished projects give her plenty to do during the moments when I was scrambling for something to keep me occupied. I played with my electronics kit a bit for the first time in two years and even managed to shoot a few arrows during a brief lull in the rain. Just enough rounds to ruin another arrow… 15 yards is really a bit too close for practice, but I was bored!

Somewhere in there during a lull, I climbed up on the roof and resealed an area that turned out not to be leaking. Four days of rain along with temperatures in the low forties overnight and low fifties for mid-day highs and we had some pretty awful humidity in the camper. Yep, raining from the skylight in the bathroom! Water forming on cans in the cupboards. As long as I was doing repairs, I fixed the connections on our inverter, which were not exactly up to code. The connections look much nicer now and should hold up much better, even if it is a bit harder to check the exact battery voltage now.

And then, there were video games! Yes, we’ve quite a collection of old games that we’re dragging around. After trying out a few things, Jenn settled in on a real time strategy game of some sort and I went to an old favorite – Slash’em. It’s a Nethack variant, and if you’ve never fought a nethack addiction, well, I suppose you’re like 99.999% of people. Any UNIX gamer will know Nethack, but there aren’t all that many of us! I’ve spent a lot of time playing Nethack off and on over the past 13 years and I’ve ‘won’ exactly twice. I don’t think I’ll ever ‘beat’ it.

For those keeping score on the costs of boondocking, I think we used roughly two gallons of gasoline keeping the batteries charged enough to watch TV, listen to the radio, read books, play video games and run the furnace. I’m guessing we used two gallons of propane keeping the thermostat set at 52, but that’s a bit harder to judge… I don’t actually remember when we last filled the propane.

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If you haven’t seen one before, I highly suggest it. Its not something us east coasters see every day. They are called mud pots, but I think that most of them looked more like mud volcanoes. They were four or so foot tall mounds that blew carbon dioxide and mud. The shorter ones blew more mud bubbles. They were the most interesting. The ones that were lower than the land around them acted more like boiling water pots than mud pots.

They are described as being hot springs that lack water, so `I assumed that the mud and air coming out would be hot, but it wasn’t. That doesn’t mean you should get too close though. You could end up getting sprayed with a free mud mask. Some of the ground around the pots is a thick, stick in the bottom of your shoes mud as well. If you step in it, you will surely be bringing some home with you.

Unfortunately, my camera’s SD card became corrupt the same day we visited the mud pots. With some work I was able to rebuild some of the files and reconstitute some of the images, but most of the pictures that we took after we left Quartzsite are gone or distorted. Thankfully, we haven’t lost any since we arrived at Joshua Tree.   Mud Pots Photo Album

After we left the geothermal coolness that is the mud pot field, we landed in another earthly wonder: Box Canyon. This place is like being on the moon. The landscape is mostly gray and white. The mountain sides are strewn with wind created pockets that look like melting faces. Unlike the moon however, there was plenty of life. The cliffs in the area looked like good climbing, but upon closer investigation they turned out to be sandstone and crumble under your weight. There are also a lot of slot canyons to explore and get lost in. There are OHV trails in the area that made us wish we didn’t have a dually. Its an area that we would like to return to when we have more time. The scenery was a welcome change after spending weeks in the flat desert. Box Canyon Photo Album

Campsites mentioned in this post:
Slab City (Coming Soon!)
Box Canyon BLM Land
Joshua Tree NP South BLM Land

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1. Part One – The fulltime lifestyle
2. Part Two – Why a truck camper?
3. Part Three – Weights & Dealing with them
4. Part Four – Boondocking resource conservation

Gordon recently posed a question over at the Truck Camper Magazine blog that seemed like a great idea for the next part of our Life in the back of a truck series. He’s curious just how long his readers can boondock and what tricks they use to manage it. I got a bit long winded, but here’s my response.

The resources we have to work with are:

• 46 gallons of fresh water
• ~300 amp hours of battery in 2 Trojan T-1275 12V batteries
• 60 pounds of propane in 2 30# tanks
• A Honda eu2000i generator
• ~4.5 gallons of gasoline plus whatever is in the scooter and generator (up to around 2 gallons if both are full)

Doesn’t sound like much, does it? Still, we manage to do fairly well when we find a place we want to stay for a while. It takes a little effort to conserve resources, but we manage to live quite comfortably for up to a two week stretch without running out of anything or breaking out a military desert survival handbook. Just how do we make these resources last and what sacrifices does it take, you ask? Well, read on to get a taste of the Hitek Homeless lifestyle!

In moderate weather, propane generally lasts us around 6-8 weeks running the fridge and cooking. If we’re in the freezing or below range, two weeks is about tops – gotta keep the kitties warm even if we’re not inside. Warm means around 55. They’ve got fur coats and we’ve got blankets. Unless we’re about to take on water and ready for a ‘luxurious’ shower, we generally don’t even turn on the hot water heater. The stove heats water quicker because you’re only heating enough for an ‘army bath’ rather than the entire hot water tank.

Gasoline is split between the scooter and the generator. That breaks down to something in the middle of  250 miles of exploration or 40 hours of generator time. If we’re in a heavy internet usage mode, we’ll be recharging laptops off the inverter and need to run the generator for about 4 hours every 2-3 days. In cold enough weather to run the furnace, we’ll typically run the generator 1-2 hours every evening.

Electric conservation is really pretty simple. If you’re done with something, turn it off! During the day, there is little need for lights and in the evening, one above the area you’re using is typically enough. Most of the time, there’s only a single light on in the camper unless one of us is cooking or laying in bed reading while the other is on the couch.

Speaking of lighting, we shelled out a small fortune for LED lighting back around Christmas. Except for the ‘vanity colored’ light in the bathroom and a small incandescent over the stove, all of the lighting inside and out of the camper is LED or fluorescent. The LED lights aren’t quite as bright as incandescent, but it’s bright enough for us and uses roughly 10% of the electricity.

And what typically runs us out is… water, or lack thereof. In nice weather, with a secluded spot next to a stream, we can do laundry, dishes and bathe without touching the holding tanks. Of course, you want to boil the water for dishes and at least get it warm for a shower, so a campfire is in order if you’re trying to save propane as well as water! When you’re done, spread the water around a bit instead of create a giant a puddle or toss it back in the stream to contaminate the water supply. The rest of the time, it usually comes down to: how clean do you really need to be?

Military showers and washing hair once a week instead of with every shower will stretch the water budget quite a bit. If we’ve been out a while and are water conscious because we aren’t ready to move, I may go as far as a full blown shower and hair washing in a gallon and a half of water. There’s probably still a bit of shampoo that doesn’t get rinsed out, but the critters don’t seem to mind.

Military showers are simple: get wet, soap up, rinse off. Do all of the above with as little water use as possible. You can either turn off the shower head while soaping up or save more water by using the sink to hold water and a washcloth to get wet and rinse off. I usually prefer to use the sink because if we’ve turned the hot water heater on, I can just let it run into the sink until the water gets hot. You don’t waste any of the cold water that way and end up with a sink full of warm water for bathing.

When it comes to dishes, we usually cook once or twice a day. If we don’t have guests, we usually manage to cook a one pot meal of some sort. Plates get burned in the campfire! Most nights, cleanup consists of one pot, maybe a lid and a couple of forks or spoons. Water glasses and coffee mugs probably aren’t up to restaurant standards. A quick swirl to knock the grinds out of a coffee cup and mostly ignoring water spots on water glasses is pretty typical.

Dish washing still takes water, but we’ve found that you can save a lot of it by picking the largest pot to hold your soapy water. There’s no reason to fill up an entire side of the sink with dishwater. Just put enough soap and water into the pot to clean the dirty dishes. Grab a dishcloth and you’ll get plenty of soap and water on the dishes to get them clean. Pile all of the washed dishes up in the same side of the sink and rinse the entire batch at once. Not all at once… that takes too much water! Just rinse one above all of the others, allowing the runoff to help get soap off of the next dishes as a sort of pre-rinse. It doesn’t take a lot of water pressure to rinse dishes. A thin trickle will do it; it just takes a little longer.

Garbage is also a consideration. Just how much do you want to pack out and how ripe is it going to be? We use basic clay cat litter, so I feel no qualms about digging a hole to bury it in away from the camping area and any trails. Leftovers don’t exist! Unless there’s a fire ban, we’ll typically burn any paper or cardboard packaging materials. After shopping, I’ll usually unpackage things like meat and repackage in freezer bags sized for the two of us. It stacks better, I can do any necessary butchering all at once, we can thaw out just what we’re going to eat that day, and we get rid of those icky styrofoam containers in the store parking lot rather than have them stink up the camper later. Things like banana peels, apple cores and coffee grounds get tossed under a bush where they rapidly degrade or feed something.

Even with all of that, we still end up with metal and plastic garbage that can’t be burned. Well, you could, but come on… who wants to breathe burning plastic or turn cans into balls of slag at the bottom of a fire pit? Normally, we just use our grocery bags for garbage collection, but if we’re out long enough that the bags start overflowing or stinking, they go in an actual garbage bag, get tied up nice and tight and tossed in the cab of the truck where we don’t have to smell it until we’re ready to air the cab out and leave.

Food has never really been an issue. Since we don’t have a microwave or oven, we’ve got lots of extra room for food. The Arctic Fox 1140 has plenty of storage space and we could probably go two months between shopping trips if we really tried. All those nights around the campfire do call for the occasional mixed drink. How do you carry a lot of fruit juice around without taking up too much room? Frozen juice! There are several brands of very tasty frozen juice mix that actually uses 100% juice. The trick is finding some you like at a good price. When you do though, you can easily store enough for five gallons or so without taking up too much freezer or fridge space.

So how long do we actually stay out in the middle of nowhere? Usually after a week or so, we’re ready to find a new spot and start looking for whatever we need – water, dump station, a nice big trashcan and maybe a few gallons of gasoline or propane. If we have a nice spot and plenty to do, two weeks is pretty typical. Longer than that and Jenn starts telling me I stink. With better water conservation and a stream for bathing, I’d say a month is pretty doable before we’d have to start doing things like distilling our own drinking water, worrying about food spoiling or going through Internet withdrawals.

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After we left Quartzsite, our next ‘destination’ was Slab City, just outside of Niland, CA. First though, we really had to do some shopping before I broke into the emergency can of baked beans. So, we hit Brawley, which is about twenty miles south of the Slabs. As long as we were in town, Jenn wanted to get some work done on the freecampsites website, so we endured horribly slow internet for a night, under the assumption that we’d have no internet at all once we hit Slab City.

Go figure. Slab City had the best EVDO connection we’d seen since we left Phoenix. In fact, it’s so good they have an internut connection in the lending library. Speaking of the library, I was really impressed with the selection of books available and found my share very quickly. I rather wish I’d spent more time in the library as I could have dug around for a few gems instead of grabbing the first half dozen titles that looked interesting.

Like Quartzsite, Slab City was quickly emptying out for the summer. However, there were still a few folks around and the area was a bit more active than Quartzsite. Since Ryan and Nicole were joining us the next day in their tent, Jenn kept me driving around the area looking for the perfect campsite longer than I could handle. Her requirements: a nice shade tree (preferably three or four), not too close to the neighbors, close enough to the center of things to be a close walk but not so close that we’re in the middle, and easy to find so Ryan and Nicole wouldn’t have to spend too much time looking.

Now, we’re talking about the desert here. If there was any tree large enough to provide shade that met the rest of her requirements (or even one of them), someone had parked under it. Even more likely to me, was that they had parked next to it and dumped their gray water on it for a few years until it grew into a shade tree. Eventually, I quit listening to things like ‘turn left behind us twenty feet’ and let my own pioneer spirit take over. I found us a spot that met all of the requirements if you considered a more liberal translation of the phrase ’shade tree’. I think it could be a nice little tree in a few more years if only someone would dump their tanks on it for a while.

Once Ryan and Nicole showed up, we all got to demonstrate our cooking abilities for a few days. It turns out Ryan is actually a pretty good chef and Nicole makes a mean chili dog. They even brought along their starving dog, Kay, to handle dish detail. She wanted to play with the cats and Hunter was ready to ‘play’, but cooler heads prevailed and Kay didn’t get any kitty snacks.

Between cooking, I gave Ryan a quickie archery lesson and he proved to be a natural. In fact, I gave him my slingshot as I’d long ago given up actually hitting anything more specific than ‘the ground’ with it. Apparently, Ryan grew up playing with slingshots and hadn’t lost the knack.

Once Jenn saw Ryan and Nicole driving around without their trailer, she started pestering me to work on the moped. That piece of junk had crapped out on me in Phoenix and hadn’t been started since I’d walked home from the police station. Lacking a good excuse, I was forced to unload the scooter and make at least a token effort.

Once I got the fancy sides off, it wasn’t too hard to see one of the problems. One of the fuel lines had dry rotted and was causing a loss of vacuum to supply fuel to the carburetor. Now, I’m far from a mechanic, but I did manage to snip a bit of uncracked line from elsewhere and get it replaced, albeit a bit tighter fit than is normal. I had to recharge the battery a couple of times to get enough fuel in the lines to start it and keep running. The kickstart is worthless on that thing; it probably still has a few small vacuum leaks and definitely needs a new spark plug, but it did finally fire up. Since I couldn’t do anything about the rest of the problems, I declared it ‘fixed for now’.

The first day or so, it seemed most of the neighbors viewed us as transients and would ignore our campsite as they drove past. Once we got the scooter ripped to pieces in the backyard and the hood on the truck up to charge the battery, I guess we were starting to look like locals. The neighbors started waving as they went past and one even stopped to invite us to a party, which we didn’t actually make, as it was the day after we all pulled out.

To stress test the scooter, Jenn and I rode it out to the ‘abandoned’ county park on the Salton Sea while Ryan and Nicole took their truck. It turned out that the park was a bit further than we thought and Ryan and Nicole beat us there by about twenty minutes since we were poking along at twenty-five miles an hour. The sun was pretty brutal, but we were determined to have a picnic, so we utilized some Slab City engineering of our own. We found some random boards scattered along the beach and used them to hold one side of a tarp up to form a shelter. One side was jammed in the truck windows and the other was held up by a broken board tied to a big log and the other half of said board tied to the scooter.

While Nicole, Jenn and I were building a squatters camp, Ryan was frying up yummy quesadillas. Since we had set up in the main parking area of the abandoned park, we shouldn’t have been surprised that a few people came along to check out the area. What was funny, though, was watching how studiously they avoided looking at the crazy people under their makeshift shelter. You could practically hear them chanting “Don’t make eye contact. Don’t make eye contact.”

Knowing how slow we’d be, Jenn and I started back a bit ahead of the rest, after watching Ryan circumnavigate a small sand bar in his inflatable boat. I think we made a bit better time than the inflatable raft would have, but that’s about it. The ride was really a bit too long for two people on a moped on the highway, even if it was pretty lightly traveled and had a nice shoulder to stay on. The scooter did pretty well, all things considered. It lost power a few times for a couple of seconds, but picked right back up with just enough of a hiccup to make us nervous. I think a little more work on the fuel lines and a spark plug will fix it’s major woes. The rest of our time at the Slabs, it cranked within a few attempts and purred along nicely, provided Jenn remembered to curse at it by the third attempt.

So, how do I feel about the Slabs after spending a few days there? I loved it. You’ve got a free place to camp without any real rules except “don’t piss off the neighbors”. Unlike your average HOA, these neighbors are pretty accepting. I mean, one of the old timers, Leonard, has been building a giant, multi-colored monument to God out of adobe, paint and random junk he found in the desert over the past twenty-five years. Maybe it’s only becoming a tourist attraction because people want to see what some crazy old coot has been working on, but some of the neighbors actually come out and help him construct additions to  Salvation Mountain.

At the other end of the spectrum, you’ve got a few folks living inside the old military bunkers. Their idea of fun is burning old tires and shooting at each others bunkers with the biggest guns they’ve got. I’m not all that keen on burning tires, but I’m not about to argue it with a neighborhood full of folks that are hunkered in so deep that they get a kick out of firing off a few rounds at each others houses. We skipped the ‘bunker party’ invite under the rash assumption that alcohol, guns and burning tires might not be the healthiest combination.

And in the middle, you’ve got a lot of just ordinary folks. People are running businesses out of Slab City. Some of them are actively involved in trying to keep a community feel to the area. You can tune into CB channel 23 weeknights at 6pm and hear the daily news, which primarily consists of the TV Guide and a list of goods and services people are selling. I guess there’s just really not that much going on and gossiping about the neighbors over the air may not always be the brightest idea. During the winter months, there is a lot more going on, but even in the Spring, we were invited up to the Range for live music, over to the Oasis for a chili dinner and the infamous bunker party. Your neighbors might have concertina wire strung around their camper or a line of old tires delineating ‘their yard’, but they’re not likely to complain about the pink flamingos stuck in your own yard.

Water might be scarce in the desert, but Slab City has it’s own hot spring and a shower fed from said spring. If nudity offends you though, best to go to the spring when you’re sure no one else is around. I certainly wouldn’t drink the water from the spring, but it’s nice to jump in for a hot soak on a chilly evening. During the day, the shower is quite cool and can be a nice contrast to the desert sun during a warm spell.

If I had to sum Slab City up, I’d say it’s as close as you’re likely to get to an Old West frontier town in the United States today. In the middle of nowhere, you can get away with just about anything you want, but once you bring people together and form a town, you get a lot of rules about what you’re allowed to do or barred from doing. At the Slabs, you’ve got a unique situation where there really aren’t any laws because the state owns the land and doesn’t care enough about it to run folks off. It attracts all kinds of people. Some just want a free place to live. Others want freedom in a truer sense. What most of them have in common, though, is a ‘live and let live’ attitude. If you aren’t bothering your neighbors, they aren’t likely to bother you.

Libertarianism, anarchy, call it whatever you like; but, even in the Slabs you’ll be reminded that you better not get too rowdy by the occasional Sheriff and Immigration patrols as well as the military choppers, hummers and trucks that roll through every day. At least you get to see some of the fancy hardware your tax dollars are paying for!

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OK, technically, Quartzsite, AZ isn’t a ghost town, but it was rapidly on it’s way to rolling up the sidewalks for the summer when we finally arrived. I’d hoped to make it in time for some of the swap meets, but one thing and another had us well into March before we hit town.

We spent a couple of days out in the BLM land and wandering around town to see what was still there- not much! We were hoping we’d be able to get together with Ryan and Nicole who’d been working at Quartzsite all winter, but they were both working double shifts. After a couple of days, we took their advice and headed over to Crystal Hill, part of the Kofa wildlife refuge about ten miles south of Quartzsite. We clambered around in the hills a bit and came up with a few moderate sized quartz crystals for our trouble.

On the way back from Crystal Hill, we decided to stay in a campground for the night as the easiest way to refill our water and dump our tanks. I’m not sure we’ve done that since about June of last year, but for some reason it seemed the easiest thing to do. Imagine our surprise when we’d finished backing the rig in and find Ryan and Nicole’s trailer is at our back door! Total weirdness. The campground owner had told us there were ’some kids’ in the spot behind us. Considering the average age of folks at Quartzsite, I guess we should have known it would be those other gypsy kids.

We ended up staying two nights instead of one and not getting many of the ‘internet chores’ done, but I did manage to climb on the roof and reseal the bulk of it before running out of dicor. Ryan and Nicole were a lot of fun and we had a couple of pretty fancy dinners. Ryan claimed to be a chef, so we made him prove it. I’m not entirely convinced yet… it may take a few more fancy meals! hint hint

Ryan and Nicole were planning to head over to Slab City as well, so we made some tentative plans to meet them in a few days and rolled out, hoping to get some serious shopping done in Brawley, CA. Quartzsite prices were, apparently, still marked up for the snowbirds. The next time we hit Quartzsite, we’ll have the cabinets and fridge stuffed to overflowing so we can avoid as much shopping there as possible.

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You know that place where all the kids go in the movies and either a serial slasher shows up or someone gets pregnant? Ever wonder just where the heck it is? Apparently, it’s just northeast of Tucson, AZ in the Coronado National Forest.

We were passing through the area and decided we just couldn’t pass up checking out all of the giant saguaro growing in the area. We had planned to hit Saguaro National Park, but as we were coming in late in the afternoon, we decided to just make camp in the Coronado National Forest and hit Saguaro later. As it turns out, there wasn’t much need to go to Saguaro just to see the cacti. You couldn’t throw a rock in the national forest area without being convicted of damaging the endangered saguaro cacti. They were literally every twenty feet or so as far as you could see.

By the time we finally got close to the top of the first mountain, we knew this was going to be a different camping experience. We passed dozens of cars coming down the road in the five miles or so before we found a nice campsite. We’re used to seeing maybe half a dozen cars over the course of a week in the national forests. As you can guess, we had people diving past our site all night long in everything from Cadillacs to dirt bikes. Still, it was worth it just to camp next to this sight!

With such a movie panorama spread out below, how could we resist? I mixed up a pitcher of fruit juice and ethanol and we climbed on top of the camper with a blanket to ward off the chill. It was a wonderful view and funny to watch people slow down to look at the nuts sitting on top of the camper.

We never did make it to the national park, but we put up with all the traffic and the shooting range just over the hilltop to hang onto the view for a few days.

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Being the friendly hippie forest dwellers that we are, Jenn put out a plate of cookies and chips and a pitcher of water since we were roughly the halfway point of the tour. Half of the group seemed suspicious of ‘hippie cookies’, while the other half grabbed for them and then seemed disappointed that they were only cookies.

This morning, I was fearing that we’d have to leave early because the silly cats eat too much and we did not plan appropriately. Now, I know that I should plan for two cats to eat about four pounds of food a week. We were toying with making food for them or possibly riding into town for a resupply, but Wayne came to the rescue. He has promised to bring back a bag of food for our feline parasites, for which they will probably neither thank him nor so much as look at him without suspicion.

Jenn and I will be immensely grateful though. It would be a shame to leave such a beautiful spot before we need to meet Jenn’s parents for the fourth of July holiday.

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Yup. That’s how the locals know us. ‘Those nutty pirates up on the ridge.’ The day after a camera shy black bear strolled through our campsite, we decided to pull out and refill on water, dump our tanks and go grocery shopping.

We stopped to orient ourselves and ran into a fella that’s full-timing in an even smaller rig than ours. He’s riding a mountain bike and pulling a small trailer behind him. After chatting with him for an hour or so and giving iffy directions to two other people that stopped by, we hit the road.

We found that the rest area in Tennessee where we’d been planning to dump the tanks no longer allowed RVs to dump. Luckily, our fallback plan was a nearby campground, Fox Fire Camp & Canoe. Jenn had already spoken with the owner, and we were going to have to go into Newport to get groceries regardless of where we dumped. I don’t mind paying for a campground after two weeks in the woods. It gave us a chance to take really good showers and wash the truck, which had everything from red clay to tree branches attached.

It turns out that this was probably the best money we’ve ever spent on a campsite. We took a stroll up to the camp store and finally met our friendly neighborhood Hummer tour guides, Wayne and Joe from Off Road Voyages. After it was established that we were, indeed, the Pirate Campers, they gave us directions to a perfect campsite. Of course, it’s on the Hummer tour, so we had to crawl down a pretty rough and steep stretch of road, ford a creek and dodge a few small boulders, but other than scraping the cargo carriers, we got in without any trouble.

Once we got in, we had a bit of a scare as I was walking back the way we’d come and noticed oil splashes on the rocks. I found some more where we hadn’t driven, so we assumed it was one of the Hummers that had bottomed out. An hour or so later, when Joe came by with a full tour group, we flagged him down to let him know about the leak. It turns out, they’d busted an oil line the day before, so nothing to be concerned about today. Before he left, Joe offered us a ride on his next tour group since it would only be half full!

I’ve got to say, taking the Hummer tour and seeing a small fraction of what it is capable of has me thinking all over again about my daydream of refitting a Pinzgauer into a small RV. I’m not sure how practical it would be cross country, but they’ll keep up with a Hummer across rough terrain. And you can buy them cheap! But, very abused by the military, not to mention thirty years old…

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It turns out that our new campsite wasn’t quite as deserted as we had hoped. Every couple of hours this Hummer drives by with a tour group. Since they never come back down past us, I assume they’re just driving a loop through the national forest. A few other folks drive by on occasion, but for the most part, they don’t slow down and point.

As we hadn’t been out for a hike in a while, we decided to hike up one of the less improved roads to the top of the mountain. We were keeping an eye out for a new campsite, hazards we might have trouble crossing with the camper and halfway hoping we were on the right road to reach the lookout tower.

After a two or three mile hike over increasingly steep roads that were in worse shape the further we went, we finally found the end of the road. Apparently this is the cell tower we’re

pulling our EVDO signal from. I was halfway tempted to move the camper to the top of the hill and park under the cell tower, but the scenery was ruined by the power lines and tower itself. Besides, there wasn’t anywhere to park that wouldn’t be blocking access to the tower if someone came up to work on it.

So much for finding the lookout tower. But with cutting the road and several right of ways for redundant power, the generator, several locked sheds and a mini weather station (zoom in on the small pole sticking up above the fence at the base of the tower), we thought we understood why our cellular bills are so high!

As it turns out, the phone company that stuck that up there probably got a cut rate deal. The power company probably stuck it to them, but the forestry service had already built the road and created the clearing at the top. This is actually the former site of the lookout tower. It was removed in 1993. So, I guess we found it after all, or as close to it as we can get without a time machine.

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After working over a decade in the industry, we’re officially internet junkies. We use it for everything: Researching campsites, routes, fuel stops and sightseeing trips. Entertainment, banking, paying bills, investments. And today’s favorite topic: the life and times of the garden variety yellow jacket.

On top of our normal uses, we were trying to complete the interview for Truck Camper Magazine via email. So every couple of days, we’d hop on the moped and ride into Highlands, where we would sit around sipping coffee at Sweet Treats and try to get a few things accomplished. Even in the middle of town, the best we could manage was public wifi and a few phone calls as long as we stood on one leg and lifted the opposing arm straight out.

We had some things piling up that required a bit more secure connection than the free wifi at the coffee shop, so we reluctantly left our site and planned our route based on Sprint’s EVDO coverage map. We swung through Franklin to get some hardcopy maps from the ranger station since it’s nearly impossible to find internet maps of forest service roads and then headed into Sylva because Sprint claims to have coverage there.

The plan was to find a nice campsite near the Sylva area in the national forest, but after an hour sitting in a parking lot downtown, with the antenna rolled up and the amplifier sucking juice just to deal with a handful banking and investment transactions, we didn’t feel like we were going to find a nearby campsite that was both serene and had EVDO service if we could barely manage 1xRTT downtown.

Here, our forest service maps came in handy. We found a likely looking spot in the Pisgah National forest that was close to I-40. We had been planning to take that route to reach our rendezvous with Jenn’s parents at the end of the month, so it’s not really out of the way; just ahead of schedule.

To make a long story short, we’re sitting about five miles down a windy forest service road, at the top of a mountain in a deserted area. It’s not quite as picturesque as the intentional sites the forest service has manicured, but we have one bar of internet ALL TO OURSELVES! We need to get some work done on the blog version 2.0 and lots of pictures need to be uploaded to the forthcoming gallery.

Hopefully you’ll be hearing more from us this weekend as it’s supposed to rain Saturday, so we should have plenty of time for playing on teh intranats.

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I’m sure there will be a few coming in for the weekend just as last weekend, but the sites are quite spread out. Unless you are specifically wanting the single group site with four picnic tables, you can’t hear or see your neighbors except when they drive past.

Last weekend, we hiked the Glen’s Falls trail. It’s only a 1.7 mile hike, but it gains about 700 feet of elevation in that period, so parts of it can be a bit strenuous. The scenery is totally worthwhile though. There are a total of three separate waterfalls along the trail. In the spirit of Where’s Waldo, can you spot Jenn in this picture?

We still have a few more of the ‘famous’ falls to visit before we leave the area. Hopefully, they will be more impressive than Bridal Veil Falls. I suppose it’s just that we’re entering summer and it’s been a bit dry, but there was practically no water flowing at Bridal Veil. We were much more impressed by this unnamed waterfall we ran across on an unnamed forestry service road.

I don’t think this waterfall was on any of the numerous tourist fliers we picked up, but we were just out exploring on the moped and had to stop to take a picture. We also found three or four more ‘official’ primitive sites along this road.

I don’t think we’re going to find another free spot as nice as the one we’re currently parked at though. It’s at about 2750 feet of elevation with enough tree cover to keep the entire site pretty cool all day along

And if that wasn’t enough, there are two separate creeks running along each side of the campsite and you can’t even see the road.

It’s not as pretty as the rest of the water here, but this little creek is what Jenn’s been using to do laundry the hard way. It sounded like a great idea when it was Jenn’s hobby, but when I have to babysit the fire to boil water all day long, it starts to seem a bit like work!

P.S. We’re famous! Gordon White just posted our interview over at Truck Camper Magazine.

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Luckily for us, spring gobbler season had just begun in NC as we were passing through. Our first night, we found a beautiful site with absolutely no one else around and with no traffic in or out. The next night didn’t pan out as well. We didn’t find the hunting camp until the local forest service guys had left for the night and it was still locked up. It was kind of late to run around looking for another legal, free site, so we ended up staying at the Bladen Lakes State Park. It was pretty and there were only two other parties of tent campers in the park, but it’s a bit annoying to pay $15 for a place to park without any hookups, even if the firewood is ‘free’.

This picture is a bit out of sequence. It’s a ’scenic view’ pull off site between Waynesboro and Charlottesville, Virginia. We’re still learning the in camera panorama technique on our new digital camera, so please excuse the poorly stitched spot.

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Virginia has a ton of WMA’s. A list can be found here. I’d still suggest checking the individual WMA rules before heading that way, but Virginia has at least one class of public land that is boondocker friendly.

We ended up camping at the James River WMA near the thriving town of Wingina, VA; population – some, but not many. It’s not the prettiest place we’ve stayed, but the price is right (free) and the neighbors have either four legs or wings.

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I quit my job! Jenn is still working a bit longer to try and meet some of her own financial goals, but I am now a lazy, unemployed slob. And not a moment too soon; the new company has become more stifling every day… which became increasingly hard to deal with knowing we already had everything we needed to hit the road.

We went to the Renaissance Festival over in Tampa during opening weekend. It was kind of rainy, but not enough to really worry about. We stayed in the camper for the first few hours when the rain was coming down, then headed into the festival… which was pretty empty due to the weather. We had a pretty good time watching the shows and hitting all of the beer tents.

We camped in a Wal-Mart parking lot the night before the Renaissance Festival, then when we saw that they had annexed a fairly large corporate parking lot across the street, we camped there Saturday night. The only other RV on the lot left, but a couple of vans stayed overnight, so I think we weren’t the only folks sleeping on-site. Thankfully, we could leave the slide out which we couldn’t at Wal-Mart. That makes life in the camper so much more bearable.

On Sunday, we ran over to Plant City. For those of you not familiar with Plant City, there is nothing at all there except agriculture and the Strawberry Festival. We were planning to work at the Strawberry Festival the following week, so we needed to find a campground that wasn’t full. Additionally, we met with my parents and got our uniform t-shirts and exhibitor tickets for free admission.

The following weekend (well, Thursday evening), we ended up back in Plant City at the Sundial RV Park. If you are looking for a great destination campground, I’m afraid I can’t recommend them. The lots are small, you’re likely to only have water and electric, with a tractor coming around periodically to pump out your tanks. In fact, if you’re only staying a day or two, the owners would prefer to stick you in a field with no facilities whatsoever. Trains run past the campground pretty much all night long and they’re not shy about letting you know when they’re going by. As for amenities, there is a bathhouse, three washers and one dryer.

All that being said, we were pretty happy with the place as the manager was about as easy to get along with as possible. We didn’t have electricity the first night and there was some difficulty with the water and sewer hookups. We just left everything laying out and when we got in from the fair the following day, everything was setup. I still can’t recommend them for vacationers, but if you’re going to be working in the area, then they have fairly reasonable rates, even if we did feel they were overcharging a bit considering the trains and lack of amenities.

The Strawberry Festival was, well, work. If you’ve seen one fair (repeatedly, day in, day out, for 20 years or so), then you’ve seen them all. I grew up working at a State fair every year with my Dad. The past couple of years, he has retired from his most recent career and bought a concession stand to travel around and work various fairs. He and my Mom seem to enjoy the work, although they are getting up in years and I am always glad when we can help them out during an event. As we will soon both be unemployed, we are planning to work with my parents during some of their larger events. It will help us keep traveling from the income as well as let me spend a bit more time with my folks than I have in recent years.

We worked the Strawberry Festival from Friday until the following Sunday. Upon leaving, we headed back to Orlando and checked into a campground down the street from where we’ve been staying. It doesn’t have as many amenities and the campers aren’t as nice as the ones in the last park, but the cost is 75%. I can’t remember the exact cost of the last place, but there was lot rent, electricity and hospitality taxes to deal with. Currently, we only have a single price and it is about 10% less than just the lot rent at the last place.

The ambiance is a bit nicer… there are more empty spots and there is more space between RV’s. We also have lots of wildlife… well, pseudo-wildlife. Apparently everyone around here likes cats. I’ve spotted about a dozen distinct juvenile to adult cats that roam around the park. I’ve seen quite a few folks feeding them. The little beggars are convinced they own the place and I actually had to sit outside and watch the grill last night because they seemed to think that I was cooking steak for them. I don’t really mind the cats, but it is definitely a different experience to have a dozen or so tame cats strutting around your campsite.

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As you can see from our Charlie Brown Christmas tree, Jenn, my brother and I went for a hike until we found something roughly Christmas tree shaped. The process of hiking in, choosing a tree, sawing it down and carrying it out took less time than the last tree we bought off a lot. It’s apparently a lot easier to choose a tree when you’re trying to convince yourself that something looks like a Christmas tree than when you’re trying to decide which Christmas tree is ‘best’. I’m not sure if we were completely on Dad’s land when we found this one, but I doubt the neighbor will miss it.

We spent the first couple of nights down on the road leading up to my parents place. We got in after dark the first night and weren’t brave enough to try the driveway. It’s something like a 30-40% grade and would have our rear jacks dragging if we hit it at the wrong angle.

We got lucky and Santa still found us way up in the hills. Jenn got a shiny new CB radio and I got an oxy-acetylene torch. Dad gave me a couple of quick lessons. Now, I can cut an almost straight line in metal and stick two pieces of metal together as long as it doesn’t have to be pretty.

I also got around to finally installing the new Wilson trucker antenna while we were up in the hills. After trying a few things and not being happy with any of them, I finally grabbed a handy C-clamp and stuck the EVDO antenna to the top of our TV antenna. Now it lays flat when we’re moving and has the highest profile possible when we’re stopped. All of that still wasn’t enough to get us an internet connection where we were though. Eventually, we moved the camper up the hill and finally got an internet connection. It dropped in and out, but we haven’t set up an amplifier yet. I think an amp on the antenna would have got us a pretty solid connection. If you look closely, you can see the omni-directional antenna mounted on the TV antenna. If you look REALLY closely, you can see the ugly red C-clamp holding it together.

We didn’t see any snow for Christmas, but we did go through a bottle of propane staying warm. And spent about a gallon and a half of gasoline keeping the batteries topped up for six days. I’m trying not to think about how much diesel fuel it took to go from Orlando to Boone and back, but we averaged about 10.5 mpg running 65 and 13 mpg running 58. Unfortunately, we were on the interstate. Instead of enjoying our driving time, we were barreling down the highway in traffic trying to deal with everyone’s schedule. Ah well… a few more months and we can make our own schedule.

We’re back in Florida for the New Year, but here’s one last view from the high country.

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Our plans were to head over to the storage, load up a bunch of stuff for my girl friend, and head down to Okeechobee. Plans always seem to change. We did pack up and head south, but it was only as far as Kissimmee. No, we didn’t see Mickey. We wanted to grab some replacement batteries from a store down there. We did some of that “exotic” parking lot camping. Camping World was close, so we stayed the night there. It was the first time we have stayed in a parking lot in the camper. It was a decent experience. The only complaint we had was the noise. There were loud people, cars racing, and city rescue vehicles going all night. It was pretty a pretty uneventful night.

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Our goals are (in no particular order):

• The ability to go almost anywhere
• Maintaining as much self sufficiency as possible
• Keeping to a modest budget during both the purchasing and living phases
• Being able to bring along a few toys to help occupy the time
• Having enough living space to not kill each other

The perfect vehicle would be roughly:

• 4×4
• diesel
• no more than 25′ long
• larger on the inside than the outside
• very popular in order to be available used and at more affordable prices

Amazingly enough, we can get everything except popularity with… wait for it… coming back full circle to… the venerable truck camper. It’s not too difficult to find a 4×4 diesel truck for a reasonable price. Truck campers are relatively small and many of the more modern models are ‘bigger on the inside’ thanks to slide outs.

The two problems we run into with truck campers are weight and availability. In Florida, there just aren’t very many available and the ones that are available tend to be older or smaller with no slide outs. Luckily, its the end of the model year. We can probably get more or less what we want without spending an arm and a leg, but it’s still going to cost a bit more than a good 3-4 year old camper.

The other tricky thing with a truck camper is weight. The nicer units with lots of space because of slideouts, overall length and insulation are just darn heavy. On top of that, we need to carry fuel, water and a few more batteries than the average camper. Depending on the unit, we’ll either be pushing the max cargo capacity of top tier ‘consumer trucks’ or well over into the range of commercial trucks.

Now, maybe 500 pounds over max capacity is ’safe enough’ on a dually with an exhaust brake if we tool along at 50 mph on the highways, but I’d sure hate to find out the hard way that it’s not.

All things considered, you gotta admit, this just looks like a helluva fun way to live:

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Along with lots of solar panels, I’ve been thinking about what can be done to extend the boondocking time we can get in a small motor home. One of the things it’s hard to get around is the size of your holding tanks. In a class C, we’re going to have fairly small tanks. While we could tear down camp and go find a spot to dump as soon as the black water tank fills up, it could get darned inconvenient if we’re 20-30 miles down a dirt road and enjoying ourselves.

One thing I stumbled across is the rather bizarre sounding composting toilet. That’s right. You let your poop sit around until it turns into fertilizer and then toss it outside with a handful of flower seeds.

Before I did a bit of reading, it sure seemed like an odd idea, but I kept getting a nagging feeling that it could be a handy thing to have in a motor home. It is a bit large compared to most RV toilets and at $1300+, it’s about 10 times the cost as well. But, it uses no water at all. Additionally, you could probably get by with a liter bottle for your black water tank if you need one at all.

It’s certainly one of the more left field ideas we’ve had about retro-fitting the doomsday machine and will likely not be the very first modification we make. However, if we end up doing the conversion ourselves from a commuter bus, I’m damn sure going to stick an Envirolet in there.

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We’re trying to avoid longterm costs like running a generator and camp ground fees as much as we can. We figure that a solar installation should pay for itself pretty quickly with campground fees of $30/night in many places. Also, we’d really rather not run a generator constantly both because of the noise and the gasoline costs.

Now, with solar power, we’re going to have a relatively limited amount of power to work with every day. One of the biggest concerns is staying cool. Once we get out of the Florida summers, I think fans will work a lot of places. However, we expect that we’ll probably want air conditioning if we can possibly manage it. I really thought it would be a simple thing to find a low amperage air conditioning unit. Let’s just say I now understand why our power bill was halved after an A/C upgrade.

So far I’ve only been able to find two different units that I think we can manage on a mid-range solar install. And they’re both pretty damn pricey.

There’s a native 12V roof unit from DC Airco (who’s website looks like it had a stroke in 1995) it claims a peak draw of 300 watts and 4400 btu. The unit plus mounting kit runs about $4k – installation not included.

The other unit is the SolCool Millenia from SolCool. It runs on 110V and claims ‘less than 400 watts’. It has an impressive 16k btu which is way more than we need. I think about 7k btu would probably be a little on the high side. It’s a ‘portable’ style air conditioner, so it would be taking up space somewhere inside the RV. However, it does have some handy accessories available. Apparently it can be converted to a heater and the dehumidifying effect can be harnessed to produce purified water (supported by the manufacturer!). This guy runs ‘about 3k’ according to the sales rep.

I’m leaning towards the SolCool unit a bit because it would be a lot simpler to remove the unit later and sell it separate than to try and convince the next owner of the RV that he should pay me an extra 4k for the after market AC. So far though, the SolCool folks don’t have the latest design specs up on their website and the sales rep that promised to send me a pdf still hasn’t done so.

There is at least one other option that is pretty cheap in both energy and dollars. Evaporative cooling would work pretty easily if we weren’t starting out in Florida where its usually hot AND humid.

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