Week #5: California Dreaming

Before getting into this blog post, I thought I'd take a moment to explain the blog name 'Tumbleweed As, Bro' as my friend Adam asked about it last night. Ginny came up with the name tumbleweed and I liked it as it really captured the essence of how we're living in the van - no deep roots and just going whichever way the wind blows us. Tumbleweed was not available on blogspot so I had to get creative to still use the name. In New Zealand, adding 'as' after adjectives like sweet or cool provides a point of emphasis and is the equivalent of saying 'right on' or 'awesome'. And since I'm already being very casual using New Zealand slang in my blog name I thought why not throw a 'bro' on the end too.....right, bro? So there you have it - the genesis of 'Tumbleweed As, Bro'!         

We've been in California for over a week now and are enjoying the more temperate weather. We haven't had to fire up the heater, worry about our freezing batteries or scrape ice off our windshield since arriving in California. On the negative side of things, gas is well over $4/gal here which is painful when filling up our 25 gallon tank! All the more reason to 'drive less and camp more'!

I've been training for the California International Marathon in Sacramento for many months and it's why we drove fairly quickly across the US to get back to California. The race had been cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic so it was pretty exciting that the race was happening this year. A number of my running friends from LA were coming up for the race too so I was looking forward to seeing all of them. We spent the night before the race in Folsom which is in the foothills east of Sacramento and where the races starts. It's also the home of Folsom Prison which you probably know on account of the great Johnny Cash. While waiting for the race to start, I ran into a guy that I used to work with in Wellington, NZ. It turned out that we were pretty similar paced runners and we ran more than half of the race together. I also ran with my friends Demian and Richie for sections of the race and we all had strong races finishing between 2:40 and 2:45 which was what we were all shooting for. See photos below of us beaming at the finish line! 

After the race, we drove to Berkeley where we were planning to spend most of the week visiting old friends. It was great catching up with our friends and we were amazed at how quickly their kids were growing up! See photo below of us at our friend's Andrew and Isabelle's house.  

After a couple nights in Berkeley, we headed off to Pt Reyes National Seashore for an overnight backpacking trip at Coast Camp. We had beautiful weather the first day before some damp weather rolled in. We went for a beach walk to Sculptured Beach and saw elk, hawks, seals, turkey vultures and all kinds of marine life. It was a great short trip to test out some new backpacking gear that we had gotten for some longer through hikes that we're planning to do in the coming years. Most of our gear performed well although we would have liked our lightweight Z Packs tent to have been more waterproof. We think we didn't set it up as well as we could have though so we're chalking some of the problem up to user error. See photos below from Pt Reyes.

I received positive feedback on my observations on vanlife from last week's post so I thought I'd continue in that vein again this week. Here are a few other musings from our experience so far:

• Cooking in the van - we have two stove top propane burners in our kitchen which are pretty good for cooking. Our only complaint is that they don't simmer as well as we would like. We're able to store a good amount of food in our fridge and cabinets so we can eat most things that we'd be eating at home. There are a few things that we can't cook such as any baking. We used to grill vegetables a lot in our oven so we're going to find a way to do that perhaps outside of the van in a hibachi grill or something. 
• Van condensation - our van started smelling kind of funny over the weekend and after some sleuthing, we believe that it's a result of too much condensation in the van without proper circulation. We've taken advantage of staying with our friends in Berkeley this week to wash all of our clothes and really air the van out so now it's smelling like a box of roses! We may also get a dehumidifier which will probably help a ton with getting rid of the moisture in the van. 
• Bicycles - many people have asked if we brought our bikes with us. We really wanted to but we just didn't get it together to get a bike rack before our departure so our bikes stayed in my dad's basement back in Massachusetts. While it would be great to have them, they would make stealth camping that much more difficult and would be just one more thing to worry about when we leave the van unattended. We do plan to bring bikes on the next phase of our adventures though!