LIVING IN THE BED OF A PICKUP : Getting ready to go: RT5 on the horizon

Road trip #5? Can it really be? We are ready for our fifth road trip in our marriage?

There is a lot to do to get ready. Some things are the same from year to year, and others are different, and unexpected.

And, like most years, something comes up at the last minute that has to be dealt with. Only this year two things came up.

The first one was that our medical insurance plan changed, and we have new forms to fill out.   Of course, the new enrollment period overlaps with when we were leaving, so this necessitated several calls to Illinois. And some anxiety about whether we could get everything completed.

The second unanticipated issue was a tree falling over the small lane that we grant as an easement for our neighbors. This fallen tree brought up an interesting question: who is responsible for removing the tree?

Answer: it is unclear. There aren't laws governing easements (we subsequently found out after doing out part to support struggling attorneys).   The "rules" are based on "common law," or agreements the neighbors have worked out and filed (which there aren't for us).

The sensible thing to do was for us to take down "nuisance" trees (i.e., trees that are dead and in danger of falling), and this fulfills our obligations to grant an area where neighbors can access their property. However, we aren't responsible for maintaining this area or dealing with "acts of God" falling trees.

So we contacted our tree person, the one who we had out this spring to take down other trees. And in doing that we realized that there are a lot of other trees in our yard that could fall on our power lines, our wood shed, or our house. We decided we should just go ahead and take them down also.

What started as a tree falling on our easement area that we cleaned up ourselves turned into a huge project of cutting down about a dozen Alder trees and having them cut and chopped for firewood.   But it's better to do this now than after some of these have fallen and done damage. We are counting this as another house project for the year.

We will have 8-10 years worth of firewood stacked in our woodshed. Although we are 1/3 owners of a wood splitter, we'll never use it again. By the time this wood is burned, we will be too old for that kind of stuff. And in that time, more trees will need to be culled. That's Life on Whidbey Island. Trees are your nemesis and your friends.

One of the other trees we had cut down was a pine tree sitting just outside our front porch. The original owners of the house had planted it many years ago. It was their Christmas tree. It was looking a little sickly, but mainly we noticed that it had split several times growing and so had several "trunks." In those areas moisture can collect, weakening the trunks. If one of them fell, it would be right on our house. Besides, its days were numbered because pine trees don't grow in the PNW, so it was out of its element so to speak.

Here goes the Christmas Tree. It was too big to string lights on anyway.

Cutting up wood for the wood shed:

We have enough wood for 8-10 years assuming we are on road trips during the coldest months of the year. The savings in propane bills more than pays for the work cutting down the trees.

Now for the routine stuff, of which there is a lot because we will be gone for 4 1/2 months and will need to have everything we will need for that time period stored in our pickup and small camper.

It is time to take down the hanging flower baskets, move the deck chairs inside, take down the swing, cover the faucets, clean the bird feeders in anticipation of next spring, and do everything else in preparation for winter. This also means taking several steps to make the house secure--alarms, cameras, monitoring systems, etc.

One part of the home security process is fun--and that is getting the grandchildren involved in watching our house, handling our mail, and cleaning up regularly to make it appear we are home. We have four of them involved in various projects, all of which mean a little money for them and all of which help us out. A lot. It's kind of sweet to have these young people doing something that is meaningful work. A side benefit is that we get to have more contact with them while we are gone. Someday we'll have jobs for our two boys in Atlanta too.

We have had the pickup serviced and the camper serviced. There were a number of small repairs/improvements that were made to the camper that we did over the course of the summer.

Every inch of storage is used inside the camper and inside the pickup. Everything we bring has to be useful or necessary.

We have purchased movies to watch in the evenings and several books. We now are a two-Kindle family. Vicky bought new pans that stack inside each other and save space. Space is at a premium because the camper is the smallest one made for an 8-foot bed. I have a toolkit that is carefully organized, plus extra parts for the camper that have broken in the past and that could create difficulties if we are miles from any stores (e.g., an extra latch for the refrigerator). You have to think of anything that could go wrong and anticipate that.

Medicines have to be purchased for 4 1/2 months which, for two people our age, means a huge headache. Like a lot of people our age we are not only supporting the legal profession but also the medical profession. The concept is that if you need something, you need it--you can't just say "hey, I'm running to the store for some allergy pills!"

We hike almost every day when we aren't traveling, so we have to make sure all of our hiking gear is in good shape, and that we have extras of some of the gear (e.g., trekking poles). After clothes, food, and dishes, our hiking gear takes up the most space in the pickup.

Back seat of the pickup is STUFFED!

Vicky does all of the meal planning, so this means making sure she has all of the spices she will need, and all of the canned goods we will need. We plan for being away from any stores for three weeks at a time. And since we are gone for so many months we have learned that good meals are a necessity. You can't live on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and oatmeal for that long. And after hiking for a few hours each day, we want something to look forward to. We eat a ton of raw vegetables and fruits, and this creates its own set of problems. We carry a cooler in the pickup devoted to our extra veggies/fruits. Last year we had a larger refrigerator installed, and even it gets completely filled when we leave.

Here is Vicky laying out the canned goods. She organizes them by meals, so she doesn't have to do a lot of digging around in the tubs we keep them in:

And the veggies we will leave with:

Somehow she manages to get all this, and more, into our small refrigerator:

Vicky is also the route planner, so this summer we purchased about 50 maps of various Bureau of Land Management areas.

First set of maps:

Second set of maps:

But just purchasing them isn't enough. It requires some serious organization to be able to find the one you need. Vicky loves doing this kind of thing.

Since there aren't campgrounds or RV parks where we want to go, these maps are essential for telling us how we can access the areas. Many of the BLM areas have roads that are too rough for even our 4 wheel drive pickup, so knowing the area ahead of time can make things much easier for us. We have a better idea where we can go and where we can't go.

The camper has to be filled with water and propane. All of our electronics have to be prepared, which involves batteries, cables, camera equipment, battery chargers, inverters so we can convert 12 volt system to 110 for charging the computer and programs we will need (what most people call "apps," but I refuse to use this term for a computer program).

Some of our electronics:

Clothes have to be washed where there are no laundromats and people have to be washed where there are no showers. Supplies have to be loaded for these two essential parts of life.

There are no toilets where we are going, so we have to bring "Wag bags" and shovels, for yet another essential part of life.

Here are the Wag Bags, organized into piles of 10:

We are excited. We only have the rough outlines of a trip planned. We will head for the Monument Valley area in Utah, where my favorite movie, The Searchers, was filmed (and many other westerns from my childhood), then back to the St. George, Utah area, and then to Southern California BLM lands where we will stay for most of the winter. That's it. The rest of it is make it up as you go.

We will miss our family, and especially the children. Everything in life is a trade-off. But we both know that if we stay here for a winter we will spend most of it sitting, and at our age that is very unhealthy. On our road trips we "move" about 5 hours a day, if not more. And it is fun, and gives us a common goal that is a necessity for a marriage. We will miss our home. And did I mention we will miss the children? I think maybe I did.

Here we go: