Tumbleweed

Happy belated Thanksgiving all! We're definitely feeling very grateful and thankful to be able to travel around in our van and see all these amazing and beautiful places. We've also really enjoyed being able to visit family and friends through our travels - hopefully we can visit you soon!  In our quest to become Texas residents, we had allowed a few days to take care of the bureaucratic hassles of getting our driver's licenses, registering our vehicle, insuring our vehicle, etc. So we were prepared to be stuck in Livingston, TX (about an hour north of Houston) for a number of days while we got all of these things sorted. Much to our delight, we learned that TX bureaucrats are much more helpful and friendly than most other places so we were able to take care of everything in a day. We did have to do a number of wild goose chases including getting our van weighed (it weighs over 8,000 lbs!) and inspected but we were very surprised to end up with TX license plates the very sa...

One week ago, we had to put our beloved Scout to sleep. His health was failing from the cancer which was spreading throughout his body which was incredibly hard to witness. Scout was always the best athlete out-running, out-jumping and outperforming all of the other dogs. So to see him hobbling around with his back legs hardly even functioning was just incredulous and heart breaking. I had to carry him in and out of our van and up any stairs as he just didn't have the strength anymore. Scout was a warrior though and was never one to mope around and feel sorry for himself. Nevertheless, he was giving us many signs that he just didn't have the energy or ability to carry on in this world. He had no appetite, very little energy, diarrhea and he was all skin and bones from losing 25 pounds over the past month and a half.  We were staying with our friends outside of Philadelphia and they fortunately had a veterinarian friend who came over on short notice to check on Scout's healt...

While we've been on the road for just over a week, we've only spent two nights in the van so far. We visited my sister and her husband in Fairfield, CT for a couple nights and then visited friends in Brooklyn, NY. We left Brooklyn on Sunday and spent the first night in the van next to the banks of the Delaware River at the NJ/PA state line, which we found using the iOverlander app.  Traveling in the van has been pretty good so far despite not spending huge amounts of time in the van. It was a little stressful driving into NYC the other day mostly due to the low bridges on FDR Dr. The previous owner of our van (Amazon) drove the van into something that caused considerable damage to the van roof so we're a bit leary of doing something similar. Our high-roof van has a clearance of 9' 6" without the solar panels and probably 9' 8" with the solar panels. We saw several signs along FDR that indicated 9' 6" clearance restrictions so we quickly exited and...

When Ginny and I decided to quit our jobs and convert a van to live and travel in, I knew that it would be difficult at times but I really underestimated the number of challenges and the overall degree of difficulty of the project. We’re resourceful, quick learners and fairly handy so I figured there would be some roadblocks but that we generally had it in the bag. Whoops, I was sorely mistaken on that one! We did look at other options to upfitting the van ourselves such as buying a used campervan or having someone do the conversion for us. The used campervans weren’t quite up to Ginny’s “look and feel” standards and we had three issues with having someone else convert the van for us: 1) most van upfitters have been totally slammed and couldn’t fit our build in until 2022 at the earliest! 2) the cost of the van conversion was more than we wanted to spend and 3) we weren’t sure if someone else could create exactly what we were envisioning for the van we would be spending the next couple...