I’ve been going over and over my story for an update and I cannot think of where to start and what to leave out and how much detail to add or not and just…cannot be motivated to write.  I figured that would be a good place to start!

We have bought another SUV!  If you’ve done any reading on towing vehicles, the vehicle being towed is called a “toad”.  Yup!  I thought that was just a joke that HLD made up but it’s an actual “thing”.  So guess what HLD called our new SUV?  MR. TOAD!!! You see why I married him!?

I’ve also done way more than I thought I would do with Max.  I had a gruesome time trying to figure out how to cover the bathroom space.  When we first got Max, he had the ugliest folding door that covered that space and it was curved and weird and ugly and I decided to remove it because it was heavy and ugly.  Really ugly.  I originally used a tension rod and a curtain but that didn’t last too long because it was in such an odd position that the tension rod would not stay.  I looked on everyone’s favorite internet Mega-lo-Mart and ordered a new track to replace the old one.  It was a disaster!  It broke before I even finished installing it!  Is it just me or is this online Mega-lo-Mart getting worse and worse?  I wracked my brain for days! I even put out a question on a page I follow on that blue I-Spy-You social media site.  I’m not even going to tell you some of the suggestions I was given other than to say that people really don’t read things before they react/respond! Anway, I ended up making something with PVC pipe and I am so very pleased with myself!

 

 

So I’ve just realized how long this is getting and, like my “one last thing I need to do” on Max, I don’t want this to get long and boring, full of details that no one will read, like I do with those really long articles in The Guardian, that start off super exciting and then I just end up scrolling through, speed reading along the way and just wishing it was all over and why did I ever decide the article would be THAT interesting and… you get the idea.  To summarize:  I made the privacy/bathroom curtain out of our Handfasting table cloths.  I used a riveter for the first time and only messed up with two rivets.

 

I made new curtains for the dinette area with those tablecloths as well.  I decorated the floor in dinette area, which is where the entire thing got out of hand! Decorating the dinette floor prompted me to decorate the walls which turned into decorating the cupboards on top of the dinette and then the bedroom and well, I’ll just leave these here:

 

I also, made a curtain to divide the cockpit from the cabin (I mean, I do live with a licensed airplane pilot!), which will help with air flow. I made another curtain rod with PVC.  I love PVC now!  There is so much you can do with it!

And:

 

The “Georgetown Law” sticker on the window is to balance out the tie dye!

The last thing I’m trying to figure out is how to make the floor less slippery for Koko.  The laminate on there makes her nervous because she slips around on it. I have a runner for the floor but I think I also want to do something with the laminate. Stay Tuned!

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.” – Anthony Bourdain

 

And just like that, we bought yet another car this weekend.

Townes lasted two weeks.  On week two of his life with us I was on my way to the dealer  to pick up another key fob, as he was sold to us with only one, when I was rear ended by an idiot who was clearly not paying attention!  “I’m sorry I was distracted, I wasn’t paying attention.”  One ambulance ride to Harborview Medical Center (the best trauma hospital in the area) later, and all day in the ED making sure everything was ok,  and we are now dealing with insurances and things and stuff involved with this.  Townes was taken to the repair shop where he was declared a total loss! I can’t think of any other reason for so many things having gone wrong with Townes, other than he was doomed from that start and maybe it was a good thing that he was totalled?  My back and neck don’t think it was a good thing, but that’s a story for a different blog. :-)

Anyway, that’s one story summarized.  We had our shakedown cruise a month ago.  I didn’t think that when you take a shakedown cruise, things really do rattle and shake! I don’t know what I was thinking would happen when you take a 30 year old RV, full of beads and baubles on the road.  A literal shakedown.  We arrived in one piece, nothing fell over, nothing landed on the road and we hooked up at our arrival spot and went on to enjoy the festivities at a friend’s house.  When it was time to hunker down, we decided to sleep in the main bed, which we figured would be cooler than the overhead.

At some point that night, I got up and walked on something wet.  I thought it might just have been from us having come in with wet feet since it had been raining.  I didn’t think much of it, wiped my feet and went back to bed.  In the morning, there was a pool of water on the floor!  Turns out the pipes under the kitchen sink had no teflon tape around the couplings and water had been leaking out all night long.  Sigh.

We sloshed back home and thankfully this was something I could fix pretty easily and no more leaking!

Last weekend, was my daughter-in-law and son’s baby shower.  We were looking forward to take Max on a three hour trip to Cinebar, WA, but now we have no house battery. Even while having shore power plugged in something drained the battery and we had to nix taking Max with us.  We are now waiting for a friend of ours to come by and poke around and see what he can find.  Honestly, I really don’t care what else I have to fix on Max, I just want him to get us to Costa Rica or Belize or Panama or wherever we decide to plant our flag and leave Max there to sprout weeds. I’m so very over this.

 

I am pieces of all the places I have been, and the people I have loved.
I’ve been stitched together by song lyrics, book quotes, adventure, late night conversations, moonlight, and the smell of coffee. – Brooke Hampton

It’s only been about eight months since my first writing and I figured it’s time to write an update.  This might be long so get comfy.

What’s been going on?  Oh, right, so, you know how we have Max parked in front of our house on a residential street, right?  Well, it turns out that he has to be moved every so often so that he doesn’t look abandoned, and that’s what we do.  Now, usually we just move him a few yard up or down in front of the house.  So this one time, Hippie-Lawyer-Dude decided that he would take Max around the block and bring him back, so that he’d land somewhere else.  So, before he heads off around the block, I thought it might be a good idea to remind HLD to make sure everything was tied down and in its place.  Hahahaha! Silly me!  Why would I ever think that he’d actually listen?  I crack me up!

I’m in the house, minding my own business and I get a text,“I NEED YOUR HELP RIGHT NOW!” ME: “WHERE THE HELL ARE YOU?”  HLD: “outside” (Because I thought he’d be driving Max in the basement??).  So I rush outside, figuring that “outside” could be anywhere from the front door to around any block in the entire neighborhood and  I’m sure that a 23ft RV looking like it’s in distress shouldn’t be too hard to find, and there’s Max, in the middle of the intersection with the door to his insides* swinging wildly and HLD looking like he’s about to light a match underneath Max and declare him a total loss.   

Apparently I am way, way funnier than even I give myself credit for, because “make sure everything is tied down” does not apply to HLD “just driving Max around the block” and if the door to Max’s insides isn’t “properly tied down” (or CLOSED PROPERLY, in layman’s terms) it will swing open as soon as you turn a corner and it will hit something along the way and it will then get torn off its hinges and will not be able to close again and it will continue to swing wildly even as the engine dies and you get stuck in the middle of the intersection. What HLD expected me to do is beyond me!  Thank the RV Goddesses that Max was at the intersection in front of our house and HLD managed to start Max again and get him to sputter back in front of the house.

I do believe that HLD was ready to light a match underneath Max and let the heat of this mechanical inferno warm up the neighborhood.  There was no fixing the door and I had it tied shut with rope and duct tape.  Classy!  We ended up calling our usual mechanic in Kent (super great place to get your RV fixed, have I mentioned this before?) and they were willing to try to fix the door by repairing it to see if they could save us a few thousand dollars.  Obviously we had to have Max towed so that his engine could be looked at and repaired as well.  (Can you hear the jingling of the loose change in my pocket?  I’m going bankrupt!)  Thankfully, the door was actually repaired without having to be replaced.  Fingers crossed that Hippie-Lawyer-Dude learned his lesson!

Meanwhile, we will be selling Levon because Max can’t tow that weight.  We bought a Honda CRV who was promptly named “Townes” (Van Zandt).  She’s the coolest car since my Dodge Ram 2500 from Virginia, Lorenzo.  (Yes, it had a Hemi!)

 

 

Meet Townes!

We still need to do that shakedown cruise with Max – stay tuned!

 

*I know there’s a proper name for the part of the RV that has the living area, but I don’t know that name right now so I’m calling it the “insides”.

 

 “Travel makes one modest. You see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.” -Gustav Flaubert

 

I’ve been mulling over how to start this travel blog.  Do I start it when I started travelling again or would it be easier to start it by telling the story of our preparations for our upcoming adventures? Should I just skip through how it is that HLD and I love to travel and why we do?  Do I need to explain what “Third Culture Kids” are? I’m not sure I’ve figured out how to “tell the story” and I don’t think there’s a particular way to tell the story.  Maybe as I write, the story will just tell itself and that’s really the only way the story won’t seem forced, boring and scripted? So, here I go, the story begins and will probably continue where the moment takes me, The Story of Max.

So, we got the RV we’re going to use for our travels around the continent, a 1988, Fleetwood Tioga Arrow. We got him in Bremerton for a screaming deal.  According to his previous owners, HER name was “The Unsinkable Molly Brown”.  Here I was thinking that Dragon #1 had invented the idea of naming inanimate objects! As we drove Molly from Bremerton to the ferry to cross back into Seattle, we played around with calling her “Molly” but that just didn’t work. HLD likes using singer’s names but nothing seemed to match her and so she was Molly until either we got used to that name, or we figured out who “Molly” really was.

Molly was in great shape for ‘her’ age, unlike me (sorry!  couldn’t resist it!) and I set about cleaning, dusting and disinfecting every inch of Molly’s interior, because why risk missing a dirty spot and having to take Molly out of commission later on down the line?  Eeww, germs! One evening as my youngest son (starring in this adventure as “Dragon #3), HLD and I were at the dinner table throwing names around when Dragon #3 said “Max.”  And it fit!

I spent about two weeks cleaning, disinfecting, sweeping, repainting, hanging curtains, and getting  Max all Boho-Gypsified (yes, that’s an actual adjective!)

Max had a really nice, upholstered swivel chair behind the passenger seat that HLD wanted to keep.  However, once we cajoled Koko into Max, there really was a whole lot less space in this 23′ Rv than originally imagined! Taking the chair off its bolts required WD-40 [insert appropriate licensing requirement HERE], a couple of trips to the hardware store for the right tool, a journey underneath Max, lots of elbow grease and more humor than I thought I would need.

It took a lot of encouragement and tempting with treats to get Koko inside max. Apparently, this 160lb Newfie is ok squishing herself into the back of Sally (our Prius, before having our truck Levon) but a large RV proved to be scarier than she was comfortable with, however, once she was inside and her treat summarily consumed, she was quite willing to sniff around, survey her domain and plonk herself gracefully at the entrance.  Koko hasn’t wanted to get back into Max, but we really haven’t tried too hard. I’m imagining her using the previous “swivel chair spot” as a “160lb Newfie spot”, but she might have ideas of her own. Knowing her and her love of being as close to us as possible, it would be adorable if she picked the spot between the driver’s and passenger’s seat for her adventures as Nomad Newfie the First!

Here are a couple of before and after photos of  Max – Hippie-BohoMobile Extraordinaire!

Max has been remodelled, smudged and taken to the mechanic to get him ready for a shakedown cruise- Date to be announced.  I can’t wait!

“There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson