We’re still in Florida, parked in Kissimmee.  Our location is ideal – a gracious friend is letting us park on his amazing land that has full hook-ups. It is such a blessing to have a safe place to leave our home, and a place to retreat to. Without worrying [...]]]> Just a quick, rather disjointed, update.

Kiki climbing trees!

We’re still in Florida, parked in Kissimmee.  Our location is ideal – a gracious friend is letting us park on his amazing land that has full hook-ups. It is such a blessing to have a safe place to leave our home, and a place to retreat to. Without worrying about the expense of a peak season priced RV Spot.

Kiki loves it here, as it’s the only place we let her go off leash for a bit, as there’s no predatory animals here to threaten her. She does amazingly well, and to her – this is Disney World.

It’s an easy hour drive to my parents place in Melbourne, where we’ve been splitting our time between the the bus and in their guest room. And with the MINI getting great fuel economy, the commute expenses have been low.

Our past month has mainly been focused on family, and getting my dad’s treatment plans off the ground.  It’s been hectic and at times emotionally draining, of course – but it’s going well so far. I thank you all dearly for all the kind comments, e-mails and support.

For the month ahead, hopefully the hectic pace will subdue some and we can all get back to a bit of a routine.  For us that means shifting attention back to work and bus projects, and doing a little bit of nomading around Florida. We’ll stay close to the area, as the next round of testing to see how treatments are going won’t be until March.

Here’s what’s generally on tap for us in the next month:

Work

We are working on updates to both our apps, Coverage? and State Lines.   Coverage? is due for a routine map refresh (we find our customers start complaining about the maps being out of date around 2-3 months) and we’re adding a new, frequently asked for feature.

State Lines will be a massive re-write with about double the amount of rules & regulations that affect US travelers, with an entirely new interface including iPad support.  If you have a suggestion for info to add to the app, now’s the time to request it!

This is of course, on top of our normal workload and taking over some support tasks from my father in our shared software business.

Bus Projects

We are potentially moving the bus over to the Tampa area next week, for a skilled family member to do some interior work for us.

We want to pull the oven/stovetop out of the kitchen and replace it with a cabinet for storing our portable induction cooktop and other kitchen gadgets that we actually use for cooking. We’ll eventually replace our microwave with a combo convection oven style for our very occasional baking needs.

We’ll also have the countertops replaced in both the kitchen and bathroom, as our temporary paint job we did back in July is starting to show wear.  We may even do some modifications to our dual desk set up to make it even more awesome!  We hope to consult on what cabinetry modifications will need to be made to swap our propane/electric fridge out for an energy efficient 12v one (such as a Novacool).

Recent changes to the bedroom in the bus - valances recovered, new TV over nightstand.

We actually did tackle a couple of small bus projects last month – we recovered our valances in the bedroom, and installed a 22″ LED TV & Blueray player that streams over wifi (with many thanks to Chris’ folks for the awesome holiday gift!).  The TV is on a swing arm over a nightstand, as we tend to watch content while snuggled up in bed anyway. It’s the first TV we’ve owned since we hit the road back in 2007 – but it’ll  mainly be used for viewing movies, Netflix content and discs.  For viewing movies in the living area, we use one of our huge computer monitors.

And we’ve started some research into approaching installing solar panels on the bus.  In preparation for that, we did a comprehensive energy evaluation on all current systems by taking measurements of each device, light fixture and appliance.  This will help us focus on our needs, as well as where to concentrate on improving our efficiency.

Moving up in the World

We’ll be moving Technomadia.com (this blog) to new hosting.  In January, we had a record breaking month for traffic (we’re up to over 30,000 page views a month these days, and nearly 19,000 unique visitors). This, despite having a fairly slow month for new content as we switched our focus to family.

Recent traffic on Technomadia.com

We’re blown away by this, particularly since we never set out to be ‘bloggers’ and don’t put effort into building traffic.

However, the increased traffic is starting to tax our current cheap shared hosting solution on Dreamhost. We’ve turned off just about every plug-in we can, but still encounter slow load times and frequent timeout related 404 and 500 errors when trying to update/write posts. The other evening, it took me 2 very frustrating additional hours to get our Purging Stuff  post polished and scheduled – just fighting these errors.

If we’re going to continue upkeeping the site, which we do mostly enjoy, it’s time to move up in the world.  We were researching other solutions (other shared hosts, switching to VPS, etc) – when our friend offered to let us have some space on his scaleable Cloud Services account with Rackspace that is way underutilized.  He made an offer we couldn’t refuse that doesn’t increase our costs to keep providing this site.  So, over the coming week or so, we’ll be trying it out and moving.

Hopefully we can do this without interruptions, but – in case we fail, now you know why.

So, next week might see us over in the Tampa area for a bit, which will let us visit Chris’ folks who are still wintering in Spring Hill.  After that, we’ll be taking it one step at a time, and perhaps doing a little bit of meandering around central Florida while we await the next round of tests for my father to know what is next.

If you’re around and would desire a meet up, have bus parking, have a hot tub, ideas for interesting things to see & do in the area, etc. – let us know!

We imagine we’ll be returning the Melbourne and/or Kissimmee area by the end of month, as that’s when the next set of appointments is and my brother is coming in town. After that? Too soon to know.

One thing is fairly certain – our bid to ‘win’ a Burning Man ticket in their new lottery system was a fail. We, and several other core Camp Nomadia members, received confirmation last night that we did not win tickets. So, like last year, we’re not making plans around attending the burn this year.  If it happens, it happens.  Which means, we’re not contemplating a cross country transition to make it to the playa in late August.  It also means, we’ll not be organizing Camp Nomadia. And with very few core members making plans around going, it’s too soon to tell if there will be Camp Nomadia.  We suspect many other veteran camps are in the same position.

We’re conditioned in our society to acquire stuff. Our culture and economy often seems to revolve around this quest. And no matter how large a space we have, we can easily fill that space with stuff.  It seems to be a universal law – the amount of [...]]]>

<— Read Chapter 2: Affording Full Time Travel

We’re conditioned in our society to acquire stuff. Our culture and economy often seems to revolve around this quest. And no matter how large a space we have, we can easily fill that space with stuff.  It seems to be a universal law – the amount of stuff you have expands to fill all available space.

The acquisition of stuff can easily end up consuming our space and our lives, cluttering our homes, our budgets and our minds.

We pay to acquire it, pay to house it, pay to store it when we run out of room, and pay to move it when we seemingly inevitably upgrade to a larger place.

Repeat this cycle a few times, until the day comes when your next of kin get stuck with paying once again to dispose of it all.

For those wanting to travel full time for an extended amount of time, breaking the acquisition cycle is essential. You just simply can’t take it all with you. With valued media collections, cherished family heirlooms and closets full of unending wardrobe choices, letting go can seem like an insurmountable task. We’re just so conditioned to have stuff around us.

One key is realizing that stuff needs us more than we need it.

If you’re determined to embrace a life with the simplicity of less stuff – you can do it. It is never too late to break free from the endless acquisition cycle. The biggest block is typically one of social conditioning and attaching sentimental value to inanimate objects.

Setting your Goal

There are a lot of extreme minimalists out there who blog about the joys of owning extremely few possessions – capping yourself at “100 things” or less, or even traveling with no luggage whatsoever. And often, your “stuff” limit may be constrained by the amount of space that is physically available – such as living in an RV or traveling via a backpack.

Packed for 5 Months in the USVI - 2 Suitcases

Goals are great, and they definitely give one motivation and discipline to keep their amount of stuff in check.  And these sorts of goals can be a fun experiment to see if you can do it for a short term.  When we moved to the US Virgin Islands for a 5 months, we set a goal of only checking  two bags weighing no more than 100 lbs. And we were successful in meeting this goal while still comfortably having everything we’d need to live and set up our household & office.  And in our first year of travel together, we compressed both of our lives to live & travel in a 16′ travel trailer with only 45 sq ft of living space. It was an awesome experiment to see just how little we could do without (including plumbing!) while still feeling comfortable and abundant.

But don’t feel you need to set a goal that seems unrealistic for you. Set a goal to live the life you want by consciously choosing how much power stuff has over you. Choose goals that meet your objectives. Some stuff has a very legitimate role in our lives, serving a useful function and adding value. And other things are just anchors holding you back.

The trick if finding what those things are, and jettisoning them.

An Approach to Purging

There’s many aways to approach purging your stuff. And there’s really no right or wrong way – just want works for you.

My trick to approaching purging is to set up a process that avoids overwhelm. Don’t try to think of your entire house as a singular project to get done.

Instead, focus on one area at a time by dividing up the purge process into sessions. Each of these sessions should be manageable within the span of a couple of hours, something that can be tackled with a feeling of fairly immediate accomplishment.

You can tackle a session once a week, or several a day – the pace is up to you and your objectives.

For each session, I followed a framework that looked something like this 7-step process:

1) Pick an Area! Pick just one area – perhaps a closet, a dresser, a drawer, a cabinet, a hutch, a filing cabinet, etc.  Set an attainable goal to purge a certain percentage this session, such as trimming away 20% of my socks. Keep in mind that you can return to do more in future sessions – it is better to work in phases than to get paralyzed trying to do too much at once!

2) Divide and Conquer! Divide things into three piles (mental or physical):

a) Stuff you see as essential must-keeps.

b) Stuff you regularly use.

c) Stuff you rarely use, touch or appreciate (this pile should be much bigger than the others – if it’s not, you haven’t made the mental shift yet.)

3) Further Divisions! Put your essential pile to the side for now, focusing on your rarely used and regularly used piles. While keeping them separate,  sub-divide things up into logical categories (using clothing as an example: pants, sweaters, ties, t-shirts, long sleeve shirts, etc. or work clothes, lounge clothes, exercise clothes, dress up clothes, etc.)

4) Rotational Purge. Start going through each of your rarely used piles in rotation with a goal to purge a certain number of items from each pile. If you’re unsure if you should purge or keep an item, ask yourself these questions:

• Does this item serve a unique purpose in my life that can’t be met by another item I am keeping?
• Do I find myself not using this item as often as I should because it doesn’t exactly meet my criteria? (continuing the clothing example – I don’t have anything to wear with this color, there’s a stain, the fabric isn’t comfy, the fit isn’t perfect..etc.)
• Does this item bring me joy and delight?

In this process, you may find some things you not only don’t want to purge, but want to move to the must-keep pile.

After you’ve completed going through all your piles once, take a deep breath and congratulate yourself!

5) Switch the focus. Do a few more rounds on the rarely used piles each time increasing the number of items you purge.  Then repeat the above steps with less aggressiveness on your regularly used stuff (ie. instead of purging 4 items each round, may be you only purge 2).  Or if your goal is bring more variety into your life, such as a wardrobe, perhaps you’re feeling ready to intentionally weed out the “old standbys” you regularly grab for.

6) Combine. Switch back and forth from your regular and rarely used piles until it feels you’ve achieved your initial goal. Combine the piles to get a sense of what you’re actually down to.  Purge more as desired.

7) Reassess Essentials. Now turn your attention to the pile of stuff you initially deemed essential.  In all likely hood, some of them no longer will seem as essential now that you’re in full on purge mode. Don’t be afraid to purge from this pile now.

Generally at this point, purging has become a virus and you’re on a roll shedding like crazy. Most folks I coach can hardly help themselves doubling their purge goal for the session!

You’ve successfully avoided initial overwhelm by starting with simple easy to reach goals that aren’t as scary as ‘get rid of 99% of everything!’  With each round, the brain adjusts, and it becomes easier and easier to want to get rid of things.

You get good at making quick judgements of ‘will I ever really use this??’ ‘is it worth the space??’ ‘does it serve its function?’ ‘is it bringing joy and delight to my life?’

Set up an area somewhere in your home to stage all the stuff you’re getting rid of… because next, you have to figure out where it goes.

How to get rid of it

Now that you’ve started purging down to stuff you love, how do you get rid of the rest?  There are several options, each with varying levels of effort involved.  You’ll probably find that a combination of approaches is appropriate.

• Trash It / Burn It – Sometimes, it seems the easier way to make stuff disappear is to simply file it away in a dumpster. And while quickly freeing, it’s also the least responsible way to deal with the hole we dug ourselves into. I strongly urge you to consider other ways, except for the stuff that really is of no value to anyone.
• 

  Taking another load to the post office during my purge.

  Sell It - With resources such as eBay, Craigslist, Amazon Marketplace, classified ads, etc., getting cash for your stuff is viable and may help fund your upcoming adventure. It takes a bit of effort to make listings and complete transactions however. You’ll have to become a proficient shipper & packer if you’re mailing packages, and you’ll be constantly setting up appointments (that often get broken) for people to come and view your stuff.  When dealing with in person transactions, you’ll also quite likely get in the role of becoming a negotiator.  When you’re dealing with a household of stuff, it is going to become overwhelming at some point. I made it a game and had a good deal of fun with it. Don’t stress about making top dollar – the key to purging is speed and efficiency.  And be ready to give in when the overwhelm approaches. You may even want to consider hiring an estate liquidator who will come in and handle the entire process for you.

• Donate It - Some stuff is just too much effort to sell, and the tax write off and/or goodwill generated is worth more than the potential cash you can get. Donating to a favored charity is an awesome way to go.  Just remember to properly document your donations so you can get the proper tax credit if you itemize your returns.
• Freecycle It - Freecycle.org is site dedicated to Freecycling – freely giving things to those who can make better use of it. Each Freecycle group is locally organized, so the results can vary quite a bit. It can also be a bit of a pain, as you’re essentially putting in similar listing efforts as selling the items, and even though no cash is exchanging hands you still having to arrange to complete transactions.  Nothing is more frustrating than going out of your way to meet a Freecycle recipient only to have them change their mind at the last minute or not show up, leaving you with both the item and wasted time. But when you do find an appreciative new home for your stuff, it is mentally rewarding!

Journal from my 'House Cooling Party'. Everyone wrote what they were taking and what it would be used for.

• House Cooling Party – Some stuff, we just don’t want. But it may not be easy to sell, and may have more sentimental value attached than we want for it to go into the hands of strangers. For these items, I offer up the suggestion of a ‘House Cooling Party’.  The object here is social time with your friends before you venture off, but unlike a traditional house warming party, at a house cooling party all the guests are required to choose and take gifts from you household. This is a great way to find an appreciative new home for artwork and other hard-to-sell treasures, and it is especially efficient at clearing away the half-empty bottles from behind the bar! And bonus, when you come back to visit your friends in your travels, you also get to visit your treasured stuff displayed in their homes.
• Digitize Stuff – To reduce the amount of paper you have, consider having documents that are still relevant digitized. You can scan them yourself, or hire a service that does this. Photos, music, movies, etc. can all be converted or purchased as digital media, requiring only a large hard drive to store it. And if you are responsible with backups, digitized data has a much longer life expectancy than treasures stored in a damp and musty garage.
• Indefinite Loans - And for some items that we might eventually want back in our lives at a future date, such as beloved furniture, artwork, etc. – consider loaning it to trusted friends for an indefinite period of time. I was able to help a dear friend furnish her new home with my family’s heirloom teak dining room furniture, and still reserved my rights to take the pieces back should I ever ’settle down’ again or my friend can no longer make use of it. Be willing however to let go of these items if something should happen to them.
• Store It - For everything else that you just can’t part with, such as childhood mementos, family heirlooms and stuff you absolutely want should you settle down again  – compact it down as small as possible and store it.  We have a few boxes tucked away in a family basement, and we also keep a small storage unit in Sacramento that we have set up as walk-in closet – allowing us easy access to periodically “check out” books, movies, flying equipment and Burning Man gear. But we haven’t managed to stop by in over a year now, and we are looking forward to ditching the storage unit entirely this year.

Whichever ways you decide to go, give yourself ample time to complete the process, but do give yourself a hard deadline – circle a date on the calendar, tell your friends, and hold yourself to it!

It took me in total about 2 months to shed myself of everything in responsible and sane ways. For instance, I made goals for myself such as  “Today I will go through all documents from 1995-2000, and reduce my hanging wardrobe by 40%.”

Chris knew that he needed a deadline to motivate him, so when he decided to go nomadic he actually “evicted himself” by giving two-month notice on his apartment, before he even had researched a trailer or a tow vehicle to move into!  But having an immovable date on the calendar is exactly what he needed to be forced into action – turning his dreams into reality.

Don’t Pretend it is Easy

It may be physically easy enough to haul a garage full of boxes to Goodwill, or to dump years’ worth of old files into a shredder. But don’t force yourself to pretend that all this letting go is emotionally easy. You’ve held on to your stuff for a reason, and you need to honor your attachments and give yourself the emotional space to let go.

Some of the stuff we kept after purging.

It may seem silly – but you might just literally need to say goodbye. For example, take photos of yourself wearing all your dorky T-shirts one final time. Or make a video of you saying what you liked about each piece of artwork in your home.

For other things, doing some sort of personal ritual might be appropriate. For example, Chris took boxes of files with him to Burning Man his first year on the road, and added them to a burn pile on the final night – releasing years of mental baggage from his past jobs and life.

No matter what it is that is holding you down, there is a way to break free of it. Take the time and find it.

Life with Less Stuff

Even if you’re not embarking on full time travel, shedding yourself of stuff has lots of benefits.   You’ll have less cluttered space, which is usually much calmer and recharging. You may even be able to substantially downscale your living space and reduce costs.

And once you break the cycle of needing to acquire for acquisitions sake, you’ll find a lot more room in your budget – as you carefully consider stuff you bring into your life and space.

Riding the rails for a month - with just a backpack each.

Once you have the stuff you own concentrated down to stuff you love and value, you’ll find you value and use them even more.  On the positive side, this means your favorite sweater becomes one of your only sweaters. On the negative side, your favorite stuff may get more use and degrade faster than before.  You may spend more time maintaining the stuff you own because it’s used more, and difficult to replace with something as perfect.

Another thing that having less stuff has introduced me to is thrift shopping for my wardrobe. With a very limited space for clothing, and a strong appreciation for variety in my wardrobe, planning to replace a portion of my wardrobe regularly at a thrift store is both fun and very affordable.

When living in a small space and keeping hyper mobile, generally to buy something new you simply have to toss something old to make room for it.

The shedding never ends however. Even once you get all your stuff down to what you can carry with you – it’s a good idea to re-evaluate what you’re traveling with after you’ve been on the road a few months. It’s really not until you’ve lived a fully mobile life that you comprehend what your style is.  You’ll probably find that a decent percentage of the stuff you thought you just had to have with you, never gets touched.  It’s time to toss it and lighten the load.

And we’ve also found that we like to change it up frequently, and regularly re-tool our arsenal of stuff to match our current traveling preferences.  When we make such transitions, going through everything and re-purging is such a freeing experience and a bit of ritual to mark changes in our traveling life.  And, because we keep on top of it – it’s generally not an overwhelming experience.

My story of shedding stuff

My path to shedding my stuff started long before I embarked on full time travel. It was the gift from a friend of the book The Sacred Santa: Religious Dimensions of Consumer Culture by Dell deChant that awakened me to the consumerism cycle that is akin to a cosmological religious practice in our culture.  I started to become much more conscious of my spending habits and the stuff I acquired. It had to have a needed purpose, and not just fulfilling what seems like a spiritual and/or emotional need.

Cherie - The Purge Genie (My shipping station).

And then while living on the east coast of Florida in 2004, I experienced three back-to-back mandatory evacuations of my beachside home due to hurricanes.  There’s something about packing up everything you deem essential into your car and leaving your home behind facing impending doom that really forces you to evaluate what stuff really matters. So when Chris proposed that I hit the road full time with him in early 2007, it was an easy transition – as I had already done the mental work.

Inside of a couple months I shed myself of about about 70% of my possessions and left my home behind, putting it on the market to hopefully sell.  I purged through old financial records that long ago needed to be tossed, stripped my wardrobe down to fit inside a small box, sold off books/movies/music that I hadn’t touched in years, shed old technology that was obsolete for my life – and hit the road with just what I needed (and a few grand in cash from selling stuff.)  It was easy, and even fun, to purge as I utilized eBay, Amazon Marketplace, Craigslist, Freecycle and donating to local charities.

With each item gone, my world seemed a shade brighter and freer. My house did sell a year later, and I shed the remaining stuff in quick order – leaving me with just what I carry with me, and a few boxes that I leave at Chris’ parents basement.

I actually found a lot of joy in the purging process, and for a while – experimented with running a professional consulting and purging service that I called ‘Purge Genie’.  I would help people go through their stuff, decide what was worthwhile trying to sell, and then sell it for them.  I got really good at managing eBay, Amazon and Craigslist – and became quite an expert packer. Eventually, I got over the charm of it because dealing with other people’s stuff by moving it into my space became a burden to my own happiness.  But it was fun way to help people escape their clutter.  (Incidentally, I still own the domain name and have all supporting business aspects built – if this sounds like a fun business idea to you, let’s talk! I’m ready to shed my shedding business.)

<— Read Chapter 2: Affording Full Time Travel

Resources:

Sell Your Crap – Adam Baker’s of Man vs. Debt very comprehensive eBook about selling your stuff via eBay, Amazon and Craigslist. He covers everything you need to know about being a successful seller and getting rid of all of your crap. Adam walks you through step-by-step in setting up your accounts, writing listings that sell and pricing your crap.  Highly recommended.

Getting Rid of It: The Step-by-step Guide for Eliminating the Clutter in Your Life (Live the Good Life) - Kindle book by fellow nomads Betsy & Warren Talbot that goes step-by-step in more detail than I covered in this chapter about the purging process.

No Excuses: Go Nomadic

This article is part of an ongoing series answering the common excuses folks give us for why they’re not pursing their dreams of full time travel.  We launched this series a few years ago as Answers to the Common Excuses - and are in the process of massively updating it.  We’ll be releasing newly updated & expanded chapters over the coming months.  We’ll be addressing topics like: Affording It, Family, Pets, Logistics, Healthcare, Community, Keeping Connected and more.

Read the whole series:  No Excuses: Go Nomadic

eBook version - This blog series is also available as convenient eBook. We offer this compilation on a ‘pay as you wish’ basis, and will be keeping it updated with the blog series.  We don’t aim to make a living off our blog, but a little support to keep the blog going is always appreciated (buying the eBook is kinda like taking us out for a beer).

Cost: Pay As You Wish (really… just set the price!)

PDF Format

Join us for a little journey in reminiscing about some past adventures.

(If you’re reading [...]]]> Over on the Escapee Forums, someone asked what quirky museums RVers have visited in their travels across the USA.  In compiling my response, I realized we’ve started a bit of a video collection of some amazing inspired artists.

Join us for a little journey in reminiscing about some past adventures.

(If you’re reading this post on RSS or e-mail, you may not see the embedded videos for each attraction. To view them, simply click through to the original post).

City Museum – St. Louis, MO

Our original post after a visit to City Museum.

We visit St. Louis often in our travels as we have family there, but it’s also become one of my favorite cities to spend time in. And we’ve had more nomadic rendezvouses here than anywhere else. And we always take our visiting friends to the City Museum.

The City Museum is no ordinary museum, however.  Sure, it is full of found things that are preserved. And it gets the ‘City’ part of its name because the found things are entirely from within municipal St. Louis.  But that’s where the museum part ends.. because this is definitely a place where you don’t just look. You touch. You crawl. You slide. You climb.

This place is what you might imagine would happen if you gave Peter Pan a blow torch.

Here’s a video we produced on the City Museum:

Cathedral of Junk – Austin, TX

Video of one of our visits:

Salvation Mountain – Slab City, CA

What other epic art projects are there to explore in the USA?  We seriously need to continue this journey!

Once I get past the ‘ouch’ or ‘you should see a doctor about that’ or ‘add some fiber to your diet!’ comments – then I explain.

I haven’t used shampoo in over four years.

I think [...]]]>

Four Years Shampoo Free - Look, No Maggots!!

I love the look on people’s faces when I tell them I’ve been no-poo for over 4 years now.

Once I get past the ‘ouch’ or ‘you should see a doctor about that’ or ‘add some fiber to your diet!’ comments – then I explain.

I haven’t used shampoo in over four years.

I think the image that conjurs up is unruly matted dreads or maggot ridden smelly tangly manes.  Which is not how my naturally curly red (enhanced) hair looks.  And actually, my hair has never been healthier and more manageable than since I went shampoo-free.

Notice I didn’t say I don’t wash my hair.   Instead, I use a combination of baking soda and diluted apple cider vinegar as the primary cleansing for my hair.

I posted on this topic at my two year mark of being poo-free, and thought this would be a great time to update it.  As not only two years later do I still not own a bottle of shampoo, my partner-in-crime (with his shoulder blade length enviable straight silky hair) has also been poo-free for many years now too.

How it started

It originally started when I came back from my first Burning Man in 2007, and my hair was ultra dry, brittle and frizzy. It was also a few months after first hitting the road full time. And after months of traveling in a 16′ trailer without any plumbing, I wasn’t able to keep up with a regular regiment of shampoo, rinse, repeat.  The combination had done its damage.

Yellowstone National Park - 2007. Just before going poo-free. (Ok, the wind might help make it look worse than it was.)

My hair had always had ups and downs of being frizzy and unmanageable – but this was a new low.  No amount of conditioner, trimming or treatments was fixing it.  I came to the conclusion that I either needed to cut it off and let it regrow, or try something drastically different to restore it. A friend happened to post that she was trying this thing called ‘nopoo’ to help control her frizzy hair, so I decided I had nothing to lose, gave it a shot and never looked back.

The benefits of going Shampoo Free

I learned that not only do we humans not actually need shampoo, it’s unhealthy for us! Shampoo is a detergent and literally strips our hair of natural oils, then requiring replacement of those oils with conditioners and treatments. It becomes an endless cycle of cleaning, damaging and restoring.  Shampoo also contains lots of chemicals, including mineral oils (that are byproducts of oil distillation) and sodium lauryl sulfate (which is on the material data sheet as a chemical that you should avoid body contact with).

The more I embraced a no-poo lifestyle, I learned that there are many benefits – especially for us full time nomads.

Here’s just some of the benefits I’ve enjoyed for the past 4-years:

1. Significantly improved the health of my hair – my hair used to be frizzy and I frequently had bad hair days.
2. Saves me tons of money (I spend only a buck or two a month on hair care).
3. Saves me tons of time – a quick shower is all I need on most days.
4. Reduced impact on the environment – so many less chemicals I’m leaching into the water supply, and less plastic use too.
5. Better for my overall health.
6. Removed myself one more step from the consumerist economy of health and beauty ‘aids’.
7. Endless supply of jokes about poo.
8. Saving water!

And that last one, water conservation, is an important one when living in an RV or any off-grid lifestyle.

In the past, our RVs had small holding tanks (none in the T@b, 38 gallons in the Oliver) – so saving water was essential for our off-grid lifestyles.  In the Oliver, with us both being poo-free – we were able to make that 38 galloons regularly last 2 or more weeks at a time.  Now with the bus, we have 100 gallons of fresh water capacity – it’s like an oasis in here!

Going shampoo free allows us to just rinse or dampen our hair daily to pull a brush through it, and then do our no-poo routine a few times a month.  With no bubbles to rinse out, I use very little water even on my washing days.

Myths about No-Poo

Over the years, I’ve heard lots of excuses as to why people won’t give shampoo-free a try.  Here’s some of them:

It’s gross and people who don’t shampoo smell

We bath and shower regularly, our clothes are clean and our hair smells, feels and looks clean! Whenever I tell a hair stylist that I’m poo-free, they’re intrigued and tell me that my hair is some of the healthiest & cleanest they’ve seen.  I even had one tell me that if I ever need it – she’d testify that I don’t have maggots living in my tresses.  If I ever see you in person, just ask – I’ll let you touch and smell my no-poo hair. (And no, your hair won’t smell like salad dressing either – the apple cider vinegar rinses out clean smelling.)

It only works for curly hair

While using less shampoo is indeed good for lots of folks with naturally curly hair, no-poo can work for a wide range of hair types.  Chris and I have just about complete opposite hair types (mine naturally curly, his silky straight) – and it works great for both of us.

I can’t style or color my hair if I go no-poo

Totally not true.  Going no-poo only means going shampoo free – it does not mean going style-free.  My hair’s natural color is a boring dark strawberry blonde – but I love to play with colors!  The past several years I’ve been doing vibrants reds.  I’ve used everything from cheap department store kits, henna and professional stuff that I use at home. I follow the directions on the package (realizing that using a hair color is not necessarily healthy or in line with the benefits of a poo-free life) and then rinse thoroughly.

I then avoid using my cleansing regiment for a week or so, to let the color set as much as possible. I condition often to help restore my hair to healthy.   And yes, I do use conditioners in my hair when I feel my hair needs them.

I tried it once… it was awful!

Yup, if you try it once or only for a week or so – it is simply gross and awful.  You see, shampoo strips our hair of our natural oils – and it takes time for our scalps to find its balance when we take away that stripping cycle.   The first 2 or 3 weeks of transition are the worst. Our scalp is still overcompensating on oil production, and our hair is adapting.  It really does take a solid month or more of being poo-free to see the benefits.  During that time, I wore my hair up a lot and just got through it.  I started out using more baking soda & apple cider vinegar than I do now (I used to use it a couple times a week… now perhaps a couple times a month.)

What’s the routine?

My hair care regiment - Baking Soda & Apple Cider Vinegar

For me, I wet my hair and pour about a teaspoon or two of baking soda in my palm. Let a little bit of water turn it into a paste and scrub it all over my hair and scalp. I let it sit for about a minute while I soap up my body, and then rinse.  The baking soda is the cleaning part – it cleans and neutralizes odors.

I follow up (sometime a couple days later, sometimes at the same time – I’ve just learned to read my hair and what it needs when) with about a cup or so of diluted solution of apple cider vinegar and water. Generally I dilute 1 part AVC to 3 parts water – but I don’t measure. The AVC is what gets rid of build up – stuff from your environment or any products you might use.

Sometimes, depending on the climate I’m in I may also use a conditioner to give my hair some extra moisture. I’ve also found that a couple drops of jojoba oil smoothed into my hair does tremendous awesome things in dry climates.

There’s really no right or wrong recipe. I’ve just learned to feel what my hair needs and adjust based on the current climate I’m in or what damage I’ve done to my hair recently (coloring, Burning Man, being in the desert, etc.).

If you have additional questions or want to learn more: This is the original post I learned about poo-free from that gives tons more information and ideas.

First of all, [...]]]> It’s now been nearly 7 months since we purchased and moved into our vintage bus.  We thought this might be a good time to answer some questions we keep getting, such as:

• Do you like bus life?
• How much have you spent on your bus projects?

Bus Life vs. Travel Trailer Life

First of all, we are absolutely loving traveling and living in a larger home on wheels.  The space feels absolutely divine and indulgent after so many years of living in micro tiny spaces.  And driving the bus hasn’t been nearly as challenging as we feared.

Chris interjects: I actually never feared driving the bus – I’ve always been comfortable with a range of vehicles (even airplanes!) and enjoy the new challenges that each brings. The bus has indeed been a little tricky, but so far not nearly so much as parallel parking with a trailer on a hill in San Francisco traffic (T@b days), or backing into an extremely narrow urban driveway with just inches to spare (Oliver). The nice surprise with bus driving is how visible you are – people actually get out of your way. The biggest challenge so far is jumping up on curbs when making tight right turns. I miss having a pivot point in the middle!

More space!

For reference of our nomadic homes so far:

• 16′ T@b Clamshell Trailer:  45 sq ft  / 7 months
• 17′ Oliver Trailer: 80 sq ft / 3 years
• Virgin Islands Cottage: 450 sq ft / 5 months
• 35′ GM 4106 Bus: 280 sq ft / 7 months.. and counting

Having two separate living areas has been a huge improvement in our quality of life.  This is serving our slightly off-set sleeping rhythms well, and giving us a touch more sense of privacy and independence.  Chris can now work late into the wee hours of the morning, and I can get a good night’s sleep… and then get my most productive morning hours done while he’s sleeping in.

That is of course, assuming Kiki allows us either of us to sleep through the night.

We love having space to entertain and have friends over for dinner. We’ve even had a couple of overnight guests on our single pull out couch, which has worked out remarkably well.

We are very happy with our modifications, especially our dual desk set up.  We’re able to be working, while not blocking the aisle way – and hardly ever feel in each other’s way. This is impressive for a motorhome that is only 96″ wide (most made today are 102″, plus slides).

Driving our Home vs. Towing it

Traveling in our home, as opposed to pulling our home has been awesome.  We really never quite got the appeal of it until we experienced it.  Not having to get out of our tow vehicle and move back to the living space is so convenient.  We now pull in, and simply shut the curtains if we like.  And while underway, we have access to everything – beverages, food, bathroom.  Kiki is loving having an inflight litter box.  And the passenger never feels crammed in and immobile, like I often did in our truck or Jeep.

I’ve even been able to get work done, do yoga, take a shower and clean house while Chris drives.  It helps make our driving time feel more productive than just making miles and site seeing.

Before we added the MINI as a toad, we were actually shorter than our truck & Oliver combined – which made pulling into parking lots a (relative) breeze.  But now with the MINI following behind, we are longer and have to think differently about approaching a parking lot. We’re slowly gaining the experience and confidence to know what is possible.  We can only back up a couple of feet with MINI attached, so we do have less maneuverability than we were used to. But it has been fantastic having a small vehicle to get around town in once we’ve got the bus parked.

We’ve not yet encountered problems with finding campgrounds that can’t accommodate the bus – but we are sure that there will come times when we dearly miss having a tiny little trailer to find room for. So far, no RV Park or “Resort” has turned us away for the age of our RV or that it’s a bus (which we are fully expecting will happen at some point.)  We already know that staying with some friends in their driveway across the country is now not possible for us because of our size.  And we will not feel confident wandering down as many small roads as we once were.

Fuel Economy

Obviously, a big change is the fuel economy.   Here’s a run down of what our past mileage has been:

• Diesel Jeep Liberty towing T@B : 16 – 18 mpg  (Liberty not towing: 24 – 26 mpg)
• Toyota Tundra towing Oliver : 12 – 13 mpg (Tundra not towing: 17-19 mpg)
• Bus towing MINI : 7 – 7.5 mpg (MINI: 30 – 40 mpg)

One of our reasons for switching to a bus has been to have a more comfortable living space for extended stays in one spot.  We really felt the small size of the trailers when stopped for more than a few days, and that generally fit us fine – as we were hyper mobile traveling 12-13k miles a year.  However, especially with the Tundra/Oliver combo – we were stuck with a gas guzzling local transport vehicle.

With the bus, it’s our intention to slow down the pace to 8-9k miles a year (we’ll see how it actually works out), and being parked in one spot for weeks and months at a time. We use the very fuel efficient MINI for local transport, hopefully balancing out our overall fuel expenditures while providing a very comfy apartment on wheels.

Life in the Slow Lane

Our bus was built in 1961, and has her original Detroit Diesel two stroke 8v71 engine.  In its day, the 4106 was considered the ‘sportscar of buses’ with it lightweight aluminum build.  While she’s a bit zippy, she’s certainly not a sports bus by today’s standards.

Traveling between 55-60 mph is her sweet spot while flat, and going up long inclines – we drop to 25-45 mph. We just get used to life in the slow lane – which is no problem, we’re not in a hurry.  We are still calibrating for how long it takes us to get somewhere.  With no cruise control, no power steering (just power assist) and a being a big wind sail – driving can be tiring.  So we simply don’t try to cover as many miles in a day, and take breaks.  In in our old setup – a 600 mile day was possible if we really pushed it.  Now, we question anything over 350 miles in a day, but definitely prefer less.

We are building even more time and flexibility to our arrival estimates so that we don’t feel pressured to be on time and push ourselves.

Cost Log

After we bought our bus, we shared what we paid – $8,000.

Since then, we’ve had a lot of requests to share what we’ve spent since.  So here it is .. a generalized list of the costs we’ve incurred to bring the bus up to date on maintenance and start making her our ideal hi-tech home & office on wheels:

(For those reading on RSS or e-mail, you may need to click thru to the full post to see the embedded spreadsheet.)

Catching up on maintenance.

All and all, we’re happy with the costs and they’re right in line with what we were anticipating when we headed off on this adventure. Our offering price on the bus was factored around needing to bring her up to date on 15 years of neglected maintenance (which we have pretty much done at this point, including passing an unofficial DOT inspection). These will be ongoing costs, of course – and we’re factoring in a couple grand each year for maintenance. And we do have a significant amount of cash set aside for anticipated breakdowns and major repairs.

At this point, we’ve paid less for our bus than we paid to have our Oliver custom built for us new. And we feel we’re way ahead of the curve had we opted instead to buy a slightly used generic Class-A motorhome worthy of our full timing in (which would have easily been $60 – 100k+). Instead, for under $30k, we have solid bus bones as our foundation, and a totally one-of-a-kind, completely ‘us’ living space.

We do have some pricey projects planned in the coming year as we concentrate on making our home optimized for being propane-free and off-grid able:

• Solar Panels (we’re aiming to get 700+ watts on our roof)
• Adding another 500 aH of Lithium Ion batteries
• Replacing all interior lights to energy efficient LEDs
• Installing a diesel burner hydronics heating system for water, house heat and engine pre-warming
• Converting all our propane systems to electric (Planning on a Novacool DC fridge and replacing the oven/stove top with a convention microwave & portable induction cooktops)
• Adding a leveling/stabilizing system to the coach
• Possibly replacing or substantially modifying our generator
• Rewiring and/or replacing our roof air conditioners…

We would not be surprised if in a year we’ve put another $20-25k into our bus. And we’ll still be under what we sold our Oliver for.

Overall – our first seven months have been great!

For a full tour of our bus, including pictures and a video walk-thru – click here.

Every so often [...]]]> Following serendipity at every turn is an interesting game we’ve been playing for the past several years.  It’s not about taking every opportunity that comes up, but rather creating a life that allows us to both be in tune with the possibilities, and being agile enough to follow the ones we choose.

Every so often we shake our magic serendipity ball, and nothing happens.  Approaching the end of 2011, that’s exactly where we were. No plans.  Hardly any ideas.

We enjoyed an excellent Christmas with both our parents under one roof. And we attended the Arcadia Bus Rally bringing in the New Year with dear friends.

A picture I took in 2007 in Yellowstone National Park (during our T@b days).

Just before we were pulling out of the rally, the news came in.

The latest unanticipated test results on my dad revealed that serendipity had left the time ahead open for a reason.  Our family is embracing hope and optimism for the rough road ahead.

We’ve been parked at a gracious friend’s tranquil place in Kissimmee – and are splitting our time out in Melbourne (about an hour away) taking an active role in his treatment, giving my folks all the support we can and taking over tasks as needed in our co-owned family software business.

Unfortunately there are few options in the Melbourne/Palm Bay area for RV parks, and they are either 55+ only, prohibitively expensive, not much closer and/or full up with the seasonal influx of snowbirds.  (Incidentally, if anyone has connections in the area for land or large drive ways that might welcome some technomads with a bus for a while, it would be quite a blessing to be closer. Although, aside from the distance – our current setup is pretty ideal.)

We don’t know yet how long we’ll be in Central Florida, we’re taking it one step at a time.  But it’ll likely be a while.  If you find yourself in the area, please do reach out – social breaks may be welcomed distractions.

All of our pre-scheduled blog posts have gone live. There were a couple more we had started and may complete.  Beyond that, I can’t say how much time or motivation we’ll have for writing. Maybe we will, maybe we won’t? (One of the big reasons we blog for joy, not income.)

We ask for your understanding if our postings here become sporadic.

Location independence is often portrayed as a glamourous life of galavanting around the world to see great places, eat great food and have amazing experiences. That’s certainly a nice motivation and benefit we enjoy.

But the core reason for our location flexibility?  To be where we choose to be.

Our plans ahead may not be exotic or inspiring blog fodder – but we’re exactly where we need… no … want to be.  No tropical beach or warm desert boondocking with friends compares right now.

We feel so incredibly blessed to have designed a lifestyle that allows us the flexibility to do something like this, and really be there for our loved ones.  No taking vacation or family medical leave time, no expensive travel to and from home, no feeling of putting our life on hold.  It’s simply built into our lifestyle to pull in and do whatever we can.

If you have a positive thought, well wish or prayer to spare – we would most welcome them.

There were far more buses here than at the BCM Rally we attended back in October in Chattanooga, and much more variety.  It was so [...]]]> Last weekend we attended the Arcadia Bus Rally - one of the longest running bus rallies in the country, and certainly one of the largest on the east coast.

Pano I took from the roof deck of Odyssey, with the iPhone app 'PhotoSynth'

There were far more buses here than at the BCM Rally we attended back in October in Chattanooga, and much more variety.  It was so much fun to see so many other buses of our vintage, and talk with so many other bus owners.  The rally posted a photo tour of all of the coaches in attendance – there’s some drool-worthy buses there.

Bus-side Seminars

We presented two seminars at the rally (on Mobile Internet Options and Lithium Ion Batteries), which seemed to be well received. We found out fairly last minute that the seminars would be live streamed, and apparently they may be accessible in an archive at some point.  The content is pretty much what we discuss in the linked blog posts, however – so if you missed the live stream, you’re not missing much.

Kiki even helped out with giving seminars.  During our Mobile Internet presentation, the screen kept advancing seemingly on its own.  We soon discovered Kiki was inside on the desk looking out the window at the crowd – with her paw on our wireless keyboard.

Technomadia & Our Odyssey

The highlight for us was getting some extended time being neighbors with Sean AND Louise of Our Odyssey.  We got to spend a week with just Sean up in Chattanooga, so it was great to re-connect with Louise as well.

Zephyr & Odyssey - Awning to Awning

Like we did at the BCM Rally, we parked our buses awning-to-awning and Sean & Louise set up their super-awesome portable hot tub for us to soak in at night.  There was some confusion amongst rally regulars, as last year our mutual friends Ben & Karen parked with Sean & Louise in a very similar configuration.

Recall that we have since purchased their MINI Cooper, and they are working on converting  Creative Cruiser – their vintage bus.  We had several folks mistake us as ‘Those friends of Sean & Louise’s with the MINI who were working on a vintage bus!’.    Well… obviously that description fits us now, but we had no clue this time last year!

Sean trying to fix our generator

We had a great time chilling with awesome friends over several days.  Sean, who doesn’t seem to be able to NOT try to fix things, made a valiant attempt at getting our generator working. It’ll start, but not keep running without bypassing some stuff.  He thinks we need some inexpensive parts or a new control board system.  That’ll have to be a project for another day. We are grateful for his efforts, and that Odyssey’s generator has more than enough power to share so that we could remain parked in the dry camping area with them.

NomadiCat MeetUp

But we weren’t the only ones enjoying a nomadic meet up. Angel & George & Opal (the onboard pets of Our Odyssey) and Kiki got to spend a lot of time chilling on our communal porch.

All and all.. a fantastic way to bring in the new year. Great friends. Hot Tub. Smoothly run rally.

When [...]]]>

<—-  Read Chapter 1: Jobs, Careers and Income Sources for Travelers
Read Chapter 3: Purge your Stuff, Shed the Anchors  —>

When you add up the airfare, hotel costs, parking, car rental, dining out, attraction tickets, tours, pina coladas, pet sitters and more – a typical American 1 week vacation adds up, often astronomically.  Even if you shop for sales and bargains, many folks need to save up for months, or even years, to manage a single memorable week-long trip.

And then they return home both exhausted and broke.

The overall numbers get even more unpleasant when you consider that while on vacation you still keep paying your normal living costs as well – the bills for your rent or mortgage, utilities, lawn maintenance, debt payments, pest control, security system, etc.

When a lot of folks contemplate a life of full time travel, they mentally calculate what their last weeklong vacation cost, multiply that by 52, and immediately conclude that they will never be able to afford it.

They’re wrong.

Traveling full time as a lifestyle isn’t the same as going on vacation full time.

Being nomadic is just as much a lifestyle choice as residing in the suburbs, an urban loft or a rural farm.

When you design your life to travel full time, your travels costs take the place of a lot of your previous housing costs… providing you are willing to leave your former fixed base behind.

Redefine Travel

Travel doesn’t have to cost a fortune, as long as you don’t equate travel with paying for a luxury resort or flying first class all the time. There are many ways to travel that are more affordable, even if you are planning to circumnavigate the world.  Lonely Planet estimates that you can travel the world for as little as $14,000/year if you make efforts to keep your costs under control.

Some more affordable choices to consider for full time traveling include:

• RVing – Putting your house on wheels gives you the benefits of always being at home and always being in a state of travel. You wake up in your own bed every morning, it just happens to frequently be parked somewhere new.  RVs suitable for traveling & living in can be purchased in just about any size range and on any budget – from a couple thousand dollars on up into the millions.  You can choose to stay in campgrounds, RV Parks or optimize your free boondocking skills. Yes, you have fuel costs in a gas-guzzling huge vehicle – but you have complete control over how many miles you drive in a year to balance that.
• Cruising / Boating - Many travelers hear the siren song of the seas, and choose to buy a boat and live life on the water. Sailing is a great way to go, as you can limit your fuel costs as long as you’re not in a hurry to get anywhere. If you learn to do your own maintenance, live-aboard sailing can be surprisingly affordable.
• Minimalist Travel – Backpacking, tent camping, staying at hostels, budget motels and/or Couchsurfing are all ways to see the world at a quicker pace while reducing the cost of lodging.
• Subletting, renting and/or house-sitting - Longer term rentals on places, or exchanging care taking for free lodging, are a lot more obtainable (and more comfortable) than short nightly rentals of hotel rooms or hostels.  You won’t get your nomad membership card taken away if you don’t change locations every week.
• Seasonal/Temp Work – Some seasonal and temporary jobs provide accommodations. Some examples include seasonal work at tourist destinations, hosting at campgrounds, teaching English as a second language, taking part in a harvest, peak season vacation area temp jobs and more. If lodging is provided, you don’t need to earn a lot to afford staying in an exotic locale.
• Volunteering – Some longer term volunteer jobs provide accommodations, and perhaps even food.  WWOOFing (volunteering on organic farms across the world) and other positions are great opportunities!
• Travel Slower - Constantly hopping around places means paying a higher nightly rate for campgrounds & hotels, and lots of transportation costs. Staying longer at your destinations allows you more time at a location to immerse yourself, and spreads out the major costs.  Sometimes monthly rates for a place are barely more than the weekly rate, a huge savings if you aren’t in a rush to move on. Besides, us mobile workers do need to carve out time to work!

The key is to distance yourself from the idea that travel has to be a luxury vacation. Nor does it have to be a minimalist frugal pursuit.

There is a balance to be struck for every conceivable budget.

Get rid of unneeded expenses 

It’s amazing how much more affordable life is when you’re not paying for a lot of the things that we tend to accept as being default costs of living.

Imagine what your budget would be like if you kept income coming in, and you cut out all of your housing expenses? What are you currently paying for rent or mortgage, insurance, property taxes, upkeep and utilities?  What if that was instead your monthly travel budget – how much could you do with that?

If you own your home, that may mean selling your house or renting it out – perhaps not as easy to do in this economy. But if you want it to happen, it will.  If you have a lease on something, it is even easier to allow your obligation to expire.

Unless you’re ready to purge absolutely everything, you’ll probably find that you’ll need storage space somewhere – either by paying for a commercial unit or utilizing a friend’s basement. I highly recommend considering shedding yourself of as much stuff as possible if you’re considering traveling indefinitely.   Paying for storage space for stuff you’re unlikely to ever need again is kind of silly – but you may not be ready to purge the last of your anchors until you’ve fully embraced full time travel for a while.

Debts

It goes without saying, debts are a huge anchor – whether or not you’re considering travel.

It is important to structure your life to pay off any you have and avoid accumulating them in the first place.  I know it may seem insurmountable, but once you put your mind to do it, it’s achievable and freeing.

When you’re preparing for a nomadic lifestyle, seriously consider every purchase you make from this moment forward. Remember, you’ll soon be deciding how you’ll dispose of the item .. or you will be (perhaps literally) carrying it with you.  Switch now to buying less stuff, and put that money towards your debts or savings.

However, if you have debts – don’t let them necessarily keep you back from pursuing your dreams of travel.  If you’re paying your debts and living costs now, the travel costs are basically going to replace your living costs – and could even be less.  You’ll just have to account for what your total cost of living on the road will be, including your debt repayments.

To ditch or not ditch the house?

Many homeowners who are pondering a nomadic lifestyle are faced with the decision of what to do with their home.  Sell it or rent it out?

Selling

If you’re sure you’re done with a stationary home and ready to be mobile for the foreseeable future, ditching the house is probably a logical solution.  Call up some real estate agents in your area and develop a plan to aggressively sell your house.   Stop thinking of it as ‘home’ and concentrate on your life of mobility ahead.

Unfortunately, in most markets, real estate prices are still quite depressed – and selling a home may be a costly proposition.  You may even have to take a loss on the property to get out of the mortgage obligation, or negotiate with your lender to consider other options.

Consult with several real estate agents in your area as to what they think your home can realistically sell for, and in what time frame.  If you need a higher price, it may take significantly longer to find the right buyer.  Consider what the total cost of continuing to pay all of your housing costs will be while you keep your house on the market.  You may come to determine that in the interest of getting on with your life already, taking that loss upfront may enable you to drop your asking price and get the house sold quicker.  You might even consider taking out a personal loan to cover the loss, so you can get out of your house and on the road.

Renting

If you’re not quite sure if the nomadic life will be for you long term, or you have other reasons to hang on to your property – keeping your house may be in your best interest.  You can rent out the house to cover at least part of the cost in the meantime.

The downside to renting out your house is that now you’re suddenly working a part time job as an absentee landlord while simultaneously trying to explore a mobile lifestyle.  Do you really want to be dealing with late rent payments and broken water heaters while adapting to your new life of adventure?  Hiring a competent local property manager may be an expense that is well worth it.

Another consideration is that rental prices in your area may not currently be enough to cover the cost of upkeeping your home. You may end up shelling out some cash to secure your homestead while you’re gone.  It’s totally up to you if that’s worth the freedom you’ll gain or not.

Typical costs of Travel

Folks always want to know what it costs to travel full-time. And honestly, it will vary so drastically based upon the kind of travel you’re doing and your personal style that there is no simple answer.

A solo traveler comfortable with a back-pack, a train pass and couchsurfing is going to be able to travel much cheaper than a couple who desires swank downtown lofts, first class airfare and gourmet dining.  A family traveling in a high end motorcoach staying at commercial RV resorts is going to have different costs than a family traveling via bicycles and pitching tents.

In general however, here are some considerations that greatly impact the costs:

• Modality of Travel:  Will you be getting around by hitchhiking, car, RV, train, plane, boat, bicycle?  What is the fuel efficiency of your RV, and how many miles do you plan to traverse a month?  Is your travel flexible enough to take advantage of deals, ride-shares, and are you willing to invest the effort to maximize frequent flier programs?
• Pace of Travel:  Do you plan to move around a lot, thus having more transportation costs and lodging logistics?  Or do you want to settle down in one spot for a month or more? Slower travels allows you to take advantage of monthly rentals and spreads out your transportation costs, and leaves you with more time to explore a location instead of figuring out logistics for your next destination.
• Lodging Preferences: Where do you want to sleep at night?  Is staying on stranger’s couches or in dorm room style hostels sustainable for you long term?  Do you require a lot of space and privacy in your home base, or will a super tiny converted van do the trick?  Do you want to park your RV in populated areas with amenities, or do you want to stay out in the boonies far away from other people?
• Live like a tourist or a local?: Do you want to embrace how the locals live, and adapt your experience to what is more affordable..  or are you budgeting for tourist attraction tickets and eating western fare no matter the cost?

Our Costs

Our pre-nomad situations

Before Chris went nomadic, he had a Silicon Valley job that afforded him a penthouse apartment in downtown San Francisco. Chris evicted himself at the end of his lease, bought a small travel trailer and Jeep, and hit the road.

I was living beachside on Florida’s Space Coast in a 3 bedroom / 2 bath house I co-owned with a housemate who was also ready to move on.  The housing market was crashing faster than most other places in the country due to hurricanes and the space shuttle program coming to an end.  I quickly went from having sizable equity in the house, to being upside down in it.  We calculated the costs of keeping the house for 2 more years, and set that as the loss we were willing to take to give us the freedom to move on. Once we made that mental shift, it took less than a month to sell at a price we could stomach. Even though my savings account took quite a hit, it was incredibly liberating.

Travel Costs

To be completely upfront – we’re not on a mission to be as frugal and minimalist as possible – that’s just not our driving force. We’re both skilled high tech entrepreneurs with the capacity to earn as much as we’re willing to work.  By avoiding making financial commitments wherever possible we have the flexibility to be lazy bums when we want to, and take on inspiring projects when we feel so called.

That said, neither of us is independently wealthy.  We have moderate savings and investments, but certainly not enough to never have to work again.

We are however completely debt free.

We have a mix of fixed costs each month that include our connectivity, insurance and a storage unit (ugh).  And then we have costs that can vary quite a bit each month based on what we’re doing – fuel & transportation, lodging, campground fees, eating, airfare, rail fare, entertainment, laundry and technology.

We do mix up our pace and style of travel often – and presently we’re traveling the US in a pimped out converted vintage bus.

We love variety though and have integrated in a 5-month stay on a tropical island, extended travel by rail and minimalist RVing in a tiny 16′ travel trailer.

Our costs have varied from $1000 – $4000/month over the years.

Since 2009 we’ve published our monthly travel cost log.

You CAN afford it!

If you really embrace nomadic living as a lifestyle, you will find it surprisingly easy to afford.

Shed your debts, stop paying for a home base, and stop thinking of travel as an expensive indulgence. Once you’ve managed the transition, you will find that life can be rich with experience and yet extremely affordable as well.

<—-  Read Chapter 1: Jobs, Careers and Income Sources for Travelers
Read Chapter 3: Purge your Stuff, Shed the Anchors  —>

Resources:

Travel full-time for less than $14,000 per year. – An excellent article by professional hobo Nora Dunn, about how to keep full time world traveling inexpensive.

Strategies for Affording Long Term Travel - The folks over at Two Backpakers One World share their tips on saving money and affording long term travel.

Nomadic Matt – Matt Knepes has been budget traveling the world for many years, and shares many of his tips and strategies on his blog and in his various eBooks.

You vs. Debt - Man vs. Debt’s Adam Baker has put together a 6 week course to help those struggling with debt develop and keep to a plan to get out of it.  Keep an eye on when the next class is open.

Travel Hacking Cartel - Run by travel hacker extrodinaire, Chris Guillebeau, this monthly membership club tracks frequent flier & hotel programs for deals to build up your free travel accounts without traveling.  (We tried it for a couple months, and it was more effort than we were willing to put in.. but it might be worthwhile.)

No Excuses: Go Nomadic

This article is part of an ongoing series answering the common excuses folks give us for why they’re not pursing their dreams of full time travel.  We launched this series a few years ago as Answers to the Common Excuses - and are in the process of massively updating it.  We’ll be releasing newly updated & expanded chapters over the coming months.  We’ll be addressing topics like: Affording It, Family, Pets, Logistics, Healthcare, Community, Keeping Connected and more.

Read the whole series:  No Excuses: Go Nomadic

eBook version - This blog series is also available as convenient eBook. We offer this compilation on a ‘pay as you wish’ basis, and will be keeping it updated with the blog series.  We don’t aim to make a living off our blog, but a little support to keep the blog going is always appreciated (buying the eBook is kinda like taking us out for a beer).

Cost: Pay As You Wish (really… just set the price!)

PDF Format

We just found out that the rally is being live streamed:

http://www.busnut.com/arcadia.html

So if you’re [...]]]> We arrived yesterday to the Arcadia Bus Rally 2012, and are parked awning-to-awning with our friends, Sean & Louise of Our Odyssey.   There are many many buses here, and it’s awesome.

We just found out that the rally is being live streamed:

http://www.busnut.com/arcadia.html

So if you’re wishing you could see a bunch of buses and join in the fun – tune in throughout the next few days.  Who knows, you might catch a glimpse of us.

We also just confirmed that they will be interactively live streaming our seminars, so thought we’d share our schedule in case you’d like to tune in or ask questions:

• Thursday (today) at 1:30pm EST – Promise of Lithium Ion Batteries
• Friday at 3:30pm EST – Mobile Internet Options

Video Feed: http://www.busnut.com/arcadia.html

Live chat room (Buswarrior will be fielding questions, if you have any): http://www.busnut.com/dieselchat/

Our past maps :  2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010

2011 was a year of a lot of changes for us, and trying to illustrate [...]]]>

Technomadia's 2011 Travel Route (Click for a bigger view)

Every year since we hit the road together, I’ve hand created a year end routing map – it’s such a fun way to reflect on the year’s adventures.

Our past maps :  2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010

2011 was a year of a lot of changes for us, and trying to illustrate that on a map was quite a challenge!  We started the year in the USVI, traveled via 3 different RVs, traveled cross country via train, traveled by car and took a few plane trips.

Here’s a quick recap of our 2011 adventures:

Virgin Islands: We ended our glorious winter on St. John, aside from a fun trip to Austin to speak at SXSW on Technomadism in March.  We returned to Miami in early April, rented a car to visit family and then re-united ourselves with our Oliver Travel Trailer stored in Orlando. We got moved back in and switched to trying to decide what was next for us.

Orion Sold: In late April, just as we were coming to realize we’re ready for a larger home on wheels, we got an unsolicited offer to sell our Oliver. We dashed up to Virginia to deliver in early May, with no plan for what to do with all our stuff, or where we’d live! It was huge leap of trusting in serendipity. We ended up traveling 1485 miles in our Oliver in 2011 before saying a bittersweet farewell.

Le’Sharo Ritual: Serendipity presented an offer to borrow a 1986 Le’Sharo motorhome to use as a moving truck with a bed.  It was an amusing ritual of frequent issues that tested our resilience.  We were pretty sure we wanted a vintage bus and viewed contenders on the east coast.  We traveled 3016 miles during our month in the Le’Sharo, including a stop in St. Louis to leave Kiki & our stuff.

Bus hunt by Train: We had a top contender bus in Oregon – and we both had always wanted to travel across country by train. So we decided to make the trip a train adventure! It turned out cheaper to buy a 1 month Amtrak rail pass than rail fare, so we decided to conduct the rest of our bus hunt by rail. We had an incredible cross country train journey in June, but got our hearts broken by the bus we went to see.

Finding our Bus: In hopes that buses in drier climates would be in better shape, we boarded a train to Arizona to continue the hunt. We rented a car to travel around the state looking at contenders.  On a whim to check out a bus that didn’t look all that promising on paper, our last stop in Yuma lead us to finding Zephyr – our 1961 GM 4106 vintage bus home. On June 22, we had our next home.

Blazing Hot Arizona: Our dear friends in Lake Havasu City, AZ opened their home & bus parking  to us.  The downside?  Summer in AZ is hot. Very hot.  At the peak, the temps reached 125+ (which  didn’t stop our crazy friends from surprising us with a bus warming!).  But we got a heck of a lot of bus work done during July. We flew back to St. Louis to bring Kiki home.

Burning Man: For the first time, we hadn’t planned to attend or not attend Burning Man.  Serendipity clearly spoke and presented us with tickets to the sold out event.  So after a stop in Flagstaff to cool off, then a trip down to Phoenix to pick up some sweet Lithium Ion Batteries to start building our new house battery system – we attended Burning Man, staying in Camp Nomadia which we founded in 2008.

Cross Country Mad Dash – We stayed in Las Vegas and St. George, UT in September (yearn!), enjoying another rendezvous with Ben & Karen (who we saw 8 times this year) – and then decided to get across country for the holidays.  A goal was set to attend the Bus Conversion Magazine Rally in Chattanooga.  It was way too quick of a trip, but we did attend the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.

MINI Adventure:  In late October, we headed to St. Louis to pick up our stuff and finally fully move into the bus. We also decided to buy Ben & Karen’s MINI Cooper to be our toad which was just coming out of lease.  To obtain the MINI, it required me flying back to Las Vegas and having a 1700 mile solo motoring trip back!

Florida: We made our way to Florida with a month long reservation awaiting us!  The holiday season was spent with both of our parents and our Florida communities.  And we also put 13.1 miles on our feet in November by completing our first half-marathon.

We ended up driving 6252 miles in Zephyr in 2011.

Whew.

What an amazing year!! Thank you each and every one of you for your encouragement throughout our adventures by following along, commenting, inviting us over and sharing your wisdom with us.  It means the world to us.

Here’s to the adventures ahead!

They included all of the holiday traditional favorites…

Wickham is a community park run by Brevard County, and is almost 400 acres – the campground is just a small part of it. The camping loops are kinda unique in that they’re fairly undefined sites – and folks [...]]]> In our last post I mentioned that we’d been staying at Wickham Park in Melbourne, FL.

Ahhh... idyllic Wickham Park campground. Who knew so much crazy lurks here?

Wickham is a community park run by Brevard County, and is almost 400 acres – the campground is just a small part of it. The camping loops are kinda unique in that they’re fairly undefined sites – and folks tend to position their rigs at all sorts of angles to get the best view and privacy.

And unlike most public campgrounds, you can stay long term –  making it an ideal snowbird winter retreat.

Stay with me here… I promise, this is NOT a campground review. 

We’ve stayed there many times while visiting my parents, and have always loved it.  Lots of trees, hiking trails, ponds, disc golf course, wild life, horse stables, dog park, senior center and an active fitness community.

It’s also conveniently located near the community college with lots of shopping within a couple blocks.   And during this particular visit, the park is the site of the county’s charming holiday light fest.

Sounds nice and idyllic, right?   Yeah, we had thought so too.  

Last week I was walking with my mother, and we stopped to talk with one of her neighbors. When I mentioned we were staying up at Wickham, he immediately said:

“That’s a dangerous place!  What, with the beatings and machete attack.”

Uh.  *blink* What?

My mother dismissed him as teller of tales, but I immediately turn to Google. And I found nothing.  So we chalked it up to local folklore or crazy talk.

Uh.. that's a lot of damage for hitting a tree at low speed???(Photo by Malcolm Denemark, FLORIDA TODAY)

And then oddly, Monday evening we caught a flash of a news story on TV – about how a Wickham Park ranger had totaled one of the park’s trucks that morning.   Ok, weird…  but things happen.

Now the story turns bizarre.

Officers had been called to Wickham Park back on the evening of December 10 to investigate – you got it, a machete attack.

Some nut job came into the campground, asked a family for money for booze and when they refused .. left and came back to attack them with a MACHETE!!  Dude… a real fricken machete! In our campground!!

The local paper ran a brief story yesterday, which is why I found no mention of it earlier.  If you want even more crazy, click through to the comments on the story.

After arresting the dude, the police went to track down the ranger on duty to question him. Much to their surprise, they found his heavily beat up car parked at the ranger station – which had been identified at a hit-and-run accident nearby with a pedestrian earlier in the evening.  I’m thinking our ranger isn’t the best of drivers? And from reading more of the story, probably a bit crazy himself.

Oh, and did I mention that the last time we stayed at Wickham in April, we were awoken to a bang at the door at 5am to call 911?? A walker in the morning had thwarted an arsonist trying to burn the park down?!?

So.. let’s total the crazy we’ve experienced at Wickham Park this year:

• Arsonist
• Machete Weilding Whackjob
• Pyscho Ranger

And that my friends, was exactly the impetus we needed to fire up the bus yesterday for our scheduled departure (which we had been contemplating extending).

Oh wait, I remember – we’ve been keeping busy!

Last April we parked in this very location at Wickham Park in Melbourne when we got the unsolicited offer to sell our Oliver [...]]]> Wow.. where did the month go?  It seems like we just pulled in to Melbourne, Florida for our long anticipated still time.

Our spot at Wickham Park, Melbourne FL

Last April we parked in this very location at Wickham Park in Melbourne when we got the unsolicited offer to sell our Oliver Travel Trailer.

Ever since we’ve been on a whirlwind tour of the country in search of our bus and making it back across country.

Melbourne (well, technically Indian Harbour Beach) is where I lived when I met Chris back in 2006 and decided to join him on the road full time. I had lived here 12 years and have a lot of roots – most importantly, my parents.  Like St. Louis (where Chris’ family is from), Florida is a frequent destination in our travels.

We consider quality time with family to be one of the main benefits of our mobile lifestyle.

Back in September, when we were still out west, my father started having some symptoms that were… concerning. We were already aiming to spend the holidays in Florida, so we made the decision to start heading eastward ‘just in case’.

And thank goodness, just days before we pulled in… his results confirmed that his symptoms where something manageable and treatable. Whew… big relief!

Our time here has been full of joy, happiness and celebration of life.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family.  My brother flew in for a long weekend for a long overdue family reunion.. and for my mother’s 65th birthday.

Chris working outside on iOS development.

Aside from re-caulking the shower, the bus hasn’t changed a bit in the last month. No bus projects!

In the past couple of weeks we’ve put out an update to both Coverage? and the final update to State Lines 2011. We’ve broken ground on a total re-write of State Lines to allow for easier expansion of data and iPad support. The re-write will also serve as a foundation for some other product ideas that we’re excited to focus on next.

We also started a total rewrite of our old ‘Answers to the Common Excuses to Not Travel Full Time’ (ugh, what a mouthful!) blog series, and are re-launching it as ‘No Excuses: Go Nomadic‘.  We’ll be releasing a newly updated chapter every few weeks, as well as updating the pay-as-you-wish eBook version as we go.

Kiki at 'work' (and our view off our porch)

Kiki has also gotten into a work routine while parked here.  Everyday we walk her over to a nearby clump of trees where she is managing a crew of squirrels.  She excitedly wakes us up every morning for her commute.

We’ve been able to get back into a bit of a fitness routine launched by us each completing a 1/2 Marathon.  We love staying at Wickham Park while we’re in Melbourne in part because of all of the walking & running trails around. Well, and it’s one of the few options in the area.  For $475/month, it’s a pretty good deal for long term stays in Florida.

Our social calendar has remained pretty full, between hosting a wonderful ‘open bus’ (which we totally forgot to take pictures at), reconnecting with old friends and making new ones.

Jessica & Duncan of Traveling On the Outskirts

We got to finally meet and hang out with Duncan & Jessica of Traveling On the Outskirts – who also originated their travels in Melbourne.  And we got to spend some time with Sean & Louise of Our Odyssey who are roaming around the area.

Tomorrow we’ll break camp and head over to the west coast of Florida (just north of Tampa) to where Chris’ folks are spending their first Christmas at their new Florida winter home. We’ll follow that up by attending the Arcadia Bus Rally (where we hope Sean & Louise will join us at – *poke poke*).

After last holiday season alone in the tropics (oh, woe is us) it’s really nice to get so much quality holiday time with loved ones.

We haven’t a clue where we’re headed after the first of the year.  There’s temptation to quickly head back west to join up with all of the NuRVers converging in Arizona and southern California for the winter (which our social side craves) or meander our way to Texas in time to ‘unattend’ SXSW in March (which our ‘take it slow’ side craves).

What’s your winter and spring looking like?  Any events, rendezvouses, gatherings, opportunities or invitations we should consider?

We’ve recently posted some ideas for physical products :

Kitchen Gadgets Ideal for RVs
Mobile Technology

But all of this stuff does take up space [...]]]> With the holiday season well upon us, we’ve been asked by non-RVing friends what would be ideal gifts to give the RVers in their life.

We’ve recently posted some ideas for physical products :

Kitchen Gadgets Ideal for RVs
Mobile Technology

But all of this stuff does take up space (which is at a premium) and requires knowing what the needs are of your recipient. And honestly, most of us RVers don’t have room for miscellaneous stuff, and prefer to have a say in what we bring into our homes on wheels.

What about ideas for things that you can give that enhance a RVers life, but doesn’t add clutter to their small living spaces?  Here are some ideas of things I know we appreciate:

RV Memberships

There are many organizations that provide services to RVers that help enable our lives on the road. Of course, you’ll want to check in to see what memberships they already have – because two is not better than one.

Passport America - $44

Passport America members enjoy 50% discounts at RV Parks across the country.  There are limits on the number of nights, and blackout dates – but it’s very worthwhile.  We use this discount quite often, and we’ve more than paid for the membership cost in our savings.  (This is an affiliate link, and will net us a $10 credit towards our renewal if you purchase.)

Overnight RV Parking – $24.95

This is an online directory of free camping locations across the country – one of the most comprehensive we’ve found. The owner of the site actively maintains the listings, giving us a lot of confidence when we pull in for the night.  It covers everything from rest areas, Walmart parking lots and remote boondocking locations.  (Bonus – if you mention our e-mail address of ‘us@technomadia.com’ when you sign up, both us and your gift recipient will receive an additional free month of membership.)

Escapees - $70

Escapees is an organization of full time RVers that provides residency assistance in Texas and many other services, like mail forwarding.  They actively work to keep on top of laws that affect full time RVers, work with insurance companies and run a network of member owned RV Parks.  Aside from RVer assistance, they’re also the only way an RVer without a home base can volunteer for the Red Cross (through the DOVES special interest group – still a goal of ours).

Annual Passes

Annual passes that give nationwide benefits can really be utilized by us full time travelers.

America the Beautiful Pass – $80

This is a park pass that gives the owner free entrance to most national parks, forests, BLM Land and monuments.  This can be a huge money saver for RVers, and because we always keep one of these passes, we never hesitate to route through our gorgeous national park lands.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide any sort of discount for camping fees.

 Zoos & Aquariums - Varies

Did you know that your local zoo or aquarium may be part of a nationwide network?  We just recently visited the zoo local to us here in Florida, and my mom offered to get us an annual pass for our holiday gift.  Turns out they’re part of the Association of Zoos & Aquariums with reciprocal agreements with about 120 other zoos & aquariums.  Many offer free entrance for members, or 50% discounts.  For the next year, we’ll be routing to include more zoos & aquariums across the nation and presenting our Brevard Zoo pass for free or discounted entrance – a perfect gift! Many museums are also part of a similar network that might be a great option too.

Media

Gifts that are digital make great gifts for the technically inclined in your life!

Digital Goods

Music, movies, apps and books in a digital format take up no physical space, and make great gifts!  Many stores that sell them allow you to pick out content to gift on, or you can buy a gift credit to allow your recipient to choose what they want.  For us, we prefer keeping an iTunes balance on account, which eliminates frequent small charges to our credit card for music, apps and eBooks we buy for our many Apple devices. For this bus-hold, an iTunes gift credit is always loved. When we run out of gifted credit, we’ll even seek out deals to buy ourselves a gift card.

Movie Rentals

DVD rental services like Netflix and Redbox can be wonderful assets to RVers.  Many Redbox kiosks are at overnight free parking spots at Walmarts – making it super easy to grab a flick for the night. And the Netflix DVD mail service, despite their recent price increases, serves us quite well for watching TV series on disc. We can update our shipping address very easily to catch up with us, and we utilize the streaming service on our iPad with unlimited data.

Stocking Stuffers

Roll of Quarters – $10

Seriously.  For us RVers without laundry machines in our rigs, a quarter is worth its weight in gold.  Why?  It’s the only currency a RV Park laundromat will take. When we pull into a campground after office hours with no clean underwear left – it’s not about the actual dollar amount charged, it’s about the number of quarters we have available.  One quarter can make all the difference.  Increase joy (and clean underpants) in the world – and gift quarters!

Fuel Card

If it’s one thing all us mobile RVers use – it’s fuel. A prepaid credit card or fuel card will always be appreciated!

Cat Treats

Kiki would like to add that cat treats , catnip and toys make great gifts! Even if your RVer doesn’t have a cat traveling with them, they are sure to encounter campground cats who will appreciate it.  And they are certain at some point to rendezvous with us, and Kiki has an *entire* cat treat drawer waiting to be filled up. So yes.. cat stuff. Lots of it.

]]> http://www.technomadia.com/2011/12/gift-ideas-for-rvers/feed/ 5 http://www.technomadia.com/2011/12/we-finally-named-our-bus/ http://www.technomadia.com/2011/12/we-finally-named-our-bus/#comments Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:49:52 +0000 Cherie Ve Ard http://www.technomadia.com/?p=6975 A couple months ago we asked for your help in coming up with a name for our bus.  We were blown away by the outpouring of ideas in comments, Facebook and e-mail. Thank you everyone!

Y’all put your brains in overdrive and came up with some pretty clever stuff - [...]]]> A couple months ago we asked for your help in coming up with a name for our bus.  We were blown away by the outpouring of ideas in comments, Facebook and e-mail. Thank you everyone!

Y’all put your brains in overdrive and came up with some pretty clever stuff - Cassiomadia, Caspur, Purdy Cassy Techno Taxi, GrusGrus, C C Ryder, Citizen Purdy and USB.  Purdy and Haboob continued to stick for us too.

But the best suggestion of all came from a reader who wrote us directly with the advice of ‘Don’t rush it.. the bus will let you know her name when she’s ready.’

We resisted the urge to pick a name.

And sure enough… it came to us.

We were just leaving Chattanooga after having spent several days getting lots of maintenance caught up on the bus at Choo Choo Express Garage after the BCM Rally.

The thought process then went something like this:

Cherie: Ya know.. I can’t help but notice the coincidence of the great service we got at Choo Choo, and that we found our bus by riding a choo choo.

Chris:  Yeah, you’re right – trains do have quite a role with our bus.

Cherie: Perhaps there’s a name potential there?  Choo Choo? Trakkie?

Chris: What was our favorite route on the train?

Both together: ZEPHYR!!!

Duh.  Of course.

The very morning we first met our bus, we had to drive from Tuscon (where we had just looked at another bus) to Yuma, AZ.  On the way, we decided to stop at the Amtrak Station in Maricopa to pick up a ticket out to Los Angeles on our rail pass… just in case we needed to continue our bus hunt.

And what was there?

An Original Art-deco California Zephyr Car - Maricopa, AZ

An original art-deco style California Zephyr observation car on display, that used to run the same route we had took from Chicago to San Francisco during our bus hunt on the modern day Amtrak.

We stood and marveled at it for quite a long time. We fantasized about converting it to be a RV-on-Rails and living in it full time.  How sweet would that be??

The next picture on the roll...

The very next picture in my camera-roll download is the first picture of what would become our bus.  Our bus had told us its name before we met her – we just needed the reminder.

When we made it to our next destination, we looked up the name Zephyr.  It means ‘West Wind’ – perfect for the Haboob concept that kept calling us.

There have also been many other vehicles named Zephry that are inspiring and relevant to our lives, including:

RV Zephyr, research vessel
Qinetiq Zephyr, a solar powered unmanned air vehicle
Zephyr, the luxury liner ship in the Colonial fleet on the Battlestar Galactica series

We let the name sit for several weeks – and it’s stuck.

So, we are proud to present to you:

 The Technomadia Zephyr

(However, I think her personal nickname will always be ‘Purdy’ to me and ‘Haboob’ to Chris.)

They crave a slower pace to more fully immerse themselves in different cultures and experiences. More opportunity to enjoy quality time with far flung friends and family. [...]]]> Many people have dreams of long term travel, something that is more than the typical 1-2 week vacation a couple times a year (or every couple of years!).

They crave a slower pace to more fully immerse themselves in different cultures and experiences. More opportunity to enjoy quality time with far flung friends and family. A chance for ever broadening horizons, not constrained by a “back to work” deadline.

That sort of long term travel is generally thought of as reserved for:

• Retirement – when life savings, pensions and social security can cover the expenses, and one has completed a career and put that phase of life behind them.
• Before career – fresh out of school before one commits to a career and family, taking a few months or years to explore the world.
• In between careers – when a current careers is no longer rewarding, quit, take off and travel for a while before re-entering the workforce.

Essentially, extended travel is often to the exclusion of work or career. It’s something you do after you’ve ended a career, or in-between phases of life.

And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with these approaches.  Taking time in-between life chapters, and focusing on travel, can give one very deep insights into themselves and the world. Valuable stuff.

But what if now is when you want to travel, not some distant post-retirement future when your health and physical capabilities may no longer be up for the experience?

What if a year just isn’t enough to experience the world?

There is another option.

Combining Career and Travel

Not many of us are in a position to entirely quit the workforce, retire early and sustain our desired lifestyle. Some of us actually enjoy working, embrace our careers, and aren’t itching to escape them. And others, despite vigilant financial planning, haven’t been able to acquire enough savings to travel without some sort of supplemental income.

Our generation, Gen-X, in particular was brought up believing that social security likely wouldn’t be around by the time we reach a traditional retirement age. The old concept of retirement just doesn’t play into many of our generation’s long term plans.  Some of us are pursuing a sustainable work/life balance that can last our entire life.  We’d rather fully enjoy our lives now, instead of putting off our dreams for some future that may not exist for us.

There are certainly many careers that are not apt to a full time traveling lifestyle.  For those passionate about such a career path, that is reason enough to put off full-time travel. In the meantime, find ways to integrate in purposeful travel into your vacation time, sabbaticals, and/or by creatively extending business related trips.

You might be surprised at how much flexibility you actually have – many part-time nomads manage to negotiate time-off (without pay) to turn the typical two week American vacation into two or more months off each year. You never know until you ask, or sometimes issue an ultimatum.

But if you’re not on a stationary career track that inspires you, and travel is calling you louder, perhaps it’s time to explore creative ways to re-think how you might make it work.

There are generally two different ways to go about earning an income while traveling.

First, find work that naturally integrates in travel.

Or, design a “location independent” career that involves work that can be done primarily remotely, letting you work from wherever you are.

Here are some examples to get you thinking…

Careers with Travel Built In

A nomadic life based on following the work is nothing new at all – it’s been part of human culture since the earliest adventurers got the itch to explore the world around them.

There are many career paths that can require, or be adapted to, travel as a core component of them.

• Artists & Jewelers
• Musicians
• Seasonal Workers
• Festival Workers
• Truck Drivers
• Migrant Workers (harvests, oil fields, etc.)
• Construction and Craftsmanship
• Contract Medical Staff (nurses, doctors, technicians, etc.)
• Journalism
• Photographers
• Cruise Ship Staff
• Fishing or Boat Crewing
• Military Service
• Traveling Sales
• Therapists & Body Workers
• Hair Stylists & Cosmeticians
• Tattoo Artist
• House & Pet Sitters
• Tour Guides
• Amusement Park Staff
• Providing Services (cleaning, organizing, computer setup, handyman, etc.)
• Repair & Technician Work
• Temp Workers
• Performance Artists (balloon twisters, dancers, comedians, gymnasts, fire swallowers, etc.)
• Conference Speakers
• Trainers & Teachers
• Teaching English as a Second Language
• Volunteer Jobs (that cover some living expenses)
• Consultants & Designers
• Workamping  (exchanging services for RV parking and/or pay)

Many of these career paths could utilize travel as part of the means of getting to a work site, but often may require adjusting your travel plans to meet the schedules of work obligations (military service!). You may have to strike a balance that works for you between giving up control of your schedule and destinations, and having work that actually pays you to see the world.

Other nomadic career paths allow for travel totally in your control, but you need to have faith that you can show up to a location and market yourself to find gigs.

There are some jobs (particularly in remote areas – such as oil fields, fishing or mining) that offer a rotating schedule of intense periods of work (weeks to months at a time) then lots of time off. Taking a job that involves such hard intense work for a month straight may be grueling, but it is balanced out with time off to travel extensively before you need to return.

One nomad we know has spent the past few years working the seasons in Antarctica as support staff at McMurdough Station. His long stretches spent living on the ice is balanced with seasons spent full-time on the road exploring other parts of the world.

Working Remotely

With the advent of wireless broadband, there’s a whole new class of mobile careers available. They’re digital nomads and location independent professionals - or as we prefer to call ourselves, technomads.

Some examples of careers that can be done remotely from anywhere with decent connectivity might include:

• Programmers
• Developers
• IT managers
• Database managers
• Bookkeepers / Accountants / CPAs
• Lawyers
• Personal Assistants
• Web Designers
• Writers
• Editors
• Bloggers
• Podcasters
• Photo & Videography Work
• Affiliate Sales
• Social Media Specialists
• Product Evangelists
• Bargain Hunting & Re-Selling Online
• Online Products & Stores
• Graphic Designers
• Online Professors
• Personal and Professional Coaches
• Consultants & Advisors
• Freelance Writers
• Customer Support
• Agents (travel, insurance, etc.)
• Investors / Traders
• Transcriptionists
• Translators
• Researchers / Information Providers

These are folks who can utilize technology to take the office with them untethered by ethernet cables and phone lines. Sometimes people pursuing digital nomadism have existing gigs lined up before they hit the road, and sometimes they search for remote working compatible gigs as needed by searching outsourcing job boards such as:

http://www.craigslist.org
http://www.elance.com
http://www.odesk.com
http://www.vworker.com

We’ve had friends who are IT consultants who took their lives completely mobile and actually didn’t tell their clients for months of the change. After all, who really knows (or cares) where the phone physically rings or where code is written?

The above lists certainly aren’t comprehensive of the options. It’s limited only to your creativity and passions.

What skills and interests do you have?  How can you adapt your skills into a job that allows you the level of travel you desire?

Brainstorm, and don’t let anyone tell you your idea isn’t worthwhile exploring.

Entrepreneur vs Employee?

Working on the beach (it's overrated, by the way)

There seems to be a common misconception that to be location independent, you have to be a self-employed, freelancing, entrepreneur.  This is not necessarily true.  While a self-disciplined motivated individual can do quite well being self-employed in a location independent career, it’s certainly not the only way.

As the world has become more and more virtual, and the economy has forced more companies to scale back on the costs of maintaining real estate, more traditional workplaces are becoming keen on allowing their employees to transition to becoming remote teleworkers. So why not take it a step further, and work from anywhere?

Some companies have even gone entirely virtual – with no fixed office at all.

One company run by a friend of ours has employees all over the world who only ever see each other at their quarterly week-long working retreats, always held in an exotic new city so that when the team comes together they can bond by mixing work and play.

Of course, not all positions are going to be able to be done remotely, particularly factoring the uncertainties that come with working while traveling. However if you have a job that you think you could do from anywhere, you might want to consider coming up with a proposal for your boss.

Don’t expect your employer to jump right on the opportunity, and expect that you may have to prove you can do it by perhaps starting with working from home a couple days a week.  It is possible however, and really all depends on how open minded your workplace is and how critical your role is to your organization. It likely won’t be an overnight transition, but if you like your current career and job but just want to do it from anywhere – think creatively on how you can make it happen.

If you are willing to negotiate a lower salary in return for fewer mandated office hours and more travel flexibility, you might be surprised as to what your bosses might agree to.

On the other hand, not working for someone as an employee is very freeing.  It also means being quite disciplined and resourceful to both find work and keep your clients happy, as well as figuring out all of the logistics of running  a company – paperwork, taxes, healthcare, insurance, etc.

If you’ve never run your own business before, it may be daunting to approach learning the ropes while also adapting to a fully mobile lifestyle. How much of a change you’re up for is going to vary quite a bit by person, skills and tolerance.

Working less or working smarter?

After Timothy Ferris’ book The Four Hour Work Week came out, a bunch of folks got the notion that they could set up online businesses, outsource the bulk of the work, and only work 4 hours a week while earning a bunch of cash and playing the rest of the time.

Sure, it may be possible for some, and there’s good stuff in Tim’s book that can really help folks think differently about the role work plays in their life.  Just don’t get the idea that life as a nomad is always a full time vacation.  It takes a lot of work to set up and maintain a passive income stream – so much so that for most it’s really hard to call what they end up doing all that passive.

Most of the mobile working nomads we’ve encountered don’t have a life of complete leisure or a passive income stream.  True, we may not be always working a typical 40+-hour work week plus commute, but we are putting in productive hours with deliverables.  We just tend to do it smartly without all the wasted time that tends to come with an office life.

Many of us are working in careers that inspire us in some way, better the world and that we actually enjoy. And we’re doing it from amazing places with ever-changing amazing office views.  Instead of ending our workday (or night) and coming home to the same ole routine, we have a new location waiting for us to explore!

We’ve encountered such a variety of ways people make it work – from working a fairly normal work day, to those that work in waves of intense 12-15 hour days for a few weeks then coast for months after that.

There’s no right or wrong way to do it.  Just make sure it’s YOUR way.

Our Mobile Careers

Working for ourselves, and working remotely, is the primary route that Chris and I have taken.

I’ve been location independent since 1994 when I started taking over my family’s software development company, running it from my beachside home in Florida. I used to tease my clients when they called that I could be working from anywhere – by the pool or the beach.  Then I started taking it further.

When I needed to travel for work, I’d tack on personal days to explore, taking advantage of the majority of the travel costs having already been covered. Then I started taking longer personal trips where I integrated in a remote work day, and used my off-time to explore.  It worked well, and remarkably, I found I rarely felt the desire to take a conventional dedicated vacation.

I liked the balance of travel just being a regular part of my life and having the flexibility to just go with little need for pre-planning.

And I’ve never felt like I needed to escape my career – I already built something I loved.

When I met my lifemate Chris in 2006 (who was already living as a full time nomad), it all came together for me to totally remove myself from a fixed homebase and office, and I started the process of shifting my life to become fully mobile.

Before going nomadic, Chris had a career in the mobile technology industry – most recently having worked for Palm and PalmSource as their Director of Competitive Analysis (aka ‘Chief Spy’), traveling the world to keep tabs on the entire mobile tech industry. It was truly a job too good to give up until Palm  & Palm Source imploded. He had already long ago decided that this would be his last job for a big company, and his lay off propelled him to finally jump into something he always wanted to do – become a technomad.

Today, Chris and I together do various technology and strategy consulting as we travel via our partnership Two Steps Beyond LLC, mainly only taking on projects that inspire us and which are fun! I continue to work for many of my long term clients, and we’ve begun developing our own line of travel related mobile apps. We’ve also taken on several intense short term gigs that have included: advising tech start-ups, orchestrating new product launches, doing intensive market research, providing market insight to investors, selling our photography and travel videography, and writing for tech journals.

And when we have lulls in our workload, we’ve been known to take on temporary gigs outside our norm just to explore new things, such as workamping for a month at Amazon.com packing boxes during their peak holiday season.

We like to shake it up, explore new avenues of income, and most of all – have fun!

Read Chapter 2: Affording Full Time Travel —->

Resources:

A Practical Guide To Going Digital - Christine Gilbert over at AlmostFearless.com provides some amazing resources and inspiration. This eBook gives a lot of information working remotely and digitally.

25 Career Ideas to Design Your Location Independent Lifestyle - Carmen Bolanos, co-founder of NuNomad.com, put together an awesome round up of 25 mobile careers using examples of real nomads he has interviewed.

Work for RVers and Campers - Website maintained by a couple who has been full-timing for nearly 20 years and earning an income while they travel.

Digital Nomad Academy - An online program run by Cody McKibben to help those wanting to be a digital nomads set up and explore business ideas to create a mobile friendly career. Targeted to the entrepreneur minded who has yet to figure out how to make it work.

Reaching Escape Velocity - The original Technomad, Steve Roberts, shares how he used sponsors, the media, volunteers, and “other potent forces” to enable and afford his own massively ambitious technomadic undertakings.  If your planned adventures are audacious enough to draw this sort of attention, you need this book.

No Excuses: Go Nomadic

This article is part of an ongoing series answering the common excuses folks give us for why they’re not pursing their dreams of full time travel.  We launched this series a few years ago as Answers to the Common Excuses - and are in the process of massively updating it.  We’ll be releasing newly updated & expanded chapters over the coming months.  We’ll be addressing topics like: Affording It, Family, Pets, Logistics, Healthcare, Community, Keeping Connected and more.

Read the whole series:  No Excuses: Go Nomadic

eBook version - This blog series is also available as convenient eBook. We offer this compilation on a ‘pay as you wish’ basis, and will be keeping it updated with the blog series.  We don’t aim to make a living off our blog, but a little support to keep the blog going is always appreciated (buying the eBook is kinda like taking us out for a beer).

Cost: Pay As You Wish (really… just set the price!)

PDF Format

We’ve been integrating in more fitness into our travels, and have been looking forward to slowing down our pace of travel to allow for more hiking and jogging.  Almost 2 years ago, we both [...]]]> We’re still in a bit of disbelief: one week ago today – we each completed the Space Coast Half Marathon!

Wow!! A Half Marathon!?!?!

We’ve been integrating in more fitness into our travels, and have been looking forward to slowing down our pace of travel to allow for more hiking and jogging.  Almost 2 years ago, we both used the amazing Couch 2 5k running program to get ourselves in gear.

We did our first 5K race after we first landed on St. John last winter.  And later during our stay, Chris totally rocked running 8 Tuff Miles – a treacherous 8 mile run across the island, including a 1000 ft elevation gain and drop. (By this point, Cherie had discovered that she and humidity & elevation gains don’t get along.)

We both returned from St. John quite fit from our experience there of frequent long hikes, swimming and just being able to concentrate on nutrition and fitness. But since returning stateside, we’ve not had much time to keep on top of it.  Our life has been a chaotic adventure these past few months of selling our Oliver, hunting for a bus and getting it settled.

When we got parked in Melbourne, FL last month and discovered a major 1/2 marathon was in a week – we said.. ‘what the heck!’ and signed up.  *gulp*

Chris most impressively RAN the entire thing, finishing in 2:49:50, with an average pace of 12:58/mile.  Wow! You can read his entire recount on his personal blog.

Cherie set out with no intention of running at all, as she knows her body couldn’t handle it without training, and walked the entire way.  She finished in just under 4 hours after completing the last 5 miles with severe blistering on her feet.

The race was an incredible experience to be part of, and the course was waterfront & flat the entire way.  Maybe it was the early morning wake-up making us delirious – be we had a blast!

We’ve definitely renewed our passion for making fitness a priority in our travels, and may even route to races in the future.

Since moving into our bus, we’ve been reacquainting ourselves with the joys of kitchen gadgets. In our previous super tiny trailers, we didn’t have much room for such things.

With a little bit more space, we’ve been enjoying picking things out that match our lifestyle and serve meaningful functions in our household.

All [...]]]>

Since moving into our bus, we’ve been reacquainting ourselves with the joys of kitchen gadgets. In our previous super tiny trailers, we didn’t have much room for such things.

A whole month!!

We are actually parked so that the campsite we were at nearly 7 months ago when we agreed to sell our Oliver [...]]]> On Friday afternoon, we arrived to Melbourne, Florida.  We happily pre-paid our monthly rate at our campground and setup. Knowing – we don’t have to move anywhere for a month.

A whole month!!

How many indications in our setup can you spot that say 'We're here for a month!' ??

We are actually parked so that the campsite we were at nearly 7 months ago when we agreed to sell our Oliver trailer is directly out our view.  It’s a nice reminder of the crazy adventure we’ve been on since.  We sold our trailer, borrowed a small motorhome, hopped on a train to search for a bus, bought a bus and did a bunch of work on our bus!  Whew.

It’s good to be back.

We seem to go in phases where we don’t know where we’ll be tonight, let alone next month.  And then time periods where we just need to plan to be still for a while. They’re different mindsets, and we love that we have flexibility to accommodate what we’re feeling most.

Having plans to be still allows us to engage in the local community differently. We have time to search out events to attend – such as shows, concerts and parties.  We have time to look forward to multiple visits with people we love.  And we have time to focus on work, writing (more blog posts forthcoming.. wheee!), each other, exploring our location, fitness and more.

And it gives us time to plan to do crazy stuff – such as this morning, we signed up to participate in our first half marathon!  This coming Sunday morning, we’ll be walk/running in the Space Coast Marathon.  It sounds uber fun and full of space themed goodies.

And we’ll still be hosting our ‘Open Bus’ later that afternoon – please do RSVP if you’re able to join us.

I explained the chief downsides of Lead Acid batteries, the tried and true battery technology that powers essentially every RV electrical system made.

And in part two, I explained about the advantages Lithium Ion batteries, the latest and greatest battery technology to come along.

It’s not often that we actually have plans more than a day or two out, but Florida is a difficult place to winter in an [...]]]> After a brutally hot summer in Arizona getting the bus ready, we’re definitely following the good weather this winter.  We are headed to Florida to spend the holidays with family!

It’s not often that we actually have plans more than a day or two out, but Florida is a difficult place to winter in an RV without reservations. So, we’ve gone against our default of trusting in serendipity on a nightly basis, and have actually laid out plans!

Here they are:

• November 13 – 17 – Altamonte Springs, FL (north Orlando)
• November 18 – December 19 – Melbourne, FL (yes… a month!! In one spot??)
• December 20 – 28 – Hudson, FL (north of Tampa)
• December 28 – 31 – Arcadia, FL for the Arcadia Bus Rally
• Early 2012 and beyond – Undetermined.

Technomadia’s Open Bus Invites

Hosting a talk on Lithium Ion Batteries at the BCM Rally.

The benefit to having actual plans, is that we can dip our toes into something we’ve been wanting to do for a while – which is organizing casual meet-ups with our readers.

As such, we have scheduled a couple of ‘Open Bus’ events while we’re in Florida.

If you’re in the area, we’re extending an invite to stop on over, meet us, ask questions about technomadism and tour our bus.

You can RSVP on our Facebook event’s pages:

Open Bus – Orlando Area – Thursday, Nov 17 – 3-8pm

Open Bus – Melbourne – Sunday, Nov 27 – 3-5pm

Eventually, when we know in advance we’ll be somewhere, we’d like to organize some casual multi-day gatherings and talk series – sorta like taking our ‘Camp Nomadia’ concept on the road.  But this is a start.

We’ll also be at the Arcadia Rally in late December – and have been invited to present on Lithium Ion Batteries and Mobile Internet Options.  If you’re also attending the rally, we look forward to meeting you there!

As always, we absolutely enjoy meeting up with our readers during our travels – as that’s the primary reason we keep this blog.  So if you’re also in Florida this winter, let us know – and let’s see what we can coordinate.

We are very much looking forward to putting the landing gear down in a few days and having much quality time with friends & family in Florida. And maybe, just maybe, a few less bus projects??

We’ve been pondering for a while what might make an ideal toad for us.  We knew we wanted something that could be flat towed with all four wheels down, as [...]]]> Yesterday I posted about our 6 carless months, and how I convinced Chris to agree to a toad.

We’ve been pondering for a while what might make an ideal toad for us.  We knew we wanted something that could be flat towed with all four wheels down, as we didn’t want to deal with a trailer too.

When flat towing, the transmission of the vehicle has to be compatible, as expensive damage can be done.  Some vehicles are certified by their manafucter to be flat towed. Others are not officially supported. And others you simply can not tow ‘four down’ no matter what you do.  Obviously, if a Prius could be flat towed – there would be absolutely no question. But, sadly they can not be.

Further resources on towing considerations:

• Motorhome Magazine publishes an annual guide to Dinghy Towing that lists the current officially supported vehicles and equipment.
• The great folks over at Wheeling It did a great article on this topic a few months ago that goes over a lot of the considerations.
• Lynne at Minnie Views made a comprehensive post about setting up her vehicle to be towed. She connects & disconnects solo!

Some of the vehicles we had considered were:

Jeep Wrangler – we loved driving our little island car around St. John when we lived there this past winter. As fun as they are for off road driving, their gas mileage isn’t much better than our bus.

Smart Car – These little cars seemed ideal to tow behind a RV and give very efficient mileage around town. However, we drove a friend’s and weren’t too impressed. The drive was rough, and gave no option for passengers.

Miata – Before owning a Prius, I briefly owned a Miata. It was a super fun car to drive, and flat towable. However, it too had no option for passengers and hardly any carry capacity for groceries.

Mini Cooper – A super cute small vehicle with great mileage that seemed a little more practical. But as our great friend’s Ben & Karen tow one, and they too are working on a vintage bus – it just seemed too weird. So we initially dismissed this idea.

We like Weird – a Mini it is!

The past fews months we’ve spent a lot of time rendezvousing with Ben & Karen.  And we’ve been incredibly impressed with how comfortable their Mini was for transporting the four of us around.

St. George, UT Rendezvous

And then we noticed – their 2009 Mini Cooper matches our bus!

Almost two years ago, Karen moved aboard Ben’s bus. But she had one condition – she either got to bring along her beloved dog .. or her Mini.  She let Ben pick.  He opted for the Mini, and ditched his Jeep Liberty. (Her dog now lives with her parents.)

It turns out her Mini was soon coming to the end of its lease, and Ben & Karen had already decided they would be ordering a new one in red to match their someday-to-be-completed vintage bus – the Creative Cruiser.  Ben also wanted one of the new larger models, as they’re frequently taking their vehicle out on photography expeditions and needed more room for their gear.

While BMW doesn’t officially support the Mini being flat towed (doing so actually voids the warranty), the manual transmission edition falls into the middle grey area of being possible with modification. They had already done those modifications – and had been successfully towing it for nearly two years.

Karen was sad that she’d be turning in her Mini, as she had planned to buy it out of lease before meeting Ben and his vintage bus plans. She simply loves it.

Thus the idea came together.  We’d buy it out of her lease.

Not only would we copy them by having a vintage bus towing a Mini Cooper – we’d just go for full on out weird, and buy their Mini.  But hey, what are good friends for if you can’t be totally weird with them?  This also means Karen will get to see her Mini all across the country as we continue to rendezvous.

My Mini Adventure

The logistical challenge to this plan was that after we parted ways in Albuquerque, we were headed in opposite directions.  Us to the east coast and them to Las Vegas to catch a flight to South Africa for a photo safari they’re leading.

So after posting about having just completed a way too rapid cross country repositioning, what did I suggest?

My first cross country solo road trip!

Why yes..  of course.   I would fly out to Vegas and drive the Mini back.

Alone. 

Now, let me reveal a couple facts about myself.

• I have not driven much at all in the past 4+ years.  Chris loves to drive, and I got spooked after our jack-knife spin out.  I maybe do 10-15% of the driving in our household.
• Aside from a few hours in total driving a manual transmission about 10 years ago, I’m a total noob with a stick.

But in light of reminiscing recently about my planned cross country road trip in my Prius before I met Chris, it just seemed like a fitting challenge. And what cooler way to bond with the Mini and bring it home to complete our new household?

On Friday I flew out to Vegas and helped Ben & Karen with their last minute preparations for their Africa trip.  And as serendipity would have it, our nomadic friends Sam & Tracy also arrived in Vegas that night and we had a fabulous kick-off party for our adventures.

After they were off to the airport, I started a 1700 mile solo road trip back to the bus in St. Louis (after figuring out I had to put the clutch in to turn the engine on).

I took 4 days, driving between 400-460 miles a day.  It was a good pace, and allowed me to drive a lot of back roads while not stressing myself out too much.

I learned the difference between driving.. and motoring!

I drove parts of Route 66 in Arizona, most notably through the twisty windy roads of the Black Mountains.

I drove through the twisty roads in Sante Fe National Forest, just east of Taos, NM.

And I dodged tumbleweeds through rural Kansas, finding abandoned towns.

I had an incredible solo journey that was soul nourishing. And on Tuesday evening I pulled into St. Louis, and parked the Mini face to face with the bus.

What a cute pair they make!

A Word about Fuel Economy

Since selling our Oliver and getting our bus, we’ve gotten a bit of reaction about how we seemed to have abandoned our previously ‘green’ ways for a fuel-hogging bus, and now adding a toad.

So, we’ll publicly address that.

First of all, we’ve never really considered ourselves identified as eco-green folks, and nor have we made much of a point to present ourselves as such.  Sure, we love the environment, and try to make smart choices.  Being greener is an important consideration for us, but certainly not the only.   Our choices for things like solar and small living were more for flexibility in the places we can go, cool technology and just seeing if we could – than being necessarily eco. 

And our decisions now are based on living and working comfortably as we concentrate on our business and evolve our travel style.  

And generally we agree with Sean of Our Odyssey‘s assessment that anyone living in a RV is likely more green than most living in a stationary house and commuting to work, just simply by the nature of the lifestyles. 

Our bus has been getting about 7.5 mpg (there are far bigger fuel hogs out there, and better than the 5-6 mpg we were expecting) and we do expect slightly less fuel economy when we’re towing the 2500 lbs Mini.  Whereas our truck towing the trailer was getting 12 mpg.  So it is a fuel economy hit for our traveling miles.  No doubt. 

But this isn’t about traveling miles alone.  It’s about balance.

Our intentions with this switch had been to slow down the pace of travel and stay places longer.  This is a transition from having a comfortable living pod while traveling, to having a comfortable apartment that can move. In theory, we want to be traveling less miles per year than before. And we were already traveling less miles than Chris was when he was commuting to work daily in the Bay Area.

We anticipate that more of our miles will be local transit miles while the bus is parked for weeks to months at a time. The Mini is rated to get 32 mpg averaged out between city & highway.  On my cross country trip, I was averaging an amazing 42 mpg.   Whereas the Tundra only got 16-18 mpg when not towing.

We were always paying a fuel economy hit for local transportation because our vehicle had to be sized to pull our house.  

Overall, we’re aiming for a measurable improvement in the balanced fuel economy of the bus & Mini. 

For the first several years of our nomadic journey, we towed our home behind a vehicle – so thus, we always had a means of transportation while leaving the house parked behind.

We intentionally kept our trailers small and [...]]]> That has been our question ever since we started our quest to live in a bus.

For the first several years of our nomadic journey, we towed our home behind a vehicle – so thus, we always had a means of transportation while leaving the house parked behind.

Our Jeep Liberty towing our 17' Oliver

We intentionally kept our trailers small and lightweight (16′ and 17′, respectively), in part so that our tow vehicle was also a somewhat practical local transportation vehicle.  Neither of us liked big vehicles (recall, we met because we both owned a Prius) – so we wanted our local transportation to be as small and efficient as possible.

When we decided it was time to try something different, we left it undetermined if we’d get a vehicle to tow behind (or ‘toad’ – as is more common in RV lingo. Get it?  It sounds like ‘towed’.)

6 months of being carless

We sold our Oliver and Toyota Tundra as a package deal in early May, and it’s hard to believe that was 6 months ago!  Since then, we’ve been carless.

Riding the Rails in Search of our bus

Heck, for some of that time – we were homeless backpackers riding the rails.

Being carless is something both of us has had desires to do.  Planting ourselves in a big city for several months with ample public transportation and being within walking distance of everything we need.  So it’s been a fun experiment these past months living without a vehicle of our own.

Sure, since we’ve had the bus – we do technically have transportation.  But that’s not ideal for a quick run to the grocery store if we run out of milk.  Using our home as local transportation is not the same, to us, as having smaller more maneuverable wheels for getting around town.  In this time, we’ve not had any means – of our own – of transportation but the bus and our legs.

We haven’t owned a car, scooters, motorcycles, bikes or even rollerblades.

It’s interesting how car centric our society is.  For instance, when we went to insure our bus, the first company our agent put us with (Progressive) actually ended up canceling our policy after they realized we didn’t own a car.  We can understand their reasoning, they don’t want to encourage RVers to use their motorhome for running errands – their policy is rated based on driving to a campground and parking.

Which ironically is exactly what we were intending to do – even without having a vehicle!

Progressive just couldn’t get it.  Even with us already having a non-owners liability policy with them to cover us when renting & borrowing vehicles, they just couldn’t comprehend that any full time RVer could possibly intend to be carless and not depend on their motorhome for local errands.

Here’s how we survived being carless:

• Walk!  We’ve gotten a lot more walking to pick up a few groceries. 
  
• Stock up! Before pulling into a location we were intending to park for a while, we tried to pre-think of everything we might need for a week or two. It changed the way we approached shopping, as there may not be an option to run out for more salsa later. We kinda looked at it as preparing for Burning Man (minus copious amounts of booze) with every stop.
• Borrow! We have been incredibly fortunate and blessed with the number of folks who have loaned us their vehicles.  It has seemed that most places we’ve pulled in for more than a night or two, there’s been a friend who has offered a lift into town, or their keys.
• Shop Online! We generally do a lot of our shopping online anyway, particularly using Amazon Prime – which gets us anything they carry shipped 2-day for free. Amazon carries a lot of stuff, including dry groceries.  So instead of worrying about stocking up on pre-made hummus, I ordered tahini sauce and garbanzo beans to blend on my own as desired.
• Rent! In the rare cases that we’ve not been somewhere with a vehicle to borrow, we’ve rented one.  Enterprise is in most cities, and they will come pick us up at our campsite (but more often, they’ve been within walking distance).  In some cities, they even have weekend deals of just $10/day.  In our 6 months of being carless – we spent about $860 on rental cars.  And $560 of that was for the 3 week period of our time in Arizona searching for our bus and getting it rolling (it was undriveable with a shredded tire for our first 10 days).  Since the bus got new tires in early July, we’ve actually only rented cars on two occasions for a total of $160.

Our bus parked miles from any town

Without being able to just hop in a car at any moment and go, we’ve had to very consciously think about our errands.  It’s made our outings incredibly efficient and targeted.

So.. a Toad?

We’ve made it 6 months without owning a vehicle. And we do consider the experiment a success.  We’re all about experimenting with testing the norm – after all, how is one to know what they truly and consciously want, instead of just accepting the defaults?

Our conversation on this topic however has differed. It’s gone something like this several times:

Chris: Ahhh..  being carless is awesome!!

Cherie: It’s nice, but I really do miss having a car.

Chris: Cars always appear when we need them most.

Cherie:  But I feel a bit trapped at times. Especially when we’re not staying near friends or family, or close to town.

Chris: But we’re carless! It rocks!  It’s simple and easy!

It is true, not towing a vehicle is simpler and easier.  We haven’t had to worry about pulling into parking lots with a car shadowing us or unhitching to back into a camp spot. That’s been a definite bonus while we’ve had enough new stuff to learn about bus life.

While at Choo Choo Express Garage getting work done on the bus, the owner let us use his truck to run errands.

And we have been on a lucky streak of cars appearing when we need them.

But that streak can’t last, and I don’t want a lifestyle that is dependent upon assuming the generosity of others, or dealing with the hassle of having to arrange a rental car every time we need to run errands.

If we were stationary and living somewhere with public transit and within walking distance to everything we need – being carless would indeed rock.  But we don’t.  We move around. We’re in and out of urban, suburban and rural areas.   We’re sometimes surrounded by friends, and we’re sometimes totally on our own.  We sometimes pull into situations where we need long term reliable access to a car, and monthly rentals get expensive.

And, honestly, not having a car has had me feeling trapped more and more often.

• I worry about medical urgencies, that would be much easier to handle if we could just hop in a car and go get help (I remember specifically instances with needing to get Kiki to a vet ASAP, such as after her rattlesnake bite last summer).
• I worry about the bus breaking down in the middle of nowhere.
• I worry about not getting out and exploring the area we’re in because it’s too much effort… it is far too easy to fall into patterns of our homebodied nature.
• As a traveling couple who spends a lot of time together in a small space, I’d like us to have the option to go different directions on occasion. It is sometimes nice to go do our own thing, and with just having the bus – that’s often constrained to one of us going to take a walk.   I want more options for us.

So, Chris finally came around and agreed with me. He’d rather deal with the increased complexity of towing a vehicle than live in a small space with a feeling trapped red head.

Smart Choice.

Next up..  I’ll share the tale of how our new-to-us vehicle came into our lives, and my fun adventure of getting it!  (Those who follow us on Facebook & Twitter already have a sneak peak).

We’re often asked about our pace of travel – and for the record – these past couple weeks are not indicative of our preferred style. In our ideal world, we’d travel a couple hundred miles and stick around for a few weeks or more before [...]]]> Whew, what a few hectic weeks it’s been.

Too Rushed

We’re often asked about our pace of travel – and for the record – these past couple weeks are not indicative of our preferred style. In our ideal world, we’d travel a couple hundred miles and stick around for a few weeks or more before traveling another couple hundred miles – rinse, repeat.

In reality, it hardly ever works out that way.

Events we want to attend, people we want to see and opportunities pre-empt our intentions and far too often we find ourselves on a cross country repositioning in far too quick of time.

For a lot of folks, taking 12 days to travel 2000 miles may seem slow – after all, if you drive straight through you can get across country in a matter of a couple days. But this hyper mobile lifestyle of ours isn’t sustainable long term if we keep a pace like that.

We’re not on vacation after all. We have to juggle the rest of life in with those miles. Fitness, quality time with each other, resting, keeping up with the world, blogging, cooking & cleaning, walking the cat, social time with friend’s paths we cross, enjoying places we stop, errands, etc. And let’s not forget, unexpected obstacles and that work thing.

We simply find that trying to get in work hours and drive hours on the same day just doesn’t work well for us. We need to stop for a day or two at a time and have office days. Especially this time of year, when one of my major clients undergoes their fiscal year turn over that I have to orchestrate.

Ever since we left St. George, we’ve been in pretty much a state of exhaustion. 12-days to get to Chattanooga is way too rushed for our tastes.

Journey to the Rally

At our last travel update, we had just left Ben & Karen in Albuquerque after an amazing time at the Balloon Fiesta.

Lake Meredith - June 2007

We took a couple day stop along Lake Meredith, just north of Amarillo.  5 years ago on our maiden trial voyage in the T@b, we discovered this free camping spot.

With scenic waterfront views, excellent 3G signal and completely free – it’s a Technomad Trifecta.

But soon it was time to hit the road, with miles to make every day.  We crossed through a very windy Oklahoma with stops in Hinton and Wister.

Lake Meredith - October 2011

Then an overnight in Hot Springs, AR for a rendezvous with an old friend – and sadly, no time for a hot bath soak. An overnight at a most peaceful rest stop in Corinth, MS, and then on to a day in Huntsville for an overdue visit to the Apple Genius Bar to take care of some poking issues. We averaged about 200 miles a day to keep the pace as sane as possible.

We pulled into Chattanooga to the Bus Conversion Magazine pre-workshop week, and hit the ground running.

Workshops

We made the rush drive to take advantage of the day long workshops being offered before the rally.

Preventative Maintenance workshop with Don of Choo Choo and Mike of BCM

Our first day was spent on preventative maintenance, a topic we knew we needed help with to bring our bus up to date after 15 years of neglect.

And our second day was a planned nearly all day driving class. While Chris has been rocking the driving, I’ve been hesitant to get behind the wheel.

Both classes were good, but honestly, a bit underwhelming for what was advertised.  Both lasted about half their scheduled time, only had 4 students and neither taught by experienced trainers (but definitely by experts in their topics).

I did successfully parallel park a 40′ bus (woohoo!), and I do feel proficient in driving a bus around an empty parking lot.  But I had hoped to gain confidence in driving in conditions that I’m more likely to encounter – like tight city corners, traffic, hills and just generally avoiding squishing people.

Bus Maintenance

Before the rally, we were a bit confused as to the relationship between Bus Conversion Magazine and Choo Choo Express Garage, who share an address.  Turns out, they are separate entities – with BCM renting space at the garage.

The workshops were held at the garage, which had us staying there too. And this turned out to be a huge blessing.

The garage used to once be the yard of a fleet of charter buses, but is now a dedicated bus shop with highly skilled mechanical knowledge.

Our bus (yes, still nameless) being inspected.

So while we were there, we had them pull our bus over the pit and do an unofficial thorough DOT inspection. As a titled motorhome, our bus isn’t required to have this inspection. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a good idea.

Joel pointed out some things that could use attention – primarily maintenance stuff that needed catching up, but all and all – the bus checked out as solid.  We had him tighten up our steering, change a pancake diaphragm in a front brake, fix an air valve, flush our coolant and swap out our transmission filter to be an easier to maintain screw on kind.

We also discussed some future projects that need to happen soon, including replacing all of the air suspension bags.

We fell in love with Choo Choo – friendly knowledgable folks, excellent shop rates and we learned so much.

The Rally

The rally itself was held just a couple miles away at Camp Jordan, so after we got our bus off the pit we headed over a night early to get set up and relax a bit.

Bus Rally!

Over the next days, there were a total of about 40 buses that joined up for the weekend.  There were buses of all sorts – Eagles, Prevost, MCI, GM, Neoplan, Wanderlodge and Skoolies.  It was great to see such a wide variety of both buses and bus owners.

Originally the rally had over a 100 buses saying they would attend, but not all of the registrations made it in. So unfortunately the organizer had to scramble last minute to scale back the event.  Considering he was taking this on alone, he did a remarkable job keeping the event together.  And we’re very appreciative of his efforts.

Presenting our Lithium Ion Battery Talk

There are many things that we could suggest to have made the rally better – but in the end, we prefer to count the positives.  We learned tons more about buses, got lots of great ideas, met many amazing people, made new friends, attended great seminars, gave a couple seminars of our own and had fun meeting up again with folks we had met during our bus hunt.

The highlight however was getting to rendezvous and park next to Sean of Our Odyssey.

It’s hard to believe we had only spent a short time once before with Sean & Louise over a year ago – as we felt an immediate kinship with them, and have maintained contact since.  Louise had to fly back to California during the rally, but we greatly appreciated getting some more time with Sean. He’s been a tremendous help in guiding us on bus projects over these past few months, even staying on the phone coaching us through priming our engine to take our bus for a test drive.

Sean presenting on hydronics in our shared seminar/hot tub courtyard.

He also set up their hot tub (yes, they travel with a hot tub) – so we enjoyed evenings with a glass a wine and a soak.  Oh yeah.  Good friends. Wine. Hot water.  That’s a recipe for bliss.

Road Ahead

We joined Sean back over at Choo Choo, where he’s awaiting parts to arrive for his bus. We intended to leave out on Tuesday, but awoke to news that has the potential to affect our routing.

So we coordinated with Choo Choo to go ahead and get the parts in for replacing our air bags and re-packing our bearings this week, while we wait for further information to know which direction we’re heading next.  And since we came across a pair of never-used Mini Max spring brakes (which are no longer made) at the rally, we’re going to have those installed as well – keeping the old ones as spares.  That should all happen today.

At current time, it’s looking highly likely that we’ll proceed as planned and arrive in St. Louis this weekend for time with Chris’ family.  We’ll also finally move aboard the rest of our stuff from the Oliver that we left in storage there.

Which is a good thing, because that includes our winter wardrobe and it’s starting to get cold!

It was also the day we had our first technomadic adventure.

We had been corresponding online since the prior June, just a couple months after Chris gave up his San [...]]]> Today is a special day for us.  It was five years ago that Chris and I met in person for the first time.

It was also the day we had our first technomadic adventure.

Chris and his 16' T@b Trailer

We had been corresponding online since the prior June, just a couple months after Chris gave up his San Francisco apartment, traded his beloved Prius for a Jeep and hit the road full time in his tiny 16′ T@B teardrop camper.

Cherie on the coast of Florida

I was living on the coast in Florida, had just put my home up for sale and bought a Prius with intentions of driving across country to California to start a new life there.

I was researching hacks for my Prius’ onboard computer, when I stumbled on a post from Chris in a LiveJournal Prius forum saying good bye to his Prius that he had taken to Burning Man and used as an aircraft carrier (for his paramotor).

I had actually recognized his name and user pic, as we had friends in common.   I had already been spending the prior year traveling frequently to California and experimenting with running my software business remotely while traveling and developing a new social network.   I dropped him a quick reply saying hi (I’m ‘serolynne’, he’s ‘radven’), that we had friends in common and hoped to be attending the burn for my first time in my Prius. (He seems to have taken that as ‘Hi, I want to move into your little trailer with you!’)

And that struck off months of correspondence that led to finding that we had much more in common than a Prius.

My house didn’t end up selling due to the housing market starting to crash early in Florida due to hurricanes.  I didn’t end up making my cross country move to California. And I didn’t end up meeting Chris at Burning Man for our first planned date.

But I did keep the dream alive of eventually moving from Florida and planned another trip to San Francisco to keep in touch with my growing social network.  I checked in with Chris, and he was still bouncing around the area. We set a date – October 18 – to finally meet in person.

He asked when I needed to be back, and I said I didn’t have anything planned until the next afternoon.  But, I would need to work – and I was already sporting a tethering capable smartphone to get online with my laptop.  He offered solar power and an incredible office view.

My first day working as a technomad, on our first date!

So the date was set – we’d met, camp somewhere overnight in his T@b and I’d get some work done the next day.

Kinda crazy for a first meeting.  But after months of correspondence and friends in common to vouch for each other not being axe murderers – if felt right.

Chris picked me up. We headed to downtown San Francisco and spent the afternoon getting to know each other in person.  We dice-walked the entire day, allowing serendipity via the roll of the digital dice to decide our every move.  Do we turn right or left?  Do we eat at this restaurant or this one?  At one point, only an hour or so into our first meeting, we were taking a snack break out the back of his T@b kitchen, and a couple comes up to see the trailer.  When Chris explained that he lived in it, they asked if I did too.

He smirkily replied ‘Not yet’.

They turned to me and told me that I should totally move in with him.

That was the furthest thing on my mind at the time, but how prophetic they were.  As it was just 6 weeks later that Chris showed up at my doorstep in Florida, to start a series of nomadic trial runs that lead up to me joining him on the road full time… starting in that tiny 16′ T@b (did I mention it had no plumbing??).

Our first date in San Francisco - we even dressed alike (no, that was not planned)

What an amazing 5 years it’s been – this life and love of ours that has grown pretty much entirely on the road. Continuing to listen to serendipity at every turn.

It is a depressingly long list.

As you will soon see, on paper lithium ion batteries seem to be superior in almost [...]]]> In the first post of this series, I explained the chief downsides of lead acid batteries, the type found powering the house bank in 99.999% of all RV’s you have ever seen.

It is a depressingly long list.

As you will soon see, on paper lithium ion batteries seem to be superior in almost every possible way – as if Zeus himself had climbed down from Olympus and handed the world the perfect battery. Or maybe it wasn’t Zeus, but that annoying pink Energizer Bunny, bringing the gift of divine electrons pulsing to the rhythm of his eternal drum.

To understand the promise and potential of lithium ion batteries for RV use, it helps to first understand the myriad of ways that lithium ion batteries differ from lead acid.

The Lithium Difference

Lead acid batteries are made from (not surprisingly) a mixture of lead plates and sulfuric acid. This was the first type of rechargeable battery, invented way back in 1859.

Lithium ion batteries on the other hand are a much newer invention, and have only been around in a commercially viable form since the 1980′s.

Lithium technology has become well proven and understood for powering small electronics like laptops or cordless tools, and has become increasingly common in these applications – edging out the older NiCad (Nickel-Cadmium) rechargeable battery chemistry due to lithium’s many advantages.

But as you might recall from the many news stories a few years ago around defective laptop batteries bursting into flame – lithium ion batteries also earned a reputation for catching fire in a very dramatic fashion. The commonly used lithium ion battery formulation had been Lithium-Cobalt-Oxide (LiCoO2), and this battery chemistry is prone to thermal runaway if the battery is ever accidentally overcharged. This could lead to the battery setting itself on fire – and a lithium fire burns hot and fast.

Just imagine how nasty the fire would be if it was a large battery burning, and not just a small laptop battery!

100 amp hour LiFePO4 Packs

This is one of the reasons that up until recently, lithium was rarely used to create large battery banks.

But in 1996 a new formula for mixing lithium ion batteries was developed – Lithium Iron Phosphate. Known as LiFePO4 or LFP, these batteries have a slightly lower energy density but are intrinsically non-combustable, and thus vastly safer than Lithium-Cobalt-Oxide.

Now that large scale LFP batteries are starting to be massed produced (primarily targeting the electric vehicle market), we are now on the cusp of LFP batteries becoming practical for RV use!

And once you consider the advantages, LFP batteries becomes exceedingly tempting.

Consider…

The Amazing Advantages of Lithium Ion Batteries

To understand just how substantial these advantages are, be sure to read the parallel list about the downsides of lead acid batteries…

Superior “Useable” Capacity

Unlike with lead acid batteries, it is considered practical to regularly use 80% or more of the rated capacity of a lithium battery bank, and occasionally more. Consider a 100 amp hour battery – if it was lead acid you would be wise to use just 30 to 50 amp hours of juice, but with lithium you could tap into 80 amp hours or more.

Extended Cycle Life

Laboratory results indicate that you could expect to see 2,000 to 5,000 cycles out of a well cared for LiFePO4 battery bank, which means that a lithium ion battery bank has the potential to likely outlast your RV!  These are theoretical results – we are looking forward to seeing how lithiums do in reality for RV use, as the energy uses of a home-on-wheels is not normal laboratory conditions, nor at all similar to that of an electric vehicle (which is where LFP is primarily used right now).

In contrast, even the best deep cycle lead acid batteries are typically only good for 500-1000 cycles.

Fast & Efficient Charging

LiFePO4 batteries can be “fast” charged to 100% of capacity. Unlike with lead acid, there is no need for an absorption phase to get the final 20% stored. This can save you hours of generator run time. And, if your charger is powerful enough, lithium batteries can also be charged insanely fast. If you can provide enough charging amps – you can actually fully charge a lithium ion battery just 20 minutes!

But even if you don’t manage to fully top off to 100%, no worries – unlike with lead acid, a failure to regularly fully charge LFP batteries does not damage the batteries.

Lithium Battery Charging Curve - From Elite Power Solutions

This give you lots of flexibility to tap into energy sources whenever you can get them without worrying about needing to do a full charge regularly.  Several partly cloudy days with your solar system? No problem that you can’t top off before the sun goes down, as long as you’re keeping on top of your needs.  Only 30 minutes left until quiet time at the primitive campground? No worries – with lithium, you can charge up what you can and not fret about leaving your battery bank perpetually undercharged!

Very Little Wasted Energy

Lead acid batteries are less efficient at storing power than lithium ion batteries. Lithium batteries charge at nearly 100% efficiency, compared to the 85% efficiency of most lead acid batteries.

This can be especially important when charging via solar, when you are trying to squeeze as much efficiency out of every amp as possible before the sun goes down or gets covered up by clouds. Theoretically, with lithium nearly every drop of sun you’re able to collect goes into your batteries.  With limited roof & storage space on RVs for panels, this become very important in optimizing every square inch of wattage you’re able to mount.

Especially combined with the fast charging ability, this also translates to less fuel costs when running your generator to charge the batteries.

Fewer Placement Issues

LiFePO4 batteries do not need to be stored upright, or in a vented battery compartment. They can also fairly easily be assembled into odd shapes – an advantage if you are trying to squeeze as much power as possible into a small compartment. This is especially useful if you have an existing battery bay that is limited in size, but you want or need more capacity than lead acid is currently able to provide.

Little Maintenance Requirements

Theoretically, lithium batteries should be fairly maintenance free. An occasional “balancing” process to make sure all the cells in a battery bank are equally charged may be called for, but a well designed energy management system should (ideally) do this automatically.

But to be fair, while we are in the experimental phase with our own lithium battery system, they are far from maintenance free as we endeavor to tweak the system. Until we perfect our setup, we are watching our batteries vigilantly.Remember, this is newer technology and barely even tested for RV use. Inverters and chargers do not yet come standard with profiles for LFP. The battery distributors and manufacturers are still tweaking the energy management systems that protects the batteries too. This is new and evolving tech, and not quite yet ready to be “plug and go”.

AGMs have an advantage here, just set your charger to “AGM Mode” and you are good to go.

Peukert’s Losses & Voltage Sag Virtually Non Existant

The discharge curve of lithium batteries (especially relative to lead acid) is essentially flat – meaning that a 20% charged battery will be providing nearly the same output voltage as an 80% charged battery. This prevents any issues caused by the “voltage sag” common to lead acid as they discharge, but does mean that any battery monitor or generator auto-start dependent upon voltage levels will likely not work well at all when monitoring a lithium bank.

On the flip side, once lithium batteries are fully discharged, their voltage takes a nose-dive quickly – which is why tweaking your energy management systems to protect the batteries to absolutely never let this happen is vitally important.  Completely discharging a lithium ion bank, even once, can render your entire pack permanently dead.

Lithium Discharge Curve - Minimal Sag & Peukert's Losses (from Elite Power Solutions)

Another huge advantage of lithium batteries is that Peukert’s losses are essentially non-existant. This means that LiFePO4 batteries can deliver their full rated capacity, even at high currents. Whereas lead acid can see as much as a 40% loss of capacity at high loads.  In practice, this means that LFP battery banks are very well suited to powering high current loads like an air conditioner, a microwave or an induction cooktop.

Size & Weight Advantages 

Our 500 Amp Hour Lithium Bank - Weighing Just 141lbs!

And finally, the reason why most folks are intrigued by lithium… LFP batteries are much smaller & lighter!!!

The 12-volt 100 Amp Hour LiFePO4 battery packs we started with when building our system are 4.9″ x 11.0″ x 9.2″, and weigh just 28.2 lbs. That works out to be 0.282 lbs per amp hour of capacity.

A Trojan 8D-AGM 230 amp hour battery on the other hand weighs 167lbs, which works out to be .726 lbs per amp hour – which is about 2.5 times heavier.

And when you take “usable” capacity into account, the weight advantage of lithium is even more dramatic. Remember, that 100 amp hours of lithium will deliver 80 amp hours, no matter the discharge rate, without worry. 230 amp hours of AGM can only deliver 70- 115 amp hours, depending on the discharge rate.

So not only is lithium smaller and lighter than AGM per amp hour, you need significantly less stored amps to get the same usable capacity.

To simplify what we’ve covered so far about Lithium Ion vs. Lead Acid AGMs, here’s this handy chart we created:

Lithium Ion vs Lead Acid AGM Batteries

As you’ve seen, the theoretical advantages of LiFePO4 batteries for RV use are exceedingly compelling, particularly if you boondock a lot, use solar and/or want to minimize generator use. But we all should remember about the difference between theory and practice…

In theory, there is no difference.

In practice – using LiFePO4 for RV house batteries remains new and uncharted waters.

And that brings us to the biggest downsides of lithium batteries – the cost and the novelty.

These uncharted waters don’t have a low cost of entry, particularly when compared to the Walmart specials on generic flooded lead acid batteries. And there are not a lot of resources you can turn to for tech support since the technology is so new. Most inverter / charger makers don’t even officially support lithium batteries yet at all. So those opting to try lithium for RV use are pioneers, and need to educate themselves to fully understand what they are dealing with.

But…

If you consider the lifetime cost, and the fact that lithium batteries should (theoretically) far outlast even the best high-end AGM’s, suddenly the math starts to look compelling.

I’ll dive into explaining how we weighed the lifetime costs vs the benefits, and will give the details on the costs and specifics of our new system in my next lithium post. Stay tuned!

By the way, we should note – we are not trying to motivate anyone to follow us on this path. We are not selling these batteries, we are not affiliates with any battery dealer, we paid for all our components and nor do we have any financial stake in the technology beyond our own systems.  We are simply full time RVing technomads who are designing our own cutting edge home & office on wheels, and are sharing our research & project. Of course we’d love to have more folks out there pioneering and helping us take the arrows in our backs.  Right now, we do not consider this technology ready for the mainstream, and those contemplating this technology need to be a bit savvy with electrical and battery technology. 

Other Posts In this Series:

Promise of Lithium #1: Lead Acid Battery Downsides
Promise of Lithium #3: Lithium RV Battery System Cost Analysis
All our Lithium Ion Battery Posts 

]]> http://www.technomadia.com/2011/10/lithium-update-2-the-promise-of-lithium-rv-batteries/feed/ 20 http://www.technomadia.com/2011/10/help-us-name-our-bus/ http://www.technomadia.com/2011/10/help-us-name-our-bus/#comments Sat, 08 Oct 2011 05:11:30 +0000 Cherie Ve Ard http://www.technomadia.com/?p=6180 We’ve now had our bus for a little over 3 months – but we have yet to come up with a name for her.

Well, I should say – we have several contenders, but none of them are quite “it”.

So it’s time to ask for your help.

A little background on the bus, [...]]]> We’ve now had our bus for a little over 3 months – but we have yet to come up with a name for her.

Our bus needs a name!

Well, I should say – we have several contenders, but none of them are quite “it”.

So it’s time to ask for your help.

A little background on the bus, and some of the ideas that we have been playing around with:

• The company who originally owned the bus in 1961, and who presumably she was in service to until she was converted, was Citizen Auto Stage.
• The family’s last name who lovingly converted her in 1989, and did a marvelous job on the woodwork that we love to much, was Purdy.
• She spent most of her life in Arizona, and we found her in the middle of monsoon season – we even went through a few monsoon storms with her.
• The temporary name we used to distinguish her from our other contender buses was Taxi Bus - as she had been purchased by the owner of a taxi company in Yuma, AZ who intended to resell her.

We’re looking for a name that conveys meaning, and we tend to be attracted to things more abstract.  For instance, our Oliver Travel Trailer gained the name ‘Orion’ because the three LED ground effect lights looked like the constellation Orion’s belt from a distance.

For our bus, we want something that acknowledges her past and bridges her future as our TechnoCruiser (our friends Ben & Karen of CreativeCruiser have dubbed that her class – we like it).  We want the name to convey personality, and the mission we’re on of inspiring and being inspired.

Our bus in the middle of a haboob in Phoenix.

Here are some of the names that we’ve played with that remain on our list:

• Cas / Casey / Cassie / Cassy – Playing with the initials of her first owner.
• Cassiopeia – Again playing with the CAS initials, and keeping the constellation theme. However, we don’t really like the extreme vanity behind the mythology.
• Haboob – One evening in Phoenix, after a long day of building a lithium battery bank, we parked the bus and a huge monsoon dust storm blew through – which is called a haboob.  We both thought that could be a cool name, playing homage to her Arizona past.  And, as our Camp Nomadia mates told us as we hit the playa – the bus kicks up a dust storm of its own!
• Iggy – My favorite character from the TV Show  ’Taxi’, which Chris has never seen.
• Purdy – Cuz she’s a Purdy-bus.
• Uhura / Uhuru – She’s our communications officer, giving us a vehicle to spread inspiration and being inspired from. To boldly explore where no technomad has gone before. She gives us Freedom (what the name means).  And the character on Star Trek was progressive for the early 1960s, as was the show in giving a vision for the future that this bus came from and is taking us into.

Would love to hear your thoughts on any of the above names.

And if you have suggestions, we’d especially love to hear them too!

Thank you!

This post is the start of [...]]]> We’ve made a few teaser posts showing off our new lithium ion battery bank, but we’ve yet to properly explain why on earth we decided to venture off into such uncharted electrical territory instead of installing a more traditional flooded lead acid or AGM battery bank.

This post is the start of a series explaining why we’ve gone down this path, and will focus on the chief downsides of the current default options most RV’ers choose. Which are:

Flooded Lead Acid – These are the most common batteries that you see in most stores, and are typically used for everything from “starter” (high current) batteries for engines to “deep cycle” (multiple deep discharges) powering golf carts and RV house systems. Flooded lead acid batteries are the cheapest per amp hour, but also have the most drawbacks.

AGM – Absorbed Glass Matt (and the similar Gel Cell) batteries are still chemically lead acid batteries, but the liquid acid has either been “gelled” or fully absorbed into a glass matt, giving them several advantages for RVers and boaters. They also typically cost quite a bit more.

What’s the upside of Lead Acid batteries?

Lead acid chemistry batteries have been around since the dawn of the electric age, they are proven, and (when treated properly) extremely reliable. AGM variants in particular are well suited to RV use, with none of the flooded battery maintenance requirements, and somewhat less of the risks of damage from overcharging.

The best known brands like Lifeline and Trojan have a sterling reputation and rock solid warranties and support networks too.

In our opinion, AGM’s are a smart and solid choice for any RV. We went this route on our little Oliver Travel Trailer (designing in two 6 volt Lifeline AGM’s to create a 220 amp hour system), and we seriously considered building a massive 1300 amp hour AGM bank into our bus.

But yet, when we dived into researching the advantages of lithium and the downsides of lead acid batteries, the price premium for lithium batteries suddenly started to seem worthwhile. After much consideration, we decided that we were willing to risk the investment in an unproven technology for RV applications.

And besides… we like a new challenge and playing with bleeding edge technology!

The downsides of Lead Acid batteries

To understand why lithium batteries show such promise for an RV house battery bank, it first helps to understand all the ways that traditional lead acid batteries fall short.

Limited “Useable” Capacity

It is typically considered wise to use just 30% – 50% of the rated capacity of typical lead acid “Deep Cycle” batteries. This means that a 600 amp hour battery bank in practice only provides, at best, 300 amp hours of real capacity. If you even occasionally drain the batteries more than this their life will be drastically cut short.

Limited Cycle Life

Even if you are going easy on your batteries and are careful to never overly drain them, even the best deep cycle lead acid batteries are typically only good for 500-1000 cycles. If you are frequently tapping into your battery bank (such as a full-timing boondocker might), this could mean that your batteries may need replacement after less than 2 years use!

Lifeline AGM Battery Life Cycle Estimates

Slow & Inefficient Charging

The final 20% of lead acid battery capacity can not be “fast” charged. The first 80% can be “Bulk Charged” by a smart three-stage charger quickly (particularly AGM batteries can handle a high bulk charging current), but then the “Absorption” phase begins and the charging current drops off dramatically.

Just like a software development project, the final 20% of the work can end up taking 80% of the time.

This isn’t a big deal if you are charging plugged in overnight, but it is a huge issue if you have to leave your generator running for hours (which can be rather noisy and expensive to run). And if you are depending on solar and the sun sets before that final 20% has been topped off, you can easily end up with batteries that never actually get fully charged.

Not fully charging the final few percent would not be much of a problem in practice, if it wasn’t for the fact that a failure to regularly fully charge lead acid batteries prematurely ages them.

Smart battery dependent RV’ers need to strike a balance – some bulk charge to 80% daily, and once a week run the generator all day, or pull into a RV Park, to do a long “top off” charge. Others just buy the cheapest (typically Walmart or Costco) batteries they can find, and just replace them when they fail.  Often they even try to get the replacement of their overly abused batteries covered under warranty!

Trojan AGM Charging Profile

Wasted Energy

In addition to all that wasted generator time, lead acid batteries suffer another efficiency issue – they waste as much as 15% of the energy put into them via inherent charging inefficiency. So if you provide 100 amps of power, you’ve only storing 85 amp hours.

This can be especially frustrating when charging via solar, when you are trying to squeeze as much efficiency out of every amp as possible before the sun goes down or gets covered up by clouds.

Placement Issues

Flooded lead acid batteries release noxious acidic gas while they are charging, and must be contained in a sealed battery box that is vented to the outside. They also must be stored upright, to avoid battery acid spills.

AGM batteries do not have these constraints, and can be placed in unventilated areas – even inside your living space.  This is one of the reasons that AGM batteries have become so popular with sailors and RV’ers.

Maintenance Requirements

Flooded lead acid batteries must be periodically topped off with distilled water, which can be a cumbersome maintenance chore if your battery bays are difficult to get to.

AGM and gel cells though are truly maintenance free. Being maintenance free comes with a downside though – a flooded cell battery that is accidentally overcharged can often be salvaged by replacing the water that boiled off. A gel or AGM battery that is overcharged is often irreversibly destroyed.

Peukert’s Losses & Voltage Sag

A fully charged 12-volt lead acid battery starts off around 12.8 volts, but as it is drained the voltage drops steadily. The voltage drops below 12 volts when the battery still has 35% of its total capacity remaining, but some electronics may fail to operate with less than a full 12 volt supply. This “sag” effect can also lead to lights dimming.

Lifeline AGM Discharge Curves

Also – the faster that you discharge a lead acid battery of any type, the less energy you can get out of it. This effect can be calculated by applying Peukert’s Law (named after German scientist W. Peukert), and in practice this means that high current loads like an air conditioner, a microwave or an induction cooktop can result in a lead acid battery bank being able to actually deliver as little as 60% of its normal capacity.

This is a huge loss in capacity when you need it most!

Size & Weight

And finally… Lead Acid Batteries are BIG & Really Heavy!!!

A typical 8D sized battery that is commonly used for large RV house banks is 20.5″ x 10.5″ x 9.5″. To pick a specific 8D example, Trojan’s 8D-AGM weighs 167lbs, and provides just 230 amp-hours of total capacity – which leaves you with 115 amp hours truly usable, and only 70 for a high discharge applications!

If you are designing for extensive boon docking, you will want at least four 8D’s, or as many as eight. That is a LOT of weight to be carting around that impacts your fuel economy.

And, if you have limited space for batteries on your rig – size alone of the batteries will limit your capacity.  We first started researching lithium options when we were designing our Oliver’s electrical system, as we could only fit 220 amp hours of AGM golf cart batteries in our relatively small battery chamber.

As you can see, lead acid batteries come with some significant downsides. In my next post, I’ll explain the technical advantages of Lithium that lured us away from the tried and true lead acid path, and then I’ll follow up with a post about the cost factors we weighed.

By the way, we should note – we are not trying to motivate anyone to follow us on this path. We are not selling these batteries, we are not affiliates with any battery dealer, we paid for all our components and nor do we have any financial stake in the technology beyond our own systems.  We are simply full time RVing technomads who are designing our own cutting edge home & office on wheels, and are sharing our research & project. Of course we’d love to have more folks out there pioneering and helping us take the arrows in our backs.  Right now, we do not consider this technology ready for the mainstream, and those contemplating this technology need to be a bit savvy with electrical and battery technology. 

Other Posts In this Series:

Promise of Lithium #2: Lithium Ion Battery Advantages
Promise of Lithium #3: Lithium RV Battery System Cost Analysis
All our Lithium Ion Battery Posts 

I write this from Amarillo, TX.

Which you might notice was NOT on our intended route.

So what happened?

As we were leaving Lake Powell, we heard a sudden WOOOSH of [...]]]> It’s only been a few days since we left St. George with intentions of heading eastward through Colorado.

I write this from Amarillo, TX.

Which you might notice was NOT on our intended route.

So what happened?

A Lot of Air Pressure Leaks

As we were leaving Lake Powell, we heard a sudden WOOOSH of air in the driver’s compartment, and we suddenly lost air pressure – which meant our main air breaks are inoperable and the spring emergency breaks would soon be engaging.

Chris got us safely pulled over to the side of the road.

Immediately behind us was an empty tour bus, which pulled over in front of us. The driver got out, and introduced himself. Turns out, he used to own a 4106 – and helped us check things over.  Even as avid followers of Serendipity as we are – this was quite the coincidence.

While we were making a new friend, the air pressure refilled on the bus on its own.  We put out a quick message to the bus conversion community asking if we were safe to move on to the next town, or if we needed a tow.  The diagnosis was that one of our air release valves likely released (normal when air pressure gets a touch high – which is explained by us recently changing out the air compressor filter), but was so gunked up that it didn’t immediately close as it’s designed to do.

Nothing a little WD-40 and cleaning wouldn’t fix up. So we did that to the visible dump valve we could reach.  The bus nut community is *amazing* and we feel so blessed. We had several mechanical gurus sending us advice and re-assurance that we were ok to drive on.

We made it into Page, AZ just fine, and decided to move onwards to our next intended stop of Durango, CO.

The incident reminded us however that we still had routine maintenance that we haven’t able to do as we have no drive-up ramps and a suspension blocking system (something we need to fix ASAP).  So we called around to truck repair centers anywhere near our route before the Rockies to schedule a brake adjustment, chassis lubbing and replacement of all of the dump valves.

We found a place in Durango that didn’t seem too scared of a vintage bus.

In the morning as we were leaving Monument Valleny, the same thing happened – except this time, the air pressure didn’t rebuild.  Some diagnosis with our bus nut friends led us to suspect the air compressor governor’s relief valve as the culprit.  It was likely gunked up, and now stuck open causing a consistent major air leak.

Some percussive maintenance (ie. pound it with a hammer) and some WD-40 fixed that right up – saving us a tow into Durango!

We arrived to Durango a bit later than anticipated, but the diesel shop was awesome.  They spent two hours with us giving the bus a good underside servicing.  They even invited us to join them in the pit, and taught us all sorts of things about maintaining the parts.

This was the first opportunity for us to see under our bus, and we again patted ourselves on the back for finding our bus in arid Arizona. Especially after seeing a 1976 Prevost we had closely inspected in our bus hunt that was seriously corroded after years of service in Canada.

Working in the pit, under our bus!

Their general assessment was that ‘She’s old – but in great shape!’ (we can only hope for such an assessment in 10 years!).

We left with brakes adjusted, every zirk found lubed and some air leaks taken care of. We also left with a new governor, which Chris replaced on his own later.

A couple scary moments, but all and all – we thrived with the challenges, and are upping our bus knowledge exponentially!

A Lot of Hot Air

We were originally going to route through Colorado primarily to visit our friends in Salida. However, we had already eaten into the weekend time they had available.  And with a couple of scares that would have been much MUCH worse on an incline or descent, we decided that risking driving through the Rockies was probably not the wisest of decisions.

We opted to take the flatter southern route – which put us going through Albuquerque.  And guess who was there?

Yup, our awesome bus nut technomad friends – Ben & Karen! They arranged us a spot next to them, which was amazing – considering it was also the start of the 40th Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta.  Being neighbors with these guys is something that we can’t get enough of – we always have fun adventures together.

Now, we’ve heard great things about the balloon fiesta – but nothing prepared us for its awesomeness.

Sunday evening Karen and us headed over for our first glow event (Ben had to fly out for a seminar he was giving, so we were sure to tease him as much as possible).  During a glow, many of the balloons inflate on the ground and synchronize glowing with their propane jets.

What I hadn’t realized is that spectators get to roam the grounds right next to the balloons!!

I spent the entire evening with my eyes up and my jaw down, and feeling like a little kid. It was absolutely beyond belief. The sounds. The crowd energy. The lights.  The BALLOONS – they’re everywhere!!

All three of us were in similar states of disbelief.  And we all decided that we HAD to return in the morning for the ascension.

Which meant getting up at the “butt crack of dawn” (my new favorite expression, coined by Karen) – something us night owled technomads don’t do well.

Karen photographing the ascension.

But we did it.. and it was so worth it.  I counted at least a kabillion (give or take a dozen) balloons launching.

And apparently those were the ‘just for fun’ launches.  Later in the morning, balloons launched from around the city at different locations to compete for prizes by tossing super tiny little rings onto poles planted on the main launch field.  And considering balloons have no steering, that’s some pretty amazing piloting.

Think the pictures above are descent?  Hah.   Be sure to follow Karen’t blog at http://www.thepixeldiaries.com , as her pictures are going to be 1,000,000x better than mine. And she’s there for the rest of the event, which wraps up this coming weekend. (If you’re anywhere nearby.. GO!!!)

What an amazing experience, and so delighted serendipity routed us this way!!!

Path Forward

We’re still heading to Chattanooga, aiming to arrive there next Monday evening for some bus workshops before the Bus Conversion Magazine Rally.  We’ll now be meandering from Amarillo, TX through Oklahoma, northern Arkansas, and then through Tennessee somewhere over the next week.

But before then, we’re taking a couple day distraction-free break north of Amarillo, TX at one of our most favorite free camp spots ever.

And I promise – if I can get Chris to focus on anything other than plotting how to carry a hot air balloon with us; his lithium ion battery post should be the next post you see here later this week.

The manager of the park introduced us to their new woodworking skilled maintenance man to see about building our dual desk unit. We didn’t think it’d be possible to build something quick enough for us to get back [...]]]> We feel satiated after completing a lot of projects while at St. George RV Resort.

Interior Remodeling

The manager of the park introduced us to their new woodworking skilled maintenance man to see about building our dual desk unit. We didn’t think it’d be possible to build something quick enough for us to get back on the road within a week – and were thrilled with the quote, the time frame and David’s easy-going attitude.

So the first step was deciding what we wanted. We got Ben & Karen’s input on configuration – we came up with the shape.

Chaos before the desk - white lines mark our planning for the desk install.

As soon as we came up with the shape, David went right to work and was back two nights later with the desk unit pretty much completed.

Installing the desk unit

We were immediately thrilled with the desk unit.

Folding Table Install

We also had an idea about a fold out table that would be in place of the old cabinet (which is now the support structure for the middle of the desk unit). This was a more complicated project to figure out, as we had a lot of ideas on how versatile we wanted it to be.

View of the workspace with the folding table stowed.

We wanted something that could fold away, leaving plenty of room for yoga & workout space.

Folding table in half mode.

And then we wanted it to fold out to become a bit of extra desk space and/or surface space for the passenger chair, without being in the way.

Folding Table support system.

We came up with a fold out support arm to help hold up the weight of the table.

Folding Table fully extended.

And then we wanted the table to fold out once again.

This space will be for projects, gaming or as a dining table when needed. As the couch pulls out to the width of a single bed, it meets up pretty nicely – while still leaving room to pass by.

Dual Desk view from the hallway.

The back of the desk was designed to be about an inch away from the windows, leaving plenty of room for routing cables. And all the while, David built in ample structural support so that the whole unit will be solid while underway.

We’re really happy with how this all came out!  Next up is getting another desk chair and two large monitors to fully complete our workspace.

See the white stripe going up between the blinds?  That’s a new holder for our inverter control panel, with the wires running up the inside and then into the battery bay below.

While the project was more minor from a wood working stance, this is a huge improvement to our new lithium battery & inverter system. (I forced Chris to sit down the other evening and write – he has most of the post with all of our research on lithium ion written. We hope to have it online soon.. promise!)

Engine Maintenance

In-between all the interior projects – we decided to tackle some engine maintenance.  We easily changed out the compressor air filter, which was a cruddy mess.

And then we moved on to the air intake filter.  Originally the GM 4106 came with oil based air filters, but a previous owner had switched it out to a paper canister by EcoLite.  And while this is a good change in theory, it was done in what ‘bus yoda’ calls a ‘cobbled up mess’.

The project ended up taking us substantially longer than it should have, namely because of a green hose – which is what we assume to be sewer line. It’s rigid, and has grown even more so over the years.

Prying the air intake hose off the old filter.

After removing the old filter from the top of the engine, we had to pry it off.

But getting the new filter back into the engine was more of a challenge. No matter what we did, it would not remount to the intake connection. The hose was too rigid to make the awkward turn at the top of the engine and we can only assume the previous owner put in the filter mounts AFTER the filter was in, and it was blocking the path.

A quick consultation with yoda, and he said it was safe to use aluminum dryer venting wrapped in aluminum tape (which we could get locally) as a temporary fix so that we could ‘boogie on’. But ideally we should replace it with something more substantial.

Can you tell which is the old filter??

It was obviously a good thing we changed out the filter. In the process, we installed a filter minder that will help us keep tabs on the status of the new filter, and when it should be changed next.

We fired up the engine, and to our amazement the bus aired up in a snap. It had been getting to a point that it took 5-8 minutes to reach a safe air pressure.  Work well done, and obviously long overdue!

And wouldn’t you know it?  Just as soon as we shut the engine door and switched tasks to packing up – we found a piece of rigid rubber hose in our spare parts bay that looked like it was meant to replace that pesky green sewer line. D’oh!

Onward to where?

With major projects completed, we are mostly packed up to head out this morning – despite the park’s flattering request we stay another week and present more talks.  We’ll return here for sure in the future – we’ve thoroughly enjoyed our stay, and we couldn’t ask for better park hosts and new friends

As us nomads are great at doing, we delayed deciding our route until the last minute… and even added a new twist!

We’ve decided that we really want to attend the Bus Conversion Magazine Rally in Chattanooga, TN. It’s just too good of an opportunity to pass up to get in on some workshops that could really aid our bus knowledge, and connect with other bus nuts.

Our anticipated route for the next 2 weeks

We’re aiming to get to Salida, CO to visit with friends this weekend.  From there, we’ll meander eastward with a quick stop in St. Louis.  Then we’ll make the final trek into Chattanooga aiming to arrive for the start of the workshops on October 10th.  It’ll be a quicker trip than we’d like, but we think it’ll be worth it.

If you’re along the route, please do let us know – we always love making time to meet folks!

After the rally ends, we’ll need to double back to St. Louis to complete dealing with the stuff we stored in Chris’ parent’s basement after we moved out of the Oliver. His folks start their snowbird journey south soon after.

We thought it was brilliant.  It very simply answers the question – “is it safe to drink the water?” for over 200 countries. A very handy reference tool for travelers .

If you’re reading this in e-mail or in an RSS reader, we invite you to click through to :

http://www.technomadia.com

.. and see the entire new blog design we just completed.

To which we of course reply ‘Then why aren’t you doing it too?’.

Over the years, we’ve compiled our responses to the common excuses that folks give us to that question, some [...]]]> Oftentimes when folks hear that we’ve been traveling full-time for so many years – we get the response of ‘You’re living my dream!’.

To which we of course reply ‘Then why aren’t you doing it too?’.

Over the years, we’ve compiled our responses to the common excuses that folks give us to that question, some very valid. We aim to share examples of others overcoming the challenges, our own stories and share resources to assist.   This will be a growing series, so please do check back to see what we’ve added.

We have greatly expanded and updated this series, and now offer it as a ‘Pay as you Wish’ eBook. By downloading and chipping in for the eBook, you are helping us fund our efforts to continue presenting this sort of information to those seeking it.  Thank you!

Currently in this series:

Excuse #1: Jobs/Career – Choose careers that are nomad friendly!
Excuse #2: Affording it - It can be far more affordable than you think!
Excuse #3: Stuff – Stuff is anchor, learn to live with what you really need
Excuse #4: Family - Travel can be an education for kids and keep you more connected to family
Excuse #5: Environmental Impact - You can travel and lower your ecological footprint on the world
Excuse #6: Pets - Some forms of travel are more pet friendly than others
Excuse #7: Community – Being nomadic opens up new opportunity for community
Excuse #8: Romance/Companionship – From solo travel to dealing with a partner who doesn’t share your wanderlust
Excuse #9: Logistics – How to handle mail, voting, taxes and banking – the mundane logistics.

Excuse #10: Healthcare – Considerations for health insurance when you travel full time.

Excuse #11: Overwhelm - Tips for handling the daunting tasks ahead of you for preparing your life to be mobile.
Excuse #12: Lack of Continuity - How to find services on the road when you need them

Excuse #13: Safety – Being mobile really doesn’t have more risky than being stationary – just different.

Excuse #14: Connectivity - How to stay connected online while in motion full time.

Excuse #15: Feeling Held Back (available only in the eBook!)
Excuse #16: Being a Homebody – Yes, you can be a homebody and travel full time!

This series has been greatly expanded - and is now available as a convenient 'pay as you wish' eBook!

What other excuses do you have, or have you encountered?  Reply in the comments, and we’ll address those too.

But we did know one thing – if we attended, we wanted a year off of hosting our theme camp, Camp Nomadia, [...]]]> We left Burning Man in 2010 for the first time without a plan one way or the other if we would be attending in 2011.  We left that decision up to serendipity.

But we did know one thing – if we attended, we wanted a year off of hosting our theme camp, Camp Nomadia, and being focused on a role as nomadic evangelists.

Technomadia at Burning Man 2011 (Thanks to Karen Nace for snapping the photo!)

We were thrilled to discover that enthusiasm for Camp Nomadia carried on, and past Nomadians were interested in taking on the reigns.  And then just after we bought our bus, and tickets sold out for the first time ever, we came across two extra tickets.  Finding our bus within a days drive – serendipity had clearly said that yes, we were intended to go again.  We even turned down an offer from a major TV show to film us at the burn, holding to our intentions to keep things low key.

This would be our year to focus on us, connect with friends and relax.  It was our rite of passage.

And it was glorious.

Camp Nomadia Caravan to Burning Man

We met up with campmates prior to the burn in Reno and Fernley, caravanned in together and had our most chill burn yet.

Our old bus powering Ben & Karen's

Before heading to the playa, we completed our lithium ion battery and inverter install, and it performed wonderfully for the week.  And thank goodness, as our friends Ben & Karen had trouble with their bus’ electrical system – so we were able to build a buddy plug to share our battery bank with them.

Camp Nomadia

Camp Nomadia was awesome, probably not much more than 35-40 folks this year (half that as last year) – a great size. Everyone was awesome, and it was wonderful be able to be part of the camp but not be in charge.  We did participate in the camp’s ‘Nomadic Lifestyle Workshop’ panel, which is always fun and a great to meet so many other past, future and present nomads.

The Temple at Burning Man

The Temple - burning.

The temple this year at Burning Man was the most amazing we’ve seen together.

We stayed at Burning Man thru Tuesday morning with many other Camp Nomadians, having one last camp party as we broke our communal shade structure.

Las Vegas, baby!

From there, we headed back south to Las Vegas to pick up Kiki, who had been staying with JoAnna Haugen and her hubby there.  Ben, who is a Photoshop guru and instructor, was able to get us guest badges to Photoshop World.

An amazing act in Absinthe - well worth catching!

So we’ve spent the last couple days attending inspiring Photoshop classes, hanging out and going to some shows. JoAnna gifted us with free tickets to see Penn & Teller, and we also followed her advice to catch Absinthe.  Both were awesome.

Today has been our first day in a long while to have a down day.

From here?  We’re actually quite unsure.  We had originally thought of heading to Sacramento to clean out Chris’ storage unit once and for all, and then moving some stuff to St. Louis to his parent’s place.

But we’re just not feeling it, and don’t have the energy to take on that huge of a project right now.  We’re behind on work, blogging and bus projects – and most crave being still somewhere for a week or two and attempting some catch up.

Just as we were coming to this conclusion, we got an unsolicited invitation from a reader who manages an RV Resort in St. George, UT to come stay for a week or so in exchange for hosting a couple of talks on Technology and RVing.  That’s a style of ‘workamping’ we hadn’t considered before, and sounds like a fitting idea!

So, we’re going to go check that out – after we have another nap or two.

So let’s back up a few days, and cover the journey since we left Phoenix – where we built our own lithium ion battery bank.

Building our bank was lots of fun, but [...]]]> There is nothing like hearing your air conditioner turn on via battery power!  Not that it’s any different of a sound.

So let’s back up a few days, and cover the journey since we left Phoenix – where we built our own lithium ion battery bank.

Building our bank was lots of fun, but it took away two days of time that we had put aside for doing our complete install.  So now we needed to somehow manage to cram in many hours of installation work of not only wiring up the inverter and battery bank, but new breaker boxes too.  All this while traveling up to Reno to rendezvous with the Camp Nomadians, Sam & Tracy.

And of course, needing to do general Burning Man preps.

From Las Vegas to Reno

So we hit the road towards Reno, with a planned stop along Lake Mead to meet up with some fellow bus nuts.   We then stopped in Las Vegas to drop Kiki off with travel writer JoAnna Haugen of Kaleidoscopic Wandering, as she and her hubby offered to keep Kiki for us while we’re at the burn (no pets allowed).  We made another stop just north of Beatty, NV at an RV Park rumored to have hot springs for soaking.

The rumors were true, and it was pure bliss.

We overnighted in Fallon, NV with dear friends – and got a surprise rendezvous with another friend out on a road trip.  (You might notice that we also had a lot of social time to fit in too.)

When we told our Fallon friends what we were up to with the battery install, it turns out he has the exact battery cabling we need to complete it – along with all the tools at his machine shop.

So our stay got extended in Fallon as Chris and he tried to hunt down all the parts that would be needed, which turned out to be more challenging than anticipated in such a small town.  Also, as we hadn’t yet mounted the batteries and inverter, we were unsure of what our cable sizes would need to be.

Projects in Reno

So we continued on to Reno for our rendezvous with Sam & Tracy. Our biggest mission (aside from catching up with friends) was to get our satellite dish re-activated for them to take to the playa.  We were able to cross paths with them in South Carolina when we were delivering the Oliver back in May, and they so kindly took that bulky dish off our hands so we had one less big thing to worry about.  They also took Chris’ Time Frame art project over for us, and scored early arrival as a result – which allows them to land grab at gate open for Camp Nomadia’s spot this year.

We spent a couple days hanging out, and doing Burning Man preps together (shopping, hair dyeing, etc.). We rented a car so that we would have local transportation, as we’re going without a tow behind vehicle (or ‘toad’) for now. There’s so many things that we needed to acquire, especially since a lot of our gear is actually in storage in Sacramento.

We were also running around Reno getting more and more parts for the battery install.  I swear, every time  I turn around this project is needing fuses, cables, nuts, bolts, screws, panel boxes, breakers, mounting boards, buses (don’t we have one already??),  relays, etc.  And frankly, the complexity of the project has seemed to grow, and it was frustrating me considering the time crunch and other projects to accomplish.  Chris and I definitely approach projects in very different ways.

And now, we had to plan in another trip back to Fallon once we knew our measurements.

All Nighter Battery, Inverter and Breaker Install

Chris and I both pulled a 12 hour all-nighter on Friday to run new wires down the length of the bus from what is now the battery bay to the breaker bay.

We then dismantled the old breaker box (which had so many code violations, it wasn’t even funny), and installed two new ones – one for the shore power to come into, and one for the inverter to take control of the AC power in the coach.  We decided to do this at night when it was cooler, so that the lack of air conditioning would not be as noticable.  While the highs in Reno were significantly cooler than they were in Arizona, mid-90s is still warm when working on projects.

Keith & Chris making battery cables

After getting a few hours sleep, we headed back to Fallon on Saturday to meet up with our friend to create the battery cables.  What should have been an hour of cable making – turned into another 5 hours on the project, as he had further ideas to make the system even safer by building better mounts. Safety is a good thing, and so are awesome friends.

Inverter on! Rainbow on!

At sunset (with a rainbow forming over the bus), everything was wired up. We turned on the inverter, and then turned on an air conditioner. All running off the sweetness of lithium ion batteries and 3000w pure sine inversion!

By our calculations, we should have enough battery power to run an A/C for almost 3 hours before needing to run the generator for a re-charge.. and all our wiring, cabling, fuses, etc. are scaled for this.

The battery bay - Phase 1 complete!

For now, phase 1 of the project is completed and good enough for Burning Man.

We’ll have power without needing to turn on the generator just to run water or lights.  After the playa, we have many other phases to implement, including a wiring schematic that our on-call electrical wizard, Sean of Our Odyssey, drew up for us that will give us many more awesome features.  (He’s been a tremendous guiding force to us these past few weeks – and we wish him and Louise well as they’re now deployed for the Red Cross in North Carolina).

Playa Bound

Tomorrow, we start the final leg to the playa.  Sam & Tracy currently are parked at the same location that Camp Nomadia was located at last year – the corner of 6 & H.  If you’re playa bound too, stop on by Thursday @ 3pm –  there will be a Nomadic Lifestyle Workshop, followed by a Nomadic Happy Hour.

Expect this blog space to be quiet until we return to the default world. I don’t believe we’ll be posting updates from the playa this year – as we’re taking this year to focus on us.

By the way, we should note – we are not trying to motivate anyone to follow us on this path. We are not selling these batteries, we are not affiliates with any battery dealer, we paid for all our components and nor do we have any financial stake in the technology beyond our own systems.  We are simply full time RVing technomads who are designing our own cutting edge home & office on wheels, and are sharing our research & project. Of course we’d love to have more folks out there pioneering and helping us take the arrows in our backs.  Right now, we do not consider this technology ready for the mainstream, and those contemplating this technology need to be a bit savvy with electrical and battery technology. 

Other Posts In this Series:

Promise of Lithium #1: Lead Acid Battery Downsides
Promise of Lithium #2: Lithium Ion Battery Advantages
All our Lithium Ion Battery Posts 

The bus [...]]]> After another all-nighter lithium ion battery research session last Tuesday, we slept in on Wednesday and then made our way down the hill from Flagstaff into Phoenix. With every foot of elevation drop, the temperature increased and we were soon reminded of why we escaped to Flagstaff in the first place.

The long 6% grade descent into Phoenix.

The bus did incredibly well on the descent, and we learned the advantage of a jake brake – they not only sound cool, they’re very useful! After our first major drop in elevation, Chris exclaimed

‘If I ever meet Jake, I’m gonna kiss him!’.

In the 7000 foot elevation drop, Chris only had to briefly engage the regular bus brake once or twice, the rest the Jake handled with ease.

Unfortunately our late departure and stops at every rest stop, often of which involved more research and ordering parts that would be needed for the battery install – put us arriving in Phoenix too late to meet up with the supplier.

But never fear, we received an invitation inbound for bus parking, power and dinner with a fellow bus nut. Well actually, they’re the owners of one of the buses we looked at in our search, Bus’Osaurus. When our friends we rendezvoused with in Flagstaff walked into our bus, they decided they too needed a bus as their full time home.. and actually bought Bus’Osaurus this week!

We hadn’t realized how contagious this bus nut disease is, so caution to anyone who invites us over.

Battery Day

Thursday morning we arrived to Elite Power Solutions, who specializes in lithium iron phosphate (for the geeks amongst you, LiFeMnPO4 is the actual chemistry) batteries for electric cars, motorcycles and scooters. Our research into the state of lithium for RV use lead us to them as a reputable supplier of a non-combustable safer battery than previous versions of lithium ion.  When we reached out to their engineers they were happy to work with us to create our RV house battery solution. And they further offered us a great price on the batteries that sweetened the temptation to pioneer into the land of untested bright speculations.

We were anticipating when we arrived our time with them would be focused on getting the batteries installed into the bus and hooked up to the various other parts we had shipped to them – including our fancy new pure sine inverter, high end relay switches, fuses, and such.

Disassembling the 100ah Lithium Ion Packs

Little did we know that the batteries came in packs of 4 cells that make up 100ah at 12v. And to create our bank of 500ah, we’d have to manually disassemble 5 packs and re-assemble them into 4 packs of 500ah at 3.2v and hook them up in parallel. We soon learned how tedious of a process this is, which includes having to unscrew every jumper and all the assembly plates.

Re-assembling the packs into 5 cell, 500ah at 3.2v.

We then had to re-assemble the binding plates to support 5 cells each, and press the cells into the bands using a hydraulic jack.

It was actually quite exhilarating to physically build our own pack (and talk about the geeky DIY points we earned!) – but it’s time we hadn’t budgeted for. And this got complicated when the house generator in the bus overheated in the 110+ heat, threatening to roast poor Kiki with out air conditioning. We had to end Thursday early with a scramble to find a nearby RV park with power hook-ups and then rent a car. After making sure Kiki was ok, we ran some errands to obtain parts for the battery bank – and got our Fry’s Electronics fix (grin).

Wiring up our Lithium Ion battery pack. (Safety note: Bad idea to keep jewelry on while working on batteries - we'll be taking our commitment rings off in the future!)

On Friday morning we returned to Elite Power to finish building our bank and getting it all wired up – which involved tediously screwing in jumper bars in parallel, fuses and Elite’s EMS (Energy Management System).

Moving 500ah of Lithium Ion goodness into our rental car.

When we were done – we had a sweet looking 500ah battery bank that measures just 21″ x 14″ x 11″ and weighs just 140 lbs. And yes, a much more technical post is forthcoming for all you interested in more of the details.

We’re much further behind on the project than anticipated, but feel much more in tune with the system we’re building as a result of being so involved with its creation.

We’ll continue sharing the install as it progresses this coming week as we meander towards Reno, with the goal of having something workable by Burning Man.

Gates open in 9 days.

By the way, we should note – we are not trying to motivate anyone to follow us on this path. We are not selling these batteries, we are not affiliates with any battery dealer, we paid for all our components and nor do we have any financial stake in the technology beyond our own systems.  We are simply full time RVing technomads who are designing our own cutting edge home & office on wheels, and are sharing our research & project. Of course we’d love to have more folks out there pioneering and helping us take the arrows in our backs.  Right now, we do not consider this technology ready for the mainstream, and those contemplating this technology need to be a bit savvy with electrical and battery technology. 

Other Posts In this Series:

Promise of Lithium #1: Lead Acid Battery Downsides
Promise of Lithium #2: Lithium Ion Battery Advantages
All our Lithium Ion Battery Posts 

We came here intending to cool off – both our bodies and on the bus projects. We were also [...]]]> Two weeks ago we finally escaped the intense Arizona desert heat in Lake Havasu City, and headed to nearby Flagstaff. Sitting at elevation 7000 ft, it’s many degrees cooler and has things that are green.

We came here intending to cool off – both our bodies and on the bus projects. We were also tempted here to be temporary neighbors with some fellow nomadic friends.

We had dreams of lots of hiking, catching up on some projects, exploring Flagstaff, birthday celebrations and beer.

Ahh… dreams.

Upon arriving, some prior conversations we had started inquiring about the state of lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4 – or LFP) battery technology for RV use elevated from intriguing to interesting. This newer LFP isn’t your old school lithium ion battery chemistry that is known for exploding – it’s non-combustable, making it vastly safer.

As our bus came with no house battery system or inverter, tackling that project was on our priority list – especially with planning to go off-grid at Burning Man at the end of the month.

One conversation lead to another, and we were introduced to a supplier of the technology – who happens to be just down the hill in Phoenix.

As we know that Burning Man would present an ideal opportunity to field test such a system, if we’re going to get it done – we had to move quick to take advantage of the Phoenix connection before leaving the area.

So instead of our chill no bus project escape, our time in Flagstaff has been consumed with intense all-nighter research into batteries & inverters, house electrical systems and taking measurements of all our bays. We’ve been weighing the benefits and risks of a bank of lithium ion versus AGM batteries, corresponding with our braintrust of electrically inclined friends and tracking down our ideal inverter.

We’ve decided that while lithium ion batteries have not fully proven their potential yet, especially for RV house electrical systems – heading to Phoenix this week is worthwhile. If it continues to hold our interest, by the end of the week we could have one very interesting and cutting edge house electrical system that could be a fantastic platform for our eventual solar install.

And yes, you can bet I’ll force Chris to sit down and write a more technical report.

So, this morning we’re off to Phoenix. Back into the intense Arizona desert heat.

I haven’t even checked the weather forecast for the expected highs.. I really don’t want to know.

By the way, we should note – we are not trying to motivate anyone to follow us on this path. We are not selling these batteries, we are not affiliates with any battery dealer, we paid for all our components and nor do we have any financial stake in the technology beyond our own systems.  We are simply full time RVing technomads who are designing our own cutting edge home & office on wheels, and are sharing our research & project. Of course we’d love to have more folks out there pioneering and helping us take the arrows in our backs.  Right now, we do not consider this technology ready for the mainstream, and those contemplating this technology need to be a bit savvy with electrical and battery technology. 

Other Posts In this Series:

Promise of Lithium #1: Lead Acid Battery Downsides
Promise of Lithium #2: Lithium Ion Battery Advantages
All our Lithium Ion Battery Posts 

I have updated our video bus tour to include footage of some of the recent updates. [...]]]> The following post will be nothing new for those who have been following along with our daily updates on Facebook.  It’s just a wrap up of some announcements we’ve made this week.

Updated Bus Video Tour

I have updated our video bus tour to include footage of some of the recent updates.  It’s amazing to see how a good wash, scrubbing and wax and new tires & wheels improved the exterior.  And of course, all of the interior changes with new floors and layout.

Link to Video Tour

Incidentally, having a video bus tour has proven to be quite handy. We encountered some difficulty securing full insurance coverage, as many companies won’t cover a non-professional bus conversion. Add in the few carriers who offer full timer’s insurance (sort of a mash-up of an automobile policy and a homeowner’s policy) – and our pickings became very slim. However, because our awesome agent at Epic Insurance was able to submit our video tour, she was able to convince a better ranked company to take us on.

We’re also finding that RV parks that have restrictions on older rigs are more prone to accept a reservation from us by giving them a link to the video, showing that the bus is actually pretty cool.

Apparently, having a yawning cat in your video also helps.

Coverage? App Update

Our Coverage? app continues to have a steady trickle of sales, and has gotten quite a bit of positive feedback for its usefulness. Even we have found it far more useful than excepted to be able to overlay data coverage maps from all of the cell data carriers, without needing an internet connection.

I always take it as a positive affirmation when we start getting a flood of e-mails asking when the next map update is coming out, and we also take that as a signal it’s time to get to work. The maps have been quite a labor intensive process to create, taking upwards of 40 hours of intricate graphics work.

With all of the bus chaos, we’ve just simply been lacking the time to sit down and crank out an update.

However, between getting a Wacom Pen Tablet and discovering some fresh techniques – we’re now able to get the updates out with a lot less effort.

Earlier this week we submitted an update to the app with all new maps, and it’s now available in the app store.

We also came out with a nifty new icon for the app!

Earlier this year we gave an analysis of our app sales. Coverage sales have picked up (now with just over 3500 downloads) – but we in no way consider the app to have reached even close to a break-even point for our development efforts. Combined sales of Coverage? and State Lines average about $9/day. We basically consider it beer money.

Sorry Android users – sadly, we just can’t justify the massive expense and effort to port the apps. We will however continue to support our apps on iOS for as long as the apps continue to sell, and they’re useful in our own travels.

Burning Man – Yes, We’re Going

This was the first year that we made no specific plans around attending Burning Man. We didn’t buy tickets when they came out, and we didn’t base our travel plans for the year around being in Nevada in late August.  We also didn’t plan to NOT attend either.

We instead decided to leave it to serendipity to decide for us.

Honestly, we had gotten a bit tired of always routing over the same paths at the same time of year, generally on a hectic cross country re-positioning.  And, last year I got a tad burnt out from organizing Camp Nomadia (even though it was pretty much stress-free and awesome) and not feeling free to just enjoy Burning Man with all the media interviews and visitors wanting to pick our brains on becoming nomadic.  So it was nice to take a break from the mental attachment of making attending a priority.

And, serendipty has spoken.

Our bus acquisition and project status has us feeling within proximity of attending.  In Lake Havasu, we came across a pair of tickets (Burning Man, for the first time ever, sold out a few weeks ago). And, a Kiki-sitter manifested right along our route in Las Vegas.

So, we’ve now got Burning Man in our plans.   And yes, we will be camping with Camp Nomadia (which is aiming to be near 6 & G) – but not hosting it.  We are absolutely thrilled with the past Nomadians who have stepped in and taken on the organizing efforts, and we’re greatly looking forward to being part of the camp.

Unlike years past tho, we’re not pre-setting up appointments for media interviews and visits.  This year is for us to enjoy the event, and not be focused on being hosts or promoting nomadism in general.    We had seriously contemplated not announcing we’re attending and going incognito… but, we just couldn’t do it.

This doesn’t mean folks aren’t welcome to stop by and say hi – just don’t expect us to be sitting around waiting, or heck, being “proper”

Plans Forward

Our plans are always somewhat nebulous. But after the burn we’ll be returning to Las Vegas to pick up Kiki, and attending Photoshop World with our fellow technomadic friends Ben & Karen.   After that, we’ll head to Sacramento where Chris will be tackling a long overdue project of finally getting rid of his storage unit.  We’ll use the bus as a moving van to relocate anything he wants to keep to his parent’s basement in St. Louis.    And from there…  we’ll probably meander around with a stop in Texas and eye towards wintering in Florida.

But… this all on NST (Nomadic Standard Time), and always subject to change.

And what is that question?  Usually it’s something along the lines of:

Honestly, the post was a feeble attempt at keeping this blog updated while we’ve had little energy for such things these past few weeks as we’ve been tackling project after project [...]]]> A couple days ago I posted a before and after picture of the bus’ interior, and asked how many differences you could spot.

Honestly, the post was a feeble attempt at keeping this blog updated while we’ve had little energy for such things these past few weeks as we’ve been tackling project after project in 110+ degree weather.  To our surprise, the post has actually turned into a fun game – and we’ve been having a blast receiving lists of changes folks have spotted!

While we’ve been focused on projects all over the bus, this post will concentrate on just the changes visible in the interior shot.

Here is the answer key to the after picture:

The backstory: We have some longer term goals with the interior of the bus to convert it to being an ideal home office for two on wheels.  Our grand vision is to eventually have a double desk facing the windows (where the dinette used to be, spanning all the way to the front passenger seat) – but we’re not quite ready to make final decisions on the design.

Our dear friends in Lake Havasu City includes Clint, who’s family owns Spencer’s Carpet & Tile.  As Lake Havasu is a winter destination for many RVers, they are quite experienced with RV flooring.  We had no doubt who we wanted doing our floors. However, doing the floors meant moving forward on other remodeling projects on the bus that we weren’t quite ready to commit to, or waiting on remodeling projects until we could pass through the area again (which any sane person would do in say.. winter).

So the current state of the interior of the bus is transitionary – making do with what we have so we could get the floors installed, while we still fine tune the eventual interior design we want to achieve.  As you’ll see, a lot of the changes are rather fun temporary solutions that cost little to nothing to implement to quickly update the interior.

The original bus floor (showing where the seats clipped in)

1 – Flooring

One of the most obvious changes is the new flooring in the bus, and this is what kept us an extra 2 weeks in Lake Havasu.  Our vision is to bring back a bit of the classic passenger bus look, while creating a space that is both home and office.  We want something that will bridge the retro 1960s to the future 2020s and beyond.  Sort of a future vision as seen from a classic era.

And of course we want it durable, long lasting and uniquely us.

The Bus Aisle Entry Way

Clint sent us home with dozens of flooring samples. At first, we thought we’d want something lighter with perhaps a concrete or industrial feel.  We knew for sure we didn’t want a manufactured material trying to look natural (ie. fake marble, stones, woods, etc. were off the table.. err.. floor for us). We also wanted something that would live up to being in motion, being exposed to extreme climates and having rolling chairs on it.  We picked up this black commercial grade vinyl stuff with funky metal squiggles on it (Atomic from Karndean’s Michelangelo collection) on a whim before leaving Clint’s showroom- sure it was going to be too dark.

But it kept standing out to us (and our hosts in Lake Havasu), while all the lighter stuff just looked way too bright with the white headliner in the bus. Our only concern was how dark it was, especially at night without lights on.

Then Clint gave us the brilliant idea of playing around with the contrasting strips of the same material in off-white.  And that brought us to simulating the original bus aisle for the length of the coach. We absolutely love it.. and ended up doing the white in the bathroom to give that room a separation of space.

Clint finishing up the flooring

The timing of the flooring materials arriving coincided with our trip to St. Louis to bring Kiki home.  Clint so awesomely posted progress pictures of the floor preps to our Facebook wall so we could stay involved!  We highly recommend Spencer’s Carpet & Tile should you ever find yourself in Lake Havasu and wanting new flooring in your RV (and no, they didn’t comp us anything to say that.. we truly are impressed!).

Other change on the floor:

• Heating vent removed.  As the (not quite working) furnace was under the dinette that we wanted removed, and we’re contemplating going with a hydronics or catalytic heating system  - we decided to remove all of the heating duct work and floor over the three vents throughout the coach.  There’s less than 1 in 3 odds that we’d actually need them, and if we do – cutting holes into the vinyl is a lot easier than plugging it later.  We have an electric space heater should there be a freak arctic freeze before we decide on the eventual heating system.

2 – Dinette to Work Space

We knew when we started looking at motorhomes that we’d be ripping out any dinette.  The typical RV dinette just doesn’t fit our style of living. We hardly ever eat at a table, they’re not comfortable enough for sitting at a computer for a prolonged period of time, we don’t intend to sleep enough guests to need the extra convertible bed space and they take up a lot of room!   So in our looking, we carefully investigated under the dinettes to make sure they could be ripped out without making system compromises (such as plumbing, etc).   As said above, the furnace was under ours, but we’re contemplating changing to a different system anyway.

New workspace and kitchen

The dinette came out incredibly easy (I actually did it myself with a manual screw driver and a crow bar!).  The only downside is that there was an integrated wine cabinet (kudos to those who guessed curio cabinet – close! ).  As best we can tell, the folks who did this conversion back in 1989 used the bus to drive from Yuma, AZ to Napa, CA and were wine enthusiasts. We’ve kept the cabinet in the under bay for now, to see if we might be able to work it into our eventual design.

I decided to repurpose the dinette table to be our temporary workspace until we decide what to do about building a desk unit.  We switched the mounting brackets to the wall under the mirror so that it takes up less space, but still leaves room for two if needed. To those who guessed new desk/workspace – *buzz*.  Fooled you – just a re-purposed table (that works great!).

Incidentally, as the table’s surface was the same as the counters I was contemplating repainting, so I used it as my practice palette to decide our colors.  I attempted to do it as artistically as I could, so that it would still be an attractive compliment to our interior for now.

I also painted the wall under the mirror once the dinette was removed, and Kiki’s food dishes now live under the table.

I’m quite pleased with the result!

Other changes in the workspace:

• Apple versus banana – Good eye to those who picked up that I had an apple in the first picture, and a banana in the second.
• Macbook Pro instead of iPad (we each have a MBP and an iPad).

3 – Kitchen Sprucing

It started with the most annoying sink ever. The one that came with the bus was 25″ wide, but a dual bowl.  Problem? Neither of the bowls were wide enough to maneuver a plate around, never mind a pan.   At first we thought we’d be able to get entirely new counters installed while in Lake Havasu, but the guy who came out to measure was lacking in personality and could offer us no guidance.  We took that as a sign that the counters are probably best left to be replaced when we have our desk unit built.

The kitchen spruced up!

The plan emerged from there to install a new sink ourselves – and while we’re at it, we might as well put in a new faucet and undersink water filtration system. Oh, and what the heck – let’s try repainting the counters to get rid of the horrid light pink/peach color they were.

I cleaned and sanded the existing laminate, a layer of extra-stick primer, rolled three layers of paint and then 3 layers of poly-urethane (with ample drying between coats).  The repainting should be good enough until we tackle the desk rebuild and new countertops. The backsplash is currently just the primer – we’re actually thinking of playing around with metal treatment of some sort.  We’re still noodling over that.

So, for about $400 in parts and a few hours of labor (thank you Wayne for your expertise in woodcutting to make a new hole for us.. and thank you Andrew for your plumbing assistance!) – we managed a complete kitchen sprucing up.

Other changes in the kitchen:

• Yup, the paper towel direction was a planted difference – good eye to the folks who caught that!
• Dish drainer – full of dishes drying, showing that we’re actually living in the bus!
• SodaStream Soda Maker – we love our fizzy water, and ordered in a soda machine to match the new kitchen. (*buzz* to those who guessed coffee maker).
• Metal scraps behind the oven – These are metal pieces that we’re playing around with integrating into the backsplash (not salt and pepper shakers)
• The light over the sink was on in the new picture, where it was off in the old (no new lighting has been installed in the bus yet).

4 – Kitchen/Living Room Wall

Yes, those are actual temps we had in Lake Havasu.

On the kitchen cabinet wall, over the couch – we have installed a Acu-Rite weather station and clock.  (Nope, not a picture frame).

The other major change that not many people picked up on was that we removed the glass splash guard next to the stovetop. And this allows the covered stovetop to be used as surface space when sitting on the couch.

We plan to eventually have some sort of counter extender that flips up when needed that will serve to protect the couch when I’m cooking messy.

5 – The Couch

Kudos to everyone for noticing Kiki has taken up residence on the couch!  I don’t think anyone missed that one. And she is indeed a major part of the household changes that occurred last week.  So far, she seems to love the bus and all of the room. And she wasn’t at all surprised yesterday when she discovered this house moves.

A lot of  folks noticed that that the couch position was different in the pictures.  The couch does slide out to create a single bed.  And it does have storage space below (it’s been there all along, just wasn’t visible in the original picture with the couch slid partially out).  We had originally thought we’d rip out the couch too, but we’ve since decided we really like it and will eventually re-cover it. But so far, nothing has been done to it but added a cat.

And yup, I reversed the pillows to see who would notice.

6 -Blinds and Awnings

A lot of folks noticed the various positioning of the blinds in the two pictures.  Some may remember us commenting on Facebook how we hate mini blinds, and they’d be the first thing we rip out on any bus we got  (they’re annoying to operate and then don’t really provide ample privacy). Well, this bus came with mini blinds.

And guess what?  We’re actually like these. They’re unlike any we’ve seen before and when closed create a solid pleated shade – providing actual privacy!  So while annoying to operate like any mini blind, they do actually serve their function.  Based on the receipts we found for them, they’re called ‘Tiffany blinds’ – I’ve not been able to find much out about them.

But what no one has noticed in the two pictures is that we have the awnings deployed in the new picture!  There are three small awnings, and one large one. Aside from needing to replace some pull handles and plastic hardware on them to get them operational, they’re in incredibly great shape (which has been the story on the rest of the bus).

7 – Laptop Desk

Before Spray Paint

So, we ordered a MaxxFan vent fan, and the box was sitting in our living room awaiting installation. I started using it while seated at the couch to put my laptop on. Wow, it’s actually the right size and height.

So guess what I did?

A can of spray paint, and viola – a temporary laptop desk!

I’m amused by how many folks guessed it was a filing cabinet or called it a ‘nice’ piece of furniture. *giggle*

8 – Lamp Shade

So many people guessed that we have a new lamp shade, or that the light was off in the picture.  Wrong.

After the answer above, can you guess what really happened here?

Yup, I’m spray paint crazy!

We do plan to replace the light fixture in general, and had trouble finding suitable & affordable lamp shades with a harp (non-harped aren’t stable enough for while in motion).  So, this is a temporary fix to have them match the evolving interior better.

9 – Bedroom Changes

A few folks noticed that we had the pillows arranged differently – good job.

But no one noticed:

• The bed is 4″ higher. We originally thought we’d go and get a high end memory foam mattress as soon as we found our bus. But the mattress that came with this one was actually quite pleasant.  We ended up doing exactly what we did in our Oliver – ordered a memory foam topper. It’s heaven.
• The 13″ tube TV is gone.  You can see it in the closet mirrored door reflection. Subtle.  Kiki has actually taken over this cubby hole as her own.

10 – Ceiling & Lighting

Yes, we had different lights on in the two photos – but no light fixtures have been changed out.   Kudos to those who did notice that we removed the dorky glass globes on the fixture over the dinette.  It’s a 12v fixture, and we will be replacing it with something snazzier (maybe LED tract lighting over the desk?).

Roof Work!

The other major change is the change out of the air vent fan.  The one that was in there was ugly, huge and non-functioning.  We decided on a MaxxFan 7000k, which is extremely low profile and stands the best odds of being able to be hacked into with an iPad app we might eventually develop as a home automation system.  For those who were following along on Facebook about our whole ordeal around getting this fan – all ended well.  MaxxAir is an amazing company to work with, and they shipped the correct unit direct to us at an incredible price after the original vendor we ordered from gave us major headaches.

Wayne and Chris spent an afternoon on top of the roof of the bus installing the fan, as well as giving the front A/C a thorough cleaning. Chris also did some body work on some minor rust on the steel part of roof.  And wouldn’t you know it? The day we have a hole in the roof is the only day while in Lake Havasu we had a brief rain shower!

11 – Other Differences

Not directly related to the remodel, but other differences between the pictures:

• I’m wearing a different dress
• My hair is down
• Chris’ head is peaking up from the entry way

Ok.. whew…  I think that wraps it up!  Keep in mind.. this is only a small portion of the projects we’ve been working on!

And the Winner Is…

This was an incredibly fun experience to involve you in our remodeling! Thank you to everyone who participated in the game – we smiled with every entry that came in (I’ve now approved all the entries so you can go back and see them all).

We offered a free copy of our State Lines eBook or the iPhone version to the winner.

We released the eBook a few months ago rather silently – life has just been too busy to do much else these days.   It contains over 75 state laws and regulations that affect travelers in the USA, and is ideal for those without a Smartphone we support with the app version.  (State Lines is also now out for WebOS and Windows Mobile.  We did have someone working on the Android version, but it doesn’t seem to be coming together.)

Well, everyone who participated is a winner in our book.. and I suck at picking favorites.

If you took the time to spot the differences, please accept a copy of the eBook with our compliments. Simply click this link and download it. Use the code ‘Differences‘ to get your complimentary copy from us.  If you’d prefer the iPhone version, just drop us a line at us@technomadia.com and we’ll send you a promo code.

If you didn’t participate and would like a copy of the eBook, use the code ’50off’ to receive a 50% discount off the eBook (just $4!).

Since today is my birthday, I’m feeling generous

Both of the codes will expire on August 10.

We re-located to Flagstaff, AZ yesterday to much cooler temperatures and great friends.   The bus did *great* on the 200 mile, 7000 ft elevation gain.  We’ll be here a couple weeks – if you’re in the area, give us a holler.  We always love meeting up with folks.

We took the photo on the left after a quick clean up. We just took the photo on the right after a lot of renovations we’ve accomplished so far! (And that’s just in this area of the bus!)

How many of the differences [...]]]>

Before & After - Click for larger version!

42 Days ago we bought our GM 4106 bus and moved in.

We took the photo on the left after a quick clean up. We just took the photo on the right after a lot of renovations we’ve accomplished so far! (And that’s just in this area of the bus!)

How many of the differences can you spot?

(Go ahead… list them out!  Whoever does the best gets a copy of our State Lines eBook or iPhone App!)

We’ll soon have a post up with an updated video tour, and will start detailing all of the work we’ve been doing.

Right now, we’re busily getting everything ready to get in motion in the morning. We’ve selected nearby Flagstaff, AZ as our next destination, which is much higher in elevation and having temperatures much cooler. Plus, turns out we have friends currently staying there we can rendezvous with! We’re looking forward to some time focused on things other than bus projects.

(All guesses are now displayed, and the Answer Key is now posted!)

I knew something was up, as just a few weeks ago we got everything out of our Oliver Travel Trailer and put it in another vehicle, drove a while and then unloaded everything.

But I [...]]]> Back in May while I was hiding under a bed, my people left me at my grandmeow’s in St. Louis.

I knew something was up, as just a few weeks ago we got everything out of our Oliver Travel Trailer and put it in another vehicle, drove a while and then unloaded everything.

But I wasn’t expecting my people to leave me!  Every morning I searched the house for Chris & Cherie.

Grandmeow would chase me around the house with her iPad, trying to tell me that my people were in it.  I could hear their voices, but there was no cuddles and scritches, so that couldn’t really be them.

It’s not so bad at grandmeow’s house tho. There are birds to watch, sunbeams and I have my own room.  Plus, I have grandmeow trained to give me treats whenever I want them.

And then late one night, Cherie & Chris arrived!  I was so happy.

They started packing up stuff, and I was going to make sure they took me with them this time!!

They packed up tools, clothes, electronics and bunch of stuff. And then finally… Me!!

Off to the airport we went.  I know the drill now.

I get in my carry around cave, a nice person at a check point gives me a scratch on the head and declares me not to be a terrorist. And then I lay down for several hours looking at Cherie’s feet (pssst… time to repaint your toe nails!!).

My people keep saying they book us direct flights so we only have to have one landing and take-off. But I don’t believe them. This time there was an unscheduled fuel stop in Kansas City so that we could make it back to Las Vegas.

After a long drive, they plopped me inside a bus and said we were home.

It hasn’t felt like home yet, because everyday we’ve been here – I’ve been supervising projects. It’s tough work.

But at least I’m finally back with my people!

We arrived in Arizona nearly 6 weeks ago. In that time, we’ve experienced only one day in which the high temperature was below 100 degrees, and many of those days in excess of 110. You’d think that when you have location flexiblity, we’d take advantage of the first [...]]]>

What are you still doing in Arizona???

We arrived in Arizona nearly 6 weeks ago. In that time, we’ve experienced only one day in which the high temperature was below 100 degrees, and many of those days in excess of 110. You’d think that when you have location flexiblity, we’d take advantage of the first opportunity to escape to cooler climates.

While the notion of following the weather is a nice one, and we definitely get why so many RVers make this a priority – it’s not always our deciding factor.

Chris & Wayne working on the back-up camera

This isn’t the first time we’ve gotten our seasons mixed up.  In 2009, we spent the winter in single digit temperatures workamping at Amazon.com in Kansas, followed by spending the holidays in St. Louis with family. And last summer we spent a considerable amount of time in hot and humid Florida to be with family during a tough time.

Our travels are primarily determined by people and experiences, not places.

And the same is true now.

Since we bought our bus in Yuma a month ago, we returned to Lake Havasu City intending to stay a couple days with our friends and perhaps tackle a couple projects before moving on.  But they had other things in store for us – such as a surprise technomadic bus rendezvous.  And then a nearby fellow ‘bus nut’ and 2-stroke diesel mechanic guru (known affectionately as the ‘Yoda of Buses’) invited us to bring the bus over.

After the bus passed his approval with no notable concerns (just some more filters that needed replacing, as well as an O-ring on the power steering pump), we seriously considered moving on to nearby higher elevations for cooler temperatures.

Chris & Andrew aiming the back-up camera

But in the end, we opted to return to Lake Havasu.

Being with dear friends won out.

Especially when those friends have bus parking, a garage full of tools, lots of skillsets to share and a shipping address to receive parts.  We don’t get the opportunity to have access to this combination of resources often, and we couldn’t imagine such a scenario happening again anytime soon. We can handle small projects as we go, but it was quite appealing to get a lot of projects done at once.

We’ve made so many improvements on the bus in these past few weeks, it’s incredible.  Here’s just a sampling:

• Fresh water system fully functional and improved
• Smoke, carbon monixide and propane detectors installed
• Night vision back-up camera & monitor installed
• Dinette taken out
• Counters repainted
• New kitchen sink, faucet and undercounter filtration system
• Bluetooth handsfree stereo system installed
• Furnace removed
• Bunches of small tweaks & projects
• Lots of upcoming projects researched and ordered

And all this while enjoying the company of awesome friends and immersing ourselves in community.  Staying places longer is exactly the pace we want to switch to, so it seems right to start off our bus adventure by staying still.

Interior remodeling underway

Next week we’ll leave the bus parked while we fly back to St. Louis to bring Kiki home and visit with Chris’ family. We’ll also grab some stuff we left behind before departing on our bus hunt back in May.

While we’re gone, new floors will be installed.

And then we have every intention of starting up the engine and driving away. We’ll probably head to the west coast, maybe towards San Francisco, where temperatures are 30-40 degrees cooler.