Technomadia

Our Frequently Referenced Content

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 15 May 2012 18:19:57 +0000

We landed in Austin on Sunday, and have hit the ground running with a lot of work projects underway this week, as well as catching up with friends in the area.

It’s very good to be here.

Since we’re lacking time to write up a new post today, I thought this might be a good time to share a new page on our website we put together – a ‘Start Here‘ page. It’s a quick reference to who we are, and links to our most commonly asked for content.

After 5 years of blogging, we’ve accumulated a lot of writings here – so hopefully this new page can help you find your way around our past content (or at the very least, help us more quickly find our past writings that we so frequently refence!)

Below, I’m re-printing some of the links. Hopefully you’ll find some of it useful.

More About Us

Our Full Story – How we met, who we are, our various forms of travel thus far (from our minimalist days in a 16′ trailer, backpacking by train, a winter in the USVI and now a vintage bus) and how we earn our income as we roam.

Our Home on Wheels - We’re currently traveling in a 1961 vintage bus. This link will tell you all about it – including a video tour and log of our modifications.

Our Technology Arsenal - Technology enables our lifestyle to keep connected and working as we roam. This page is kept up to date as we change out our technology arsenal.

Our Monthly Cost Log – We frequently get asked ‘how much does it cost to travel full time?’. We’ve kept our log online for the past few years.

Life on the Road

Curious about hitting the road yourself? We’ve written a lot of practical and ‘thinky’ content about how to make it work that you might find useful:

No Excuses: Go Nomadic – This is our series of articles about the logistical aspects of living a nomadic life. Everything from earning an income, affording it, family, handling mail, pets, getting rid of your stuff and keeping connected. We offer it as a free resource on the blog, or as a convenient eBook on a ‘pay as you wish’ basis. Enjoy!

Nomadic Philosophy & Logistics - All our ‘thinky’ posts about the nomadic lifestyle in one place – everything from explaining:

RVing Advice & Guides - All our articles specific to RVing, including:

Looks like serendipity has said we’ll be using Austin as a basecamp until early June, as we were able to score a campsite at the fabulous Pecan Grove RV Park for our entire time here.

As always, if you find yourself in the area and want to get together – just give us a shout.

Our State Park Trail to Texas

Cherie Ve Ard — Fri, 11 May 2012 11:20:31 +0000

Whenever we’re making a repositioning, it’s always a choice of what pace to take. Do we concentrate on just getting to our next destination by having long driving days and few stops? Or do we meander and take time to explore? Both have their benefits.

We didn’t have an event in Austin we were aiming for, so we had some time. We don’t always get that flexibility. We are also deep in the middle of some major work projects on a strict deadline, so we needed to make sure there was plenty of time & energy for focused work hours.

Our 1237 mile FL -> TX route - staying at State Parks along the way.

We decided to embrace our love of staying in state parks. We’d route based on which parks had availability, decent odds of cellular signal (we of course used our app, Coverage? for that) and were generally on our way. We opted for aiming for very comfortable, yet productive 4-5 hr driving days – giving us about 200 miles of range between our stopping points.

The reason we love state parks include:

Scenic places with hiking trails and outdoorsy things to do
Capturing a piece of history about a location
Campsites with plenty of room
Easily booked online – no phone calls for reservations needed

After staying in too many commercial RV Parks these past few months, we were ready for views that didn’t include our neighbor’s sewer hose.

And we’re always on the hunt for camp locations where we can feel comfortable leaving at least one side of windows open all day and night long while still feeling secluded. (Our criteria: Can we walk around nekkid inside our own home, with the privacy blinds on our darkly tinted windows open – and not impact anyone.)

Stop A: April 22 – Wekiwa Springs State Park – Altamonte Springs, FL

Wekiwa Springs Campsite #33

Before leaving the state, we wanted to touch base with our development team – who live in the north Orlando area. My parents (and business partners) also came in for the afternoon to join the team meeting.

One of our favorite parks to stay at happens to be Wekiwa Springs in Altamonte Springs. It’s a park that puts you feeling right out in nature, but yet you’re really close to town and amenities. It’s always a perfect spot for us while in the area, but incredibly difficult to get into over a weekend. We snagged a spot for during the week, and attended to a lot of business meetings and conducted work hours.

Wekiwa Springs didn’t disappoint – we got spot 33 (our lucky number – we were both 33 when hit the road together, and our Oliver’s hull number was 33). It’s huge, treed and makes us feel like we have our own wooded yard surrounding us. Wekiwa has accessible hiking trails right from the campground, which is perfect for having no excuses to take a break from work and be active (us computer nerds need all the help we can get). There’s a wonderful spring fed swimming hole and beautiful kayaking – which are the major attractions of the park. But this time around we didn’t manage to take a swim or go kayaking (but we have plenty of times in the past).

I even had a unique combo business consult & hair cut with our nomad-friendly small business law firm while in the area – The Meehle Law Firm. Yes, our law firm is *that* awesome. (We highly recommend them for Florida based roaming business folks – hair cuts are optional.)

Window Report: We felt comfortable leaving all our windows open all the time, except the front windshield. Score!

Price: $27/night (with taxes) – 30amp electric, water

Stop B: April 27 – O’Leno State Park – High Springs, FL

O'Leno State Park Campsite

As Wekiwa was full up for the weekend, Friday was the day we’d move on and start our journey out of Florida. While most state parks are very easy get into during the week, the popular ones tend to be full up months in advance for the weekends. They are a mini-vacation destination for locals. So I searched around for spots, and found availability at O’Leno State Park just north of Gainesville.

As it wouldn’t give us much distance, we decided to just book one night. This turned out to be a good decision. O’Leno is one of Florida’s oldest state parks, and its major feature is the Sante Fe River which submerges underground at this location – which is pretty cool. Unfortunately, the water level has been so low for so long, that the swimming and kayaking has long since been shut down. There’s really not much else besides some hiking - which we accomplished during our brief visit.

Oh, and the ticks – the park is infested with them (ick).

The campground itself was decent – the sites were a bit smaller than other parks we’ve been to, but not too bad. The dirt road needs some smoothing and there are a couple of tight turns – which we of course felt maneuvering the bus!

One night was enough for us to check out this park, and we were ready to move on.

Window Report: As we had occupied campsites visible on both side, we didn’t feel comfortable leaving our windows open all the time. Boo.

Price: $19.80/night (with tax) - 30 amp electric, water

Stop C: April 28 – Torreya State Park – Bristol, FL

The bluffs the Torreya State Park campground

There are a bunch of state parks in the panhandle of Florida, and we looked into trying to grab a spot at one along the gulf with no luck. Poking around, I found a couple of spots open for a Saturday night at Torreya State Park just west of Tallahassee.

Coverage? didn’t have us thinking there’d be good signal, so we only booked one night. I honestly didn’t have any expectations coming here, after all – if it was that good, it wouldn’t be available on a Saturday night. Maybe I should have read the description of Torreya first:

High bluffs overlooking the Apalachicola River make Torreya one of Florida’s most scenic places.

After driving twisty backroads for many miles and feeling like we had reached the middle of nowhere – we were completely blown away by this place.

The campground is a huge circle (with a mix of nicely sized spacious sites and some quite small ones with little privacy – whoever took the time to note this on the ReserveAmerica.com website, job well done!) with the front a public scenic overlook of the bluffs.

Bluffs!! In Florida?!?

Torreya State Park Campsite

But we hardly had time to take in the view, because everyone here was so gosh-darn friendly. Within 30 minutes of landing, we had met at least a half dozen fellow campers, shared many stories, had an invite to dinner and given countless tours of our bus. (FYI, if you watched Jonathan’s video interview we posted earlier this week, we definitely don’t have the same experience of never getting to talk with our neighbors.)

And the best part? Those gorgeous bluffs made for excellent cellular coverage, so all of our devices were quite happy! I got online and booked the site for a second night. We enjoyed a hike from the campground, explored the Gregory House and did laundry for $2. Yes, laundry.. at a state park! Wild.

We will definitely be stopping back here for a future visit, and be exploring the dozens of miles of hiking trails to find some of the nearly extinct Torreya trees the park is named for.

Window Report: Our first night we had immediate neighbors, so didn’t feel comfortable leaving our windows open. The second night the park was nearly empty, so we let the sun & moon shine in!

Price: $17.20/night (with tax) – 30 amp electric, water

Stop D: April 30 – Gulf State Park – Gulf Shores, AL

Gulf State Park - Campsite #33 - Parked to maximize our view!

Our escape from Florida! We had always heard tremendous things about Gulf State Park, and were curious to check it out. We had originally thought we’d plan to plop down here for several days, until we saw the price. Starting at $34.41/night (with taxes) for a basic site and with them having 496 sites (how could it feel like a relaxing place) – we just couldn’t justify committing until we got there.

With this park, you make a reservation for your 2 night minimum for a basic site. All sites are assigned upon arrival, at which time you can upgrade to a lake view or lake front site. As we’re view-junkies, we decided to splurge for lake front. Our friendly reservation agent grinned and said ‘I’ll put you in site 33′. (There’s that magical number again!)

When we first pulled up to our spot, all we saw was a line of trees and pouted – ‘We paid for a lake VIEW, not trees!’.

But once we got the bus backed in and angled across the site (remember, you don’t have to back in straight!), we had a most fabulous spot! Our office view was magnificent, plus we had a completely private feeling space with shore access. Splendid! But honestly, all of the lake area sites are HUGE with ample space between them.

Gulf State Park - Lots of distance between sites

Our cellular signal was great, plus the park offers free WiFi. The lake side sites tend to be the fullest during the week – with the rest of the park pretty empty. So we used our WiFiRanger Sky (now nicely mounted on our roof, thanks to our fridge replacement dominoes) to snag a WiFi signal from one of the more distant and underutilized hotspots, which gave us more bandwidth. Sweet!

We did end up extending our stay for a third night, as it was an ideal spot for getting a lot of work done. We only left the park once for a quick drive around the area and a glorious swim at the beach.

The park is indeed beautiful and well laid out so that you don’t feel like you’re in a 496 site park – but we’re not sure we’d want to be there when it was full up. But would like to return in the future perhaps planning to take advantage of their weekly and/or monthly rates.

Window Report: The way we parked, our entire curbside felt completely secluded – we left all the windows open all the time on that side. Which allowed us to awake every morning to gorgeous gulf sunrises from bed. We even reversed the pillows to the foot of the bed, to maximize the sun rise views. Score!

Price: $41.07/night (ouch) – 50 amp electric, water, sewer, WiFi, Lake front

Stop E: May 3 – Bayou Segnette State Park – Westwego, LA

Bayou Segnette Campground

On previous repositioning from Florida to Texas, we’ve stopped in New Orleans – one of our favorite cities. Last time we stayed at the French Quarter RV Resort, which is an ideal location if your focus is exploring the French Quarter, as it’s in stumbling distance. The park itself however is quite pricey ($79/night) and not very scenic on its own.

This time through, our focus was work – so we took the advice to try out the nearby Bayou Segnette State Park. You can catch the free Algiers Ferry nearby to get into the FQ if that’s so desired.

When I saw there was availability over a weekend, I just snagged 3 nights (Thursday – Saturday) and figured we could extend if desired. Much to our surprise, we discovered that was right over Jazz Fest!

Office View at Bayou Segnette

Bayou Segnette was a delightful and beautiful park – the sites are huge with lots of open space around them, although most are not shaded. There was park WiFi, but we just couldn’t get it to connect reliably on any of our devices – but our cellular signals were strong and quite usable. Best feature? They all come with hoola hoop hooks! (grin – you might be a NuRVer if you get this joke).

And the other surprise about this park? FREE LAUNDRY!! We were already shocked at laundry being available at a state park on this repositioning, but FREE?? It only could have been better had they done our laundry for us! Suffice it to say, we did more laundry in the past 2 weeks than we normally do – just because we could!

While there, our new friends from the Pork Chop Express rendezvoused with us. They’ve been followers of ours for a while, and just launched on their nomadic journey – that very morning! It was way cool to get to share in someone’s first day on the road and we hope we’ll be meeting up with these two many times in the future. Our friends Lisa & Brian also stopped by for a bit, and it was good to catch up with them. We also met another bus nut couple who were staying at the park in their nicely re-done Wanderlodge.

We did end up extending our stay by two nights, staying for a total of 5 nights. In that time, we never got into the French Quarter or to Jazz Fest. Sometimes you just have to let go and realize .. this isn’t vacation, and it’s not always about seeing the stuff places are known for.

We did get a lot of work done, and have found if we want to do local stuff too – we just have to stay longer than a few days to have the time and energy.

Window Report: While lacking defined seclusion between sites, there was plenty of space between. Given the awesome angling of the sites, we felt comfortable leaving the curb side windows open all the time… except the morning of lawn maintenance (oops). Score!

Price: $26/night – 50amp electric, water, WiFi, Free Laundry

Stop F: May 8 – Lake View RV Park – Eunice, LA

We had 500 miles to go now on our repositioning into Texas, and getting pretty ready to get ‘there’. After advice from our friends over at Cheddar Yeti, we had aims to make Sam Houston Jones State Park near Lake Charles, LA as our final state park stop. We set out in the morning from Bayou Segnette for what should have been an easy 200 mile drive, leaving just one long driving day.

All was good until traffic on I-10 came to a complete stop before reaching Crowley, LA. Apparently a tanker truck had overturned near Jennings spilling benzene, so they were re-routing traffic on surface roads. It totally rocked being stuck in traffic in our home – as we had access to our bathroom and kitchen – and we were even able to get up to dance and make popcorn. But after over 4 hours in stop and go traffic, we knew we were not going to make it to the park in time to enjoy it.

Breaking our State Park Streak at Lake View RV

Listening in on our CB radio, we had picked up that all of the truckers were thinking like we were – find the nearest free parking area and stop for the night. So I decided to pull up the RVParking app (free) on my iPhone to see what was nearby. I found Lake View RV just north of Eunice, just a couple miles from our current location. I tried calling, but there was no answer. Given that their website said they had over 90 pull thru spots, we decided to take a chance that the park wasn’t full yet (imaging that every RVer stuck in this traffic mess had the same idea).

We arrived to discover that only one other RVer made the decision we did – and we pretty much had the entire park to ourselves. A gorgeous lake view, quiet evening and fast WiFi. A perfect place to rest up for the final leg of our journey, as we now had tacked on about 50 miles to our already planned long driving day. And a perfect double bonus score – they’re a Passport America park, so our fee was half price!

Window Report: Given the lack of neighbors, we felt comfortable leaving all our windows open. But had there been nearby neighbors, this would not have been true – the sites are right next to each other with no division.

Price: $17.44 – 50amp electric, water, sewer, cable, WiFi, beach party

Stop G: May 9 – Hill Shade RV Park – Gonzales, TX

Settled in at our central TX base camp - Hill Shade RV Park

Two years ago, Hill Shade RV Park hosted the NuRVer Gathering – and it’s been in our hearts ever since. The park itself is great – very low key, shaded and pretty. It’s the people who run this place who make it feel like coming home… if their home had wheels, they’d be NuRVers themselves. We were greeted with hugs from the entire family and got settled in our sweet park side spot.

We’ll base camp here in Gonzales for most our central Texas stay. Finding a spot in Austin for the entire duration just proved to be too difficult, and besides – our work & meet-up schedule has us shuffling between Houston, San Antonio and Austin. So this really is a perfect location for us.

And besides.. we know the WiFi works.. after all, we installed it for them.

Window Report: One downside of this park is the lack of privacy between sites. So sadly, not much comfort level in leaving the windows open all the time. But as the most the residents here are oil workers – they are early to bed and gone most of the day. So we feel privacy at home.

Price: $325/month – 50amp electric, water, sewer, WiFi and unlimited hugs

So, that rounds up our Florida -> Texas repositioning. We’ll be sticking around central Texas until early June, when we start meandering north towards St. Louis.

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads – Jonathan Sisk

Cherie Ve Ard — Wed, 09 May 2012 11:44:41 +0000

Meet Jonathan Sisk

Jonathan hit the road full time in February 2009 in a travel trailer pulled by his suburban. After being a successful business entrepreneur in a niche computer industry, he funds his travels from a mix of pulling from his savings and picking up consulting work along the way.

In this video he shares a unique way that he went about bartering work on his trailer to get it ready to hit the road.

Direct video link.

Follow Jonathan:

Website: JonSisk.com
Twitter LinkedIn

Stay tuned.. more nomads coming soon!

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads is intended to introduce you to some amazing people who are living life on their terms by traveling full time.

In this video series, you’ll be meeting and hearing the stories from a wide range of nomads we’ve met, with one thing in common – they’re not waiting for a traditional retirement to pursue their dreams of perpetual travel.

The entire video series will continue to grow at: http://www.technomadia.com/ramblings

We’ll be soon introducing you to more nomads, aiming to release 2-3 videos a month until we run out of content. Make sure you’re subscribed to our RSS feed to be automatically notified when we post.

Would you like to be featured in this series? Let us know when our paths might be converging and let’s hang out – and we’ll be happy to film you in person too.

Join Us – Upcoming TX & MO Events

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 07 May 2012 11:28:52 +0000

We’re back in motion, and it feels good! Being on the move again also re-opens up our intentions to integrate in meet-ups and events along our journey. And as such, we’ve put a few things on the calendar:

The $100 Startup Meet-up – May 17, 7pm – Houston, TX

Chris Guillebeau will soon be touring the country launching his new book, The $100 Startup. As we’re profiled in it, we decided to pop on down to his Houston gig. It’s billed as an interactive casual meet-up (not a book reading or signing). Chris says we’ll be ‘in the circus’ and there ‘might be cupcakes’.

If you’re in the area, this should be a fun and inspiring event to attend – and we’d love to meet up with you there! (No, sorry – we won’t have the bus with us.) Sign-up to get free tickets here.

Happy Hour – May 23 – Austin, TX

We’re hosting a happy hour at our bus on Wednesday, May 23 from 5-8pm. If you’re in the area, we welcome you to stop by for a tour of the bus, to pet Kiki and say hi! We’ll have drinks and snacks, and if there’s interest – a Q&A session might emerge.

More info and to RSVP: Technomadia Austin Happy Hour

Burning Flipside – May 24-28 – Austin Area

We just learned that we’ll be participating in the Austin area Burning Man regional – Burning Flipside (happy dance, flip flops.. wheee!!!). It’s a sold out event, but thanks to serendipity and friends, we’ll be able to attend. We love this event, and being able to participate in this one kinda makes up for likely missing Burning Man itself this year. If you’ll be there too, we’d love to meet up (we’ll likely be out in the open camping area).

We also just put in an offer to host a ‘Tech-Nomadic Living Workshop’ – sort of like our Q&A sessions hosted at Camp Nomadia. It’ll be Saturday morning at 11am.

Technomadia UnRally Thingie – June 7 – 10 – Dixon, MO

Our friend Michael Hargis – an amazing entertainer and bus nut, just bought a festival campground in Missouri. He’s hosting a casual bus & RV rally (called ‘Summertime Bus Rally’) and we’re aiming to be there. We’ll of course be presenting our talks about tech & travel – and Michael’s given us the thumbs up to tempt you to join us there for our own little ‘Technomadia UnRally Thingie”.

Basically, if other technomadic NuRVer minded folks show up, we’ll figure something out based on what everyone is interested in. Kinda unconference style.

The rally fee is just $25 per person, and includes breakfast, dinner, seminars & entertainment (a great deal!). And RV/tent space is available starting at $11/day for dry camping on up to $21/day for full hook-ups. We have no financial interest in this.. we just want to connect with you!

Are you within roaming distance and able to join us for all or part of the weekend? Then please do! We’d love to see you there. Click here for more info – and to sign up, you can either call Michael and/or just let us know.

Gateway Burn – June 14-17 – Eldridge, MO

We’re attending the St. Louis regional Burning Man event, which has always been a good time. We consider this group to be the closest thing we have to a ‘home group’ due to our history with them. This year it’s being held at a campground, and apparently electric hook-ups are available for RVs. If others join up with us, we’ll have an informal ‘Camp Nomadia‘ there, and perhaps even present a talk about life on the road. Or not. We may just kick back, relax and have fun!

Tickets are just $30 per person, and should be available up until a week before the event. Unlike other Burning Man events, this one doesn’t tend to sell out or have nomad-challenging ticket lotteries.

(Note, if you’ve not been to a Burning Man style event before – be sure to do your research in advanced to make sure it’s in line with your values… cuz you know, there might be nekkid people.)

If you can join us for any of the above, please be in touch – us@technomadia.com or by leaving a comment.

After these events, we should be in the St. Louis area for at least a couple of weeks.. and then who knows where from there.

Project Dominoes – Refrigerator Replacement

Chris Dunphy — Fri, 04 May 2012 16:24:19 +0000

There is an exhilarating yet exhausting game that every bus owner, RV owner, boat owner, and home owner will probably play at some point.

Project Dominoes.

In case you aren’t immediately familiar with the game, let me describe for you a recent relatively epic project dominoes tournament of ours.

First, you start with a single simple project…

Vitrifrigo DP2600

Project: Swap out the old Dometic propane fridge in our bus for a new energy efficient all-electric Vitrifrigo DP2600, purchased and shipped on sale from marine outfitter Defender.

Ok – maybe this isn’t strictly a “simple” project since the new fridge is slightly shorter than the old one, and thus reconfiguring our bus’s fridge cabinet we knew would require a bit of carpentry work.

And since the original converter is long deceased – we did not know if the fridge was built into place, or (sensibly) installed after the cabinetry work was completed. The measurements were tight, and there was a distinct possibility that the fridge might not even fit down the bus aisle or out the front door.

But fortunately my general contractor uncle in the Tampa area who had helped us with our kitchen and bath remodel was available for more work, so we set aside a few days to swing by and handle the project before leaving Florida.

Why replace the fridge?

With so much uncertainty and hundreds (literally!) of other projects waiting on our bus conversion projects to-do list, why replace a working refrigerator?

Our old Dometic 2-way (propane/electric) cooled quite well, but it had a broken thermostat – meaning that it was either always on (and thus freezing our veggies), or off (and thus thawing our fruits). We had to constantly keep an eye on the fridge, and toggle it off/on as needed. Annoying, especially when we had to leave for a few days and the entire contents of the fridge would end up freezing.

We could have gotten the thermostat fixed, but since we’re aiming to be Propane Free, we knew we wanted to replace the old fridge anyway with an electric compressor fridge optimized for running off our battery bank. We did extensive research into every possible refrigeration option for the space available, selected our top contenders (NovaKool and Vitrfrigo - both Danfross compressors), and when the opportunity presented itself to get the project handled we ordered a new fridge and dove in.

It seemed like a relatively simple and self-contained project. Right?

And the Dominoes Fall

The fridge project should have been a simple install taking just a day or two – leaving us a lot of time to use my uncle’s skills and tools to tackle some other smaller carpentry projects in the bus – perhaps a shoe rack, drawers in our desk, etc.

Here is how the fridge project ended up going down:

Step #1: Transfer all the contents of the old fridge into a big cooler filled with ice. This should keep our stuff from spoiling during the day or two we are without modern refrigeration.

Step #2: Take out old fridge. It requires removing a propane line, the fridge doors, the cabinet doors across from the fridge, and the grab-handle in the entrance of the bus to make enough clearance to get the fridge out, with only millimeters to spare. But overall it was a lot less work than I feared – I had been afraid that we might need to take the windshield out too!

And then before we even get to step #3, the unplanned for (but in the moment irresistible) dominoes begin to fall.

You can keep score by counting the number of unplanned for new tasks that get intermixed into the original project…

Well… While the fridge is out, it exposes the space behind, underneath the roof fridge vent. We might as well take advantage of this opportunity to run a conduit here so that when we eventually do solar, we won’t have to pull the fridge out again to run wires between the utility bay and the roof.
Over our past year of ownership, we have discovered that while the craftsman who did such a great job with our bus’s original conversion was a master carpenter, he was unfortunately not much of an electrician. One of his mistakes – when he did the conversion, rather than running conduit, he routed wires through the walls and inside the roof, and then filled this space with foam insulation – making it impossible to ever upgrade, repair, or replace the wiring. Making matters worse, we discovered that he had used the wrong type of wire for safely carrying high currents through foam-filled walls. Though most of our loads are low-amperage, the roof air conditioners are of course not. Worse still – our friend and bus-guru Sean discovered last year that the wire to the front air conditioning had actually been long ago damaged (probably by a stray screw or nail nicking it) and the neutral line was bridged to the bus frame, causing any GFCI we plugged into to instantly trip. Because of this, we had been planning to run new wires to the roof AC units when we installed solar, so if we are running one DC conduit to the roof for solar we might as well run a second for these future AC lines…
Why stop running conduit at the top of the roof vent? If we are going that far, we might as well run it to a junction box, and then T and secure conduit all along the top of the roof of the bus (in a position that would not be noticeable from the ground, but still left plenty of room for solar panels), all the way to each air conditioning unit.
If we are going that far, why not disassemble the roof AC’s and work out a way to route the new power lines into the air conditioning units from above (not how they were ever originally designed). If we do that, we can actually fully replace the substandard original wiring sooner rather than later – and feel safe going into the heat of the summer (did we mention we’re heading to Texas?).
Hey – now we are actually pulling new wires, and not just running conduit. Get out the fish tape, and crack open the breaker box!
Meanwhile, since the air conditioner shrouds are off, the coils sure need a major cleaning. There is twenty years of Arizona dirt caked on!
And hey – while the coils are drying, why not repaint the old yellowed plastic exterior shrouds? Shiny silver will be spiffier!
Woah – they look great! While the AC is disassembled from below for pulling the new power lines, let’s paint the yellowed inside shrouds as well!
We’ve now made major unplanned for improvements in how the roof of the bus looks from ground level, but the old very weathered MaxxAir rain shroud over the bathroom vent sticks out like a sore thumb now. Let’s get rid of it.
Uhoh – the bathroom vent lid underneath is severely cracked. Amazon Prime to the rescue – a new replacement lid can be here overnight!
The new lid is lower profile than the old lid – it won’t fully close over the top of the fan motor. The bathroom exhaust fan sounds like a screaming banshee, so we never use it anyway. Let’s disassemble it and remove it.
Back to the wiring – if we are replacing wiring, why not also run a new dedicated circuit for the fridge that allows the fridge to run on AC only when on shore power, and DC otherwise. This way the fridge is never inefficiently powered via the inverter.
And since we are doing that circuit – how about running a new wire to the kitchen counter outlets too, replacing the old non-ideal wires. Sure this means convoluted drilling through foamed walls and partially disassembling the kitchen window to route the wires, but it is worth it to be sure the wires we use daily for cooking (our stovetop is an induction cooktop, after all) are up to the task.
Since we are now redoing so much of the AC wiring and the circuit breaker box is all pulled apart, let’s also rewire the shore power cable to give it a more solid and safer connection.
While the breaker box is out, let’s also put better strain relief connectors where needed, and bolt it more solidly to the bulkhead.
Oh, what the hell – let’s keep going and re-run all the AC circuits that we can reach and which might conceivably carry a high-amp load. Like the water heater. And a new dedicated circuit for the microwave!
The other high-amp load we occasionally have is our electric space heater – sometime used in the bedroom, sometime in the front of the bus. But the existing wiring to the wall outlets in each place is essentially impossible to upgrade. It would be a shame to have all the high-current loads other than the heater on new safer wiring… So – why not put in an entirely new 20A outlet in the bedroom, and one in the living room?
Hey – let’s give all the upgraded outlets a special color faceplate so it is easy and obvious to know which circuits have the hefty wires and 20A breakers! Now they’re all a classy modern black.
Speaking of breakers… Let’s put in a dedicated GFCI breaker for the kitchen outlets.
Back to the fridge (fridge? what fridge? oh – yeah! There’s two of them sitting outside the bus we keep tripping over) – removing the old fridge revealed some water damage to the floor and walls under the roof vent. Let’s treat the wood and reseal it.
Let’s also redesign the fridge vent with some additional sheet metal to make it even harder for future driving rain to get in.
Years of rain and condensation had gotten under the old fridge, and had slightly rotted some wood. One of those pieces of wood behind the fridge that needed to be removed had the DC wiring for the kitchen cabinet lights and living room lights running through it, and these wires needed to be cut to get the wood out. Let’s use cutting those undersized wires as an excuse to run heftier new wires, with dedicated grounds so that we can start moving away from all the bus DC circuits being grounded only through the chassis.
The old DC fuse block is an ungainly home-brew affair with old-style glass fuses, and doesn’t even have a ground bus. Now is a good time to pull that big box out and replace it with a pair of Blue Sea Fuse Blocks, using blade-style fuses.
While we are rewiring the DC – we need a new dedicated DC circuit for the fridge too. It will be pulling 5A’s DC often now and should have a heavy-gauge wire with its own ground.
If we are going to run some new DC wires – let’s also run a new DC circuit back to the TV cabinet in the bedroom so that we can power our Top Signal cell booster and WiFiRanger WiFi Range Extender.
Wait – what?!? Aren’t the booster and WiFiRanger mounted in the front cabinet over the driver?!? Yeah – but that cabinet gets roasting hot and summer is coming. And if we relocate the electronics to the cool interior TV cabinet, we can (relatively) easily route wires for the antennas up through the fridge vent to the roof, instead of the tacky looking current wire running out the driver’s window.
Easily? While the fridge (wait, we have a fridge?) is out, maybe. But once the new one is installed it will be very hard to run new wires. And the odds of Technomads getting new wireless tech to try is pretty high. We would also have to empty the two intermediary closet cabinets every time to even begin to get access for running new antennas from the TV cabinet to the roof!
Great point – let’s run some open 1″ conduit from the TV cabinet to the space right under the fridge vent to make wiring new antennas easy.
Ah – and let’s also run another conduit down into the utility bay and across to the other side of the bus, so we can run some dedicated ethernet from the WiFiRanger to our office desks!
Now that the conduit is in place – let’s mount the cell and WiFi antennas nicely on the roof, but using a semi-permanent adhesive and zip-ties so that the tech can be easily changed, and no new holes need go into the roof.
The TV cabinet is partially on display – open to the bedroom, and easy to show off to tech-curious guests. If the booster and WiFi Ranger are going to be there now, let’s mount them to the wall and carefully run the wires to make the “Museum of Connectivity” look spiffy. (Look for a blog post about all the gear in this setup soon…)
Ah – but the blinken lights on all the electronics might keep Cherie up at night. Let’s use putty to carefully cover over all but the error LED on the booster. Why do electronics need so many blnken lights anyway? And why so bright?!?!
Hey… How long has this cooler been filled with warm brackish water? What day of the week is it, anyway? What ever happened to our plan to get a new fridge? Oh… I guess we actually better get started on installing that new fridge one of these days, huh?

This was all during the span of a dizzying few days last month.

But that’s how the game is of project dominoes is played, and once they start to fall there is sometimes just no stopping them.

We eventually got back on track, got the new fridge installed, and the cabinetry modified around it. We even managed to get some help from my uncle with a few other pending carpentry tasks, like partially redoing the front door, and building a passenger accessible iPad & laptop holder which doubles as a pull-handle on the door. (And we even discovered the original ‘Watch Your Step’ sign underneath the old rotting wood.)

There were a lot of the other tasks we actually planned on getting done that week, but the unexpected twists and turns (rewiring half the bus!) kept them on the back burner. Overall, we’re thrilled to have taken care of some very major projects on the bus and massively improved our electrical safety.

One thing is for sure, we doubt we’ll ever run out of projects on this bus!

Goodbye Florida .. Hello Next Chapter!

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:43:22 +0000

Yesterday afternoon we crossed the border into Alabama, ending our 5 month and 17 day stay in Florida. While we were roaming around quite a bit in Central Florida, that definitely ranks amongst our longest being in one geographic area during our 6 years of nomadic travels.

While there was little more than a road sign marking the crossing, it was quite the emotional border. It feels like the closing of a chapter, and the start of a new one.

The past several months have been quite intense for us, dealing with my father’s health (and if you read yesterday’s post – it’s also been wrapped up in our work life).

As I’ve said many times before, I can’t express adequately how blessed I feel to have a lifestyle where we could pull in and really be there.

It’s definitely been a time of shifting our focus inward towards family and ourselves, and thus – not much on a personal or adventure level to report here.

We extend our thanks to you – our followers and readers and friends – for being kind and understanding with the shift in content posted these past few months. We hope to have more variety to share again as we begin a new chapter of roaming, exploring and adventures.

We have a lot of work projects on our plate right now, so we’re carefully balancing long work days with a slow transition to Austin. This generally means we travel 150-200 miles, then park ourselves for a couple days to hyper focus. We’ve decided to concentrate on finding scenic and peaceful state parks during this segment to work from, and thus far – we’re quite pleased with the results. We’re taking lots of photos to share a wrap-up post later.

I write this from Gulf State Park in Alabama, which is a pretty ideal spot. While we’ve only made it a few miles from the Florida border, it was a big milestone for us. Our next stop will be the New Orleans area, which we just discovered is coinciding with Jazz Fest this coming weekend. So much for peaceful focused work time. Oh… darn.

We’re on track for arriving to Austin by mid-May, and will stick around for a couple weeks attending to some business meetings – providing we can string together enough RV space available for our time there. That’s proving difficult.

Anyway, that’s all to report for now..

We have some other upcoming events coming together. But for now – if you find yourself roaming around the midwest during the time period, then please save the dates of June 7-10 to join us in Dixon, MO for a little rally-type thingie. We’ll follow-up with details soon.

No One Is Truly A Born Entrepreneur…

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 14:00:45 +0000

We don’t talk much about our work life here. I puzzle at myself sometimes why we don’t.. after all a focus of this blog is about the intersection of travel and technology in our lives. Sharing more about our technology work life would seem like an obvious fit.

Sure, we’ll talk fairly in-depth about the iOS apps we’ve created. And I would imagine that leaves a lot of folks thinking we’re primarily mobile travel app developers. That’s the business aspect that came out of our own technomadic pursuits. It’s the easiest one to weave into conversation.

But there’s a lot more.

Me pretending to work in a cubicle (I never have)

I’m a lifelong entrepreneur who has vastly more experience working for myself than working for anyone else.

Not only that, but I am a second (maybe even third) generation entrepreneur.

I grew up in an entrepreneurial household.

I’ve been involved in a range of companies and ventures, but my most consistent income source comes from continuing to run some version of the software development business my father started in 1978. (Yes, computers existed back then!)

Perhaps I don’t share much about this part of my life, because I don’t feel my journey as an entrepreneur is all that helpful to others looking to get started. Or that I don’t want anyone to use the excuse that they’re not capable of it because they don’t have my history.

I don’t have an inspiring story like:

‘She woke up one day with a crystal clear vision and an unstoppable drive.‘

Or a story of woe like:

‘She got trampled by a herd of elephants after being laid off from her job and had to overcome immense odds to feed her family of 10 by selling pencils.‘

Or even the seemingly typical:

‘She hated her cubicle job and decided to take matters into her own hands.‘

I’m just me, incredibly blessed to be born and raised by a technologically pioneering entrepreneurial father and a wise & grounded banker mom (which by the way, is a kick-ass combination… and they’re gleefully in love after 42 years of marriage). Few step into adulthood and self-employment with an existing business to build from.

But really, I think it’s that running a business has been so deeply engrained in my life, that there’s not many natural opportunities to bring it up. It’s just simply part of who I am. Telling the story of when I “decided to become an entrepreneur” would be kinda like me starting to talk about when I decided to breath oxygen.

Woah – We’re Profiled in a Book

“No one is truly a born entrepreneur… but Cherie Ve Ard probably comes close.” - Chris Guillebeau, The $100 Startup

One evening listening to chirping critters on a tropical island last year, I quite randomly saw that bestselling author and popular blogger Chris Guillebeau was soliciting stories from ‘Unconventional Entrepreneurs’ for the sequel to his inspirational The Art of Non-Conformity book. I felt a kindred spirit with him after reading that book, but never thought in a million years I could be on his radar.

There *may* have been a little rum involved, but that evening I worked up the courage to submit a summary of my story. After all, what did I have to lose?

He got an astonishing 1500+ submissions.

So I tried my best to appear suave and debonair (and not the shocked blabbering idiot I felt like inside) when he approached me at a party at SXSW last year and said my story was on his short list of folks going to the next round. I answered my follow-up questions… and forgot about it.

There was no way he was going to pick my story with all of the amazing people he has connections with. The lack of follow-up contact seemed to confirm my suspicions.

Receiving my copy - woah. He picked me???

Imagine my surprise last week, over a year later, when Chris wrote asking what I thought of the ‘early galley’ (which apparently means ‘advanced copy’) he had sent me… and if I liked the way my story was presented?

What?!? He couldn’t be serious.

As our mail goes to our forwarding service in South Dakota, it had not yet reached us and wouldn’t for a while.

I went into nervous anticipation of knowing something was in print about me that was realistically capable of appearing on the New York Times bestsellers list, but I had no clue as what area of my story he was telling! And I wouldn’t see it for over a week??

So he had a freshly printed final copy of The $100 Startup overnighted to me. (I’m still in shock that I’m actually typing these words… really, little ole me.. in a big new book??)

I read it cover to cover the evening it arrived.

And WOW. Talk about inspiration. Of the 1500 submissions he got, he dwindled it down to 50 to profile in the book to show various aspects of being an entrepreneur and a huge variety of business ideas that worked for various people.

The focus of the book being that it doesn’t need to take a huge upfront investment to be successful. Just an idea, a straightforward plan and the ambition. He imparts a lot of practical advice from people like me who have actually lived it.

This book reminds me so much of growing up in an entrepreneurial household. I fondly remember afternoons spent with my father and a whiteboard, talking about these same subjects.

Find something you can provide.
Find something people will pay for.
Have a way for them to pay you for it (my mom usually interjected that point).

Whether I was 10, 15, 28 or now 38 – these have been normal everyday conversations my entire life. Bonding experiences with my dad, that lead us to becoming business partners for nearly 2 decades now (ahem – dad, you ARE retiring this year).

Only72.com

You can’t buy the experience I had. No book or course can give you the kickstart of what I grew up with, or the lessons I’ve learned after 18 years of my own entrepreneurship.

But there is something noteworthy happening starting in a couple hours - Only72 may give you a small taste of it. Adam Baker and Karol Gajda occasionally put together a 72 hour “fire sale” on a collection of highly regarded eBooks/eCourse for a fraction of their individual costs.

This time around, the focus is built around The $100 Startup‘s launch – and providing tools to help you build an entrepreneurial business. They’ve rounded up 18 eBooks and programs that can help you build pieces of your business… all packaged up for just $100 (appropriate to the book’s title!).

If you’ve been a reader here for long – you know that we strive to keep this blog as non-commercial as possible. We only share with you about products and services we are using and love… and then, only when an appropriate part of our own tale. We try to avoid pitching.

I’ll be honest, we’ve not read any of the included eBooks so I feel a touch hypocritical mentioning this deal. These just simply aren’t books we feel called towards (our business has been built the old fashioned way – blood and tears). But we do know that our friend Adam has an impeccable track record of gathering up the best of the best.

I’m inspired to share this deal with you anyway. In part, yes – because a hardcopy of The $100 Startup is included - which we are featured in (woo-hoo!).

But also because I know many folks follow us as part of their own journey in building a business model that might become nomad-compatible. So go take a look at their line-up and decide for yourself if the content might be worthwhile in your path.

But do it quickly, the deal starts today at noon … and is gone on Thursday at noon EST.

(And yes, we do get a cut of the sale if you purchase after clicking on these affiliate links.)

Back to the book

The most important business lesson I have learned from my dad was how to combine quality of life with work. And that’s the piece that Chris focused on with my story (he does also make mention of us in the roaming business section).

My dad and I - after decades of friendship, business partnership and family love.

Most of my early childhood was spent feeling the effects of an entrepreneur becoming so successful that running a business quashed his creative energy… the inspiring fun stuff fell to the back burner. Dealing with managing 50+ employees, investors and marketing became way too stressful.

One of the best things that ever happened was that larger company imploding (there’s a dramatic movie-worthy story here that you’ll just have to ask me about over drinks) when I was 13 and my father scaling it back to become a home-based, location independent business.

I’m quoted in the book about how my father lost some of his passion trying to run that larger business. That was way back in the mid-1980s. It doesn’t go on to tell you how the switch to going small drastically improved our family’s quality of life.

In contrast, my teens where spent with my father working from home, and me learning afterschool the art & joy of technology, software development and business from the most inspirational teacher I could ever have.

When I was 20, I decided to pass on completing college and I joined my parents full-time in that business… and eventually took it over giving it my own flair. We’ve strived for keeping it small and family focused. As a small team working from home, we’ve done some amazingly large projects… and we’ve had a heck of a lot of fun. And we continued, even as my home grew wheels.

I’m very shocked that any piece of my story made the cut at all. Especially with the switch of title to the The $100 Startup (not me) from the original Unconventional Entrepreneur (totally me).

As a lifelong entrepreneur who has since added my life & business partner (my Chris), my story really can’t be summed up in the few paragraphs portrayed in the book. My “start up” costs? Hah. I can’t remember a definitive ‘start up’ point and I can assure you the cost of all my businesses has far exceeded the $125 quoted in the book (that was just the latest corporate filing fee for one of our companies).

A single phrase describing my ‘business’?? Heck, in the book I can’t even clearly name a single company I have ownership in, which shows as there are mentions of Technomadia (not a business) and Two Steps Beyond (my and my Chris’ business). It’s no wonder I come off as having an identity crisis by being referred to as a web developer, app developer and healthcare consultant in various places throughout the book. Yes, I am all of those.

I’ve also been a de-clutterer, database manager, crafter, trainer, writer, magazine publisher, babysitter, social networking consultant, event organizer and Kiki’s favorite – cat feeder.

Even if you’re not feeling inclined to take advantage of the Only72 deal – I still encourage you to pre-order a copy of The $100 Startup which gets officially released on May 8 (available in hardcopy and Kindle).

Here’s a video trailer that Chris and his team just released about the book, showing you a couple of the prominent stories in it:

Buy it not only to see our story in print, but because there’s some awesome stuff in there.

(Use the link to purchase it through Amazon.com - and we will get a small cut, our ONLY financial interest in the book.. thanks!)

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads – The Roaming Pint

Cherie Ve Ard — Fri, 27 Apr 2012 11:38:23 +0000

Meet Maria Scarpello & Brian Devine

Maria & Brian hit the road in August 2010, launching from their college town of Lawrence, Kansas.

By containing their living costs, they are achieving their goal of

‘working part time and living full time’

Both work remotely in web and software design.

Along their journey, this couple found a way to combine their thirsts for travel and craft brew – and now write about roaming to visit breweries.

Direct video link.

Follow Maria & Brian’s adventures:

Beer & Travel Blog: The Roaming Pint
Travel Blog: Trippin With Stanley
Twitter Facebook YouTube

Stay tuned.. more nomads coming soon!

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads is intended to introduce you to some amazing people who are living life on their terms by traveling full time.

The entire video series will continue to grow at: http://www.technomadia.com/ramblings

Would you like to be featured in this series? Let us know when our paths might be converging and let’s hang out – and we’ll be happy to film you in person too.

Leaving Florida

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:09:30 +0000

Florida has played a big part in our life in the past year, and this week we reminence that it was one year ago that we made the decision to accept an offer on our Oliver.

We were also parked in Florida then and contemplating life ahead of us. It was much more of a whirlwind, as we had no plan for what to do after dropping our only home off with its new owner. Wow what a year it’s been since.

This time around we’ve been wandering Florida since mid-November, and I feel so incredibly blessed that we’ve been able to be with my family these past intense months.

But it’s time to move on.

We’re craving new adventures.

Work connections are calling us yonder.

And we’re starting to push up against residency grey areas that have us contemplating if we might need to officially move to Florida (on paper) to avoid any potential legal issues if we stayed much longer.

So this Friday, we’ll start our journey from north Orlando (where we’re at for the week) heading out of state.

Where are we aiming?

Technomadia's estimated route through the end of June

Well, first – Austin, TX.

Aside from it being my home town and where my bro lives… Central Texas is also where we have two work contracts. While none of our work is dependent on us being on site, we always find it well worth the while to have some in person time with our clients. Since we have nothing else on the calendar, Austin seems like a good destination to aim for – before it gets too hot.

We’ll take about 2 weeks to meander there, stopping along the way wherever captures our interest and balancing work time with drive time. And then we’ll likely stick around at least 2 or 3 weeks.

From there, we have our sights on St. Louis by the end of June to celebrate Chris’ grandma’s 90th birthday. Along the way, we have a couple of events we’d like to drop in on – a St. Louis area Burning Man regional and a bus rally.

As always, we welcome invitations to meet up with folks along the way – and especially appreciate offers to park the bus for a night or two. So if you’re not too far off our projected route and would like a technomad meet up, give us a holler: us@technomadia.com.

After June, our summer is a blank slate. With Burning Man pretty much off our calendar this year, we’re contemplating the possibilities of staying around the east for the summer. Usually by mid-July we’re setting sails towards Nevada, and haven’t nomadically gotten further into the northeast than Philadelphia.

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads – Kasson’s Wild Ride

Cherie Ve Ard — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 11:51:08 +0000

Meet Bill & Debby Kasson

Bill and Debby hit the road in July 2010, launching from Lake Tahoe in their 35′ gas powered motorhome. She is a CPA working remotely for her clients, and he’s an environmental analyst submitting his reports from wherever they’re parked.

Meet this dynamic and fun loving couple who count Burning Man, Hashing and Yoga amongst their interests.

Direct video link.

Follow Bill & Debby’s adventure on their blog at Kasson’s Wild Ride.

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads.. more nomads coming soon!

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads is intended to introduce you to some amazing people who are living life on their terms by traveling full time.

The entire video series will continue to grow at: http://www.technomadia.com/ramblings

Are you a nomad too and would like to be featured in this series? Let us know when our paths might be converging and let’s hang out – and we’ll be happy to film you in person too.

Chapter 6: Pets Can Be Nomadic Travelers Too!

Cherie Ve Ard — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:55:58 +0000

<— Read Chapter 5: Green Your Travel – Environmental Nomadism

Pets are part of the family to many, and it’s quite understandable why many folks make lifestyle compromises to keep them part of their lives.

As we have discovered – if wanderlust is your calling, you don’t necessarily have to give up having pets in your life. But you might need to make some compromises in your style of travel.

Take Your House With You

Kiki and her bus home

The easiest way to integrate a mobile lifestyle with pets is by selecting a style of travel that keeps your house with you so your pet is always at home. This might include an RV or a boat.

It’s not uncommon at all for folks traveling about in mobile homes to have pets onboard. By and large, most campgrounds have no problem with pets, making it even easier to find places to park.

Here are some inspiring examples of folks traveling with pets:

In RVs:

Louise & Sean – This duo has been traveling the US in an awesome bus conversation with their zoo, boondocking most of the time. They currently have two cats, but have previously had a fish tank on board. And sadly, their beloved dog Opal recently passed away. They are currently shopping for a live aboard boat to move on next.
Lynne – Lynne travels part of the year with her companion Millie – a yellow lab – in a Winnebago View.
Cat & Bryan – This young duo is traveling the US full time in a motorhome with a cat, bird, a bearded dragon and hermit crabs. Wild!
Nina & Paul – After a good amount of international travel, these two with their dog and 2 cats are now traveling the US via motorhome.
Rene & Jim – This duo took off in a fifth wheel after their dog Jerry was diagnosed with cancer. They enjoyed two years on the road with him before he passed on, and now have a younger tripawd family member, Wyatt. They also run a community site for three-legged furry family members.
Ramblecrunch – Canadians Renee and Mark are currently traveling Europe by RV with their 10 year old daughter and Scout, their dog.

In boats:

Steve – The original technomad Steve Roberts is finishing up preparations on a geeked out sailing vessel, Nomadness. Onboard will be Steve’s cat Java.
Jessica – Jessica has been sailing with her pooch, Kip McSnip – and together they wrote the book, Doggy on Deck, on sailing with dogs.
Laura & Patrick – This family aboard s/v Just a Minute is ending a 3.5 year sailing journey in Mexico traveling with a dog named Rudy.

As with having pets in any sort of home, there are things to keep in mind when keeping a pet in your mobile home:

Kiki hiking with us in Colorado

Always be aware of temperature and make sure that your home is comfortable for your pet, particularly when you are away from it.
Make sure your pets get enough exercise – most mobile homes have far less room to play and run around in.
Lining up vets, grooming and pet sitters across the country (and out of country) can be a challenge. We tap into friends, fellow travelers, and Yelp for recommendations. Make sure you keep current copies of all vet records and vaccine certificates, and take them with you to each vet appointment to avoid unnecessary treatments and vaccines. These are also helpful if you decide to cross borders. Tip: Some of us US domestic travelers have chosen Banfield Pet Hospital as our vet of choice – they have offices in many Petsmarts across the country, and have a centralized database of our records. They also offer an annual plan that includes all vaccinations and office visits.
Realize that everywhere you take your home may not be a welcome environment for your pets. Many festivals we attend have strict ‘Leave Your Pets At Home’ rules. Though when we explain that bringing Kiki with us actually is “Leaving her at home” we’ve had some luck getting the rule waived.
Pick brands of food and other supplies that are available nationwide, and keep close tabs on supplies. If you run out, you may not be nearby a pet store to run in and get more. Some folks even prepare their own food for their pets from raw foods – which are readily available most places they go. We have food shipped in on our Amazon.com Prime account to wherever we’re at, so that we are sure to keep a consistent brand always available for our cat.
Be in the know about local predators where you stay, especially if you let your pet outside – and always supervise them! Even supervising Kiki on a leash – we’ve had local campground cats get in fights with her, a scary rattlesnake bite and a flea infestation.

Other Forms of Travel

Living in a RV or a boat however is not the only form of full time travel that folks explore with their pets. It is more difficult but still possible to travel with animals via planes, buses, backpacking, bicycling, and more.

Kiki boarding her first flight!

In the 2010/2011 winter, we had an opportunity to spend 5 months in the US Virgin Islands – and we took Kiki with us. In one day she got to travel by car, shuttle, airplane and ferry boat, she’s such a trooper! As the USVI is a US Territory, the hoops were pretty easy to jump through – but it did take some research to make sure we wouldn’t encounter any snags.

For instance, our airline told us we’d need a health certificate from a vet, so we paid to get one (believe it was around $60 for the vet appointment and form). But not a single person along the way asked to see it – turns out, the airline was misinformed about the requirement. We also paid to carry Kiki in the cabin in a pet carrier placed under the seat in front of us – to the tune of $125 each way. Again, no one along the way ever asked to see her ticket.

All and all tho, Kiki traveled amazingly well and only got upset after going through 2 suddenly aborted landings in the middle of a highly turbulent approach to the island (heck, most the passengers were freaking out too!).

Last year during our bus hunt, we traveled extensively by train across the US. However, Amtrak doesn’t allow non-service animals on board – and we didn’t want the complication of traveling with Kiki while we needed to focus on finding our next home on wheels. So we made the decision to leave her with ‘grandmeow’ for a while. When we had our bus ready, we flew back to get her and bring her home.

Traveling with a pet does take making some compromises, and we do loose some flexibility by taking on the responsibility of creating a safe and comfortable environment for our cat.

International Travel

Kiki filling out her international travel certificate.

International travel is also possible with your pets, but quarantine, vaccination, permits and importation procedures can make this a logistically challenging and expensive venture. The added levels of cost and complexity make finding an extended pet sitter a very reasonable alternative – which is what we plan to do with Kiki when we start mixing in a month or two of international travel at a time.

But, that doesn’t mean people don’t make it happen. Based on the examples of folks traveling internationally with their pets, such as Renee & Mark above and folks & critters at The Road Unleashed, they seem to explore within quarantine borders and only rarely switch to a new location that requires going through the process over again.

For researching taking your pet into other countries, here are some resources to start with:

The USDA maintained list of animal export regulations

Pet Travel’s Immigration Guide

Ramble Crunch’s Guide to Taking a Dog to Europe

Pet Friendly Travel’s Guide to International Pet Travel

Don’t rely on these online resources however – the best and most accurate source of information will be directly contacting the country’s embassy that you plan to visit.

Other Options For Pet Love

If you are craving the love of a furry companion, there are alternatives even if it isn’t practical for you to bring your own pet on the road.

Finding opportunities to pet sit can be a very rewarding experience to get your snuggle time in, helping folks out and perhaps even earning a few bucks or free lodging in a new location. Christy & Kali of Technosyncratic have been finding housesitting gigs around the world to get their pet love time in.
Many campgrounds seem to have resident stray cats that love the attention of folks passing through.
Volunteering at pet shelters or rescue organizations as you travel can also be an excellent way to get time with animals and help out.
Visit lots of friends along the way who have pets.

Sometimes, taking your pet on the road just isn’t the best decision for them – as travel can be stressful. If you find your pet is stressed out with life on the road, it may be the best decision to find them a new loving home while you continue to explore your wanderlust. Charon over at OddAngel recently had to make this tough decision about one of her cats.

Our Pet Life

Kiki exploring the Pacific Coast as a kitten.

When Chris and I set out for our first seven month trial run of traveling together in 2007, we decided that my cat Alma was not meant to be a traveling cat. So Alma stayed behind with my ex – and we both thrived in our new homes.

But there was a furry void in my life, and Chris and I agreed that we would stay open for a travel compatible cat to join us on our journey. In the meantime, we took a few petsitting opportunities and enjoyed the companionship of animals whenever we could as we visited people and stayed at campgrounds.

While visiting some friends on a ranch in Oregon in December 2008, a seven-week-old bundle of cuteness named Kiki stole our hearts. A quick test trip proved that she was travel and allergy compatible, and she has been traveling with us ever since. Having literally grown up on the road, she has grown to be a natural traveler – having now traveled by truck, bus, car, airplane and ferry. We trained her from day one to walk on a harness and leash, and she’s highly adaptable to new situations – a perfect traveling cat!

Traveling Cat!

<— Read Chapter 5: Green Your Travel – Environmental Nomadism

Next Chapter Coming Soon: Community! —>

Resources:

Almost Fearless addresses a lot of tips and issues for traveling abroad with your pets.

Pet Corner – Nina and Paul of Wheeling It offer a lot of practical tips on traveling with pets, from RVs to international travel.

How to Travel with Pets - A website maintained by digital nomad Anil Polat, dedicated to the topic of traveling with pets.

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. We don’t aim to make a living off our blog, but a contribution to keep the blog going is always appreciated (think of it as taking us out for a beer or dinner).

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

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Vacation is not in our Vocabulary

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:10:01 +0000

Working on the beach (over-rated, actually... like sex on the beach, you get sand in places you don't want it.)

As we were pulling out of Cedar Key, we had a friend comment:

‘I liken this stop to being like a ‘vacation’… and now you come ‘home’ and back to balance. Or at least, that’s how I imagine vacation to be for a full-time RVer.’

Hmm.. Not really.

We’ve crafted such a lifestyle that is balanced between work, community, play and travel that even when stopped at a gorgeous tourist spot with lots of friends, it’s still not even close to being a vacation for us.

It’s just another day living at home, going to the office and doing non-work things in our off hours.

The hours in our day that seem like a vacation to outsiders – such as when we’re hanging out at a tiki bar, snorkeling on the beach or going kayaking with friends- is on par with the time that folks in a fixed location might spend in their day going for a jog before work, dropping the kids off at soccer or meeting up with friends for happy hour after a long work week.

Just happens the location, options for non-work activities and the cast of our social life change often.

We made this when the 'What __ thinks I do' meme was going around Facebook. Truth is.. it's all true for us!

Our designed life is about constant changes in scenery and pace.

Yes, Cedar Key was a change of pace after some intense months and full of social time in contrast. But we also worked a lot. We relaxed a lot. We explored a lot.

In other words, just another atypical day in the life of a technomad!

We always enjoy being neighbors for a bit with our nomadic peers who were also living a similarly balanced life. It’s a rare treat to be amongst friends who just get why we can’t come out and play all the time.

In the many years we’ve been on the road full time, I think I can count the number of times we’ve been on something resembling ‘vacation’ on one hand. Perhaps the occasional cruise is the closest we come. Even while participating in Burning Man we generally have satellite internet and are happily integrating in some limited work hours.

Yup, that about sums it up.

It seems counter intuitive to those who have to plan a vacation each year, and we catch a bit of flack when they see us working during theirs:

‘Shut the computer and enjoy the beach already!’

When you’re trying to convey it to those with a clear distinction of ‘vacation time’, it can be hard to comprehend.

“Our Job is Better Than Your Vacation” – a shirt worn by fellow nomad Pat Bonish of Low-Key Hideaway.

We think it’s pretty fricken cool that our office view changes regularly, and we get to constantly explore new places in our non working hours.

Our life is so varied that a typical vacation is not even something we crave. If there’s a place we feel like being, or we need a change of pace – we just move on, change our view and adjust to the pace that is calling us.

Our home office on wheels.

As entrepreneurs who are in total control of our work hours, it’s not even like hours equates to vacation. The variability of our lives is just that … life.

Sometimes we’re more focused on work. Sometimes more on fun. Sometimes more on family. And sometimes we struggle to try to do it all.

But in the end, our chosen lifestyle is all about balance.

We consider it a measure of success in finding that balance when ‘vacation’ is not a common word in our vocabulary.

Cedar Key Bliss

Cherie Ve Ard — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 21:13:22 +0000

Few places in our travels have seriously tempted us into actually looking at real estate during our visit.

Chilling in Cedar Key - Low Key Hideaway

Cedar Key was just such a place, and we can totally understand why our new friends Pat & Cindy Bonish took an extended hiatus there after their years of RVing to run the Low Key Hideaway.

Now mind you, we weren’t shopping for real estate to settle down at – heck no.

If we were to ever purchase real estate, Cedar Key comes close to our vision of someday being part of operating a nomadic landing pad. A place to come back to, switch modalities of travel, converge with peers and kick back for a spell.

Our dream place would need to have a deep water dock for our (eventual) live aboard boat, access to a runway to land & park our (eventual) single engine plane, a couple rooms for hosting couch surfers & a caretaker and have plenty of RV parking for our bus and fellow RVers.

It’s a nice vision, for sure.. but we’re nowhere ready to own or manage fixed property again.

For now, we’ll put Cedar Key on our short list of places to keep in mind for when we are ready… and here’s why.

Beautiful Sunsets

The first part of our stay was at Sunset Isles RV Park, where a few other NuRVers had been staying.

Our landing party, Debby & Bill had gotten sucked into Cedar Key there a few weeks prior when they fell in love with it. Soon after, Maria & Brian of The Roaming Pint… and Jeanette & Dennis of Cheddar Yeti landed as well.

That was enough to tempt us over to take a much needed break from being stationary in Melbourne. We enjoyed many pot lucks, dinners, hang outs, adventures and Tiki Bar fun with these guys.

Our tight fit to get an awesome waterfront view.

Upon arriving and seeing the waterfront spots, we were convinced to upgrade our reservation for the week.

Despite the tiny tight spots, it was totally worth it to wake up every morning to a direct water view and experience some of the most amazing sunsets. We had a dock right out our front window, which was perfect for morning yoga and sunset toasts.

Waterfront Bliss

After just 3 days there, we realized a week just wasn’t going to be enough. But Sunset Isles was unable to extend our stay in a waterfront spot.

Sunset from Low Key Hideaway

But no worries, mon.

Low Key Hideway is just a block down the road, and most our gang had been spending the evenings over there anyway at the Tiki Bar.

Pat & Cindy of EveryMiilesAMemory.com - RVers who got pulled into Cedar Key long term.

Low Key is run by on-hiatus RVers Pat & Cindy, and they’ve done amazing things with this property – boasting a few nicely appointed motel suites and 4 waterfront RV spots. They had just had a cancelation, and were able to get us in for a few nights to extend our stay and sunset views a bit longer.

We moved our bus over and parked with a Tiki Bar out our front door. How cool is that?

Low Key Town

Despite it's 'key' name - Cedar Key is located in the western 'armpit' of Florida, and off the beaten path.

Cedar Key has a very low local population. There’s one market in town, one gas station and a produce stand that is open only 4 days a week. There are no stop lights.

The feeling reminded us a bit of St. John in the US Virgin Islands where we wintered for 5 months last year – minus the mountains and beautiful tropical beaches, of course. However, unlike St. John – Cedar Key is only a reasonable drive away from major shopping and facilities.

It has all the chill quaintness with only moderate isolation from the rest of the world. A perfect mix for getting away without much effort.

Kayaking at Cedar Key - the tourist dock behind us.

Cedar Key does have a tourist component, but it’s done in such a way that is not overwhelming or overdone. All of the accommodations are individually owned classic motels or condos. There’s a dock on the water with all the tourist themed restaurants and shopping, which takes only a minute to walk through.

Going kayaking!

There’s plenty to do for the active minded – including kayaking (our crew renting a fleet of them for the afternoon), biking, walking, boating, fishing/crabbing and sipping a brew.

eXceSs leads the 'Chalk Talk' before starting the first Cedar Key Hash!

eXceSs and Lycktonite (aka Bill & Debby) even treated us to the first ever Cedar Key Hash, which gave us all a good scouting out of the area by foot. (Hashing, for those not in the know, is like the classic paper chase – except it’s with beer. It’s best described as ‘drinkers with a running problem’.)

Everyone we encountered in town was super friendly and chill. Even the postal office worker was wearing a tropical shirt and a smile.

Accessible & Desirable

While Cedar Key is out of the way, it’s also accessible. As soon as we announced we were heading there, we were flattered to be contacted by 3 different folks telling us they were re-routing to meet us there during our stay.

Elaine & Clarke and their Newell bus/RV.

During our visit, we got to meet fellow bus nuts and new to full time RVing Clarke & Elaine. They fit in just swell with all the NuRVers, and we had a great time hanging out with them.

Enjoying sunset with our friends Elliott & Ann

Our dear friends Ann & Elliott (and nomad wannabes) from the Savannah, GA area also made a weekend trip in their Le’Sharo (yes, the same one we borrowed last year after selling our Oliver, and Chris told a hilarious tale of our trials and tribulations) to visit with us. It was awesome.

NuRVer Jonathan joined us too!

And 3-year full time RVer and tech guru Jonathan got tempted and headed over to join up with the NuRVer crew too.

We feel that we’d have no problem selling Cedar Key a desirable & accessible stop-in spot for nomads of all sorts to come join up in community.

Wrap-Up

Hosting our 'until next time' Cedar Key dress-up pot luck dinner

Cedar Key was just what we needed, and we fully intend to return in the future. Probably many times.

Our visit was possibly a bit more on the social side this time around than we were were prepared for after coming off such an intense couple months with my folks. But we did manage to get a lot of work done in paradise (yes, we some how found the time, even if we did have to cut some of our evenings short) and get a tad bit of relaxation in.

What’s Next?

We’ve been spending the past several days in Spring Hill, FL – and just saw Chris’ parents off on their return to St. Louis after their snowbird winter. We enjoyed a most excellent Easter celebration with them, and my folks even decided to take a road trip and join us.

From here, we’ll head down to the St. Petersburg, FL area where we’ll contract Chris’ uncle to do some more interior modifications on the bus with us. On the list is re-finishing our front door, installing a new all-electric compressor fridge (we’re installing a marine designed Vitrifrigo to replace our old Dometic 2-way) and some additions to our dual desks for storage.

After that, we’re booked to be back in the Orlando area to take care of some business. Our plans beyond that are quite fuzzy.

Boosted Electrons = Better Views

Chris Dunphy — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 11:25:52 +0000

We’ve had a lot of requests for updates on our lithium battery system, but the truth is that it hasn’t been getting much of a workout.

We’ve spent the past several months focusing on being near family, and we haven’t had any opportunity to tackle the solar panel project or to do any boondocking.

Victron MultiPlus - The Postbox of Power

Instead of maximizing every electron in our battery bank, we have been hopping from pole-to-pole staying with friends and at RV parks, never really giving the batteries much chance to run down.

But…

We have actually been making good use of the other core piece of our electrical system – our Victron MultiPlus 3000VA Inverter/Charger.

And the special features of this inverter coupled with our ample lithium battery capacity have actually given us a lot of flexibility beyond what a traditional RV setup would have been capable of, very literally improving our outlook on life.

Read on to learn how!

Converter vs Inverter vs Inverter/Charger

Every RV with a DC electrical system needs some way to power the DC system and charge the batteries when plugged into AC shore power.

The most common way this is done is via a component known as a “converter” which takes AC 120-volt input, and then converts it into DC 12-volt output.

The ancient 50-amp converter that came with our bus.

An “inverter” does the exact opposite task of a converter – taking DC power from the batteries and transforming that into AC power suitable for running appliances like TV’s and microwaves and computers when shore power is not available.

Inverters range in size from pocket sized devices which plug into a cigarette lighter jack and which can handle just enough wattage to run a laptop, on up to big boxes that need to be hardwired with hefty cables directly to the batteries, and which can generate enough AC power to run even the heaviest loads such as air conditioners or power tools.

Many hardwired inverters are actually inverter / chargers – replacing the need for a separate converter. If you have an inverter / charger in your RV’s electrical system, it will keep your batteries charged when you are parked and plugged in, and all your appliances running when you are disconnected.

A good inverter / charger is the heart of a quality mobile electrical system.

Sine, Sine, Tell Me – Do I Need Sine?

In addition to a range of sizes ranging from 50 watts to 5000 watts (and up!), inverters are offered as either “Pure Sine” or the often substantially cheaper “Modified Sine Wave” style.

This refers to the shape of the AC power output curve coming out of the inverter – a “pure sine” inverter produces a perfectly smooth sine wave that is likely a higher quality than the hard-wired power at any RV park.

On the other hand, the curve produced by a “modified sine wave” (MSW) inverter looks like stair steps, not smooth at all.

Most small electronics can’t tell the difference – and if all you care about is powering a laptop and some lightbulbs a MSW inverter is a fine choice. But motors (like fans and power tools) and compressors (air conditioning units, refrigerators) will often eventually burn up on a modified sine input. LED lights will very faintly flicker. Some battery chargers will fail over time. And perhaps most annoyingly, some sensitive electronics and radios will pick up a buzzing noise when using a MSW inverter.

In our Oliver trailer we built the system around a 1500 watt Xantrex Freedom 458 modified sine inverter / charger – and though we were mostly happy with it, in hindsight I wish we had gone pure sine – if only because our 24″ monitor buzzed faintly if we left it plugged in, even when it was turned off!

With the bus, there was no question – we knew that we wanted to invest in the best possible inverter that we could find. And that meant not only pure sine power, but the ability to boost it.

Are More Volts Better?

The Quattro has built in support for two AC inputs - shore power and a generator, avoiding the need for an external transfer switch.
24-volt components have an advantage in that they can carry twice as much power over the same size wiring as a 12-volt system, and thus 24-volt inverters tend to be available in more powerful sizes and require less massive (and expensive) battery interconnect cables.

Most RV’s however are built around a 12-volt system, but some buses (not ours) are designed around 24-volts.

Though the advantages of a 24 volt house battery bank and inverter / charger are tempting even in a 12-volt bus, we still decided against it. Since we were designing a power system from scratch, it makes sense to go with a house system that matches the chassis system so that it is easy to charge off the alternator while underway

If we had gone 24-volt, the ideal inverter / charger for us would have actually been the Victron Quattro 5000VA, but because of the size of the internal components required and lack of market demand Victron has indefinitely postponed bringing the 12-volt version of this awesome inverter/charger to production, and only the 24-volt model is available.

The Transformational Magic of Boosting

There are two commonly sized plugs used to connect an RV to shore power.

50-amp cords are huge and hefty.

Most larger RV’s use a hefty 50-amp cord that when connected to a four-wire split-phase (240V) source actually provides 100 amps (two 50-amp legs) of 120 volt power – up to 12,000 watts! This is enough power to run multiple roof air-conditioning units, charge the batteries, run the microwave, and more – all without risking blowing a fuse.

Smaller RV’s (especially those with just a single roof AC unit) usually have a 3-wire 30-amp shore power cord that can deliver a maximum of 3,600 watts. This is plenty for most needs, but turning on the AC, a microwave, and a hairdryer all at once still risks blowing the fuse on your incoming line. And with a powerful enough charger, even charging a depleted battery and running the AC at the same time risks overloading a 30A shore power circuit.

30-amp plug ends

Most RV parks offer 30A and 50A sites (and commonly charge more for 50A), but very few people (we love those who do!!!) have 30A RV plugs in their side yards.

If you are setting up camp in a friend’s yard, a typical home power plug and heavy duty extension cord can only deliver a maximum of 15 amps, and if you use an adaptor to plug in your 30A or 50A cord and then draw more than 1800 watts you will be blowing the fuse of the circuit you are plugged into.

It isn’t hard to do this – particularly since outside outlets are often sharing a 15 amp circuit with other home loads, such as exterior lights or the electric garage door opener.

A 100' Heavy Duty 15-amp Extension Cord

A depleted battery and a powerful battery charger might actually be enough to blow a 15A shore power circuit even if no other RV loads are turned on.

Blowing fuses constantly is not a good way to get yourself invited back to camp in a friend’s side yard…

Fortunately, many higher end inverter / chargers have the ability to set a maximum shore power draw via a control panel or a dial. This way – as long as you remember to tell the inverter that you are on a 30A or 15A circuit, it will scale back and charge the battery slower – keeping you from using too much power and blowing a fuse.

But… What if even after the battery charger is dialed back to zero, you need 20 amps of power, and you are on a 15 amp circuit? Or 35 amps, and you are on a 30 amp circuit? What if you only need that surge of extra power for a minute or two, like the initial heavy surge current draw of an air-conditioning cycling on?

Victron's basic control panel makes it easy to set a shore current limit.

Depending on the inverter you have and how it is configured – in this case you are back to blowing a fuse on the shore power circuit, having your inverter shut down and black-out RV loads, or having the inverter switch over to power all the AC loads only by the battery – draining it exceedingly rapidly and leaving you with a dead battery even though you may think you are plugged in and charging.

The few, the proud, the boosters…

An exceedingly few inverters support the ability to “boost” the incoming shore (or generator) power with battery power – for example, taking 15 amps of shore power and adding 5 amps of inverted power generated from the batteries to provide 20 amps overall.

This lets you use electricity as needed within your RV, without worrying about overwhelming a limited shore power connection or undersized generator. As long as your average usage remains below what your shore power input can provide, your batteries will not end up depleted.

This seems like an absolutely invaluable feature – but for some reason none of the primary US inverter manufacturers support boosting at all. The only alternative from the traditional RV inverter manufacturers is the long-discontinued and now legendary Xantrex / Trace SW4024 and SW2012. Those in the know hop on these when used models come up for sale on eBay.

To get boosting in a new inverter / charger – we had to turn to the European companies Victron and MasterVolt, both primarily only found targeting the marine market in the United States.

Our needs were substantial – since our bus has no dash air, we needed an inverter powerful enough to handle at least one of our roof air conditioning units off of battery or alternator power while underway without needing to constantly run a generator.

After a lot of research – we settled on the Victron MultiPlus 3000VA model, one of the most powerful and capable boosting 12-volt inverter / chargers we could find. The MasterVolt Mass Combi 12/4000-200 was a close second choice, and also has a stellar reputation.

UPDATE: It appears as if Xantrex is bringing back the SW series! In November Xantrex announced a new generation of SW2012 and SW3012 inverter / chargers, with a new “Generator Support Mode” that sounds a lot like boosting! Xantrex’s reputation for quality has suffered over recent years, but for anyone looking for a boost-capable inverter, these are definitely worth checking out in addition to MasterVolt and Victron.

UPDATE x2: RV electrical master Sean of Our Odyssey has taken a closer look at the new Xantrex Freedom SW models, and discovered that they fail to offer the same true boosting capabilities of Victron, MasterVolt, and the still legendary classic Trace SW line. Read his comment on this post for some more of the disappointing details.

UPDATE x3: I just stumbled across a post on the RV.net forums from a former Trace engineer that indicates that a true replacement for the classic SW4024 is at last imminent:

“Actually we (ex Trace guys) are still here, just go by a different name now, Magnum. We do things the old Trace way, built in the good old USA with good old fashioned tech support that answers the phone!

We are just releasing a new model MSH4024M (MagnaSine Hybrid 4k, 24v)that does everything the old Trace SW4024 did including true “load support” where the inverter is sync’d with the generator or grid power in order to start and run larger loads than the generator or grid can support but with a much better wave form. A 12v model will follow this fall MSH2812M.”

This new MagnaSine Hybrid line isn’t even mentioned on the Magnum Energy website yet, but it looks like there may soon be another inverter option that lives up to the legacy of the classic Trace SW4024!

Boosting Inverter = Smaller Generator

RV generators have traditionally been sized so that they can handle the absolute peak load that they might ever need to power – in particular, the surge current of multiple roof air conditioners turning on at once.

Onan HQD810 Hybrid Generator - A 7,500W generator that uses a paired inverter to boost to 10,000W.

You thus end up with 7,000W – 15,000W generators typically running at a fraction of their capacity, only rarely ever even approaching full power.

If you instead use a boosting inverter to handle spikes in demand, you can get by with a much smaller, cheaper, and more fuel efficient generator. It is a win all around, and the money you save by going with a smaller generator will likely more than cover the cost of a more capable inverter.

Cummins Onan has even embraced this design philosophy in their new flagship hybrid generators, bundling a matched inverter / charger right with the generator itself.

Victron MultiPlus Thoughts & Observations

Overall we have been really pleased with our MultiPlus inverter – but there have been a few disappointments and issues.

The Victron manual and spec sheet claim to support a shore current limit as low as 11 amps, and the control panel UI allows this. But only after noticing it not limiting as expected and contacting Victron did they confirm that the low limit had been raised to 15 amps. This makes it harder to share a shore power circuit that may also have other loads on it like exterior lights or a garage door.
The Victron inverter has a built in ground relay that automatically connects the Neutral output to the chassis if no external AC supply is available. Inverters that lack this feature will trip any GFCI outlet that they are plugged into. Since most exterior home 15A outlets are required by modern electrical code to have a GFCI, an inverter lacking this could end up severely limited when side-yard surfing. The classic SW2012 lacked this feature – I do not know about the new version.
The Victron control panel displays a wealth of information.
The Victron is fabulously programmable via the “Blue Power Panel” remote control, and we can precisely set the charging profile to match our lithium batteries. But certain settings I wish were more configurable to better match our lithium battery setup. For example – the “DC Low Shutdown” can be set to any voltage, but the “DC Low Restart” must be at least 1.00 volts higher than the shutdown, and the Victron often needlessly flashes “low battery” any time the voltage is in this range. This is great for lead acid batteries, but lithiums drop so slightly over their range of use that I would prefer the ability to better customize this.
Victron’s newest (2012) models have added explicit support for talking directly with Victron’s own lithium batteries and battery management systems. I do not know if there is any way to integrate this in with a third-party lithium EMS, like the one we are using from Elite Power Systems. Our older inverter model is also not upgradeable.
I discovered a very weird bug with how the Victron Inverter and Blue Power Panel work together while installing the system, and actually thought that our inverter had died completely. In a nutshell – it is possible while connecting / disconnecting the battery power for the inverter to “crash” and get locked in a state that it will not wake up from – even toggling the hardwired power switch on the case does nothing. But – if you fully disconnect and reconnect the remote control panel (after leaving it disconnected for a full minute), everything resets and is fine again.

Using an Inverter to Improve Your Outlook on Life

The reason that so few companies have offered boosting is because so few people have really understood the benefits of it. So let me give a few examples from our past few months in Florida where being able to boost literally improved our views.

#1 – We spent the month of January staying on a friend’s absolutely beautiful patch of land in Kissimmee, with the only available source of power being a single outdoor outlet 50 yards away. By dialing our shore current limit down to 15 amps we were able to keep from blowing fuses, and thanks to boosting we were even able to run our electric heater on the coldest nights. In the morning the batteries would get charged, making up for the drain in the evening. Without our boosting inverter, we would have had to go without heat, or stay in a drab commercial RV park.

We love staying with friends whenever possible, and having a boosting inverter makes this vastly easier than it would be otherwise.

#2 – Just this week we have been staying at a commercial RV park on the water in Cedar Key, FL. Though we have a 30-amp outlet available, to reach it with our shore power cord we have to park the bus rear-end towards the water. But since we can get by with 15 amps thanks to boosting (and can even run the AC during the heat of the day!), we have been able to use a common heavy duty extension cord to allow us to plug in and park the bus nose in. (Sure we could carry around a huge and expensive 30A extension cord, but the bulk wouldn’t be worth the rare times that we’d actually be able to use it…)

Facing the other way, we would spend the day looking at a parking lot full of generic 5th wheels.

Tell me, which view would you rather have out your front window???

Sixth Nomadiversary

Chris Dunphy — Sun, 01 Apr 2012 21:22:11 +0000

Six years ago today, right as the sun was rising, I left my apartment keys on the counter and pulled the door shut behind me.

I had no set plans about where I was going. I didn’t have any mobile-friendly work lined up. I didn’t have a partner by my side to share the adventure with.

Just two months earlier (without even a trailer or tow vehicle picked!) I had given my landlord irrevocable notice that I would be out on April 1st. All my belongings had been purged via an intensive month of Craigslisting, Goodwilling, and a final epic take-my-stuff-home-with-you house cooling party. What remained was crammed into a borrowed Jeep, or piled into a small storage unit.

I was very literally heading out with no idea where I would be sleeping that night – my new T@b trailer had been delayed and was not yet ready to be picked up and moved into.

My world was filled with uncertainty. But I trusted that I would figure it all out each step of the way.

And I was absolutely thrilled to death.

A snapshot from my second month on the road – camped alone with my Tab, Jeep, and paramotor – preparing for a sunrise flight.

Six years have passed, and a lot has changed.

Instead of living in a new 16′ T@b Clamshell with essentially no amenities (or plumbing!), I am in a 35′ vintage bus that is over fifty years old and decked out with more technology and creature comforts than many homes.

Instead of traveling solo, I have an amazing partner by my side.

Instead of wondering when the next paying gig might come along, I’m wondering how to best keep an ideal work/life balance (focused on the ‘life’ side!) as I juggle all the pending and potential projects we have.

Instead of feeling alone on this technomadic path, I am now surrounded (this week, literally!) by a community of other full-time travelers who have charted a similar course.

Nomadic Serendipity at work yet again… Today we participated in the impromptu first ever Cedar Key Hash with a bunch of other nomads. A very appropriate way to celebrate my sixth nomadiversary!

The future is still filled with a lot of uncertainty, and the road ahead remains mostly unknown. But I continue to trust that no matter what comes along, I will always be able to move forward figuring it out a step at a time.

That is what nomadic serendipity is all about – and trusting in it has given me a wealth of encounters and experiences that I could never have planned, predicted, or prepared for.

Life is good.

And, six years… Wow!

What’s next?

Memory Lane:

Fifth Nomadiversary – Giving up nomadism and buying a condo (not!) in the Virgin Islands.
Fourth Nomadiversary – Discovering the secret prize that comes inside every box of wine.
Third Nomadiversary – Camped on a beach near Malibu, watching dolphins frolic.
Second Nomadiversary – Working with Cherie to custom design our Oliver, moving up from a trailer ideal for one to one made for two.
First Nomadiversary – Preparing to set out with Cherie, reminiscing about my first very eventful year on the road.

Marching On

Cherie Ve Ard — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 11:53:27 +0000

The month of March found us mostly staying put in Melbourne, FL to be close to my parents.

Aside from seemingly endless doctors appointments and treatments; we managed a lot of chill quality family time, catching up on work & projects, exploring the area and some social time. My brother and his girlfriend were able to come out for a visit, which was marvelous.

Brevard Attractions

As we wrote about in a previous post, we took the opportunity to explore some of the local attractions around Melbourne.

Space Coast Stadium - Spring Training

We spent an afternoon at a spring training game at the Space Coast Stadium, between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Washington Nationals – and we had a ball (pun intended).

At the Start Line

We ran in a 5k/10k adventure charity run at Forever Florida – an eco aerial center between Melbourne and Kissimmee. We definitely want to return here, as they just opened up the first zip line roller coaster in the US!

And we attended a charming rendition of musical The Drowsy Chaperon at the Melbourne Civic Theatre.

We enjoyed some hiking at the nearby Malabar Scrub Sanctuary.

Bus & Tech Projects

While still, we tackled a couple of bus projects.

Obviously, we completed our sink install.
Chris hooked up the bus’ large 220 amp inverter to our Lithium Ion Battery bank & inverter so that we can charge while under way (and run one of our air conditioners)
High-Tech Fuel Gauge
And we installed a high-tech fuel gauge (the number tells the driver when to start looking for fuel).
We updated our off-site back-ups to leave behind with my parents.
WiFiRanger Pro & Sky
We received a new WifiRanger Pro and Sky from the great folks at WiFiRanger to beta test for them – we’ll have reports up on our findings. These gadgets help RVers boost WiFi signals (such as from a campground, host’s home or public hotspot). This came in quite handy during our Melbourne stay, as the campground only allowed us to use one MAC address. With WFR, we were able to use that, boost the hotspot signal and then re-broadcast the signal inside the bus to all our devices. It also can route our cellular data signals too – making this a quite promising device for us.
A nomad day.. with iPads!
We upgraded one of our iPad 2′s to the ‘new’ iPad (we went the Verizon model.. see our post about choosing a 4G network for why).

Social Time

Melbourne also seemed to attract some other visitors to the area, who we were able to converge with. We greatly appreciated the social breaks.

Indialantic Beach with Barb

My dear and long time friend Barb, former sailing nomad and awesome jeweler (who made our commitment rings) took a diversion from her Disney vacation for an afternoon with us.

Long time reader and future technomad, Bob, was out visiting family and spent an afternoon with us hanging out in the bus to geek out.

And Charon and her beloved were in town for a guest appearance at a local tattoo shop, so we were able to get a second casual visit in with these amazing fellow Airstreaming, sword swallowing, tattooing nomads.

Cedar Key

We received some promising news on my dad’s health – although there’s still a lot ahead for him. Feeling quite relieved & blessed, our monthly site up for renewal and being quite ready for some re-charge after 3 very intense months for our family – we decided it was a good time to meander.

We were also craving more extended social time with peers. With a convergence of NuRVers seeming to spontaneously happen – we set our sights to Cedar Key, FL.

Our waterfront spot at Sunset Isles RV in Cedar Key

It’s been on our list of places to visit for a while, and now we know why. We are loving it here.

NuRVer Cedar Key Convergence

We’ve joined up with some other awesome RVers – Jeanette & Dennis of Cheddar Yedi, Maria & Brian of The Roaming Pint (by the way, check out this fun interview they recently did with us about beer travels) and Debby & Bill of the Kassons Wild Ride. We’re also next to the Low-Key Hideaway, where RVing nomads Cindy & Pat of Every Miles a Memory have been hosting for a few years now.

And almost as soon as we announced our arrival, we started having more friends and fellow-nomads decide to head our way too. We’ve gone from relative social starvation to saturation in no time flat.

Our Facebook followers have been tormented with photos of time here, but we’ll do an appropriate wrap up post later. We still have several days left on our planned stay.

What’s Next?

Next week well head south back to Spring Hill for Easter with Chris’s parents before they end their winter snow birding season.

After that. We haven’t a clue. We’re still playing things by ear, and probably won’t want to venture more than a day or two’s drive away from my parents for a while.

Which works well for us – we just agreed to take on a custom iPad development contract, so we’ll be looking to find a balance that gives us lots of focused work time over the coming months. We’re contemplating everything from finding someplace scenic in Florida to plop down at for a bit (perhaps back to Cedar Key??) to venturing further away. A visit to Austin to be near my brother and then up to St. Louis in June is also a possibility.

We don’t generally plan more than a week or so out.

Green Your Travel – Environmental Nomadism

Cherie Ve Ard — Fri, 30 Mar 2012 14:15:47 +0000

<— Read Chapter 4: Family Aspects of a Nomadic Lifestyle

Read Chapter 6: Pets Can Be Nomadic Travelers Too! –>

One concern we’ll hear from more eco-aware folks is that traveling full time would inevitably have too high of an environmental impact for them to leave home without bringing along a hefty burden of eco-guilt.

This guilt is understandable – a life in motion consumes resources, and we certainly do not dispute the environmental impact of travel.

But we have found that being green(er) while traveling is actually very achievable. And indeed, it is often possible to have less of an environmental impact living nomadically than by living a more typical American lifestyle (which generally includes travel for work and pleasure anyway).

Each of us needs to find our own balance that combines exploring the world with preserving it. And if you stay conscious to your consumption, you don’t have to compromise your wanderlust for your desire to live a sustainable life.

Choose Greener Forms of Travel / Travel Slower

Every mode of transportation has a different footprint on the environment. Air travel is generally considered the dirtiest mode of transportation and walking/biking the cleanest. The energy consumed in getting from place-to-place is one of the most substantial impacts a full-time traveler has.

One solution? Slow down!

Spend more time in one location and less time in actual transit. Stay in places long enough to get a feel for them, and immerse yourself in the communities you visit.

If you are keeping a relaxed enough pace, you can actually log a lot fewer miles than a typical suburb-to-city commuter will over the course of a year. And since you are not repeating the same route day after day, you will see SO much more of the world too!

Also consider greener ways you can get to where you want to be. For example – what about taking a slower route via rail or sailing, instead of flying? Or you can do like some nomads have and use human power to bike, walk or run.

Make the journey part of your destination and you’ll add value to your travel experience and decrease your impact while doing so.

For those who’s form of travel is physically moving their mobile house (RV or boat), find ways to green them as much as possible. They range greatly in energy needs and construction – research and select based on your priorities.

Integrating in alternative energy sources, like solar and wind – not only reduce your environmental impact, they can increase the range of options for places to visit. Some diesel RVs can even be converted to be powered by waste vegetable oil (WVO), which lowers environmental impact and reduces costs dramatically. We’ve met full-timers who have gone for years without paying for fuel!

Reduce your Destination Impact

Once you’ve arrived to a place you’re planning to stay for a bit, find ways to reduce your impact and respect the local ecosystem while learning about your new surroundings.

Be there long enough to contribute to the community – either financially to the local economy and/or through volunteerism.
Find ways to support local businesses.
Eat foods grown and made locally. Eating locally reduces the impact to the earth for foods shipped halfway around the planet to catch up to you – and it helps you really experience the locale.
Seek out greener options for your lodging.
Use public transit, walk or bike instead of driving around town whenever possible.
Be aware of your impact.

A full time traveler has a unique opportunity to have their visits to places be contributive overall, as well as gaining unique perspectives on our planet.

RVing and Being Green

We’re often asked to justify our full time RVing lifestyle, as it’s perceived by some as being a very environmentally dirty way to live. This often begins with criticism of the lower fuel efficiency that most RVs have.

For the record, being green is important to us, but it is not the primary goal of our journeys. There are many others striving for much greener RVing lifestyles than we manage.

But with just a little care, even a less conservation obsessed traveler can actually end up living a greener life than most living a more typical fixed lifestyle.

As an example – here is what we have learned carefully watching our fuel, water, and power consumption over our years on the road.

Fuel Consumption

This is where RVing gets its dirty reputation. Mobile homes burn fuel. And lots of it.

Our bus, on a good day, gets 7 – 7.5 mile per gallon burning diesel fuel. Many larger motorhomes get fuel economy in this range (typical seems to be anywhere between 5 – 9 mpg), and some other optimized configurations can get into the teens. The most fuel efficient small diesel RV’s (usually based upon a Sprinter chassis) can occasionally manage 20+ mpg, but that sort of efficiency is exceedingly rare.

When we were towing our homes, our Truck/Oliver combination was 12-13 mpg (gas). And our Jeep/T@B combination was 16-18 mpg (diesel).

Compared to us previously living ‘at home’ and each driving around a high fuel economy Prius – yup, those seem like pretty bad numbers.

But here’s another perspective – our annual fuel consumption over the years:

Our Annual Fuel Consumption - Before & After RVing

Living on the road changed our lifestyle. Driving our RVs around has been not that much more fuel consumption than driving two Prii (Priuses).

Pre-Nomadic

When we were stationary, Chris had an apartment in San Francisco and commuted 45 miles each way, daily. And that’s not including his ‘fun’ non-commute miles during his off time. Annually, he easily put 30,000 miles on his Prius.

Cherie worked from home and didn’t have a commute, but most of her miles on her Prius were on weekends to go visit friends or longer road trips. She would put on what is considered typical mileage of 12,000 miles per year.

Combined, we probably consumed about 926 gallons of fuel a year.

But keep in mind.. we each had a Prius getting on average 45 mpg. Had we been driving more typical American high efficiency cars getting, say 28 mpg, we’d would have been burning 1500 gallons a year.

RV Nomadic Years

Now with both of us working from home remotely while on the road – all of our miles are either in the RV or touring around where we’re visiting or running errands. And we have complete control over those miles! No more required commutes. We pick the pace of our travels (which has slowed down over the years). Some months we may be parked still and just doing some minor local driving. Others, we may be making a cross country transition.

Obviously, this is just one example based on our unique circumstances – but hopefully it shows you some perspective. Living in a micro small space like the T@b was actually pretty much on par with our previous commuter fuel consumption. And at worst, our bus has made us 30% less green from a fuel consumption viewpoint… than driving our Prii around. If we had previously driven more average vehicles, we’d be ahead.

But here’s the biggie – WE’RE MOVING OUR ENTIRE HOUSE. And that, to us, is a significant and important point.

Water Usage

Ok, now here’s where RVing will pull ahead for most people.

I will argue that just about any RVer will use less water than they would in a regular fixed home.

Why? Simple.

All of our water & sewer is handled by tanks – that we have to monitor and fill/dump.

RVs generally have a fresh water tank for holding clean water for cooking, cleaning and perhaps drinking. They then have holding tanks for used water (grey) and toilet sewage (black). Because RVs have limited space and weight capacity, those tanks are limited in size. And it is that size limitation that affords RVers a green card on water usage.

Regardless if we’re trying to be eco or not, filling and dumping tanks is an annoying (even icky) chore. Even while parked at a site with full sewer hook-ups, the tanks have to be dumped routinely (just leaving them open is asking for trouble). Depending on the size of the tanks and water usage, that can be every few days to every couple of weeks.

This awareness that every drop of water that comes out of the faucet goes into your holding tanks, that you will then have to dump – just simply makes most of us use less water. When you can just turn on a water faucet in a traditional home without worrying about running out or having to find a way to dispose of the dirty water, it’s very easy to lose touch with how much you’re using. Even if you look at your water bill monthly and see how much is used in a month, it’s really hard to quantify just what that means because you’re not physically handling all of the actual wet stuff.

Looking back at my average water bills for my house in Florida before I hit the road, we were using about 1000 gallons a month PER PERSON. This seems incredibly wasteful to me now.

In our bus, even if we’re being totally glutinous with our water usage, it’s rare of us to need to dump our 100 gallon tank even weekly. At most, we are using 400 gallons a month of water – or 200 gallons per person. Ok, sure – we’re not doing laundry at home anymore. So let’s add another another rough guess of 100 gallons a month for the 3-5 loads a month we do.. and call it 250 gallons a month, per person. Max.

Even not thinking about water conservation in our bus, we use 1/4 the water we did previously in our fixed based home.

Now, get us off-grid and away from easy access to fresh water and dumping, and we can revert to our ultra conservative water usage methods (we could make our Oliver’s 38.5 gallons last 2+ weeks at a time). In those cases, we can easily bring our water consumption down to less than 100 gallons per person.

You can read more in our full report on how we conserve water.

Power Usage

Living off battery power for any extended period of time will make you VERY aware of your power consumption. When RVing, unless you are living pole-to-pole, you’ll probably have some periods of time when you want to be away from shore power. Whether it’s overnighting in commercial parking lots while on the move, or staying an extended period of time boondocking in scenic locations.

RVers who spend time off the grid tend to also invest in energy efficient modifications – such as LED lighting. We do this not to save money on our electricity bills, but rather to extend the range of our batteries.

Before hitting the road, I really had no concept of how how much energy I was actually using. But now after years of living off of solar filled battery banks, monitoring our usage is just a part of life.

When I flip on a LED light, or power on my laptop, thanks to our battery monitoring system, I know exactly how much energy I’m depleting from our battery bank. Being that aware can mean the difference between being able to stay in an awesome off-grid location another night, or needing to seek a replenishment soon.

Other Advantages

There are some other edges that RVers and boaters have that tend to also mean a lower environmental impact.

We have a very limited amount of space – so we tend to buy less stuff.
Mobile dwellers have the option of following the weather, thus reducing energy use to heat or cool their homes while at their destination. And even when we do need to heat or cool, our space is so much smaller to regulate – resulting in a much lower overall energy consumption.
We’re often visiting beautiful places and are inspired to do our part to keep them that way.
Our homes take less resources to construct and maintain.

<— Read Chapter 4: Family Aspects of a Nomadic Lifestyle

Read Chapter 6: Pets Can Be Nomadic Travelers Too! –>

Resources:

Go Green Travel Green – Offers tips for the eco-conscious traveler.

Cheap Green RV Living – A sibling site of the Cheap RV Living community focused on greener RVing.

Green Tortoise - Want to leave the driving and planning to others? Green Tortoise offers socially conscious travel adventures in their awesome sleeper buses

No Excuses: Go Nomadic

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 along with the updates to 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

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads – How They Fund Their Travels (Compilation)

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:32:12 +0000

In what seems like a short time ago, the NuRVers gang had a major organized gathering in Gonzales, Texas called ‘Days of the Nu 2′.

NuRVers 'Days of the Nu 2' Gathering - Photo by Sarah Janssen.

Not only were we fortunate enough to attend this unique convergence of other full time RVers who work as we roam – we took on the task of filming video interviews during the event.

We had great intentions with the project – ranging from producing a feature length film introducing you to some inspiring people to perhaps publishing a video podcast series with the footage.

But between some technical glitches getting the video in a format we could edit, life shifting focus for us and swimming in dozens of hours of footage – I really came to appreciate those who have the patience, dedication and talents to put together such projects.

I realized this week – it’s been nearly 2 years since that gathering in April 2010!

We’ve past the point of the project being nearly ridiculously delayed and into a point where the project could take on a whole new perspective.

Below is short compilation I put together from the interviews, focused on introducing you to some of these downright inspiring folks. Each clip shares with you how long the RVers were into their journey at the time, how they were keeping funded and some words of inspiration.

Over the coming weeks we’ll be tracking down each of these NuRVers and seeing if they’d like to update us on their journeys with a follow-up interview.

We’ll be posting those interviews along with some more of their original video footage – we think it’ll be interesting to see where everyone is at today. Are they still on the road? What adjustments and life changes have they made – new income sources, new RVs, new family dynamics, new goals?

Ramblings: Tales from Nomads

We love how many stories we’ve been blessed to hear from our peers over the years, and the sheer variety of how this lifestyle can be made to work. So we’re making a video series call ‘Ramblings: Tales from Nomads’.

As we encounter other nomads in our own travels, we’ll film the ones willing and introduce them to you.

You can catch the entire series at: http://www.technomadia.com/ramblings

We hope you have enjoyed the video and what is to come.

The Brevard Zoo Treetop Trek

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 19 Mar 2012 11:58:47 +0000

We’ve spent the past several weeks in the Melbourne, FL area (which is where I lived before I hit the road full time with Chris). Obviously our main purpose in being here has been to be with my folks during my dad’s treatments.

But we have been making time to get out and explore some of the attractions in the area. Thought we’d share some of what we’ve been up to.

The topic of today’s post – a visit to the Brevard Zoo’s newest attraction, the Treetop Trek.

Treetop Trek

I’ve always loved the Brevard Zoo – for a local community zoo, it’s really well run and the habitats amazingly natural and spacious. Recently however they took the bar up a notch and into the tree tops by installing a zip line and aerial challenge course. This combination is one-of-a-kind experience.

On my brother’s recent visit to the area, he and his girlfriend joined Chris in checking it out. And they had an excellent time.

Carrie, Chris & Ken go through Zip Line Training

They opted for the full on Treetop Challenge Course - which was 3 hours of a combination of zip lines and obstacle “games”.

View from the ground - over the spider monkey enclosure. The obstacles are so well integrated into the environment, that zoo patrons on the ground hardly notice them.

View from the trees! (That's my mom and me!)

It starts out easy through the ‘Canopy Walk’ course that puts you over many of the animal enclosures. There are even signs describing the animals below – a great way to experience the zoo!

Aerial challengers have to agree to not taunt the animals or zoo patrons below them – but this rule definitely does not apply in the reverse *grin*.

Island Obstacle Course

Then challengers get zipped onto an island of escalating in difficulty (and height) challenges.

About to zip over alligators!

Followed by dozens of interconnected zip lines returning you back to the zoo area, with an extra long one taking you right over a pit of alligators and zoo patrons (not sure which is scarier).

Here’s some video clips from two differing perspectives:

Quick video clip of Chris zipping over a pit of alligators.

Quick video clip of my bro zipping over alligators – from the platform perspective.

The final obstacle. Extra challenging as it's over the kid's play area - so no cursing allowed!

The entire course is unguided, making the Treetop Trek a somewhat unique find as you go at your own pace and have to figure out the challenges. My brother, an adventure junkie (his hobbies include pilot, skydiving instructor, BASE jumper, wing suit flyer and rock climber), was thoroughly impressed by the experience.

The whole crew said the $48 admission price was more than worth it. They also took GoPro video of the entire experience from two different cameras. If they ever find the time to edit them into a produced video, we’ll update this post.

Feeding my mom to a dinosaur

Meanwhile, on the ground – my mom and I were no safer as we wandered through the zoo’s Dinosaurs: Dead or Alive exhibit. (These are actual REAL fake dinosaurs… they growled and spit on us!)

The Choice: Verizon or AT&T’s 4G/LTE Networks?

technomadia — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 11:20:14 +0000

One of our most frequently asked questions (right up there with “How old is that bus?” and “Oh, wow, is that a cat on a leash!?!”) is “Who has the best cell network?”

As technomads who have been living and running our business on the road for 5+ years now, indeed, we have more first hand knowledge about staying connected than most, and have written some internet connectivity posts offering up advice.

We can tell you all about the pluses and minuses of every network in the USA, usually because we’ve tried them all out.

But as for the best one overall? In short, there is no simple answer.

If you live in one location and only travel occasionally, it’s relatively easy to pick a network. Obviously, you go with the one that you’ve observed to have the best service within your area, knowing that coverage and speeds may actually vary block-by-block in your neighborhood due to tower placement and network load.

While there might be an obvious “best” network for a given neighborhood, us frequent travelers have a harder choice to make. There simply is no single best network everywhere nationwide. All of the big four have their strengths and weaknesses in various locations across the country.

And they are all at different stages of evolution in their technology roll out. Verizon and AT&T are the first to bring the latest LTE technology to market, but while Sprint and T-Mobile lag behind, they are headed that way as well.

With the new iPad coming out later this week on Verizon and AT&T’s LTE networks – the “best network” question is once again buzzing all over. If you are going to stand in line on Friday to get a new iPad you’ll be faced with a choice: AT&T or Verizon. Or neither – and go with a WiFi version and use your existing internet pipelines.

Which should you choose?

Does LTE even matter where you plan to travel?

What on earth is LTE, anyway?

LTE

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is the latest and greatest cellular wireless technology standard that promises a future filled with blazing fast mobile internet speeds – so fast that even watching streamed HD video on the go is possible.

But with great speed comes great responsibility.

Using LTE it is theoretically feasible to actually use up an entire month’s 5GB data allotment in a matter of minutes, so you need to watch your usage carefully! HD video may be possible, but for now at least, it is not advised.

Both Verizon and AT&T have been aggressively rolling out LTE equipment and service, and Sprint has announced they will be abandoning their current WiMax 4G network to embrace an LTE future too. Even T-Mobile will be migrating towards LTE in the coming years, at last unifying all the major carriers under a common technological standard.

Verizon (red) vs AT&T's (blue) LTE Networks

Above is Verizon’s (Red) vs AT&T’s (Blue) current LTE network, compared head to head using the newest release of our app ‘Coverage?‘.

If LTE is your goal, as you can see, Verizon is far ahead in rolling out coverage into many more markets than AT&T currently serves.

But LTE isn’t everything…

“4G”

While LTE has always been considered a 4G technology, lately the term “4G” has largely devolved into a marketing term to mean “anything faster than what we used to call 3G”.

What Verizon labels as “4G” is LTE, and the speed difference over Verizon’s older slow CDMA 3G network is night and day.

AT&T and T-Mobile though both evolved their 3G networks to support an intermediary technology called HSPA+, which though it is based upon third generation wireless technology, it is actually capable of speeds that in the real world are vastly superior to the older “3G” networks.

Some carriers called their HSPA+ networks 3G+, but AT&T and T-Mobile decided that the user visible difference was enough to start marketing their HSPA+ networks as “4G”. With this bit of redefinitional wizardry accomplished, suddenly AT&T’s 4G network jumped from being way behind Verizon’s to being somewhat ahead.

AT&T even finally convinced Apple to display HSPA+ coverage as “4G” on the indicator status of the HSPA+ capable iPhone 4S (if you’ve noticed this recently when you upgrade to iOS 5.1, that’s why – you’ve actually been getting this coverage all along.)

The new iPad though is capable of both HSPA+ and LTE, but AT&T makes it a bit hard to tell what coverage they have where.

It’s only through deep digging that you can determine what parts of AT&T’s network are using the faster LTE standard. In our ‘Coverage?‘ app, we’ve done the work of making that difference easily visible.

Verizon (red) vs AT&T's (blue) "4G" Networks

When you compare Verizon’s 4G network (which is all LTE) against AT&T’s 4G network (both HSPA+ and LTE) – it’s a much tougher comparison, with AT&T pulling ahead in many areas.

For 4G compatible devices, going with AT&T will actually give you faster speeds in many different places, particularly since Verizon’s 3G network is relatively slow and there is no intermediary step before LTE.

So this brings the question back to being dependent on where you plan to go and what speeds you desire as you travel. There is no easy answer.

Our Connectivity

Which network did we pick? We couldn’t!

We actually carry a Verizon 3G USB data card (contract-free via Millenicom - which unfortunately, they stopped offering this week due to running out of modems ) as our primary dedicated data stream.

We use AT&T for both of our iPhones, including one set up to create a mobile WiFi hot spot when needed.

We also have an iPad 2 on AT&T with a grandfathered unlimited data plan (perfect for streaming video content), and we just ordered a new LTE iPad on Verizon.

We like the redundancy that the combined coverage map of both carriers gives us. We used to have Sprint on board as well (who’s wider availability of unlimited data plans makes them tempting), and before that T-Mobile too.

For a technomad, there may be no such thing as too much connectivity.

The ‘Coverage?’ App

All of the above images are taken from our iPhone/iPad app, ‘Coverage?‘

‘Coverage’ is a simple app we created to help us travelers determine where we’re most likely to catch some mobile bandwidth while on the go. Many of us travel with multiple networks on board, so this app allows us to create a personalized coverage map by overlaying our carriers and preferred data speeds – incredibly useful for planning routing, overnight stops, and campgrounds to put down the leveling gear.

However even if you aren’t always on the move, a lot of people have discovered that ‘Coverage?’ is the perfect tool for comparing coverage maps to decide which network to go with. As far as we know, ‘Coverage?’ is the only tool that actually lets you directly overlay and compare data speed separated coverage maps in this way. The maps are based upon what the carriers report (which are optimistic, at best), so you do have to take them with a grain of salt. But if you are looking for a way to make a high-level comparison across the entire nation, we know of no better tool.

You can get ‘Coverage?’ in the App Store here. (And sadly, no, there is no Android version… yet.)

Are you planning on getting a new LTE iPad? Which network have you decided to go with? Why?

Bus Kitchen & Bathroom Remodel

Cherie Ve Ard — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:17:23 +0000

The month of February had us with the opportunity to tackle some more bus projects. The availability of Chris’ nearby uncle Brian, who is a licensed building contractor, shifted our focus to kitchen & bathroom remodeling.

Our temporary kitchen remodel back in July.

After we first got the bus in June 2011, we did some basic kitchen updating that was meant to be temporary. This included repainting the countertops to start playing around with colors (and getting rid of the pink!), and replacing the kitchen sink & faucet with something more functional.

After months of living in the bus and finding we only used the propane oven as a storage cabinet – we were ready to remove the oven, make the space more usable and move forward with our Propane Free Goal.

Bus Remodeling Workshop

So off to Pinellas Park, FL where Chris’ cousin had some open land to let us park for a few days while we had the work done.

Aside from knowing we wanted a cabinet where the oven was and a new countertop – we had no clue what else was possible. We spent some time with Brian brainstorming and enjoyed that he was easy going and worked with us to come up with some innovative ideas as we went.

Wilsonart Laminate - Blue Agave

We decided to go with a laminate/formica for the countertops, as we just couldn’t justify the extra weight of a solid surface – nor could we find any that matched the decor we were going for. We found a subtle teal wavy pattern that caught both our eyes, and was available next day.

Here are some of the other design ideas we came up with:

New Cabinet

: Oven Removed

With the oven gone, we had free reign over how the cabinet should come together. Besides, while Chris fit nicely in the space, we didn’t think it would be an ideal seat.

: New cabinet and the extension stowed.

We decided to have the door come down, much like the old oven door did.

We also designed the placement of the shelves to hold our existing appliances (induction cooktop, toaster oven, rice cooker and large wok) – and be able to eventually hold a second induction cooktop should we ever decide we’d like two.

Countertop Extension

We had been noodling over ways to make our countertop larger without sacrificing living space. There are just certain times that a little more space would be nice.

Slide out countertop construction

At first, we had thought about a fold-down extension. But as we deconstructed the existing countertop, I remembered we had a spiffy pull out cutting board (on the other side of the sink). I asked Brian if a similar construction for a larger space was possible to be built into the new cabinet.

Slide-out countertop extension

It was a brilliant idea, if I do say so myself. Much simpler than fold down hardware, more usable, more adjustable (we can bring it out a little or a lot) and makes much better use of the space. We also think it looks great even while stowed with minimal invasion into the living space.

The extra counterspace is an excellent salsa making bar!

For those of you concerned about our safety – we’ll be adding some sort of latch to make sure that the extension doesn’t come flying out during an abrupt stop in the bus.

We’re very happy with how closely Brian was able to match the cabinet door design!

I also spent an afternoon sanding, staining and re-varnishing all of the kitchen cabinets – and getting the new wood to match the existing 20+ year old aged wood.

Me painting the backslash (see, I do actually help!)

As Chris is allergic to the varnish and left for the day, and I was too lazy to remember – there are no action shots of me tackling that epic job that has still left me with a sore back.

The above picture is of me painting the backsplash with a stainless steel paint from Rustoleum. I include it to show up in a picture that is not just a reflection in the mirror, and prove that I do actually help out on occasion. (The backsplash will probably eventually be some sort of mosaic.)

Dual Desk Addition

So often while we’re working at our awesome dual desks, a little extra space would come in handy. After all, rarely are our desks as neat and tidy as shown below.

Slide out Desk Table

So Brian worked with us to come up with a cool little slide out table between our workspaces. And it worked out perfectly – as the surface was able to be built from the countertop we cut out for the sink.

It’s not a coincidence that the table perfectly fits two glasses of wine and a plate of cheese – perfect for when happy hour rolls around!

And it’s just big enough to fit two of our dinner plates, so this has also become our default place to eat meals together. Just turn our chairs facing each other, nosh, toss the dishes in the sink behind us and then back to work.

The little table has also been great to create a little quick extra clean desk space for paperwork, a book or setting up an iPad.

Bathroom Vessel Sink

Ok, first of all… that nonsense about going Sink Free? It was a joke! I’d better be careful what I post, as before I know it – there may be flocks of shampoo-free, propane-free and sink-free nomads roaming the planet.

Our New Sink-Free Bathroom Countertop

As we did outline in the March-fools post, we had decided on an above counter vessel sink for the bathroom to solve the problem with the counter being so low. And we did have difficulty finding one we liked available locally in stock. We had Brian leave the counter uncut and unsecured, and lived bathroom-sink free for several weeks while we weighed our options. (Oh, woe is us.)

The pickings for a smaller sink in the 14″ size range are sort of slim, but we had a couple sent in. We immediately sent back the clear frosted glass one – as it was way too green in color and bulky feeling.

But when the hammered nickel bowl sink arrived, we were in lust. Stylish, small and lightweight.

It even seemed to nicely match with the vessel nickel waterfall faucet & pop-up nickel drain we randomly picked out on Amazon.

Installing the bathroom sink

Chris went to work researching how to properly install a vessel sink, bravely drilled some holes in our brand-new countertop, did some plumbing magic and.. voila!

The new bathroom sink!

We went with a corner mount for the faucet, which has been completely awesome and functional. And overall, we could not be happier with how it all came together. Especially since we had no plan and kinda made it up.

We’re still in a bit of a honeymoon phase with it, and probably wash our hands more than needed.

I still need to re-finish the wood in the bathroom, and the backsplash will also probably end up with some sort of mosaic. But that project will just have to wait until my back heals up some.

Video Tour

Now that we’ve completed a major round of remodeling, I’ve updated our video tour.

It shows off our awesome dual desk and the new bathroom & kitchen, and shows off the recovered valences (which may or may be not be temporary – we haven’t decided) and our start of replacing light fixtures.

That completes this round of re-modeling! We’re really happy with how the bus is becoming more and more US with every step of the way. We’re also thrilled with how we’re managing to get projects done as we travel.

Each project has its own story, friend helping out and location. Which just makes us love our bus even more!

How Many Similarities Can You Spot?

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:53:15 +0000

We’re working on a more detailed post with our recent kitchen and bathroom remodeling, as well as an updated video tour of Zephyr’s interior.

In the meantime, I thought it’d be fun to share this before & after picture:

Before & After - Comparing Zephyr's interior between June 2011 and Now.

Feel free to click on the photo for a larger version.

The first photo was taken just after we bought the bus in June 2011, and shows the original bus conversion interior of the living space. The second was taken today, and shows all of the interior mods we’ve been working on during the past 8+ months of bus ownership.

After our first round of interior modifications, we posted a similar Before & After picture – and asked ‘How many difference can you spot?’.

I think this time around, it might be more appropriate to ask:

How many similarities can you spot?

If you’d like to play along, please do by responding with your answers in comments, e-mail or Facebook!

We’ll even offer up your choice of fabulous Technomadia prizes to the winners – to include apps, eBooks, stickers or a visit with Kiki.

The Sink-Free Lifestyle

Cherie Ve Ard — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:59:04 +0000

Our recent bus remodeling included a new bathroom countertop. We were perplexed with what kind of sink to put in it, as the counter is a very low 30″ tall. Given the small space of the bathroom, we didn’t feel we wanted to bring the counters up to a more modern & usable height and lose the feeling of open space.

This lead us to considering an above counter vessel sink to solve the problem – keeping the visual space the low counter provides, while raising the sink’s height by a few inches for practicality. Plus, they’re pretty darn spiffy looking.

Problem with a vessel sink, is that there are very few options in stock at most hardware stores and we needed a particularly small one for the space. We decided to just have our contractor leave the countertop uncut, and we’d deal with the install ourselves once we found the sink we wanted.

Our New Sink-Free Bathroom Countertop

For the past few weeks as we’ve had sink contenders shipped in to try out, we’ve been living bathroom sink-free.

Since we’re enjoying our clean smooth bathroom countertop so much – we’ve decided we’re staying sink free!! Woohoo.

Here are some advantages of a sink-free lifestyle that we’re enjoying:

Simplified plumbing systems. With no sink, you don’t need a faucet or a drain – or any of the plumbing to make them functional. And no leaks to worry about!
Significantly less water consumption. With no faucet, you can’t use water. Brillant idea, and awesome for boondocking when water conservation is key.
Easier cleaning. No toothpaste dribbles to clean up. Simply wipe the countertop every so often, and you’re good to go.
More space. In a small space, every corner, edge and design feature takes away from the illusion of space. Without having a faucet and sink in the way, our bathroom looks huge!

Sure, there are some trade-offs. It’s brought back some fond memories of our first nomadic days traveling in the T@b travel trailer, which had just a small kitchen sink outside. Here’s some tips we learned from that experience:

You can brush your teeth with just a little bit of water in a cup to rinse your brush.
You can use a hand sanitizer instead of washing your hands with water and soap.
Men can shave in the shower instead, or let their beards grow out.

Ok, I’m kidding. Happy March Fools?

I’m thrilled that we’ve finally found our vessel sink, and we’re tackling the install today! We’ll soon be brushing our teeth where they should be, in a slick looking bathroom sink… not the kitchen sink!

February Rolled On By

Cherie Ve Ard — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 17:10:07 +0000

Wow. Seems like a blink of the eye, and already another month has rolled by. And, this month we actually did a little bit of rolling around ourselves.

Pinellas Park Visit

With my dad’s treatment plan underway, we decided it was a good time to get our nomadic itch scratched and see other parts of Florida, visit other family and take a bit of a break.

We also had learned that Chris’ uncle is a skilled builder and had some open time – which seemed like a perfect match for tackling some bus projects. Serendipity further lended a hand with an invitation from another family member to park the bus at their place to get the work done.

Bus Remodeling Project - in Pinellas Park, FL The horses were awesome supervisors.

So we spent a week parked in the equestrian district of Pinellas Park, FL – ripping out our kitchen and bathroom. We are very happy with the results, integrated in some sweet space saving features and made progress on our propane free goal.

We still have a little bit more work left to do to finish the project (namely installing our new vessel bathroom sink) and then I’ll likely make a post about it all and update our video tour.

We also got to hook-up for dinner with our friends James & Maria of Live Collar Free, who live in nearby St. Petersburg. We enjoyed an incredible Thai-Mex fusion (Chipotle Pad Thai = yum!!!).

We had signed up to participate in another 1/2 marathon while in the area – but between some frigid cold temperatures that morning and a lot of accumulated stress, we opted out last minute. Some things just aren’t worth putting your body through.

Spring Hill, FL

With the parts of the bus remodeling requiring tools we don’t own completed, we decided to move up the coast a bit to Spring Hill, FL – where Chris’ parents are now snowbirding at.

Aside from spending a lot of quality time with his folks, helping them with some tech upgrades – we also finished a major update of our Coverage? iPhone/iPad app and got it launched with a bit of a media buzz, in thanks to a great review on TUAW.

Settled in Melbourne, FL

A couple weeks on the west coast, and it was time to return to Melbourne.

Finding RV Parking in Melbourne to be close to my family during this difficult time has been a struggle. Between a general lack of options and it being the high winter season, we just were coming up empty. No reservations pretty much meant, no luck.

We’ve begged and pleaded to friends & family in the area, here on the blog, on Facebook, posted on Couchsurfing.org and on various RVing forums – with no luck whatsoever finding alternatives such as driveway surfing or people with open land to host us.

Kiki's favorite place on earth - our friend's land in Kissimmee.

We have a dear friend in Kissimmee with beautiful land who had been hosting us, and said we could stay as long as needed. It was a great spot to be at, and we’re tremendously thankful for that gift.

Unfortunately, it also meant an hour commute each way. In the beginning of my dad’s treatments that was working out fine. But after several weeks of commuting multiple times a week for doctor’s appointments, treatments, our shared business interests and quality time – it was becoming less than ideal. I really craved being closer by, not staying in a guest room regularly and having my home to retreat to.

Chris was diligent in calling all of the RV Parks in the area to keep checking on availability – and finally we found an open spot for a month. It’s within 10 minutes of my parents, which is perfect. The downside is – it’s ridiculously expensive due to the high winter season rates. We decided it was worthwhile to pay the premium. We feel especially blessed to have been on the receiving end of gifted parking thus far – which definitely helps offset the costs now. We’ve also been able to offset some of the costs by putting our wireless data plans on ‘vacation’ mode as we have fairly reliable access to WiFi.

So, we’re now parked for at least a month – and will play things by ear from here on out. It’s been wonderful to be close enough by to my parents for quality time when he’s feeling up to it, while still allowing everyone their daily routines and lifestyles.

Please do keep the positive thoughts coming. Our family greatly appreciates them.

Family Aspects of a Nomadic Lifestyle

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 11:59:12 +0000

<— Read Chapter 3: Purge your Stuff, Shed the Anchors

Read Chapter 5: Green Your Travel – Environmental Nomadism –>

Family, biological or intentional, is a mighty important part of life.

And we often hear the excuse that making family a priority is the reason that people don’t travel as much as they would otherwise like.

Whether it be raising kids, care taking for a loved one, just wanting to be close by, or even concern about a loved one’s reaction – family plays a huge role in many travel and lifestyle choices.

We personally think that family connections are hugely important, so we’d like to offer up some alternative ways to think about incorporating family in with full-time nomadic travel – whether you are focused on staying close to your family, or maybe are trying to stay as far from them as possible.

The family that roams together..

“As soon as the kids are grown up – we’re hitting the road!”

This is one of the most common reasons we hear from people about why they aren’t undertaking the travel they want.

While Chris and I aren’t resources for inspiration on this particular topic (we’re intentionally childfree by choice and have specifically made choices to not have any kids) – we address the subject often however, as folks sometimes assume that it’s our childfree status that gives us the freedom and agility to travel.

And while this is undeniably at least somewhat true, raising a family does not necessarily preclude a nomadic travel-filled lifestyle.

We actually both grew up with a good deal of travel in our lives as kids, and we’re pretty proud of the way we turned out!

Granted, we didn’t travel full time (darn!), but we both greatly appreciate and honor the travel experiences we had growing up. Some of my fondest and most pivotal experiences as a child where not from sitting in a classroom, but from the many travel adventures I had with my family and out on my own. And Chris actually spent four years living as an expat in Indonesia with his family as a kid, and he actually loved growing up in a family that moved around every few years.

The Gilbert Family (Almost Fearless) at Burning Man 2010, Filming us for their documentary on digital nomads.

There is a common assumption in our American culture that kids need a stable place to be in order to get a good education and grow up “right”. However, after meeting many kids growing up on the road, I can say with certainty that that’s not always true. Some kids absolutely thrive on the variability of experiences.

Most of the families on the road we’ve met homeschool their kids, or as some prefer to call it – Road School. Think about it – isn’t it exceptionally educational to travel to places to experience them firsthand, instead of just sitting in a classroom reading about them? The kids I’ve met who have a lot of travel in their life are well rounded with great perspectives on life and people. And they often grow up to do amazing things in their own education and careers, well prepared for life on their own.

As we’re not qualified to provide detailed guidance on this topic, we’ll point you to some traveling families who blog regularly about how they make it work:

Tricknor Tribe – For anyone who says that having kids means you can’t travel full time – you need to check this group out. Imagine – a family of 14 traveling the US in an RV! Two of the kids have grown up and are on their own now, so there’s now *only* 10 kids and two parents on board. Yes – you read that right – 10 kids!
Boyink Advenures – After a year-long trial run, this family of 4 is currently preparing their lives for indefinite travel!
Family on Bikes – The Vogel family left June 8, 2008 for a 2 1/2 year bicycle trip traversing the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina. Their new book Twenty Miles Per Cookie: 9000 Miles of Kid-Powered Adventures - has just come out, and is a very inspiration-filled & informative read about epic family travel.
BumFuzzle – This couple started out traveling on their own, and embarked on building a family while on the roam. Presently, they are back to living full-time on a sailboat.
Almost Fearless – Christine & Drew started traveling the world on their own, and didn’t let the arrival of their son Cole slow them down at all. They’re still traveling the world and are raising him on the road – currently they are in China.

Follow any of these amazing inspiring families, and you’ll soon be linked to dozens of others doing similar things.

This isn’t to say that every family is suited for traveling together full time, or that there aren’t other situations which would make family travel but a pipe dream. Obviously special needs, sharing custody, and other situations may mean needing to hold off until the kids are grown. But do think outside the box and realize that there are more ways than in a traditional fixed home to raise a family.

Talk to your family. Present the idea to your kids. You may be surprised about what is possible.

Extended Family

One huge advantage of nomadic life that often goes overlooked is how travel can actually help bring an extended family closer together.

Being nomadic gives you the flexibility to visit far-flung family for prolonged periods of time, vastly increasing the amount of quality time you can spend with them.

Part of our decision to hit the road starting in our early 30s was a realization that our parents and grandparents are aging – and a time would come that we’d want to be able to easily be closer by for extended periods of time. Our lifestyle gives us an incredible amount of flexibility to integrate in lots of quality time with loved ones, really being there when needed and not feeling like we’re compromising our style, or theirs, at all.

Holidays with both our parents!

With his past Silicon Valley corporate job, Chris might have been able to travel to St. Louis to visit his parents for a long weekend over the holidays once or twice a year, managing at most a few days each time. The time together would always be rushed and chaotic, with more time seemingly spent hustling to and from the airport than actually catching up together.

But thanks to our current nomadic lifestyle, we’re able to pull into St. Louis and enjoy the more relaxed pace of a several week visit if we like. And because we bring our own house with us, we don’t necessarily have to stay in a guest room and give up our own privacy and autonomy.

We get to enjoy extended every day life with our loved ones, and we cherish that!

And by being nomadic, we’re also better able to respond to family crisis and pull in to help out longer term when it’s needed. This is what we’re currently doing by positioning ourselves in central Florida to be near Cherie’s family as her father is undergoing medical treatments.

It’s really been wonderful to have built in flexibility and mobility to really be there, without it needing to be a disruption to our lives. Because our lives are designed to be mobile, and we can work from anywhere – we’re not having to balance vacation time, keeping a home base going, travel expenses, and being where our hearts want to be. We just bring our home as close as possible and setup camp for as long as needed.

And for those that are wishing for more distance from family (not us!), being on the go is actually a great excuse for getting away from the family you don’t get along with! Maybe a little distance is just the thing that will let you come back together and eventually connect. We know of many estranged families that have grown closer via the perspective and growth brought about by extended travel and time apart.

Dealing with Unsupportive Family

So you’ve made the decision to hit the road full time…

You’re full of excitement, making plans, selling your stuff and figuring out all the logistics. The friends you’ve told so far are supportive and calling dibs on all your cool stuff. Your boss and co-workers are sorry to see you go. Now it’s time to make the big announcement to your parents. Your aunts and uncles. Your grandparents. Your siblings.

How will they take it?

Sure, many of us expect our parents to someday announce that they’re selling the house and traveling in their retirement, but when the dynamic is reversed – it’s a more unusual situation. Family members tend have a different reaction than friends.

Sure, some of them may be genuinely excited for you, and even envious. But do anticipate that some family members may be less than thrilled. Your excitement bubble may be painfully burst if you get a strongly negative reaction.

Some in your family may be concerned that you’re throwing your life away, ditching your career, exiting society and living a carefree lifestyle. They may feel you’re throwing away what they have invested in your upbringing, education and values they hoped to instill in you. Some may be more concerned about how they’ll explain it to their friends and how your choice reflects on them. And some may be concerned about supporting you in the future should you come back broke and homeless.

When you give up a fixed location home to be a nomadic traveler, you’ll be battling whatever prejudices they (and their community) have about gypsies, the homeless, nomads, vagabonds, hobos and the like. There’s just not a lot of examples out there that they’ve likely seen of financially secure, career accomplished people who choose to combine a rich life with travel full time.

Being able to work remotely is a relatively new concept in our society, thanks in large part to how technology keeps advancing.

So before you break the news, be prepared to answer some questions.

Here’s some things to have thought through that you should be able to address to help get your family more comfortable with your decision:

1) How will you afford your travels? If you’ll be working – explain your business model or job situation. Share your progress. If you’re taking a gap year or able to retire early, be prepared to share some of the financial planning you’ve done to get here. Explain that this isn’t like taking an extended vacation – you’re not paying for a house ‘back home’ while you travel long term, and your not burning through cash reserves at a vacation-style pace.

2) How are you planning for your future? Do you have savings, will you be continuing to save for retirement? How will you handle emergencies? How will you handle it if nomadism doesn’t suit you after a while?

3) How about logistical stuff? How will they be able to reach you? Send you birthday cards? How will you pay your bills? What about health insurance, driver’s licenses and voting?

If you want their support, you’ll need to ensure them that you’ve thought through this all and have a good grasp on what you’re doing.

We began writing this series to help answer all the questions & assumptions that we’ve encountered over the years. If it helps, feel free to point your family here, or send them a copy of this eBook.

Be confident in yourself and your decision. Share your dreams of location independence and the adventures you want to have, and balance it out by sharing how you plan to deal with the responsibilities that come along with life.

Use real life examples and stories that make it all seem real and approachable. There are probably even stories within your own extended family to use as examples. How about your cousin who is a traveling nurse? Or a nephew who just lost his job due to being downsized in this rough economy? How is your choice to pursue a location independent career any less risky than assuming a traditional employer will remain loyal to you?

And if you feel your new traveling lifestyle will benefit them in any way, such as increasing opportunity for quality time together – make sure they know of your plans to include them. Invite them to plan their vacations around meeting up with you in amazing places where you’ll be able to show them around. Tell them that this lifestyle can prepare you to be there when they need you, more so than being tied to a fixed home and job might.

Don’t expect them to get comfortable overnight. It’ll take time to see your success. Our parents were both a bit hesitant about our decision, but they were also supportive of us making our own choices – as whacky as they are. At first, we think they thought it was a phase we’d get out of our systems in a year or so, and then want to settle down – and for Chris in particular, go back to a traditional job.

Nearly six years later, we think our families have come to accept that this is our lifestyle. That we’re making it work, that we do contributive stuff. Our careers continue to advance, we’re happy, we’re financially independent, we have amazing pictures & tales to share, and we get to spend lots of quality time with them.

We’ve even overheard them brag to their friends sometimes about how proud they are of us!

<— Read Chapter 3: Purge your Stuff, Shed the Anchors
Read Chapter 5: Green Your Travel – Environmental Nomadism –>

Resources:

Families on the Road – A community of full time traveling families, with an emphasis on RVing nomads.
Vagabond Family – A community and family listing for global nomadic families.
Dear Uncle Calvin – Full time nomads Dalene & Paul Heck ran a series on their blog of letters their readers would write to their unsupportive ‘Uncle Calvin’ explaining their traveling lifestyle.

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

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

PDF Format

Introducing Coverage? 2012 for iPhone & iPad

technomadia — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 21:01:50 +0000

A bit over a year ago we released ‘Coverage?‘ for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

In the time since, we’ve been thrilled with all the great feedback and reviews we have gotten. The app has sustained a 4+ star rating. This app really is genuinely useful, and there is nothing else like it out there. We use it far more in our travels than even we anticipated.

It’s a perfect tool for us travelers who need to stay connected.

The app was called “indispensable” by Lifehacker.com, was chosen for Venture Beat’s Mobile App Spotlight, and has been featured by TUAW, Gizmodo, Boy Genius Report, and others.

And more recently, we were thrilled when Wired Magazine named ‘Coverage?’ one of their “400 Essential Tools” and featured us in their 2011 App Guide along with some very prominent apps.

Coverage? for 2012

We’ve got big plans to make ‘Coverage?’ even more useful in 2012, and a substantially new version has just gone live in the App Store.

Coverage? 2012

The new for 2012 version of Coverage is a free update for existing customers, and includes all new updated maps, including for the first time tracking AT&T’s LTE coverage (we started tracking “4G” for all the carriers early-last-year).

We’ve also substantially updated the user interface, and added a search feature that lets you scout the connectivity in the cities and towns ahead. Here’s a video demo we just put together showing some real world uses of Coverage?

As far as we know, ‘Coverage?’ remains the only tool that actually lets you overlay and directly compare the coverage maps for all the major US carriers. Some of the other features that make Coverage? a useful and unique tool:

No internet needed: All coverage maps are stored locally; check where coverage is most likely even when you have none.
Urban and rural areas: Maps cover the entire continental USA, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands for AT&T, Sprint, Verizon & T-Mobile. (‘Coverage?’ is not intended to give city level details – it’s goal is to provide an overview while traveling.)
Know where to roam: view 4G, 3G, 2G and roaming areas as inclusive overlays, focused on finding the coverage type you need.
And unlike apps that rely on user submitted data, ‘Coverage?’ is truly nationwide, not just showing details around the “popular” urban areas.

Coverage? is only $1.99 in the App Store.

Help get the word out!

Coverage? remains a side hobby business pursuit for us.

We’d love to get some wider exposure of this app, which we think is useful for anyone who travels with an iOS device. It’s very difficult to get noticed in the App Store these days with nearly 1/2 million apps competing for your attention.

Obviously, if you travel and carry an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch – we’d love for you to give the app a try. We also very much appreciate sincere and authentic reviews & recommendations of the app to your friends and peers. Please do help us spread the word. Thank you!

Our Propane Free Goal

Cherie Ve Ard — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 20:01:18 +0000

We are deep in the midst of a kitchen remodel this week, and we’ve been posting progress photos on our Facebook page as we go. We’ll do a post with better photos of the completed project later.

But because the remodel has involved us permanently pulling our propane powered range / oven, we’ve been getting a lot of questions about our goal of going propane free – and specifically, how we’ll cook.

We haven’t really written much about our propane free goal, because frankly, we’re not necessarily advocating the choice. We think it’ll be the right choice for us, but we have some specific circumstances that most folks won’t ever have to contemplate.

For most RV setups, propane when done right is likely still a good default choice, and you’ll be hard pressed to find a RV without it already installed. Propane is a very dense energy source, it’s readily available, affordable, portable and fairly efficient. It is undeniably a great way to provide for basic household functions like hot water, heating, cooking and refrigeration while boondocking.

So why are we ripping out all of our propane appliances and standardizing on electric & diesel? It’s a multipart answer.

Influence #1: Safety

Despite its convenience, propane has its share of risks. There’s a reason there are codes around it, requirements for proper ventilation, rules around tank placement, and leak detectors. When things go wrong with propane, it’s a very bad day.

Our bus conversion was done back in the late 80s – and either the codes weren’t what they are today, or our converter ignored many of the basic guidelines, as is actually quite common in non-professional conversions done by hobbyists. The biggest oversite was placing a 50 gallon propane tank in a poorly vented bay with no separation other than physical distance between the propane and an electrical panel.

This is a no-no that someday might result in a big kablooey.

So we started off our bus ownership knowing that if we wanted to keep our propane systems, we either needed to find a way to isolate the tank and properly ventilate it, or re-locate the propane tank to another bay. Either way, it would be a big project.

Removing the 50g Propane Tank

To make things immediately safer, we removed the huge 50 gallon tank, and replumbed our remaining propane appliances to a small 20 lb tank in a properly vented bay. This system is workable for now, but not an ideal long term solution. A 20 lb tank is not enough to rely on for any length of time, and there’s not room for more without lots of modifications.

Influence #2: Old Appliances

And, as all of the propane appliances were 20+ years old.. we knew that we would need to be replacing or refurbishing every appliance relatively soon anyway. And we knew from the beginning that every single one of the appliances that came with our bus had problems.

Our fridge works on electric, but is finicky about lighting on propane. It also doesn’t currently have a working thermostat – meaning that if we leave it unattended for a weekend, the entire fridge begins to turn into a freezer.
The furnace that came with our bus looked as if it had never even been used, but though the blower worked the ignition during our tests would never engage. We’re pretty sure a $15 part and a few hours grunt work would have solved the problem, but since the furnace was located under the dinette we were ripping out to put in our desks, a repair didn’t make sense since we were already needing to find another heating solution.
The hot water heater needed some work to come back to life, and it did – but the tank sat partially filled for 15 years and has seen much better days. We know it’s living on borrowed time.
The bus’s stovetop just needed some cleaning to get it to light, but the oven (which looks like it has never been cooked in!) burner has resisted all attempts at lighting. It probably just needs a part replaced, but it’s primarily been a storage cabinet for us.

Add this to our safety concerns, and we were looking at replacing our entire RV appliance suite including the fuel source. This gave us a pretty clean slate to consider all our options, instead of just patching an existing system.

Decision Point 1: Energy Source Simplicity

In our past RV setups, the choice to use propane was an easy one. We were designing for primarily off-grid boondocking, and we also just didn’t have the physical space for hefty battery banks or for alternative energy sources like solar panels. Going all-electric just wasn’t an option – even with solar we still needed propane for some of the heavy lifting.

With the bus, we have a lot more space to play with, and that gives us many more options.

We’re designing our bus to be flexible & comfortable for a variety of situations – from boondocking to RV Parks.

One of the reasons we were ready to move to a larger unit than our Oliver was that we were finding ourselves staying in campgrounds and RV Parks more often. As much as we like being out in the boonies, we also like being close to friends, family, professional networking, attending conferences, etc. The bus makes this so much more comfortable.

Since we anticipate having access to shore-power far more often than we were used to and we wanted to retain ability to be off-grid via solar and large batteries… it just didn’t make sense to us to try to optimize for propane too.

We also already have another fuel source onboard – diesel. We have a 140 gallon tank of it that fuels our bus and our generator. Why not rely on that, instead of an independent propane system?

Decision Point 2: Newer technology

Propane is a tried and true technology. There haven’t been many recent advancements with it, and we don’t see many coming down the line.

But alternative electric energy is another ball game, and is much more our technomadic style. Solar keeps getting better and better. Battery technology is finally advancing. And as we were already investing in things like Lithium Ion batteries and researching the latest solar tech for our other electric needs – it is appealing for us to look towards optimizing all of our appliances to match.

There are electric options for most things that are traditionally propane powered in a RV. In fact, most propane appliances are dual mode – supporting both electric and propane. But rarely are propane appliances at all energy efficient on electric – just take a look at a dual or tri-way absorption fridge. It’ll drain a battery in no time flat if you turn off the propane while not plugged in. But there ARE options for electric-only compressor fridges for RVs and boats that are quite efficient.

Decision Point 3: Our Cooking Style

But what about another critical component of living – cooking? If we got rid of our stovetop and oven, how would we cook?

Spend a summer in the 120+ degree heat of Arizona with just a propane cooking solution, and you’ll understand why a flame sucks inside a tin can. It’s already fricken hot out and air conditioning is struggling to keep it even reasonably tolerable. Turn a stovetop on to heat up a meal, and in seconds flat you’ve lost the battle.

The day our induction cooktop arrived, was a ray of sanity. It’s so fast and easy, and it doesn’t heat up the space around you – just the pan & food inside it. And pretty darn power efficient (at a medium setting, draws 70 amps). Sure, it uses power… but it doesn’t need it for very long since it is very targeted. Boiling water takes less than 5 minutes.

Aside from that, we don’t bake much at all.. we haven’t had an oven in years. Having a microwave is a new thing for us, and something we only use sparingly or when electricity is abundant. We figure we’ll eventually replace that with a convection oven combo so we can bake in small servings on occasion too.

Not to make this a discussion about diet choices (a topic we generally avoid here), our household is gluten free and mostly vegetarian …. we’re simply not doing things like thawing chickens and baking pies. Most of our food prep is either stovetop, grilled, blended or raw. As a result, we use a lot of small kitchen appliances for our cooking.

A big oven is just not our style. Since we’re using it now primarily to hold our portable induction cooktop and rice maker, we might as well optimize the storage space.

So what’s the plan?

We removed the furnace when we installed the new floor way back when we first got the bus, and now the stove / oven has been removed too. We still have the fridge to replace (with probably a Nova Kool), and then the hot water system.

The fridge and cooking will be electric powered (aside from occasional outside grilling with independent propane bottles).

To power our electrical system, we’ve already installed a 500 ah Lithium Ion battery bank, and anticipate we’ll double that sometime this year. We also intend to maximize the amount of solar we can get on the roof. We’ll obviously be looking to make every electric component in the bus as energy efficient as possible – such as converting most our primary lighting to LED. We hope to tackle the solar project this year, and research is well underway.

Our intentions is to create an electric solution, like our past RVs, such that the solar is enough to keep up on most days … and we hope to only rely on our generator occasionally.

Hot water and heating will eventually be addressed by installing a diesel burner hydronics system, which will also serve to pre-heat our engine on chilly days. That’s a project we aim to tackle before winter rolls around again, as we’re currently getting by with just an electric space heater. It’s working fine for our Florida winter this year, but we don’t want to plan our winters around having to stay south.

We’re making progress towards our goal!

The Cost of Leaving Our Options Open

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 20:41:52 +0000

We don’t plan our travels much far in advance. We like to keep our lives open to embracing serendipity – when cool things emerge as potentials, we like having the flexibility to say ‘YES!’.

This agility has led to some amazing experiences.

However it does have a financial cost.

As we often don’t know where we’ll be on any given day, we don’t find out what events are going on until rather last minute. As was this week as our plans focused in on heading to the Tampa area to get some work done on the interior of the bus. We were arranging parking at a family member’s place when she mentioned she was running in the Rock’n'Roll 1/2 Marathon in St. Petersburg next weekend.

1/2 Marathon? Rock’n'Roll? Sounds good to us! Sign us up!

This is a common scenario for us:

We’re often paying late registration prices to events, sometime up to double what pre-planners might pay. Planning in advance does have its rewards.

It’s a premium we find worthwhile, most of the time, to keep our flexibility. And it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than registering for a bunch of events at the cheaper rates and likely forfeiting them when we find out we won’t even be in the area. And besides, we totally appreciate that organizers of events need to get as many commitments early on to keep things on track.

We’ve just simply learned that it’s a cost of our lifestyle, and to not try to notice what we could have been paying had we registered early. We can only make our decisions based on what it costs now.

Eeppp!! We’re doing another 1/2 Marathon in just 6 days!!

January Wrap-Up and What’s Ahead

Cherie Ve Ard — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 17:45:01 +0000

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.

Purge your Stuff, Shed the Anchors – Travel Full Time!

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 12:13:59 +0000

<— Read Chapter 2: Affording Full Time Travel
Read Chapter 4: Family Aspects of a Nomadic Lifestyle –>

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
Read Chapter 4: Family Aspects of a Nomadic Lifestyle –>

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

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

Roadside America – Epic Artists

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:33:23 +0000

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:

Sadly, the artist behind this project – Bob Cassily, passed away last year in a freak bulldozer accident while working on his next major art project.

Cathedral of Junk – Austin, TX

Our original post after our visit to Cathedral of Junk.

I grew up in Austin – but didn’t discover this quirky place until just a couple years ago while we were in town for SXSW. Starting with just a few hubcaps, Vince Hannemann has amassed an amazing cathedral of junk in his back yard.

You’ll know you’ve arrived to the Cathedral of Junk when you spot a car on the roof of a house, and obviously displeased neighbors displaying ‘Keep off the Grass’ signs.

Here’s a video we produced of our visit to the Cathedral of Junk:

If you’re interested in visiting, be sure to visit the Facebook Page to see what the current status is. This project has encountered a lot of local city ordinance problems and has been shut down on and off for the past couple of years.

Magic Gardens – Philadelphia, PA

Our original post after our visit to Magic Gardens.

As you wander throughout downtown Philadelphia, particularly around South Street, you’ll notice a lot of buildings decorated with broken mosiac murales.

These are the artwork of Isaiah Zagar, and you can tour his huge installation at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens at 1020 South Street.

Video of one of our visits:

Salvation Mountain – Slab City, CA

Our original post after our visit to Salvation Mountain.

In 1967 Leonard Knight was inspired by a message. Decades later his “small statement” has grown into a 150 foot wide by 50 foot high mountain, called Salvation Mountain, built out of adobe clay and buckets of paint just outside the no man’s land of Slab City, CA.

Salvation Mountain entered further into the pop culture mainstream when Leonard and the mountain were featured in Sean Penn’s 2007 Oscar-nominated movie Into the Wild (read our movie review), a dramatization of the true story of Chris McCandless, who spent time in Slab City on his nomadic journey towards his tragic death in Alaska.

Video of our visit with Leonard Knight:

Sadly, late last year Leonard was placed in a full time care facility – and the future and preservation of Salvation Mountain is in the hands of others.

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

Four Years Shampoo Free

Cherie Ve Ard — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:46:43 +0000

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:

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

7 Months in a Bus

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 18:32:18 +0000

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.

Extreme Rough Break (why our posts may be infrequent)

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 12:43:45 +0000

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.

Bringing in the New Year

Cherie Ve Ard — Sat, 07 Jan 2012 16:33:34 +0000

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.

Affording Full Time Travel

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 12:43:32 +0000

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

When you think of pursuing your dreams to ‘travel’ do you immediately imagine that the costs will be similar to what you might spend for a typical vacation or business trip?

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?

The awesome thing about not being tied to a location is you alway have a choice to mix things up! You can play around with the pace & modality of travel as your budget and mental sanity allow. Funding running low? Find yourself a low cost way to get still for a couple of months, and focus on income earning. When the funds build back up, move on to your next destination.

Remember, this isn’t like having a job you have to commute to regardless of if you can afford to fill the gas tank. You are in control.

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

Read the whole series: No Excuses: Go Nomadic

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

PDF Format

Live from the Arcadia Rally

Cherie Ve Ard — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 17:28:25 +0000

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 2011 Travel Route

Cherie Ve Ard — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 06:05:13 +0000

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!

Happy Holidays

Cherie Ve Ard — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 12:07:14 +0000

The park our campground was in while in Melbourne, FL was also the host of the Space Coast Lightfest. Which meant every evening we had to ride through 1.1 miles of light displays to get back home. We got to know these displays rather well.

They included all of the holiday traditional favorites…

Ho Ho Ho!

Merry Sea Dragon

Holly Shark Attack!

Pink Flamingo Elves

Santa Shuttle Blast Off!

Florida Winter Wonderland!

Festive Golf Cart About To Run Off a Cliff (???)

Wishing you a very happy holiday season,

: Happy Holidays from Technomadia!

From Cherie, Chris & Kiki

Weird & Whacky Wickham

Cherie Ve Ard — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 12:25:20 +0000

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).

Our Month Still – Melbourne, FL

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:43:26 +0000

Wow.. where did the month go? It seems like we just pulled in to Melbourne, Florida for our long anticipated still time.

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

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?

Gift Ideas for RVers

Cherie Ve Ard — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 12:18:45 +0000

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.

We Finally Named our Bus!

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:49:52 +0000

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.)

Technomadia Tech Update – The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Chris Dunphy — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:56:05 +0000

It is time to share more of the “Tech” side of Technomadia. As technomads, we’re constantly updating our technology arsenal. Here is an update on some of the technology toys we’ve been playing with lately – the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Millenicom 4G Hotspot Plan / Samsung SCH-LC11 Hotspot

We absolutely love Millenicom – we have been loyal customers for years, and have long recommended them as the best deal out there for US based technomadic connectivity.

Which is why it pains me to give this warning — don’t be tempted by the new Millenicom 4G Hotspot Plan.

Millenicom resells Verizon and Sprint service under their own name – and the Verizon 3G powered Millenicom Advanced Plan (20GB/month for just $60 with no contract) has been serving us wonderfully as our primary connection to the net since we returned from the USVI.

We have however been paying close attention to the ever-expanding 4G coverage maps (keeping our app ‘Coverage?’ updated!), and have noticed 4G service available in more and more cities that we frequent.

Geeks like us always crave more speed, so when Millenicom began offering a Verizon-powered 3G/4G Hotspot Plan for $70/month that includes up to 10GB of 4G data and 10GB of 3G data (for a combined 20GB – with no contract), we decided to upgrade our plan and give it a try.

The plan is great, but unfortunately the Samsung SCH-LC11 4G / WiFi Hotspot that Millenicom ships proved exceedingly frustrating. After receiving one dead-on-arrival device and having it replaced, the new unit was blazingly fast, when it was working.

But particularly when both of us were online using the hotspot at once, the SCH-LC11 proved to be essentially unusable, needing rebooting every 30 minutes or so.

We spent hours troubleshooting with both Millenicom and Samsung tech support, but even with the latest firmware updates the hotspot remained a source of unending frustration. Plentiful accounts and reviews posted around the internet confirm we aren’t the only ones experiencing these annoying issues. The Samsung SCH-LC11 is a dud of a product.

In our opinion, Millenicom should not offer this modem for sale – they should have held off offering any 4G plan until they had a more reliable modem to offer.

When it comes to connectivity, reliability is WAY MORE IMPORTANT than speed.

If you want to read my more detailed (and frothy) rant about our frustrations dealing with the Samsung SCH-LC11, you can read about it over at my personal blog. Cherie wisely suggested keeping so much negativity off of the main blog here.

Anyway, other than the 4G fiasco, we still love Millenicom. They reactivated our 3G Advanced Plan, and after the month of 4G frustration and constant modem reboots, the last few weeks have been heaven. Our connection has been up and solid and has not dropped for days on end.

It is so nice when technology actually works!

Top Signal 55 Cell Phone Booster Vehicle Kit

We have been evaluating the Top Signal 55 Cell Phone Booster Vehicle Kit the past few months (provided to us by the awesome folks at Powerful Signal), and are very impressed.

We haven’t had much chance to use it extensively out in the deep boonies, but we do spend a lot of time inside a big metal signal-blocking box (aka ‘bus’), and the booster has made an incredible difference. Thanks to the Top Signal 55, the cell signal inside our bus is always better than outside – often taking a marginal signal and turning it great.

Unlike the Wilson Booster we used to use in our Oliver, the Top Signal constantly recalibrates itself, continuously adjusting to the signal available, even while in motion. The Wilson was much more temperamental, and if the signal started to oscillate (the exterior antenna picking up the signal rebroadcast by the interior antenna), the booster would shut down entirely until manually reset. The Top Signal on the other hand never needs to be manually reset – we just leave it on all the time and enjoy the constant boost for all of our 3G devices (iPhones, iPads and USB data stick).

One interesting catch we discovered with the Samsung 4G Hotpsot & Top Signal 55 combo is that the Samsung has no option to force a 3G connection when a 4G signal is present, even if the 3G signal is much stronger. So at one campsite we discovered we would often have a modem connected with a spotty barely-there 4G signal when the 3G signal was actually much stronger, thanks to the booster. When we do finally switch to a 4G device, we’ll be investigating a system that can handle boosting that too.

WiFiRanger

Top Signal is our answer to pulling in distant cellular signals, and we’ve recently started to experiment with a borrowed WiFiRanger Wireless-N Router for pulling in distant WiFi.

WiFiRanger seems to be perfectly designed with the needs of RVers in mind. The device is a smart router that automatically scans for any nearby open hotspots, and then connects and rebroadcasts the signal to the various gadgets inside your RV. If there is no WiFi that you are able to connect with, the WiFiRanger then uses your 3G or 4G USB data card to fall back on to keep you connected.

We are also trying the WFRBoost Mobile optional add-on kit which is an extra-long-range roof mounted WiFi antenna that works with the WiFiRanger and should allow you to get online via WiFi at vastly further distances.

We’ve camped in dozens of parks where there was “free WiFi”, but it was actually unusable inside our rig. The WiFiRanger is made for these situations, and it is super-simple and automated to use. You can even use the WiFiRanger to allow multiple devices to share a single paid connection (like campground Tengo Internet) that would normally be locked to just a single laptop.

So far in the short time we’ve had the WiFiRanger, we haven’t been anywhere where there was any open WiFi within range (of even the WFRBoost!) to thoroughly test it. But the WiFiRanger has been working wonderfully as a local wireless/wired router that controls our USB data card, keeping us connected 24/7 to Millenicom.

We’ll be able to make a more solid recommendation once we’ve used it in a wider ranger of environments, but right now our first impressions of the WiFiRanger are extremely favorable. They have great online support forums too, and we were completely blown away by having some of our suggestions posted there responded to by the head engineer of WiFiRanger R&D personally!

Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Home NAS

I’ve wanted to set up a NAS (network attached storage) drive for a while now, to simplify our backups and media streaming. When we stumbled across the FreeAgent GoFlex Home NAS on sale at Costco recently, we decided to give it a try.

And… We are still trying…

The hardware is fabulously capable in theory – there is a full Linux server and 2TB’s of storage inside, and all sorts of great hacking potential lurks under the hood. But, the stock Seagate software and documentation is a mess, and getting things initially configured was a nightmare. We never did manage to get the built in print server to work at all.

And even more troubling, we’ve actually already had TimeMachine detect that a backup had gotten corrupted! It has been over a week now without a repeat, but I am feeling wary.

Seagate is beta-testing new firmware with an entirely new setup process and lots of fixes, so hopefully this will soon be vastly improved. But right now – this is probably a product that is best not trusted with critical data.

Apple MacBook Air – 13″

With our new desk setup in the bus, we’ve been re-thinking our core mobile devices. For years, we both had 15″ MacBook Pros, which was a great compromise between power and portability in a self contained unit. Now, we have deskspace for large monitors, and we want to optimize for docking ultraportable gear. Our goal is to be able to occasionally park the bus and take a backpack overseas for a month or two at a time, and when backpacking every ounce counts.

I’ve been itching for a faster and smaller laptop for a while now, and I at last found something worth investing in when the new MacBook Air 13″ model was released. It is blazing fast, yet incredibly small, and built incredibly well. It is the best all-around laptop I have ever used.

I haven’t missed having a DVD drive one bit. And I am totally in love with having an SSD (solid state drive) for storage instead of a regular spinning hard drive. The Air may have half the capacity of my old 15″ MacBook Pro, but the HD speeds are so much faster that it makes using a computer without an SSD an exercise in frustration now.

Apple Thunderbolt Display & Input Devices

The Apple Thunderbolt Display is the perfect companion for the MacBook Air. The Air’s small size makes it ideal for portability, but it is lacking in expansion ports and the screen real estate that I crave when working at a desk. The beautiful 27″ Thunderbolt display uses the Air’s Thunderbolt port to turn the monitor into a high-speed docking station, giving the Air a load of extra ports and an incredible 2560×1440 resolution screen when connected.

With the 27″ Thunderbolt display and Cherie’s (new to us) 30″ Apple Cinema Display, we’ve turned our bus into an incredible mobile office. After working exclusively on a 15″ laptop screen for years, all this screen real estate is fabulously refreshing.

While we were stopped in Evansville, IN on the way down to Florida – a fellow bus nut with welding equipment helped us build custom ‘seat belts’ for our monitors to let them stay clamped to our desk while in motion. It’s been working out fabulously!

To complete our desks and let us fully dock our laptops, we have also each added wireless keyboards and trackpads. We are absolutely loving them!

Apple iPhone 4S

We (ahem) needed an iPhone 4S for testing the latest updates to our apps, so I went ahead and upgraded two weeks ago and so far am very impressed.

The iPhone 4 was the best all around phone on the planet, until the 4S came along. Now there is a new king. It rocks. I love it. And Cherie accuses me of having an affair with Siri because I am always chatting with her asking bizarre questions… Using Apple’s Friend Finder, she even knows “Where Is Ben?” *grin*

Our technomadic office!

Jobs, Careers and Income Sources for Travelers

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 12:32:24 +0000

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

Read the whole series: No Excuses: Go Nomadic

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

PDF Format

3… 2… 1… We did a 1/2 Marathon!

technomadia — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 00:42:13 +0000

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.

New Stuff at Technomadia.com

Cherie Ve Ard — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 19:39:45 +0000

Since we launched our new WordPress theme for our blog a couple months ago, I’ve been tweaking and re-organizing things as I find a spare hour here and there. After nearly 5 years of keeping this blog with over 400 posts now, we have a lot of content accumulated, and we wanted to make it easier to access.

Both for our readers, and honestly – for ourselves.

I’ll go through some of the subtle changes we’ve made, and show you how I did them in case any other WordPress admins out there want to do something similar.

Menu Changes

One of the features of WordPress I’ve been taking advantage of is creating a custom menu to navigate our site, instead of just accepting a default of having either Pages or Categories.

If you poke around at the top of any page on our site, you’ll see a lot of direct links to different topics we’ve covered – both in posts, as well as information pages.

Blog Admin Tip: You can find the option for custom menus under the ‘Appearance’ section of your dashboard. From there you can drag and drop pages, categories, posts and custom links into a menu. Be sure to set the option in the upper left corner so that your Primary Website Navigation (or whatever your theme might call it) is set to the menu you design.

Some of the highlights of the custom menus I’ve created include:

Chapters

Our travels over the past 5+ years can best be summarized in different chapters. So I spent a bunch of time going back through our archives (what a fun trip down memory lane!) and categorizing posts .

So now you can quickly access our stories from the road from our first adventures in our 16′ Tab (which we’re calling ‘Tabbed Browsing‘), our days in the Oliver (or, ‘Oliver the Place‘) and now our current chapter of living in our vintage bus.

To access the chapters, click on the ‘Our Tales’ menu at the top of any page on our site – and then scroll down to ‘Chapters’.

Technical Series

Also by categorizing past topics, I’ve grouped together technical articles that are related to one another. We’re always getting asked to refer back to articles we did on various projects we’ve approached, so this will make it easier to find that information.

This all started because I wanted to create a simple link to bring together all of the posts Chris is writing on Lithium Ion Batteries. So this structure will give us a great place to start grouping together other such projects we approach in the future (such as solar, our propane-free conversion, etc.)

To access the technical articles, click on the new menu item at the top of our site for ‘Tech and Nomad Articles’ and scroll down to ‘Technology’.

In addition to the new menu access, folks can now bookmark the entire Lithium Battery series by simply going to : http://www.technomadia.com/lithium

Blog Admin Tip: We use a WordPress plugin called ‘Redirection‘ to manage creating custom URLs. The Lithium Link above actually just re-directs to the category page for our lithium series. It also automatically creates re-directions for any post that we might change the name or date of.

Link Love

There are a lot of great websites and blogs out there of amazing people doing amazing nomadic things. And we love to share the link love.

Our new link pages off our main menu

However, our link page was starting to get very difficult to maintain. I don’t like just listing a website name with no explanation – I prefer to give you a bit of introduction to the people behind the site and why we think they’re fantastic. So the default style of a simple blogroll just didn’t do it for me, and I had been hand maintaining a link page.

But that got cumbersome, and thus far out of date. When I went back through it a couple weeks ago, I discovered that many of the sites no longer existed or had long ago been left stagnant with no updates.

I wanted a new way to manage our links, display them in an attractive informative way and provide a way for our readers to introduce us to new sites. And I think I found it!

New Link Pages

One of our new link pages

I decided to see what was available for utilizing the Links/Blogroll feature built into WordPress, and found a great plug-in called WP Render Blogroll Links that allows me to list more than just a blog name!

Using this plug-in and some CSS, I was able to create categorized link pages that display an image, a blog name and a blog description. And it’s so easy to create a page – just a one line snippet of short code, and it creates a great looking page that auto updates based on what blogs I currently have in our blogroll.

To view our new link pages, just go to the menu at the top of every page and find ‘Links’. I’m keeping several categorized link pages now – everything from other RVing nomads, global nomads, nomadic resources (including links to our mail forward service, insurance agent, small business attorney, nomadic communities and other services that help make the logistics of our lifestyle possible).

Blog Admin Tip: WP Render Blogroll Links also comes with a great bookmarklet that you place in your browser’s bookmark bar. Now whenever I’m visiting a blog or webpage that I want to link to from our site, I just click this button and it pre-fills the WordPress Link page for me. It makes it so easy to add new content to our links page.

I’m loving this method so much, that I’ve also converted our Tech Arsenal page over to this format – including links that include our Amazon Affiliate tags for the products we use and recommend. And my recent post on Kitchen Gadgets for RVs was also done via WordPresse’s links and this plugin. So as we update our kitchen with new gadgets, the post will stay fresh and dynamic.

Suggest a Link

Not only did I want a new way to organize and display links, I also wanted a way to for our readers to introduce us to other folks.

Our suggest a link contact form

So, I found a contact form management plug-in called Custom Contact Forms that allowed me to create a form for doing just that. Using our theme’s ability to display a special sidebar for specific pages, I created a contact form and displayed it as a widget on the top right hand corner of every links page.

If you or someone you follow is someone you feel we should be following too – please do introduce us!

In the future, I might experiment with creating other types of contact forms, such as I’ve always wanted an easy way for our readers to contact us and suggest places we should see, invite us to stop in during our travels or ask questions.

Events

Another problem I wanted to solve was having a way to easily invite our readers to events we’re attending or hosting.

This has become especially relevant as we’re getting invited to speak, and we’d really love to organize more meet-ups as we travel to answer questions about nomadic life.

Our sidebar events calendar

I looked into several event management plug-ins for WordPress, and decided to give All-in-One Event Calendar Plugin a shot. It creates a custom post type called ‘Events’. So when I want to add an event to our page, I just create a post there with any details I want to include.

I then installed their widget on our sidebar, which will display any upcoming events, with links to the event page. It also allows anyone to subscribe to our event calendar in their own calendar programs, including Google Calendar.

I’m sure there are many other small changes I’ve made over the past couple months. So I invite you to take a peak at our blog and poke around.

Kitchen Gadgets Ideal for RVs

Cherie Ve Ard — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 03:08:14 +0000

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 of the below items are products we’ve purchased and are loving. And we consider them all ideal for RVing life – whether it be for how they save power, maximize storage space or just add to our mobile joy!

The links are to our Amazon.com Affiliate Account – meaning if you happen to purchase any of these items after clicking our links, we’ll get a small cut. We greatly appreciate the contribution to our diesel tank (and you can always use our affiliate link anytime before you do your online shopping to toss us a few coins). Thank you!

So we now present you the kitchen gadgets we love that you, or the RVer in your life, might like to add to a holiday wish list.

And oh heck, they’ll probably all work in stationary homes too.

Cooking & Food Prep

Kitchen Gadgets

Beverages

Landing Gear…. Down!

Cherie Ve Ard — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 12:51:03 +0000

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.

Promise of Lithium #3: Lithium RV Battery System Cost Analysis

Chris Dunphy — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 12:49:42 +0000

In the first post of this series:

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.

In particular, I raved about the new hotness on the battery chemistry block – the fabulous and happily non-explosive Lithium Iron Phosphate (aka LiFePO4 or LFP). On paper at least, LFP batteries seem to be ideal for RV house battery use.

Other than the expected “pioneers get arrows in their back” downsides of exploring any emerging new technology, the one chief downside of lithium I pointed out was the cost.

There is just no ignoring that a battery bank made up of quality AGM-style lead acid batteries will cost a lot less upfront than a similarly sized lithium battery bank.

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

So lets look at the numbers….

Lead Acid Costs

Lead acid batteries can be had at almost any price – ranging from generic no-name flooded cells on up through list price name brand AGM batteries.

And because lead acid batteries are so common – it is actually possible to find decent-enough (hopefully!) batteries for sale used. We know of people who have gotten essentially unused AGM batteries that were being scrapped from other projects for pennies on the dollar.

But for the sake of comparison, lets take a look at the prices you might find on new 8D-sized AGM batteries, the type that would be considered the prime choice for building a large RV battery bank in a pre-lithium world.

One of the most respected AGM battery makers is Lifeline. The Lifeline 8D AGM battery has a total capacity of 255 amp hours, and weighs 158 lbs. Googling around, I’ve found this battery available ranging from around $660/ea on up to a staggering $966/ea!
A similarly specced off-brand 8D AGM costs around $550/ea.
If you’re really persistent you might be able to find a wholesaler willing to sell direct, and you can end up with name brand 8D AGM batteries for less. Our friends Sean & Louise of Our Odyssey just bought a new battery bank of eight Trojan AGMs and they managed to only pay just $488 per 230 amp hour battery, each weighing in at 167 lbs. (Their post is very worth checking out, as it goes over the math they used to analyze the lifetime costs of their bank.)

If you are certain that you will be able to keep on top of the maintenance required (and are willing to put up with the other drawbacks), you can save some money by going with quality flooded cells (often referred to as ‘golf cart batteries’), such as 2x Trojan T-145′s which will give you 260 amp hours for around $408 total cost (and 144lbs total weight).

To keep things simple for comparison purposes – we’re going to use a reasonable “good” average price of $2.30 per amp hour (or $460 for 200 amp hours) as our baseline for comparing the cost of lithium vs AGM lead acid batteries.

And keep in mind, when talking about any lead acid battery, you should only consider 50% of the bank to be “usable” power.

Lithium Battery Costs

One of the hardest things about buying lithium batteries for RV use is finding someone actually willing to sell them. A few years ago when I designed the electrical system for our Oliver trailer, I actually fantasized about going lithium, but I couldn’t find a practical supplier at any cost.

You need to keep in mind that with lithium, it is about more than just finding a battery – you also need to design your entire DC electrical system to be lithium compatible. You need to make sure in particular that it is impossible to over charge or overly drain the lithium batteries, which can easily permanently damage them.

To do this, most lithium systems incorporate some sort of EMS (Energy Management System) that can cut off current to/from the batteries when necessary. Some battery suppliers integrate this functionality right into the battery, others sell it as part of a complete system package, and if you are building a system from scratch you will need to procure all the necessary components yourself.

These are a few of the lithium battery providers I tracked down in the course of my research:

Marine & High End Suppliers

There are now a few big name manufacturers bringing lithium battery systems to market primarily targeting the high-end marine market (where cost is no object).

Valence: Valence sells very advanced lithium iron magnesium phosphate (LiFeMgPO4) battery systems, generally custom built with custom pricing. If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it. But if you don’t have to ask, this is a good place to start planning the system for your next mega-yacht.
Victron Energy: We were very impressed by the specs of the Victron inverter / chargers (and ended up buying one – we’ll detail why in a later post), so it was really exciting to learn that Victron is bringing a line of LiFePO4 batteries to market. But to date, Victron appears to be only in trials, with no pricing available yet. When the batteries are ready, Victron will be updating their inverter / chargers to communicate directly with the battery EMS system – a very nice feature that sadly does not seem possible as a retrofit.
GenaSun: GenaSun sells complete lithium systems including battery management circuitry. A 200 amp hour setup (designed with redundancy for the cruising market in mind) currently sells for $5500, and weighs 70lbs. A 360Ah setup sells for $7,700. And keep in mind – “An on-site system inspection by a Genasun technician or representative is required to activate the warranty on batteries and battery management systems.” This isn’t a system for the do-it-yourself type.
Mastervolt: MasterVolt has been selling lithium battery systems to the marine market for a few years now, and the 12 volt ML 12/320 is appropriate for RV use – delivering a sizable 320 amp hours in a 120lb package that will set you back between $6,600 and $8,360 (the range I found on Google today).

Pre-Built RV Targeted Packages

There are some new companies emerging targeting the RV market with slightly more practical pricing on pre-packaged systems.

Lithionics: Lithionics offers several lithium batteries specifically targeting the RV market, but they do not currently list any prices. Lithionics was also under evaluation for potential resale by AM Solar, but the Lithionics battery failed under typical RV use, and AM Solar ended up reporting that: “We have severed ties with Lithionics for several reasons that are very important to us and our business ethics and will not be following up with a second round of tests on the Lithionics batteries.” AM Solar has a stellar reputation in the RV world and we’re in communication with them about our respective LFP projects. As such, I would be hesitant to pursue a Lithionics system until all the issues have been demonstrably resolved. (Though the Lithionics three year warranty is somewhat reassuring.)
Smart Battery: Smart Battery used to be a distributor for Lithionics, but now they are going it alone designing their own pre-packaged battery systems. I’ve noticed their design go through several iterations over the past few months, but the current pricing listed has a 200 amp hour system for $2,299, and a 400 amp hour system for $3,399. I’ve been in regular contact with Smart Battery, and they seem to understand what it takes to build a reliable battery system. But until they have demonstrated a track record, we consider them unproven but promising. There has been some mention that they might like to send us a sample system to test – and if they do I will certainly share our results.
AM Solar: As I mentioned above, AM Solar had been evaluating Lithionics but is now pursuing having its own custom made LiFePO4 battery systems made to resell. They have had great success with this model building custom RV-targeted solar systems, so I intend to keep a close eye on their progress. The folks at AM Solar are fully RV focused, and they have a great reputation.

Not everyone is willing or able to build a system from scratch, and thus we think that these pre-packaged battery systems will be the way most RVs will eventually integrate in lithium battery banks.

We are watching this evolving industry closely.

(BTW: One thing about at least two of these battery companies I have noticed that I find tacky is the claim “Made In USA” tacked on to the batteries they are selling. But in truth, the batteries are only assembled in the USA, and as far as I am aware all LiFePO4 battery cells are currently made in China.)

Do It Yourself Wholesale Suppliers

If buying one of the pre-packaged solutions linked above isn’t in your budget or isn’t your cup of tea, there is an opportunity for hands on folks to custom build their own solutions. There are several companies catering to the electric vehicle hobbyist market that wholesale LiFePO4 cells imported from China, and they are willing to sell to anyone who clicks the ‘Buy’ button.

If you go this route beware that you will be treading into rather uncharted waters potentially without a lot of support.

Of course, that is what we chose to do….

Elite Power Solutions: After getting a lot of our more technical questions answered competently by the helpful techs at Elite Power Solutions, we decided to make a go of building a system around five of Elite’s GBS-LFMP100AH 100 amp hour battery packs. Elite’s price for these packs was $620, making the list price of our battery bank $3100.

But to create the 500 amp hour battery bank that we desired, we actually had to disassemble five 100 amp hour 12-volt batteries of four cells each, which we then re-assembled (using a hydraulic press) into 4x 500 amp hour 3.2 volt batteries (with 5 cells each). We then bolted these batteries together in series to make a single 500 amp hour 12.8 volt block… weighing in at just 140 lbs.

As I said, a process not for the faint of heart, and it took us nearly 8 hours of unscrewing, screwing and pressing. But it was also a heck of a lot of fun to build our own battery bank.

Elite isn’t the only provider of LiFePO4 cells – if you search the electrical vehicle market you will find many other companies selling LiFePO4 cells. We know of one other RV’er planning an even more affordable system using HiPower cells – purchasing 600 amp hours for $2,880 (plus shipping from China).

We honestly didn’t evaluate a ton of the alternative in this space – we went with Elite because they were nearby to where we were at the time (in Phoenix), knowledgeable, had stock on hand, and they were excited to work with us. They even invited us to their facility to use their equipment and coached us on building our bank. This was invaluable to us.

And so far we have been very pleased with the followup support we have gotten.

But… To be clear, if you are not electrically knowledgeable and ready to assemble the components of an EMS (energy management system) from scratch – building your own battery bank from components is probably NOT a good path to pursue!

You might be better off pursuing a more integrated system where the EMS that protects the cells is hidden and integrated inside the battery, or sold as a complete system.

Or… Wait a few more years till all this stuff is cheaper, and mainstream.

The Lifetime Cost Math

Our goal in building our battery system was a system with at least 400+ usable amp hours, which could run one of our roof air conditioning units full blast for around 2-3 hours before resorting to the generator – perfect for keeping our cat Kiki cool while we leave her behind in the bus to run errands.

(When it comes down to it, everything in the end is really all about the cat…)

To get that capacity we needed roughly 800 amp hours of AGM (at 50% usable), or 500 amp hours of lithium (at 80% usable). If we take the numbers above for simplicity sake (it’s difficult to directly compare them, as the packaged batteries come in different sizes), the upfront costs we were comparing were:

800 amp hours of 8D AGM – $1840
500 amp hours of lithium – $3100

Things look bad for lithium based on upfront costs.

For those of us full timing and/or anticipating a lot of unplugged time in our RV – this is where the lifetime costs start to look promising.

Laboratory results indicate that we should expect to see 2,000 to 5,000 cycles out of a well cared for LiFePO4 battery bank. In contrast, even the best deep cycle lead acid batteries are typically only good for 500-1000 “deep” cycles.

Cherie and I crafted up a quick spreadsheet that tries to make the comparison as simple as possible, summarized:

No matter how we played with the numbers, formulas, and assumptions – over time lithium worked out to be at worst break even compared to AGM, and under most scenarios showed the potential to come out way ahead by not needing to replace our batteries every couple of years.

When you then consider the weight savings, and all the other advantages Lithium Ion batteries, suddenly investing more up front in a lithium system seems very worthwhile indeed!

For anyone planning on heavily utilizing their battery banks, or trying to maximize a solar installation, lithium makes particular sense. For those that mostly move from plug to plug, with just a night or two off grid while in transition – the costs probably won’t make sense for a long while.

The rest of the system…

Of course, it takes more than just batteries to build a proper lithium battery system.

Here are all the components of our system, and their cost:

Elite Power Solution GBS 100Ah Cells	$3100
Elite Power Solutions EMS CPU	$240
Elite Power Solutions EMS-4SB Sense / Balance Boards	$66
Victron MultiPlus 3000VA Inverter / Charger*	$1890
Victron Blue Power Panel & Battery Monitor	$427
Misc EMS Components (fuses, contactors, etc.)	$500+
Battery Cabling	$200+

* Victron gear is fabulous, but relatively hard to find in the US market. The best prices (listed above) and availability I found was via Ward’s Marine, but I always encourage shopping around.

The battery bay - Phase 1 complete!

It all adds up fast. We have over $6000 invested in our battery & electrical system … so far. Of course, things like the inverter/charger and battery monitor we would have needed even with a traditional AGM system.

But – off-grid power is not necessarily cheap!!

I’ll go into more details on the features and reasons we selected our inverter, and the details of the battery EMS system we built, in a future post.

The Next Chapter

So now I’ve explained the system we built, and how we justified investing in it.

But how has it been working out so far? In what ways has theory failed to match reality?

Overall we are still just getting started exploring what is possible with our electrical system, and mostly we are loving our lithium battery bank. But even so, there have already been a few hiccups along the road.

But I’ll save those stories for the next chapter…

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 we do not 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 most, and those contemplating this technology need to be a bit savvy with electrical and battery technology before jumping in.