But imagine how you would feel if you inadvertently racked up over $10,000 in charges after just an hour or two of web surfing and email while in a foreign country?

It happens, even to tech industry professionals who should know better.

Waiting for a flight in Toronto recently, Nilofer Merchant of Rubicon Consulting used her AT&T data card to catch up online rather than pay the $10 charge to use the airport’s WiFi.

Her phone bill for that usage? $10,609.27.

Our good friend Michael Mace works with Nilofer at Rubicon, and he has written in depth about Nilofer’s misfortune and how the mobile carriers routinely rip off customers who are roaming. If you travel and use mobile data, read this before it is too late!

Michael has to dig deep to find the fine print that discloses these outrageous fees, and he concludes that this warning printed in big red letters on the top of every phone bill would be a bit more appropriate:

“Using wireless data outside your home country is about as smart as juggling chainsaws. In a single day, you can build up charges large enough to buy us a new car. We’re constantly amazed that people keep falling for the roaming thing, but you know what PT Barnum supposedly said about suckers. If after reading this you’re still stupid enough to use roaming data, please stop by our headquarters the next time you’re in Dallas and we’ll buy you a drink (although knowing you, we can probably stick you with the tab for that as well.)”

It is little wonder that people grow to hate their phone companies. For a more in depth look at what the various carriers charge for roaming, check out this post as well.

Protect Yourself: On your phone, turn OFF data roaming BEFORE you leave the country or board a cruise ship. On the iPhone, this option can be found under the “Network” panel of the “General” section of the “Settings” application. On other phones, this setting may be much harder to find.

If you forget to disable data roaming, your phone may be silently pulling down email updates and racking up a huge bill without you even touching it. Be especially wary on cruise ships – the “cellular aboard” plans have burned many travelers who never even take their phones out of their luggage. Turn your phone off before the ship leaves port!

If you know that you will need wireless data during a trip, call your phone company in advance to confirm the rate, and to ask about special international data plans. If you have an unlocked GSM-compatible phone, you may also be able to purchase a local SIM card and vastly cheaper data plan in whatever country you are visiting.

And if you have a data card for your laptop, don’t even think about using it abroad unless you are certain about what charges you might face. A laptop can burn through data MUCH faster than any phone, and you could literally spend thousands of dollars before you even realize it. Your best bet is to seek out WiFi and to get online that way.

Think about it. TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. In a bit over an hour.

It could happen to you.

Consider yourself warned.

It’s amazing how many mundane details in life are dependent upon having an address. When contemplating becoming intentionally homeless and embarking on a life of travel, trying to muddle through all of these simple little details can begin to seem insurmountable. But never fear – you don’t have to let a little red tape keep you tied down. There’s always a way around.

Setting up a good base structure can give you a strong foundation to travel from.

Picking a Domicile State

Most of the obstacles center around one critical choice – where will your legal mailing address be if you’re no longer maintaining a fixed home?  For US citizens, you need a legal address to handle things like a driver’s license, vehicle registration, passport, banking accounts, credit cards, insurance, filing taxes and so on.

You’ll need to establish yourself as a resident of a state for legal purposes, and you can do that without owning or renting property. Since your legal address is no longer dependent upon your physical location – you get to choose which state to be legally from!

Depending upon your unique situation, different states will make better sense for different people. If you’re earning an income, a state without a state income tax may be most appealing (Texas, South Dakota, Florida, Nevada). Insurance rates, taxation on dividends, property taxes, homeschooling laws, inheritance laws and insurance accessibility (medical, vehicle, life, etc.) may be other key factors for you that could trump even a state with no income tax.

There’s other logistical considerations – such as vehicle inspection rules, jury duty obligations, requirements for residency and more.

Here’s one site that lists key domicile considerations for each of the 50 states. You may also want to consult with a mobility-aware tax professional before making any big decisions if you have other factors in your life.

Aside from choosing the right state to establish yourself as a resident of, you need to also be aware of what the local laws are for the places you actually find yourself staying at.  Some states are more aggressive than others at going after “transitory” residents. For example, if you work in California for a bit, you run a risk of being liable for paying state income taxes for all of your income, not just what you specifically earned in the state. You you aren’t careful you can easily find yourself being classified as a resident of a state you don’t intend to live in.

Chris and I chose South Dakota as our state of domicile. We have everything based out of there – our driver’s licenses, vehicle registration, business registration, banking, insurance, etc.  South Dakota is a popular choice with their low vehicle registration fees (3%), low insurance rates, easy exemption from jury duty if called, no state vehicle inspections and the state overall is extremely supportive of full time travelers. To establish our South Dakota residency we had to just show up in the state once to get our driver’s license, and we use a mail forwarding and residency service that handles everything else for us.

However, one detail of South Dakota that I didn’t realize until too late was that they don’t support spaces in last names on driver’s licesnes (mine is ‘Ve Ard’) – so I had to change my name on the spot to ‘Ve-Ard’ to get a license.  I launched a protest on the courthouse steps – ‘Great Places! Great Faces! No Spaces!’.

Lesson learned – thoroughly research for your unique situation to find the best state to be from.

Mail & Deliveries

The logical step is to minimize the amount of mail you receive before you start traveling. Convert bills and statements over to electronic, and make sure you’re setup to pay online. Get off mailing lists and cut out subscriptions. Encourage friends and family to engage in online communication, as opposed to snail mail.

But in all likelyhood, you’re still going to have mail that needs to make its way to you. The world simply is not completely digital.

Options include:

A mail forwarding & residency service. In many states that are popular domiciles, there are services setup to support us full time travelers. They act as both our legal address for use on driver’s license, taxes, insurance and more – and our mailing address.  Our service – MyDakotaAddress.com – charges as little as $5.95/month for their service, and they even handle our vehicle registrations for us. We were able to set up our residency remotely via mail, and then just show up once in the state to obtain a driver’s license. Easy.  In Texas, another popular domicile state, Escapees.com is a popular service and community for full-time RVers.  When considering your state of domicile, research what services like these are available.

Friends or Family. One option is to use the address of a friend or family member as your legal and mailing address, and have them forward your mail as needed.  Make sure you choose someone who is reliable and you can trust, and who really won’t mind. Before ‘moving’ to South Dakota, Chris kept his California residency and had a friend handling his mail for him. This was awesome for him, but after a while we felt like it was too much of an ongoing chore to ask of a friend. And besides, California is one of the worst states tax-wise to be from if you’re not actually living there.

A mail forwarding only service. If you’re able to secure a legal address for domicile purposes elsewhere (such as with a family member), then you may only need a professional mail service.  It’s totally ok to have a different mailing address from your legal address. Services such as EarthClassMail, while much pricier, give you access to your mail electronically – but they typically don’t have ideal addresses for residency purposes (most are in income tax states).

Personal Assistant – It may make sense to hire a personal assistant who takes care of a lot of your logistics and paperwork for you. They can physically manage your mail, your home office and more.

We have all of our regular mail sent to our South Dakota address, and once or twice a month we contact the service with an address to forward our mail to. They ship via US Priority, which takes 2-3 days (generally two, as South Dakota is fairly center in the US) – so we do have to think a little bit in advance about where we’ll be to receive it.

However, we don’t have everything shipped there. If we’re ordering stuff online, we use whatever address we’re at – a friend’s place, a RV Park, campground, etc.  And apparently if you have a FedEx account, you can have packages shipped (via FedEx) to any FedEx Office location for pickup.

We recently joined Amazon.com’s Prime service, which gives us unlimited free 2-day shipping on anything they ship. This has been working out quite well as a reliable way to get stuff quickly wherever we are at.  They even stock dry goods, so it’s been awesome to have staple grocery items shipped to us when we’re away from speciality stores.

Folks are also often surprised to hear how well Netflix works for us via their mail service for DVDs – which is how we get most of our TV series. By default we have our discs sent to South Dakota, but when we know we’ll have a temporary “local” address, Netflix is awesome about handling address changes. And when we do have access to wifi, we enjoy their included streaming service.

There are annoyances and challenges from time to time. Deliveries are not guaranteed to always arrive someplace when we are still around, or shipping mistakes get made such that items may show up a day or two later than expected. This can be a problem if you’re planning to move on, and we have had to adjust our departures before to wait for a package. Not living on a strict schedule has given us a lot of flexibility to roll with the punches however.

Voting

Giving up your physical home in no way takes away your government representation – you still get to vote!  Your legal domicile address now serves as your voting address. Of course, you likely won’t be showing up in person, so you’ll need to make arrangements in advance to get an absentee ballot in plenty of time for any elections you want to participate in.  In South Dakota, we just downloaded the absentee ballot request form from the state’s website and sent it into our county representative.

One thing to get used to is that now you’re voting on a lot of  ballot items that are related to a location you likely have barely even visited, nevermind live in. We don’t tend to vote on local issues unless they are general causes we care about.  We always vote on national level ballot items.  In fact, we’ve even volunteered full time on campaigns we’re passionate about.

If you’re traveling overseas, you can visit the Federal Voting Assistance website to arrange to vote absentee.

Banking

When you start investigating banks that are nomad-veristile, you’ll quickly find – there’s not an easy answer. There’s not a single bricks-and-mortar bank that is ubiquitous across the US, let alone the world.  While we rarely find we actually need a physical bank, it never fails that we have a check to deposit where we don’t have access to one of our banks.  And while mailing in a deposit is always an option, there is increased risk with the check getting lost in transit.

Presently we keep accounts with Chase and Bank of America – which between the two gives us decent odds of being able to find an ATM we can access for fee-free cash or deposits.  We don’t consider either bank our ‘primary’ bank however – but rather just access points, handling everything else electronically. We also keep a PayPal account for electronic inbound and outbound payments.

We use ING Direct, an online only bank, as our primary personal bank. They have some cool digital features, such as free electronic person to person payments.  However, they do not support paper check writing (only online).  I’ve actually found that we write more checks now that we travel than before – as a lot of public campgrounds have self registration stations that take cash or check only.  So we have to keep at least one bank with a checkbook.  If you’d like to check out ING Direct, let us know – they’re currently offering free referral cash to both you and us if you open an account.

An ideal solution would be what USAA is currently offering. As a system designed to support our troops and veterans, they offer a lot of services ideal for mobile families. Their coolest new feature is being able to electronically deposit checks via a camera and an iPhone app.  Unfortunately, this feature is not available if you’re not a qualified USAA member, which we’re not. But if you’re eligible – check it out! We’re hoping this technology is an upcoming trend in banking – it may finally make local branches fully obsolete!

All and all.. don’t let the logistics keep you down. There’s almost always a creative way to work around anything and make it work.

—-

Check out the other articles in this growing series on Answers to Excuses not to Travel Full-Time.

Unfortunately, we’ll not be attending this year either – the ticket prices are just too steep for us, especially last minute.  It’s an unfortunate side effect of living via nomadic serendipity – there are financial penalties for not pre-planning far in advance for events like this.

Given that Austin is where I grew up, I have family in the area and a bunch of our friends are converging in Austin over the next couple of weeks – that’s the place we feel called to be.  Earlier this week we snagged one of the last RV spots in town.

From what we hear, there are plenty of ‘fringe’ SXSW related social activities going on that don’t require a badge to attend.  For instance, the Location Independent Professional’s community will be hosting a LIP Meet-Up (click to RSVP and join us!) this coming Sunday, and we’ll definitely be there.

If you’re attending SXSW and know of any events we can crash – or want to meet up – please do let us know.

Presently our plans have us in Austin through the end of the month, and then moving on to Gonzalez, Texas in April – which is where the NuRVer’s Gathering (a tribe of us younger full time RVing freaks) will be happening towards the end of the month.  We also have ticket requests in to attend Burning Flipside, the Austin regional Burning Man event over Memorial Day weekend.

We’re looking forward to hanging out in the hill country of Texas for the spring, enjoying the wildflowers and focusing deeply on a couple of projects, all the while enjoying a lot of awesome Tex-Mex cuisine!

But first we’ll be making a stop in New Orleans on the way.

We’ve discovered that escaping the stress that comes from rushing around to meet scheduled obligations opens one up to truly being in tune with what is around you in the moment. This allows you to truly experience where you are at, instead of always being “just passing through” on your way to a destination.

As a rule, awesome things tend to happen when you’re not a slave to a pre-planned schedule.

As an example, by not having a specific schedule and nothing pending that we had to be at – our recent intentions of relocating to Orlando got wonderfully sidetracked by some fabulous ripples of serendipity.

None of this was planned for in advance, and if we had been trying to stick to our original intentions we would have missed out on it all.

Serendipity of this caliber is a normal occurrence for us. And we’d like to invite you to experience it.

Your Invitation to the Serendipity Challenge

You don’t have to sell your home, quit your job and take off around the world as a nomad to experience high-grade serendipity. Challenge yourself to invite serendipity into your life. It’s pretty simple if you can learn to embrace the mindset.

Here’s the challenge..

Make plans to not make plans.

Set aside a day, a weekend or part of an upcoming vacation. Your time can be pre-planned, or embarked on spontaneously. You can do this in your own neighborhood, or make it an adventure to somewhere new.  Make whatever arrangements you need to start and end the time period – such as transportation, budget and lodging.

And that’s where the planning stops.  No pre-scheduling shows. No pre-booking tours. No planning visits with friends or family. No pre-buying tickets. No making dining reservations.

Research all you like about what options you might have. Even set intentions for things you’d enjoy doing – but be fully open to them either happening or not happening.

Let go of your need for planning. No commitments. No obligations. No expectations. None. Nada. Zilch. If you put anything on a calendar besides your arrival and departure information – you’re probably planning too much. Remove yourself as far as you’re comfortable from anything that resembles pre-planning. And then remove a little more.

If you’re ready for more advanced serendipity, you even might even want to forgo booking a rental car or hotel, or book your departure from a different city (and maybe not the transportation inbetween). Really escape the filters of pre-planning.

Once your serendipity window opens – take off your watch and go experience.  If you’re unsure how to get started, try some of these ideas:

• Take a walk around your immediate environment
• Go visit a museum or attraction in the local area
• Hop on the nearest public transit and randomly pick a stop
• Get out a set of dice or a coin (real or digital) and let them decide which turns you take
• Crowdsource serendipity by taking a Twitter/Facebook poll of your followers
• Grab a camera, pick a topic (‘yellow things’, ‘children playing’, ‘found art’, etc.) and go explore with an intent to capture.

If you start to feel rushed, remind yourself that there is no schedule to keep. You have nowhere you have to be, no obligations looming over your head trying to keep you on task.  If something catches your eye, move closer to hear, smell, feel and see it better. Stop and not only smell the roses, but photograph them, marvel at them.

See people mingling about?  Be open to conversation without fear of distraction from where you need to be next. Allowing the possibility that serendipity may speak to you via interactions with others. Who knows where you might end up?

Your mission is to experience what comes about when you don’t have a mission.

Be in tune with the sometimes subtle invitations serendipity presents… and remember, you have to be present to win.

Once you’ve taken the Serendipity Challenge, we’d love to hear about your experience.  Please write and share it with us. We’ll be featuring a collection of them!

As our February has been full of exploring the possibility of a future nautical component to our nomadism, here are some amazing sailing nomads who have been wonderfully helpful in answering our questions:

Nautical Nomads

Cindy’s Island – Cindy & Gray were introduced to us via a mutual acquaintance, and it just happened that they were moored nearby in Florida. We spent a delightful afternoon getting a tour of Cindy’s Island, their full time live aboard monohull boat, and picking their brains.

It’s Irie – Leisbet & Mark where introduced to us via Gray & Cindy, who are also living full time aboard a catamaran named Irie. Previously, they were full time RVers. We’re looking forward to getting to know these two.

Zach Aboard – A boy. A boat. A life afloat.  This nomadic family lives aboard a gorgeous catamaran, raising their young son.

Christine – We met Christine at Strictly Sail in Miami last month. She’s been doing epic sailing and live aboard for many many years, and we had a delightful time hearing about her adventures.

Bumfuzzle – These two have been mentioned several times to us now that we’re blogging about our sailing aspirations. Many years ago on a lark, they bought a sailboat with no prior experience and spent 4 years circling the globe.  And then they got a small VW van and toured 28 countries in Europe.  Now they just had a daughter a couple months ago, and are living in Mexico.

Dramanauts – We talk about Steve, the original technomad, a lot – who is massively geeking out his own epic sailboat, Nomadness.  However, he’s not alone on his journey.  Growing tired of Steve perfecting his boat, Sky has now procured her own sailing vessel, Dervish, and two are the start of the Technomadic Flotilla.  Their two boat system seems perfect for them!

Land Nomads

Happy Janssens – Matt, Sara, Bella and Lucy are a modern nomadic family.  In 2007 they set off on the Live Lightly Tour, and are now back on the road full time.  Their motorhome is powered by veggie oil, and they fund themselves by doing photography, veggie oil conversions and RV remodeling as they travel. We can’t wait to meet them soon at the NuRVer’s Gathering!

Our Take on Freedom – Jay & Amy are an adventurous and creative duo.  They recently wrote to several Caribbean resorts, and managed to get hired on to teach classes in exchange for free room and board.  When their job is up this summer, they’re getting an RV and heading to Burning Man (we’re hoping they’ll join us at Camp Nomadia!).

Appetite 4 Adventure – Johnny Biscuit bought a 17′ Casita last year (similar to our Oliver) to set out doing comedy (he blogged about it under Comedy Bailout). At the end of his year, he decided to keep going.

Drifting Focus – Kelsey is a mid-20s adventurer who has crafted a life well suited to her wanderlust and photography passions. She’s been able to balance a romantic relationship that includes a home base with her pursuits of solo travel.

RamonaCreel –  Ramona and Matt full time in an Airstream. Like us, they’re childfree by choice, believe in simplicity, being debt free and are under 40. Ramona is a personal organizing coach, which helps fund their travels.

All of these awesome nomads have been added to our growing List of Nomads – which I seriously need to put some effort into better organizing.

If you know of other nomads with blogs or are one yourself (even if you’re aspiring to be ) don’t be shy about introducing yourself! We’d love to feature you in an upcoming post like this one.

Changes to our blog

• New Paint – We’ve finally had time to customize our awesome Thrilling Theme WordPress theme to be ours – with our own colors, tweaks and a new user icon, which we’re now also using on our primary Twitter account. It was fun to dive deep into CSS, PHP and Photoshop for an evening.
• Current Travel Status – Want to know where we currently are, what we’re up to and what our current view is?  Come visit any page of our blog and check out the sidebar about midway down.  We post via our new Travel Status Only Twitter account, our current location updated via Google Latitude and a snapshot of our current view.  You can also see our current best guestimate of our upcoming schedule via our Google Calendar.
• Featured Posts – On the right hand sidebar, we now default to displaying some of what we consider our signature blog posts. These are articles that we find get most often referenced in our conversations and linked to. You’ll find topics such as Living on NST – Nomadic Standard Time, Selecting a Home on Wheels, Temporary Neighbors – Not Guests, The Domestic Nomad and much more.  If you’re looking for inspiration, an overview of our philosophies or concrete advice on a nomadic lifestyle, this is a great list of our articles to start with.
• Answers to Common Excuses – We’re still slowly building our repository of our answers to commons excuses we hear as to why people don’t do the travel they want to do. You can quickly access the entire thread under our ‘Nomadic Lifestyle’ menu item, or under the ‘Excuses’ tab in our sidebar.
• Cost Log – We continue to update our monthly costs, which is always accessible by clicking ‘Costs‘ on the top menu of our site. We recently started keeping the costs in a Google Spreadsheet, and using their nifty embed feature to display it on the page.
• Technomadic Events – We keep a Google Caledar of potential events that would be of interest for us and other nomads to attend. We cross post this calendar under the ‘Events‘ link on our top menu.  If you’re looking for something to attend – check out this calendar.  We tend to keep geek conferences, Burning Man style regional events, RV rallys and other similar stuff there.  We’d love to crowdsource this project, so if you’re interested in collaborating contact us to be added as a contributor to the calendar.
• Tour of our Oliver Travel Trailer – We did some updates to the tour page of our little RV by adding some new previously unpublished pictures.

Other places to find us

We’ve been working on establishing ourselves on other places on the web, and now actively maintain multiple video, photo and social networks. Feel free to join us on any of the following:

Social Networking
Twitter – Social Networking: Technomadia
Twitter – Travel Status Only: TechnomadiaStat
Facebook Fan Page
Social Media
Flickr: Our Photo Album
Flickr: Our Current View Mobile Uploads
YouTube: Videos
TripFilms: Videos

In addition, Kiki has started her own Facebook Fan Page.  She’d love if you joined her there and followed her mischief hunting. She even has started to explore her artistic side.

Funding Experimentations

We’ve been pretty resolved to not be actively seeking out advertising revenue for our blog. We know we could likely monetize, and have followed a lot of Nomadic Matt’s advice in his eBook : Make Money with Your Travel Blog to increase our visibility, but we simply don’t want to flirt with getting trapped with writing for money. We want our posts to remain being about what we’re inspired to write about, and without feeling pressured to produce content just to generate revenue.  But that doesn’t mean we wouldn’t appreciate sponsorships and financial thanks from our readers.

We do have an Affiliate account with Amazon.com, and when we find products that we genuinely can recommend – we’ll link to them in review posts. If readers buy them, great – we get a couple bucks. And we do welcome you to shop via our affiliate link – it’s an easy way for our reader’s to support our blogging efforts without any extra cost to them.

We also just signed up with a new innovative crowdfunding venue, Kachingle. Basically, as a content consumer – you spend $5/month via PayPal, and then allocate which content providers you want to divide your contribution between. It’s a great way to voluntarily fund content you enjoy.  

If you’re a Kachingler (it’s easy to sign up), you can Kachingle us on our sidebar – we’ll do a little dance every time  If you have a blog of your own, we encourage you to check it out as a way to monetize your content. The more Kachinglers, the better it is for all of us – and we’d love to Kachingle others in our blogosphere.

Recent Honors

We’re proud to once again be part of Lonely Planet’s Blogsherpa program for 2010. Whenever we post content about location, we get featured as part of their content.

TravelPod’s TravelBlogSites.com come also informed us that we’re now one of the top 100 ranked Travel Blog sites on the internet. We’re honestly quite humbled by this. Check out their site for links to other great travel content!

As we generally earn our income doing various technical & marketing consulting, both remotely online and onsite, we thought it would be interesting to check out a different way of earning an income while traveling. We even got featured on Gizmodo about our experience.

Workamping is an awesome concept that matches up businesses that need temporary workers, and RVing travelers who would like to earn a little bit of income, or have some of their living expenses paid for. Workamping opportunities range from hosting a campground to temporary work with wages.

Express Employment Professionals in Independence, Kansas has been working with Amazon to bring in workampers to help out with their holiday rush of shipping. As of last month, Amazon has decided to cut Express out of the picture and hire on workampers directly, and have apparently been out at Quartzite, Arizona recruiting wintering RVers themselves. This does concern us, as the folks at Express went to bat for workampers on many occasions, and went out of their way to be ambassadors for us with the management at Amazon. The stories we heard from workampers in the Fernley, NV location – not run by Express Pro – were not nearly as cheery as our experience was. We credit a lot of our positive experience to working via Express Pro and the nature of the midwest economy and friendliness.

The Hours and Pay

We worked the night shift (5p – 5:30a) – so our wage in Kansas was $11/hr and $16.50 for any hours worked in a week over 40. They also offered a bonus in the last week of $100 to anyone who completed their mandatory 55 hours.

Here are the hours we worked during our four weeks there, and our gross income for the month:

Not bad, together we grossed $5,354 – with our low living expenses, the income is still funding us, and will well into March. (If you’re reading this in e-mail or RSS, view the full post to see the embedded weekly breakout.)

In addition, they paid for our camping spot. We selected Elks City State Park in Independence, which afforded us a scenic and secluded spot, and cost Amazon about $470 to park us for our time there. Some people consider this additional compensation as they would have been paying for camping anyway, but as we generally only pay for camping about 20-30% of the time, we more looked at it as one less cost of employment.

Costs we incurred to take on the gig included:

• A 40 mile a day commute, that cost us about $126 in gas for the duration.
• Needing to buy supportive shoes and insoles for all the walking and standing.
• Buying some extra shirts and underwear in the last couple weeks, because we were lacking time to get to the laundrymat.
• A big bottle of Advil.

If we were to do it over again – we may have opted for one of the very crowded and muddy, but only 5 miles away, campgrounds in Coffeyville. Especially post-Thanksgiving, when time off became a thing of the past.

The massive overtime hours only occurred starting on Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving). Up until that time, workampers were only assigned four – 10 hour shifts a week, and were frequently being let go early, thus reducing their potential income. Amazon hires on workampers starting in late August. This can be a good arrangement, as you earn up to $440 a week working only 4 days, having 3 days to yourself – while having your camping paid for. A good number of workampers who had been working those hours quit once the overtime kicked in. For us.. we were there specifically to experience the mad holiday rush, and rack up the OT.

We started our gig the week of Thanksgiving (November 22), and our first week was capped at 40 hours. Immediately following Thanksgiving, everyone was on ’scheduled’ overtime of five – 11 hour shifts a week. Scheduled overtime means, it’s mandatory – and you will start racking up ‘points’ if you miss a shift. Accumulate enough points, and you’ll be let go. The last two weeks of our time there, they offered an additional optional 5 hours a week of overtime (which you could choose to work as a half shift, or adding an hour to your shift.). We coordinated with our managers to work four – 12 hours days and two – 6 hour days – as that left us more daytime hours to be available to our ‘real’ work clients.

During each shift, you are given two paid 15 minute breaks, and forced to take an unpaid 30 minute meal break.

The Bad

I include this not to complain, or gain sympathy – but rather to prepare anyone considering this gig in future years to be fully aware of what you’re getting into.

Especially once the mandatory overtime kicked in, we felt like our time was owned by Amazon. For the few waking hours we weren’t working, we were trying to stretch our muscles, shop/preparing food for our lunch break or commuting. Amazon frequently didn’t give much notice that you had been assigned an extra shift on your regular off day. This made It tough to cram in our normal non-Amazon work obligations.

Your lunch break is 30 minutes long – but there’s no time to leave the Amazon campus, you spend at least 7 minutes of it walking to/from a time clock/your station/a break room, and you must be at your stand up station precisely at the end of the break after clocking back in. This essentially means your actual lunch time is not even 20 minutes, and is spent in one of their break rooms. You also needed to arrive to the parking lot at least 15 minutes before your shift (uncompensated) to clock in and make it to your station in time. On the flipside, there didn’t seem to be any problem with leaving your station a couple minutes early to clock out at the end of your shift.

Once you escape a typical corporate job you tend to value time differently when working for others. I look at not just my time on the job – but any time that I’m not spending doing what I want to be doing. And those hours aren’t compensated. I feel each work day cost me an uncompensated minimum of 2 hrs a day (lunch, commute, early arrival, etc). Which essentially means, even with OT pay, our gross pay rate was averaged out at $11/hr.

The work is very physically demanding. Chris and I both are in pretty good shape, and there were days we’d come home in tears of pain.. and we were assigned to what is considered the ‘easy’ job – Sortable Singles (packing single order items into single boxes.) The first week or so, we were both living on Advil to keep swelling down. I ended up in Amazon’s ‘Amcare’ Center once for extreme pain in my wrist and arms due to swelling and abrasion from the boxes. I had to call in sick one day simply because my feet were too swollen to fit in my shoes. Some of the positions required 15-20 miles a day of walking. We were some of the younger workampers there, most of a more traditional retirement age – I’ve gained new hope that in 30 years I may still have the energy to take on a gig like this again.

But, once we acclimated to the physical challenges of lifting, squatting, walking and packing 12-hrs a day, it became much easier for us. And even fun! And asking for a couple 1/2 days definitely helped break things up for us.

The other complication is that Kansas has state income tax, which was withheld from our paychecks. Filing an income tax return in Kansas is mandatory, however they don’t make it easy for once-in-a-lifetime non-resident earners to file. Right now, we’ll have to wait about 6 weeks for the forms to reach us, and then they’re anticipating 12-16 weeks to process them manually. We could efile using a tax service – but most don’t handle non-resident state income earnings, and those that do – require you re-entering in your entire federal return (which for us, is most complicated). Most annoying, and a lot of hassle for about $200 due in refunds to us.

The Good

Even despite the challenges mentioned above, we both definitely consider our time workamping at Amazon to be totally worthwhile… as a new experience.

Our managers in our department were awesome – very accommodating, friendly, appreciative of us and ‘got’ that full time RVers are not their typical workforce. The folks at Express were awesome too, and we had someone from their office visit our station every shift to check in and make sure things were ok. Amazon takes safety seriously, and we felt that our physical safety was a priority for them. We were given cool t-shirts commemorating ’surviving’ the peak season, and Amazon did provide meals a few times.

I actually made the following post to my personal journal towards the end:

How much would you pay to:

- Have a physical training coach for 60 hours a week, who whips you into shape with squats, miles of walking, weight training, stretching and more?

- Have your fingers literally on the pulse of consumer trends in your industry ?

- Have access to figuring out the operations of what makes one of the world’s most successful companies tick?

- Get your mind into a month-long zen state of meditation by doing receptive tasks, and feel grounded to take on the world?

This sort of hands on transformational coaching and experience is worth thousands.

But act now.. and you’ll not only get all this for FREE.. you’ll be paid to have it!

We truly were fascinated by being a cog in this huge machine. We learned so much about consumer culture, big distribution centers and got to interact with many locals in Kansas who were grateful for their employment at Amazon. We got to pick the brains of a lot of full time RVers about the workamping lifestyle. And we each lost a few pounds and came away better toned.

Now, will you see us working there again? Unless circumstances lined up perfectly and we had nothing else going on – probably not. We’re experience junkies, and did it to try something neither of us had done before. It wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to do again.. and if we did, we’d make sure we got a different position. And we’re unsure of how the new dynamic would be without Express Pro involved.

Other posts we made about our Amazon.com experience:

• Adjusting to the Night Shift – Working Vampire hours
• Inside Amazon’s Coffeyville Warehouse – More information about the actual work we were doing
• Digital Fasting – Not being able to bring cell phones into Amazon, had us disconnected for a month.
• Secret Lives of Amazon’s Elves – Our feature on Gizmodo

—–

If you’re interested in checking out workamping at Amazon – they will apparently be hiring in Kansas, Kentucky and Nevada for the 2010 season. The pay rate will be $10-12/hr, and they will be including camping. You can contact workampers@amazon.com for more details.

Meeting so many and such diverse cool people is one of the best parts about being nomadic.

It is usually very interesting to hear the story around how various folks came to be reading our relatively obscure little blog. The chain of serendipity that lead to our meeting our new friends Richard & Claire and Dave & Julie in Jupiter Florida is particularly amazing.

You see, Richard spends a lot of time gardening, and he had gotten hooked on listening to podcasts while working in his yard. A few years ago while searching through iTunes for promising podcasts to keep him entertained, he stumbled across a show called GeekSpeak, and over time it became one of his favorites.

For those who don’t know… GeekSpeak is a weekly Geek / Technology call-in show on KUSP “Central Coast Public Radio”, the NPR affiliated station serving Santa Cruz and the central coast of California. It is a relatively small station, to say the least. My old friend Lyle is the host of GeekSpeak, and years ago when I lived in Boulder Creek (in the mountains above Santa Cruz) I was one of the regular co-hosts.

I alway make it a point to stop by when I am in the area, and Cherie and I have been on the show together twice now in the past three years.

Anyway, a year or two ago Richard was in his garden working through the backlog of GeekSpeak podcasts, and he heard a show featuring Cherie and I discussing technomadism. Afterwards, he went to our site, and reading about our lifestyle and adventures had a big impact on him.

But then over time he lost the bookmark.

But then, a few weeks ago Richard was talking with two of his local friends, Dave & Julie, who mentioned to him that they are planning to go nomadic in a few years once their kids are out of school. This reminded Richard of us, but he couldn’t remember where to find us. Hours of internet searching eventually lead him to the About the Geeks page, where I am still listed in the “extended community” section as a former co-host. And from there he rediscovered a link here.

When he went to our site, Richard saw the map on the front page, and realized we were actually right now in Florida, and would be passing near his family’s home on our way to the boat show in Miami. He wrote to us, and a few days later we found ourselves camped in his front yard – a perfect stop for us in between Marathon and Orlando.

Richard was very literally thrilled to meet us and to be able to have us over to stay the night on his land. His entire family made us feel like visiting rock stars.

And then he let us know about his future-nomadic friends Dave & Julie, and told us that they were coming over in the morning hoping to meet us for breakfast…. Richard said he knew that they would have a hard time sleeping because they were so excited to meet us and ask us a million questions about nomadic life.

Can’t sleep?!? Because of us?!???!

We are inspiring and influencing the lives of people we never would have connected with otherwise, and making great new friends in the process. All because a few years ago a listener in Florida was catching up on podcasts from a small California NPR station while working in his garden…

The ripples, they astound me!

I saw a shuttle launch in Titusville! I even tried to run away and climb onboard. Wouldn’t it be cool if I was the first cat in space? But I got caught before I could blast off.

And then we headed south to look at boats. I don’t know what is up with my humans, but they seem to think I would like catching fish at sea. That sounds like work.

And then we met some really nice people in Jupiter, and made I some new friends.

This is Porkchop – she is a pig. She makes funny sounds. And if you scratch her belly, she rolls over!

And then there were chickens!! I liked the chickens a lot, they reminded me of where I was born.

Well, that’s my week. What have you been up to?

Oh.. one more thing. These blog posts are a lot of work, and I’m a cat. Play and mischief is so much more fun. So I finally convinced the humans to let me have my very own Facebook Page. Come see my latest art projects!

After an extended month long winter and holiday stop in St. Louis visiting Chris’ family, it was time to head south for the remainder of the winter. Cherie previously lived in Florida for 12 years before we hit the road, and that’s where her parents and a lot of our friends live. We knew we’d be in for a hectic schedule of trying to fit seeing everyone in.  We started our adventure south on January 20, 2010.

Atlanta

Our first planned stop would be in Atlanta, a place we never seem to get enough time in as we’re alway just passing through. However we wanted to be sure to stop in and see Diane and Jill, who own a T@b clamshell twin to our former home on wheels. We used to be able to park at their place, but with our slightly larger Oliver Travel Trailer, we weren’t certain our trailer would still fit in their back lot.

And then serendipity happened.  We received a well timed e-mail from someone who almost camped with us at Camp Nomadia the very first year we brought the camp together. Dale was formerly a nomad, but he ended up camping elsewhere and we only got to meet briefly at Burning Man 2008.  Before he switched camps, he had made up some awesome caribineer/flashlight/bottle openers with ‘Camp Nomadia’ printed on them. He gifted us a handful, and they’ve been quite useful. Especially for lightpainting!

As it turns out, Dale has since settled in Atlanta, and invited us to stop in – citing he had plenty of parking space.  His directions ended with ‘park anywhere on the tennis court’ – which raised an eyebrow.  So thus we parked, intending to only stay a couple nights, on his tennis court in front of his airplane hanger converted loft.  It was awesome to get to know Dale and compare stories from the road, Burning Man and geekery. Our intended couple night stay turned into 5 nights (see what we mean about Nomadic Standard Time?) until we figured we really did need to be on our way.

While in Atlanta, we also got to meet up with Diane, however Jill was sick. We also got to make a new friend, who was introduced to us via a mutual friend in California. We went to an independent artists fundraiser and saw a cool afro-celt band play.

Tomoka State Park

After coming off of our intense month working at Amazon.com, holidays, cold weather in St. Louis and our unexpected social time in Atlanta – we were craving some alone time with just the three of us before heading into more social time. One thing we’ve found in our travels is that if we want time for ourselves, we have to carve it out.

So we selected one of our favorite campgrounds in Florida – Tomoka State Park in Ormond Beach. It was one of our destinations when we were first trying out nomadic life together back in early 2007. We love it for it’s authentic Florida hammocks and nicely wooded campsites along the waterway.

We got some relaxing and alone time in. However, one thing about state parks in the middle of the week, is that we’re not the only interesting people traveling through. We ended up meeting two other traveling couples.  They were closer to traditional retirement age than us – but what was interesting, is that in each couple, one of them was earning an income by being online professors. They were each using mobile technology to explore their wanderlust, visit their families and keep funded.  It’s so inspiring to encounter so many people exploring these mobile lifestyles before retirement.

Titusville

Next stop was Titusville, primarily to visit with Cherie’s ex and her former cat, Alma.  Cherie and Fritz dissolved as a couple primarily because they were simply on different life paths – Cherie wanting more mobility and adventure, and Fritz wanting to settle into one spot and focus on planning for retirement with a stable career.  Their solution was to seek what they both wanted in life and remain close friends.. instead of getting bitter and angry over it.  It was wonderful to see just how happy they were now that they were well into their chosen paths.

We did split our time down in Melbourne, staying with Cherie’s parents a few nights.  Unfortunately, they live in one of those neighborhoods where they don’t allow RVs, so we opted to stay in their guest room while we left our camper at Fritz’. It’s worth it to get quality time!

While in Titusville, we noticed that the last planned night shuttle launch was planned, and ended up being temporary neighbors with the delightfully awesome nomadic Louis and Sean of Our Oddyssey. We were part of ‘Camp STS-130′ – an amazing temporary RV city that forms around launch time.

James and his partner Maria came over from Tampa – he’s better known as @NomadRIP, to join the fun. We look forward to many future rendezvouses with all these like minded folks.

The launch was delayed an evening, but it was an amazing 4:14am launch of Shuttle Endevour.

Melbourne

We relocated down to Wickham Park, a county run park in Melbourne for a couple nights.  Chris’ parents are experimenting with being snowbirds on the west coast of Florida this winter, and came over for a fajita cookout at Cherie’s parents place.    Chris also took care of routine medical exams at our primary care physician in Melbourne, and we both had our routine eye exams.  While we have medical access all over the country via our individual health plans, we do prefer to establish providers in spots we consider ‘home bases’.

Orlando.. no.. now Miami!

At first we were planning to relocate to the Orlando area, where we have friends with several wooded acres who extend an open invite. However, we got hit with a Nautical Bug, and found our way to Miami instead to attend the Miami Internatational Boat Show.  Chris has written prolifically about this.

Following Nomadic Serendipity

The next week was an amazing ride of following the Ripples of Serendipity – which took us down to Marathon to check out an older catamaran we were intrigued by.

Then up to Jupiter Farms to meet with some awesome readers of our blog – Richard & Claire and Dave & Julie, and answer their questions about nomadism on wheels. Richard and Claire have a pig and backyard chickens, and we spent an evening combusting Christmas trees in their backyard firepit with their awesome sons, Glenn & Patrick.

Then serendipity decided we weren’t done yet, and handed us a connection to a similarly aged full time sailing couple, Gray and Cindy, who seemed happy to spend an afternoon sharing their lifestyle with us. It was great to be on the other side of the table, inquisiting someone else about a lifestyle we’re interested in embarking upon.

Orlando.. and beyond?

We finally found our way to the Orlando area, a full week after our original intentions.  We plan to stay here a week or so – get caught up on a bunch of projects, and just enjoy the solitude of our wooded nest camped next to great friends, Cec & Paula, who truly embrace our self sufficiency and temporary neighbor preference.

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Soon we’ll decide when we need to start heading to Texas. We’re still undecided about South by Southwest, mostly because we just can’t justify the high ticket cost.   If we make it to Austin by mid-March, we may just meet up with friends attending outside the event, and enjoy the ancillary festivals and events that apparently happen.  Perhaps next year we’ll submit a proposal for a Technomadic panel and try to get in as presenters.  At the very least, we need to make it to Central Texas by late April for the NuRVer’s Gathering (or whatever they decide to call it) – a rally of other younger full time RVers.

But after spending some time at the Miami International Boat Show & Strictly Sailing event, the idea of relocating at least part of the year onto a liveaboard is starting to seem more real.

In the few days since the boat show, we’ve both shown signs of ‘boat fever’ – surfing boat listings and dreaming of life on the water. We even managed to route from Miami to Orlando by way of the Florida Keys (only a slight detour) to spend an afternoon checking out a rather sweet used Gemini 3000 catamaran. And yesterday, thanks to an introduction from an online friend, we further detoured to Stuart Florida to meet up with Cindy & Gray of Cindy’s Island to tour their boat and hear stories of their past few years on the water.

We’ve been soaking up insight, experience, and advice – and over a beer at a dockside bar a few nights ago Cherie and I started working on our first draft of the things that we are looking for in our ideal home afloat. Thoughts and feedback appreciated:

Boat Size & Type:

• Sail! — We both a drawn to sailboats. Even the nicest motor-cruiser isn’t really that interesting to us. Whatever we get, it must have a mast!



• Monohull or Catamaran? — A week ago we were feeling strongly drawn toward catamarans. But after seeing some really nice monohull cabin layouts (like the sweet Catalina 375), now it really is a tossup.
• Sailing Optimized / Light Wind Capable — We want a boat that is fun to sail, and which is not overly dependent upon its engine. Too many sailboats seem to spend way too much of their time cruising under power. We are not all that concerned about going fast, but would like a boat that can sail (slowly) even in light wind.
• Cruising Area — It would be nice to get a boat that would be capable of setting off to circumnavigate the world, but at the very least we want a boat that can handle coastal cruising up both coasts of North America. We want to be able to sail the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco Bay, Baja, the Caribbean, Florida, the Atlantic Coast, and all points in between – including through the Panama Canal.
• “Thin Water” Capable — All catamarans can handle shallow water exploration. But if we get a monohull, I don’t want to be confined to deeper waters. A “Shoal Draft” capable monohull that draws less than 5′ would be great. Less than 4′ would be even better. Less than 3′ would be amazing. And less than 2′ is incredible. But… To get shallow water capability, we do not want to sacrifice too much stability in the process. Finding the sweet spot will be key.
• Length — It seems like 30′ – 40′ is the sweet spot for a liveaboard cruiser. The Gemini 3000 (30′) we saw on Monday is definitely a livable size for a catamaran, and the 37′ Catalina we toured at the boat show was a great size for a monohull. Whatever size we get, we want it to be sailable singlehandedly by one person.
• Width — It would be nice to be able to fit into a standard slip. But what size is considered “standard” in most marinas? The Gemini 3000 is 14′ wide and seems a practical width. Many other catamarans are probably too wide to avoid extra marina fees.
• Mast Height — In addition to coastal offshore cruising, we want to be able to cruise the Intercoastal Waterway (55′ – 65′ mast height limit), the “Great Loop“, and maybe even explore the Okeechobee Waterway (49′ mast height limit) across Florida. To do the inland sections of the Great Loop we will have to be able to drop the mast to clear a 19′ bridge near Chicago. If our above water height can be reduced to less than 15′, we can cruise the entire Erie canal!
• Strong Bones — We want a solid boat that is built to last. An older used boat with a proven pedigree is preferable to a shiny newer boat that will be falling apart in just a few years.
• Photogenic — A sailboat is a work of art. We are photographers and travel bloggers. Of course we want a boat that will look good in pictures… *grin*

Layout, Comfort, & Storage:

• Cabins — A lot of boats seem designed for the charter market, with three or four or even more small cabins and space overall to sleep twelve or more. We want a boat designed for a couple, with one large and comfy master cabin, and just one private guest cabin so that we can have space to take on a friend for an extended stay as crew. If the boat has more than two cabins, the surplus will be converted into storage or geekery.



• Heads — Again because of the charter market, a lot of boats seem to have two or even three bathrooms. We only want one. Any extras are just wasted space and something extra to clean.
• Headroom — We will need at least 6′ headroom in all the primary interior spaces. I don’t want to live in a home where I have to spend a lot of time hunched over.
• Dry Inside — Some boats leak a little. Others are known for being “wet” on the inside. Considering how important our electronics and our comfort are, we want a boat the excels at keeping the interior space cozy and dry.
• No Carpet Headliner — One of the things we most disliked about the Casita travel trailer was its use of a fuzzy carpet headliner. Carpet gets musty over time, and it is near impossible to clean. In contrast, we really love the bright and low maintenance fiberglass gelcoat interior of our Oliver. We want something just as durable and easy to keep clean in a boat.
• Comfortable “Boondocking” at Anchor — A lot of cruising boats seem designed for marina hopping, always ending each day plugged into shore power at the next marina. Bah. While RV’ing we prefer extended boondocking, and while sailing we would like a boat that is happy to spend extended periods of time away from dock.



• Inside / Outside Dining — Seating for six would be great – it would be nice to have space to actually entertain guests. Being able to entertain both inside and outside is important too.
• Screens & Shade — Having a way to shade and screen the deck would be great. Bugs – not so great.
• Workspace With A View — We will continue to spend a lot of time every day working on our computers – and we want the view from our workspace to be inspiring. A lot of monohulls seem to be overly dark inside with not enough windows to let in light or a view. No matter what, we want to have a great view from our main workspace without needing to bring our laptops up on deck!
• A View To Movies — We will want to be able to mount at least a 24″ screen (and appropriate speakers) for movie watching. Having the screen on a swing arm so that it can be position for use with our laptops as well is great.
• Storage — Onboard we will want a place to store a decent dingy, two foldable bikes, and eventually some dive gear as well. And of course, we want enough food and clothing storage to be able to last a while without needing to wash or restock.
• Cat Friendly — We will need a place to tuck Kiki’s litter box that is both out of the way and accessible for cleaning.
• Climate Control — Will we want an air conditioner while at dock? What about some sort of heater when anchored out on cold nights? A good set of ventilation fans and hatches is a must, of course.
• Paper Towel Holder — Cherie reminds me that there must be a good place to keep paper towels handy – something all too often overlooked.

Geekery, Systems & Electronics:

• Solar Power — We will need space to mount 250-500 watts of solar panels where they will get minimal shade from the boom or mast, and a MPPT capable charge controller. A wind power generator might make a nice addition too.
• Battery Capacity — We will need space for at least 200-600 amp hours of AGM storage batteries.
• Battery Charging — We will want a large enough alternator on the engine to quickly charge the batteries, and/or a generator that can handle the job. We will also want a nice sized sine wave inverter / charger on board.
• Water — We will want space to someday add a water maker, and large enough fresh water tanks to last a while without. And of course, we will need a hot water heater and a filtration system for our drinking water.
• Antennas — We will eventually want antennas in the mast for SSB radio, long range WiFi, a cell phone booster, and television reception. Having space to eventually add radar is probably a good idea too.



• Space For Geekery — We will need space to mount a chart plotter, various radios, and all sorts of other technology. The more accessible and easy to work with the wiring spaces are, the better.
• Easy Maintenance & Upgrades — Too many boats seem to be incredibly poorly designed when it comes to doing maintenance and upgrades. The engine should be easily accessible. Wiring should be accessible, well labeled, and with space for new runs. Plumbing and tanks should be reachable, and well labeled. And so on… You shouldn’t have to destroy pretty woodwork to get at the internal systems. I’d rather leave off the “pretty” entirely, and instead focus on intelligent functionality and easy access.

That’s the list we came up with – the ideal. Now we need to start debating the tradeoffs, and figuring out where we are willing to compromise and where we are not.

And of course, we want it at all as affordably as possible to maintain our current debt-free lifestyle. Fortunately we’ve heard plenty of stories lately of great used boats selling for a fraction of what the same aged boat would have sold for a few years ago.

A new boat on the other hand probably does not make any financial sense.

Any thoughts? Things we are missing? Suggested additions or deletions?

And most importantly – please point us towards any boats that come close to meeting our needs!

Anyone who helps us find our perfect cruising home will get a “finders fee” of a nice bottle of rum, and an invitation on board to sail with us.

Ahoy, anyone?

Though these events have traditionally been very distinct, the no-longer-appropriately-named “Strictly Sail” has unfortunately now been devoured by the vastly larger powerboat focused Miami International Boat Show. To our disappointment, there were only two docks featuring sailboats at the show. And to make matters worse, the two docks were 1.5 miles apart – requiring a trip on a water taxi (that ran just once an hour?!!?) or a shuttle bus trip to get between them.

Nevertheless, we had a great time checking out boats and the expo on Saturday, and on Sunday spending a day attending the Strictly Sailing seminars.

Here are some of the highlights:

The Miami International Boat Show was huge – filling up every nook and cranny of the Miami Beach Convention Center and a vast area outdoors as well. We couldn’t have seen it all if we had spent all five days at the show. And since we were eager to get to the sailboats, we ended up not staying long at the main expo area at all.

We did check out practical things for our current RV life as well as our future boating aspirations, such as folding bikes and inflatable kayaks:

And some rather odd items, like a floating dog (why not for cats?) bed and an “instant” wine chiller:

There was also lots of cool gadgetry to be found, such as dive masks with integrated cameras, and solar powered refrigerators:

I was really pleased to see so much “green” technology on display at the show, particularly in the separate expo area targeting sailors. In sharp contrast to the RV Show that we went to last month, here we found lots of solar panels, LED lighting, wind generators, and more.

The expo areas was fun, but the real reason we were at the show was to check out some sailboats, so after lunch we hopped the shuttle bus over to the marina to check out the action on the docks.

The boat we most wanted to see was the Gemini 105Mc catamaran, and it mostly lived up to our expectations:



The 34′ long Gemini has an incredibly well laid out interior, and it is perfectly sized for a single traveling couple with space for occasional guests. We really loved the hanging couch on the back that also serves as a solar panel mount.

The other catamaran that really impressed us was the innovative little TomCat 9.7:


The 32′ TomCat packs a lot into an even smaller space than the Gemini. The layout feels extra spacious because there is so little dividing up the interior space – the kitchen, main salon, and master stateroom are all open to each other with only curtains for separation. It reminds me of the interior layout of our Oliver in that regard.

All of the other catamarans on display were overly large, and packed with cabins for the charter market. And while a large salon area is nice, and we like the idea of a raised upstairs galley – a boat featuring up to FOUR bathrooms is not anything that we would want even if we could somehow afford such a monster.

After running out of catamarans to look at, we then turned our focus towards the monohulls.

Most of the models on display were either tiny day sailers, or cruisers vastly too large to interest us. When we asked why so few 30′ – 40′ boats were on display we were told that it was because the “middle class has stopped buying sailboats” and that only the most extravagant yachts were worthwhile to bring out to the boat shows. Interesting.

One of the monohulls that did catch our eye was the incredibly innovative Seaward 32RK:


Thanks to its retractable keel design, the Seaward 32RK can operate in less than two feet of water. It has a large, comfortable, well designed interior. And it is actually even trailerable!

The other boat that really impressed us was the beautifully designed Catalina 375:


More than any other boat that we toured, the interior layout of the Catalina 375 felt like it would make for a comfortable long-term home. We started the weekend biased towards catamarans, but thanks to the Catalina we left it completely open to a monohull as well.

Despite fewer sailboats on display than we had hoped to see, our trip to the boat show served its purpose well. We now have a much better idea around the sizes, layouts, brands, and features that felt best to us. Armed with this research, we’ve already started to begin distilling down what we want in our ideal boat.

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To see many more photos from our trip to the boat show, check out our full photo set or slideshow on Flickr.

Before the Oliver company went into hiatus making these awesome little fiberglass RVs, less than 50 of them had been made. In this down economy there just isn’t enough demand for such a high-end yet small RV. Yet for those that know what they are looking at, the Oliver design is leaps and bounds above anything else out there.

We feel quite fortunate to have our 2009 Oliver (dubbed ‘Orion’), and after 18 months of living full time in ours, we can attest that these are awesome and incredibly well built trailers!

Ours still looks brand new, and we have never regretted investing in it.

While Oliver plans to eventually make a comeback and resume production, for now – finding an Oliver up for sale is a rare thing indeed. As far as we know, only one other used Oliver has ever come to market.

The trailer up for sale is owned by our friends Chuck & Geri. The trailer was Chuck’s before he met Geri (a Casita owner), and now that they have gotten hitched, they need something larger. They’re traveling further and longer these days, and they travel with multiple pets. They had hoped to get one of the new 22′ Olivers, but with the company on hiatus they can’t really wait any longer.

They absolutely love their Oliver, so deciding to give it up has been a tough decision for them.

Theirs is a 2008 model, the 13th built, has traveled about 35,000 miles, has never been smoked in and is up to date on it’s maintenance – including wheel bearings that have just been serviced. We’ve seen this trailer in person, and it’s in great shape – especially considering dogs travel with them.  The interior has a southwest decor.

Some extra features this units has in addition to all the Legacy Elite standards, include:

• Shore plug on front for Honda 2000 propane powered generator
• Extra propane outlet tween the 20# propane bottles for the generator


Graphics are removable - Cat not included

• 2 extra 110 v outlets and 2 extra 12v outlets
• Shelf in closet
• Kingdome Satellite TV package
• Exterior cell phone booster
• 10 ply tires with about 2800 miles on them
• 6 halogen bulbs upgraded to LED
• 3 extra battery powered LED lites, 2 for ceiling by microwave and reading lite in rear bed/dinette area
• Marine flooring in bath
• Pet barrier on door
• Fantastic fan with Maxxaire Vent. Can be open while traveling, even in heavy rain
• Maxxaire louvered vents for both back windows – windows can be open in the rain.

If you could order a trailer new from Oliver configured this way, it’d cost about $36,000. On top of that, Chuck is *including* his Honda 2000 generator which (like ours) has been converted to run propane, with only 25 engine hours on it,. This is worth an extra grand, at least.

These trailers were made to last a lifetime, and Oliver stands behind them.

This really is an amazing trailer – it is the best small RV you can find anywhere.

If you’re interested, please contact Chuck & Geri for more information. They, and their Oliver, are currently based in the panhandle of Florida – and their travel plans include Arkansas, Missouri, South Dakota and New Mexico in the coming months.

We really would love to see this Oliver find another great home, so spread the word!

We’ve imagined someday running across a cruising couple who might want to “swap houses” for a few monhs – trading a chance to explore the open road in our land yacht while we spend some time getting our feet wet in theirs. Or we could dock our Oliver for a while, and maybe buy a boat of our own to begin exploring seasonally.

Cherie sailing the 'Wilde Ride' in 2004

We’ve had cruising on our “hypothetical future adventures” list for as long as we’ve known each other, and individually the idea of a liveaboard sailboat has haunted us even longer.

It really isn’t so much a question of if, but when.

Thanks to the down economy, the used boat market is ripe with amazing deals right now. In some cases (as seen this week on Craigslist) people are literally giving old boats away – “haul it off our lot and you can have it”. And our dear friend and fellow technomad Steve Roberts and his partner Sky just scored an amazing deal on a liveaboard-worthy boat for well under $10k, adding a second boat to their technomadic flotilla and inspiring us with what is possible on even the tightest budget.

We dream of eventually joining Sky and Steve in a floating community, but first we need to figure out what sort of boat we want, and what we can afford. We aren’t anywhere close to being actively boat hunting, but if the perfect boat comes along in the next year or so we want to be ready to jump.

And until then, we can start learning, gaining some experience, and fantasizing about future adventures.

To gather up some fuel for the fires of imagination – we are heading down this weekend to visit the Miami International Boat Show and in particular, the sailing focused Strictly Sail Miami.

We are hoping to check out the latest and greatest in new boats (like the sweet looking Gemini 105Mc Catamaran) so that we can have a better sense for what we want in a used boat. Catamaran or monohull? How big? What things are must haves? What things could we do without?

You can only learn so much on the internet. But nothing can actually compare to actually standing onboard to get a sense for what feels right.

There are also a lot of interesting sounding seminars that we plan to check out.

We will report back next week on what we thought of the show. I am really interested in contrasting this giant boat show with the RV Show that we went to last month in St. Louis.

In the meantime, advice on all things nautical, and in particular things to see and check out at the boat show are appreciated. Are any of our readers out there past, present, or future cruisers?

Abandon The Cube - Mike and Lauren quit their jobs, and are traveling the world. They’re currently preparing to be part of the Mongol Rally, and are looking for sponsors.

Freely Living Life – The McLeod’s are a family of four traveling the US in an RV, roadschooling their young kids. They just started a blog to share their journey.

Activated Storytellers – Dennis and Kimberly Goza left their home in San Francisco in 1992 with their son Zephyr (who was still in diapers) to perform professionally at schools and libraries across the United States. The Goza family performed together as “The Act!vated Storytellers” since Zephyr was about 4 years old. In May of 2008, Zephyr decided to retire when he turned 18, however Dennis and Kimberly are still traveling full time  and performing via RV.

Airstream Fairtales – After 2 years splitting time between hotels, an apartment in Venice Beach and a house in San Francisco – Stu made a change. He sold his house in San Francisco, bailed on Venice Beach and bought an Airstream as his home base.

Vantramps – Mike & Heidi met much like us – online, via a vehicle forum while they were each already exploring full time life on the road as individuals. They got hitched last summer and are now embarking on travel in a class B van together.

Levity Ahead - Adolfo and Vicki are giving up their stationary life in Austin, TX and hitting the road full time in an Airstream they call the Silver Whale.

Travel Fables – Not attached to any mode of travel, Dale will don his backpack for a wilderness adventure, travel abroad or will hook up to his travel trailer and explore.

World Wide Wonderment - Jon is 33, and on a year’s leave of absence from his job to explore the world.

All of these awesome nomads have been added to our growing List of Nomads.

If you know of other nomads with blogs or are one yourself – even if you’re aspiring to be – don’t be shy about introducing yourself! We’d love to feature you in an upcoming post like this one.

Camp STS-130 in Titusville, FL

Since Saturday afternoon, we’ve been camped along the Indian River in Titusville, Florida – right off Highway US 1.  We’ve been enjoying a completely awesome nomadic rendezvous with Sean Welsh and Louise Hornor of Our Odyssey as temporary neighbors (it’s our first in person meeting after years of cyber stalking each other around

Sean & Louise of Our Odyssey

the country.)  We’ll post most later about our time with them.

What we’re here for was to watch the last planned night shuttle launch. And one of the last five shuttle launches, period.

I lived on the Space Coast of Florida for 12 years before going nomadic. Stepping outside to watch a launch is an amazing part of everyday life here, and an experience that never gets old. I feel very blessed to have serendipitiously ended up back on the Space Coast, in the perfect area to watch this last night launch.

Only on two other occasions had I made the effort to get a close up view and see the entire launch from engine ignition.

Our view across the Indian River - VAB & Launch Pad

There’s been a temporary RV encampment here along US1 that has been fun to be part of, it’s been sort of a ‘Quartzite East’.  The City of Titusville allows free overnight camping on their owned land during a 36 hour window surrounding launch time, something we greatly appreciate!

And we have had the most spectacular of views.

The first attempt of the launch was scrubbed Sunday morning due to low clouds in the area. However, we had an awesome time hanging out with Sean and Louise.  Nomad-stalker, James Schipper and his partner Maria, also came over from the west coast of Florida for the launch and for our first in person meeting.  The four of us huddled all night long in our little Oliver Travel Trailer until the last minute no-go call.

This morning however, at 4:14am EST – all systems were GO (or GEAUX for you Saints fans!), and we witnessed an amazing launch. We also had the nomadic Browski family stop by for a bit before they headed on to their shuttle view hotel room.  The past couple days have been quie the nomadic tweetup!

We recorded video to share:

Direct link to the video for those on RSS/E-mail. By the way, this HD video was taken with my ultra compact Canon PowerShot SD780 – which I got back in July and am still totally loving.

I had a tear in my eye watching this magical moment of technological splendor, knowing that the shuttle program is soon coming to an end. And most likely, this will be the last shuttle launch I’ll ever get to witness in person.  What a beauty!

Knowing only that About Schmidt was about a retired Jack Nicholson taking a road trip across country in an RV, I had somehow ended up with the impression that the movie would be a Meet the Parents style screwball seniors comedy, perhaps with a bittersweet twist. Needless to say – About Schmidt wasn’t high up on my “to see” list.

Fortunately, while passing through Atlanta recently Cherie spotted the DVD lying out on our hosts coffee table, and mentioned that it was one of her personal inspirations towards leading a nomadic life. We ended up watching it that evening, and I am so glad that we did. Rarely has a movie so thoroughly exceeded my expectations – I was honestly blown away.

About Schmidt is not a comedy, nor is it entirely tragic. The film is a character study, looking deep into the character of Warren Schmidt, and in the process casting a harsh and unflattering light onto the superficialities and isolation of modern life.

Jack Nicholson’s performance as Schmidt was Oscar nominated, and he should have won. His was an acting tour de force filled with subtlety and emotion. Kathy Bates was also deservedly nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Director Alexander Payne does a fabulous job using imagery, framing, color, perspective, and focus to give every scene a certain look and a sense of emotion that I found captivating. His Golden Globe winning screenplay is refreshingly clever, and not at all formulaic.

Roger Ebert’s review sums up the genius of this film better than I can:

“About Schmidt” is essentially a portrait of a man without qualities, baffled by the emotions and needs of others. That Jack Nicholson makes this man so watchable is a tribute not only to his craft, but to his legend: Jack is so unlike Schmidt that his performance generates a certain awe. Another actor might have made the character too tragic or passive or empty, but Nicholson somehow finds within Schmidt a slowing developing hunger, a desire to start living now that the time is almost gone. … Most teenagers will probably not be drawn to this movie, but they should attend. Let it be a lesson to them. If they define their lives only in terms of a good job, a good paycheck and a comfortable suburban existence, they could end up like Schmidt, dead in the water.

Portraying that “slowly developing hunger” is at the core of About Schmidt, and it is clear to me now why Cherie cites this film as one of her inspirations.

Though the RV trip is actually secondary to the deeper story, every full time RV’er will find a touch of truth and inspiration in this story. And every wannabe traveler will find in Schmidt motivation to hit the road sooner rather than later. Don’t wait to start living your life!

Watching this film is watching masters at work. Go see it.

Rating: 5 stars!

PS: An earlier version of this review is featured on my personal LiveJournal blog. If you like my movie reviews, you can find many more posted here.

What Is Burning Man: Once a year, tens of thousands of participants gather in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert to create Black Rock City, dedicated to community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance. They depart one week later, having left no trace whatsoever.

This year Burning Man runs from Aug 30 – Sept 6, and the art theme is “Metropolis: The Life of Cities“.

For the past two years, we’ve organized Camp Nomadia, a theme camp specifically for full time travelers (past, present, and future) to come together.

Last year, we had 70 like minds camped with us – it was *incredible*.

We’ve just started organizing efforts to put the camp together again for 2010 – and invite you to consider camping with us if you’re planning to attend Burning Man this year.

Clicking the graphic below will take you to our information page about the camp where you can find out more:

Camp Nomadia goes Regional

Nothing on earth (really!) compares to Burning Man itself, but the distance, cost, time commitment, overwhelming size, and extreme desert environment make the main event an epic journey that may beyond reach for some. Fortunately, there are now regional burns happening all over the country, and around the world.

For those who would like to get a taste of burner culture, we’d like to additionally extend an invitation to join us in creating Camp Nomadia at some of the regional Burns that we’re lining up to attend this year.

These events tend to be 3 or 4 nights long, and have only a few hundred folks at each. Regionals are like a single block of Black Rock City, and much less overwhelming.

The events we’re aiming to hit this year are:

• Interfuse – Kansas City area – April 29 – May 2
• Flipside – Austin, TX – May 27 – 31
• Gateway Burn – St. Louis / Central Missouri – June 10 – 13
• Lakes of Fire – Lacota, MI – June 24 – 27

The only one we’re 100% certain to be attending at this point is the Gateway Burn – as we just recently joined the planning staff of this event, having had such a great experience last year. This is a smaller regional burn with some really fabulous people who happen to LOVE us nomadic types. In fact, they loved us so much that they’re specifically aiming to be the first Nomad Certified Regional Event.

What does that mean? Well - in response to Kiki’s protest last year, they’ve decided to exempt us full time travelers from the usual “no pets rule”.  Kiki is excited to become a burner kitty this summer!  And, they have an easy electronic ticket system that doesn’t require a mailing address or making a commitment more than a week prior to attend.

We are hoping to lure as many nomads as we can to converge with us at the Gateway Burn this summer. With its low price (aprox $30), central location, great people, and RV friendly grounds – we feel that this is a great “Burning Man Lite” experience for those not ready or able to dive into the main event.

If you are at all interested, please consider joining us! We also keep a calendar with all the regional US Burning Man events we’ve discovered, as well as other events we’re considering.

We’re here to stand up and say – being a Domestic Nomad is an equally valid form of vagabonding.

Last year the fabulous website NuNomad.com featured a roundtable discussion with several prominent nomadic entrepreneurs, exploring the topic of what it takes to be a long term nomad.

In my comments on the article, I pointed out that they had only gotten contributions from folks exploring worldwide travel – and that the whole universe of domestic nomadism was being ignored. As a result, Carmen from NuNomad contacted me and asked if we’d be interested in being interviewed about our style of domestic RV nomadism. The interview was just published this past week.

Now don’t get us wrong – we love global travel (and have done plenty of it ourselves), and we admire those who have made it work as a sustainable lifestyle.

But traveling internationally is not the only way to embrace nomadism, nor is it the “ultimate” way to strive for. Domestic travel can be just as rewarding, and it is often vastly easier, more practical, and better suited to craft into a sustainable lifestyle.

For many, traveling the world full time ends up feeling more like an extended vacation or a prolonged break from normal life than something that feels truly sustainable. For some, international roaming ends up being a gap experience between major life transitions, or becomes a search for a new home to settle down at. And a lot of people struggle with the hurdles and roadblocks of being away from their home country, such as work visa issues, difficulty with the fine line between travel & vacation or a sense of disconnection from friends, family, and community.

Some do make it work, certainly. But many who try report hitting walls of unsustainability.

For those craving a fully mobile lifestyle, there are ways to embrace nomadism without dealing with the challenges of perpetual international travel.

Embracing nomadism or a location independent lifestyle doesn’t have to be a ‘permanent home’ vs ‘conquer the world’ proposition.

When we set out, our intention was to create a lifestyle of full time mobility that could be unending. International travel is fabulous, but there are extra challenges that can decrease the sustainability of it. Domestic full time travel has given us freedom of mobility, while keeping us accessible to family, friends, work, and (ever critical) easy and affordable wireless bandwidth.

In domestic travel, we are managing to fulfill our wanderlust, without compromising on sustainability or community – and after almost 3 years of full time travel, we feel we’re just getting started. The good ole US of A has an amazing amount of diversity, beauty and awesome things to keep us fulfilled. Heck, despite intentions otherwise – we’ve yet to find time to cross into Canada or Mexico!

One day, yes – we do intend to explore further afield. Perhaps we will head overland towards Central America, or downsize into backpacks for some extended globe trotting. Or maybe we will even trade our wheels for sails, and hit the open seas to spend some time with the now forming Technomad Sailing Flotilla.

But for now, there is no rush. Domestic nomading suites us just fine.

Fake Fireplaces, Giant TV’s, Mobile Man Caves, Central Vacuum Systems

Things we didn’t see any of:

Solar Panels, Energy Efficient Lighting, Composting Toilets, Camper Vans

Though we have been full time RV dwellers for years now, neither of us had ever been to an actual RV show. When we saw that “one of the largest public RV shows in the country” would be happening last week while we were still in St. Louis, we knew that we would have to check it out.

Mobile Luxury: Kitchen Island, Huge Living Room, and Fake Fireplace

We were hoping to get exposed to variety of RV’s of different sizes and styles, and to check out a wide range of the latest products and technologies for mobile living.

We ended up being disappointed.

The RVs on display did not reflect nearly the breadth of RV’ing style and quality that we had hoped to see. Instead of variety, the St. Louis RV Show offered up aisle after aisle of fairly forgettable cookie-cutter box style trailers, oversized fifth wheels, and slide-out-laden class A’s.

Only a handful of smaller travel trailers were on display, and there were no camper vans, bus conversions, fiberglass trailers, or truck campers to be seen anywhere on the show floor.

If you were hoping to be exposed to a breadth of choices, this was not the show to come to.

We did however get a chance to ogle at some over the top RV’s optimized for hosting epic tailgate parties, and others designed to be luxury condos on wheels pushing the boundaries of ostentatious excess to new extremes.

Though nothing we saw fit out personal style of travel, it was nice to spend an afternoon checking out a few of the more impressive designs.

Here are a few things that caught our eye…

With many of the premium models costing upwards of $100,000, it is no surprise that a lot of emphasis is placed on recreating all the comforts of home while on the road. But I was disappointed in how rare an emphasis on intelligent design, practicality, longevity, or quality seemed to be.

For example – why worry about being able to open up your refrigerator door without cranking out the slideouts, if it means that you can have an elegant island in your kitchen? And why bother with energy efficient lights or space on board for more than a single battery when you’ll need to be perpetually plugged in to a 50amp circuit full time for your dual rooftop air conditioners?

We saw RV’s with dual kitchens (indoor and outdoor), dual bathrooms, three or more giant screen televisions (including outdoors), fake fireplaces, ceiling fans, elevated back porches, and cavernous cargo holds… Many of the toy haulers even found space for a dedicated beer fridge in the garage area!

One brand was using the tagline “Leave Nothing Behind” – and that was indeed a design philosophy on display at the show.

There were only a few RV’s at the show that were suited for full time living on the road, and there was nothing at all on display that was suitable for “boondocking” or operating off grid. Solar panels and power efficient technologies were completely absent.

For those wanting less emphasis on square footage, the smaller and easier to tow RV’s on display disappointingly tended not to have tanks or electrical systems worthy of more than a weekend away from power hookups.

And while there were plenty of “bargain” smaller designs on display, the lack of quality in construction and the pervasive smell of formaldehyde when you stepped aboard made it clear that with most of the cheaper models you were getting what you paid for.

One standout design was the ultralight Quicksilver CampLite. The all aluminum body and frame should last years longer than most traditional plywood & steel RV designs. And the sub 2000lb empty weight should allow for towing by even some cars!

One of the larger fifth wheels we toured actually had a built in beer tap in the “man cave” second living room that the garage in the back transformed into once you pulled your ATV’s out. Imagine – two living rooms, two bathrooms, two fridges, beer on tap, and a garage – all in a single RV!

And while having quality microbrews on draft is something that our Oliver lacks, we ultimately didn’t see much at the show to excite our technomadic souls. And in the end, there was nothing that left us fantasizing about upgrading from our Oliver.

One final disappointment was the vendor area. I was surprised with how little we could find of interest to full-time RV’ers. Instead of solar panels and satellite internet systems, there was an out-of-place preponderance of home-show style booths. Basements? Bathrooms? Aluminum siding? Kitchen remodeling? Dog training?!?

The only appealing thing we managed to find in the entire vending area was a very clever but way overpriced 50′ long wind-up collapsible water hose. After spending hours looking at all the mobile monuments to inefficiency, seeing an actual space efficient design – wow!

To see more from the St. Louis RV Show, check out our full photo set or slideshow on Flickr.

Also – for our advice on how to choose the style of mobile home that best suits you, be sure to check out Cherie’s guide to selecting a home on wheels.

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

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

Currently in this series:

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

Other topics coming up include: Health & Healthcare, Staying Connected, Fear and Procrastination.

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

To many, those things are just as essential to life as water or oxygen.

What sort of impact will living a nomadic life have on your current relationships? Or on your prospects for finding one?

Today I am returning to fleshing out my ‘Answers to Common Excuses Not to Travel‘ series of articles that I started last summer. I apologize upfront for not keeping on top of this project – we’ll blame it on the time spent living a fabulous life getting in the way of producing these loftier posts. I suppose there is also some hesitation – I’ve covered the basic topics that are easier to address and which have firm resources to point you towards. Now we are getting into the topics that don’t have easy answers, and the “right answer” will vary widely for folks.

And ‘the relationship issue’ is indeed one of the most substantial excuses we have heard from people explaining why they’re not embracing a traveling life. The issues range from a fears around traveling solo, to the complications that come from having an existing partner who is not interested in or able to set out for a life on the road.

For the Single Traveler

When you travel alone – you’re on your own time schedule, you’re seeing the things you want to see, you’re free to give in to your whims, you’re able to eat whatever you want whenever you want, and you have the flexibility to be moving on to your next destination whenever the desire strikes.  There is a lot of freedom that comes from not having to keep another person’s wants and needs constantly in mind.

The sort of freedom that comes from solo travel thrills some people, and terrifies others.

Some want to experience traveling the world as a single person before meeting their ideal mate in life, for others solo travel might be the perfect thing to fill a gap in between major relationships, and some folks just prefer being intentionally single for the long term.

On the other hand – some people just don’t want to travel alone. We run across many people who put off their travel dreams because they want to share it with a companion and they are waiting to find the right person to partner up with. Some people wait a lifetime, which is tragic. In our experience however, even if you start off alone, you are much more likely to find a like mind once you are already on the road than if you wait. Someone drawn to a life of travel is going to be much more attracted to an active traveler, after all.

When Chris originally set off to be nomadic, he needed to actively let go of his attachment to finding a nomad-compatible relationship in advance. Just as he was becoming fully comfortable with the idea of being without a primary relationship and a partner in life and travel, that’s when I came along and messed up that plan for him. The universe tends to work that way. *grin*

We are living proof – you can find compatible life and travel partners out on the road. After all, it’s easier to meet people who share your interests by getting out there and exploring them!

If you are considering traveling alone, it’s a good idea to make sure you know what you’re getting into. Some long term single travelers begin to express a certain level of loneliness with the transient nature of the romances and friendships they explore as they travel.  Pursuing new relationships on the road requires a good bit of intention setting (both for yourself and your mates) to avoid getting emotionally hurt in the process. It also involves learning to make an art out of saying good bye.  Check out the links above for some insights, particularly the comment threads.

Here are some other resources for the single traveler that might be useful:

Solo Traveler Blog – A collection of resources about a variety of topics that come up for the solo traveler.

Matador Travel Partners & Lonely Planet’s Travel Companions forums – Both of these highly visited independent traveler sites offer forums for meeting up with other solo travelers. Sometimes, finding a short term travel companion helps a lot with easing any loneliness.

Wandering Individuals Network - A network of solo & single RVers who meet for events across the US. (Caution, their website auto plays cheesy music.)

Even if you do have a life partner, if one or both of you is craving some solo-style travel, try it out. A week or a month spent venturing off in different directions can leave you energized with a wealth of new experiences and stories to share with each other when you rendezvous again. For traveling couples that are together 24/7, an occasional extended break can actually be a great way to recharge and reset with some much needed alone time.

Mismatched Travel Lust

It happens every so often that one partner gets bit by the travel bug, and to their surprise discovers that their partner shares this previously undisclosed lust.  Congrats.. you’ve won the lottery!

But more often than not, one of the biggest barriers we’ve discovered in talking with folks is that they’re in a relationship they love – but their partner does not share their wanderlust.  We’ve heard everything from “my wife couldn’t do without the curling iron if we lived in an RV!” to “staying at luxury resorts is my husband’s idea of ‘roughing it.’”

Another common issue is mismatched physical ability, particularly amongst couples who wait until retirement to begin traveling. We have run across several couples that have had one partner’s medical issues derail plans to spend their golden years exploring the great outdoors or exotic foreign cities. All too often we are told by older couples that they wished they hadn’t waited so long to follow their dreams.

No matter the reason, a significant mismatch in ability, desired styles of travel, or even a desire to travel at all leaves folks having to make some tough choices and compromises if they want to explore a travel-centric lifestyle.

For some, the compromises are too much – and perhaps changes to the relationship just have to be made so that everyone can get their needs met.  Perhaps you’re able to eventually convince your partner to enjoy travel, particularly if you ease them into a traveling lifestyle slowly. Perhaps you’ll decide that occasionally living/traveling apart is an appropriate choice for where you are in life.  Relationships can work even when two people choose not to live together full time.  For some, it’s ok to agree to go your separate ways for a while – it doesn’t have to diminish the love or the commitment.

One afternoon in Utah while filling up our gas tank, we encountered a solo woman RVer. We stopped and chatted for a bit, as us travelers tend to do. She shared with us that her husband of several decades didn’t like to travel – but she was drawn to it. She now spends 6-months of the year living with him at home, and the other half of the year out on the road visiting with family and friends. It seemed to be working quite well for them.

There are ways to to find workable solutions, if you’re willing to look outside the box of what we’re told relationships need to look like.

Whether solo or partnered, life is best lived when you are following your dreams. Don’t wait!

—-
Check out the other articles in this growing series on Answers to Excuses not to Travel Full-Time.

So in 2009, I kept a basic log of our fuel and camping fees for public display and just added in December’s numbers. In the process, I decided to add in some of our fixed costs that are necessary to our travels to better give folks a realistic cost of our full time travel.

Here’s the 2009 totals:

(For those on RSS or e-mail, you may need to click through to the full post to view the embedded Google Doc spreadsheet.)

Now keep in mind, I’m only reporting the costs specifically associated with our full time traveling. I’ve left off expenses that we’d incur anyway if we lived more stationary – such as food, clothing, entertainment, tech geekery, etc.  I figure that these expenses will vary by person anyway based on personal style, so what we spend isn’t really all that representative.

The combination of fuel and camping fees are the most equivalent living expense we have that replaced paying rent or a mortgage, which as you can see typically comes in less than moderate accommodations in a decent sized city.  At an average of $500/month, it’s about a 75% savings over my previous mortgage payment in Florida.

There are two fixed expenses that I did include, that are arguable if they’re travel specific or not.

• Connectivity: Our two cell phone bills and cellular data service are both expenses that we’d have regardless.  Even before I went on the road, I used my cell phone as my only phone line and maintained a data plan for mobile accessibility. However, since these expenses are so essential to enabling our life and work style  - I decided to include them as part of our fixed technomadic expenses.
• Insurance: Obviously. a full-timer’s RV policy is travel specific.  I included insurance on our tow vehicle (despite auto insurance being necessary for any vehicle owner) as a travel expense.  And I decided to include our health insurance plans – as prior to being nomadic, we were both covered by group plans paid by our employers (ok – so I’m my own employer, I’ve always technically paid my own.)  However, in order to secure coverage across the nation, we went with individual insurance that can’t be paid through our company.  Finding nationwide coverage that doesn’t penalize you for being geographically flexible is a challenge, for sure – and we’ll be addressing that in a future post. I’ve decided to include our self paid premiums as part of our travel expenses.

Other expenses that folks should keep in mind if considering a full time RVing lifestyle might include payments on your rig if you can’t purchase in cash. Ours is paid for, so we don’t have those sorts of expenses. For a more complete description of our monthly expenses and factors that influence our costs, refer to our Cost Log – which I generally keep up to date each month.

I found it rather serendipitously ironic that in 2009 we spent just over $13,000 and traveled just over 13,000 miles.  

So I suppose another way of expressing our travel cost is A buck a mile!  

Which to us.. seems like a pretty sweet deal for a life of full time travel!

We’re currently in St. Louis staying with Chris’ family, and this week we’re house sitting while his folks are on vacation.

Between recovering from the long physical hours of a month working at amazon.com, coming directly into family holidays and then unseasonally cold temperatures and snow – we’ve reached a week of nomadic stasis.

While we had intentions of getting out and exploring the city and connecting with local friends – we’ve not really left the house much.  And it has indeed been nice to be staying in a traditional house during this very cold weather, we’re quite thankful for the timing. It’s proven to be quite a bit of effort to keep the Oliver warm enough when the temperatures dip down into single digits. We’re definitely looking forward to moving on to warmer temperatures in a couple weeks. 

Perhaps this is how nomads have a vacation?  We stay put for a bit and chill, and take a break from exploring.   At any rate, while our week isn’t full of exciting new adventures, we consider any day we’re doing exactly what we want – to be awesome!

2009 was my first year – and I spent it entirely growing up on the road!  I’ve been all over the place, hiked in amazing places, visited lots of people and made lots of new cat, dog & bunny friends!

Here’s some of my favorite pics from the year:

I’m now a year old, so technically I’m not a kitten anymore.  But I’m still cute, right?

We started 2009 with an extended stay near San Francisco, working to orchestrate the launch of the iPhone travel application HearPlanet with some over-the-top guerilla marketing. With our unauthorized renegade double-decker DJ-equipped party bus, we generate a lot of buzz at Macworld, and started off 2009 with a bang.

We wrapped up our time in the SF Bay Area by presenting on Technomadism at the O’Reilly ETech conference, and in March we were on the road again.

Since then we have crisscrossed the country 2 complete times, with many meandering paths and fabulous encounters along the way. Some highlights of 2009 include attending Burning Man, three regional Burning Man events, a submarine veterans reunion, Photoshop World, OReilly’s ETech, and our two particularly intense temporary work gigs (Amazon.com and HearPlanet).

Our 2009 Routing

Here are direct links to our pictorial travelogue posts covering the segments of this year:

• Florida, Bahamas and Washington, DC – January
• California Exodus – March 22 – April 9
• Arizona & New Mexico – April 9 – 23
• Texas to St. Louis – April 24 – May 17
• Loop to Hohenwald - May 18 – June 11
• St. Louis to Indiana – June 12 – June 29
• Philadelphia, DC, Appalachians and St. Louis – June 30 – July 29
• St. Louis – Burning Man – July 30 – August 28
• Burning Man – Hemet – Sept 6 – October 24
• Hemet to St. Louis – October 25 – December 31

It has been a great year on the road. And most importantly, we made many new friends and fabulous contacts along the way.

Visitors to Technomadia.com in 2009

In our online life, we definitely increased our visibility by a substantial amount. At the beginning of the year we were getting less than a thousand unique visitors a month to our site, which was originally aimed at just keeping friends and family updated on our travels.  Now we’re getting a least 7 times that traffic, plus we have several hundred RSS and Facebook subscribers as well. We feel very blessed to be able to share our adventures with so many people!

Here’s to an awesome 2010 – we look forward to where our adventures lead us next!

With plans to spend the holidays with family in the St. Louis area, we looked ahead to doing a mid-country run very much similar to the path we took earlier in the year.  We decided to sign on to workamp at Amazon’s distribution center in Kansas on the way to kill a month, which would mean the trip across country would be at a much quicker pace than our normal.

San Diego, CA

Upon discovering that we had potential vehicle issues with our Jeep that might need additional attention before attempting another cross country jaunt, we decided to relocate from Hemet, CA to San Diego – where there would be more resources for repairs. It also helped that our technomadic friend, Ben Willmore, was also hanging out there – so for only the fifth time in our travels we stayed in a commercial RV park.

And much to our surprise, the park was able to place our tiny 17′ rig right next to his 40′ bus. It was nice to be temporary neighbors with Ben for a week while we took care of our chores and he took care of his. And as it was the San Diego Beer Week, we spent many an evening sampling some fine craft beers together.

In the end, it turned out that repairing the Jeep didn’t make sense, so our focus shifted to finding a replacement tow vehicle  more suited for full time towing. We said good bye to our beloved diesel Jeep Liberty CRD, and hello to a 2006 Toyota Tundra.

Exploring the Salton Sea

With a new tow vehicle procured, it was time to start our eastward journey – but not before a long anticipated rendezvous with nomadic photographer Sandi Wheaton.  She had been put in touch with us several months ago after she lost her job and decided to spend several weeks doing an epic phootography roadtrip down Route 66 in a small travel trailer. During the course of conversing about the lifestyle, a friendship was formed.

With her now  in Los Angeles and ready to start her eastward trek back home – we rendezvoused back near Hemet at a paragliding field that Chris had been practicing jumping off mountains at.  While we just missed the opportunity for him to have a sled ride down, we had an awesome time meeting Sandi – so much so, we called our awesome artist friends Sean Mahonney and Helene Lohr (who we had spent the past 6 weeks with).   They came out and joined us, and an epic Salton Sea photo exploration for the next day was conceived.

Arriving after dark, our first night on the Salton Sea was spent boondocking at the old Niland Marina and doing some epic light painting.  Both with Cherie doing fire and LED poi dance, and of Sandi’s triangle trailer.

In the morning, we all spent several hours photo exploring this area – coming up with some amazing shots!   And then, Sandi offered to give us a tour of Slab City and introduce us to her friend who lives there.

Went spent the rest of the day in an artistic wonderland that is known as East Jesus in Slab City, and exploring Salvation Mountain – both of which we’ve written about separately.   We ended up staying the next two nights at East Jesus before continuing on our way eastward.  We will be returning for an extended visit.

Eastward to Kansas

As we had previously gone a very similar route through Arizona and New Mexico earlier in the year,  we opted to traverse this section of the trip on the interstate and make good time.

We did stop off for a couple nights in Lake Havasu City to visit our Oliver-owning Burning Man friends – where Andrew was sweet enough to help us track down some problems we were having with our tail lights.

We made good time through Albuquerque, then decided to slow the pace down a bit and started taking our preferred backroads once we hit Tucumcari. We got across the great state of Texas in record time by just crossing the tip of the panhandle, and explored around Oklahoma. Spotting a sign for the city of Laverne, we took a detour to do a special photography holiday gift for Chris’ grandmother – of the same name.

We arrived to Independence, Kansas and began scoping out our camping options for our month long stay in the area while we worked at Amazon. We checked out the closet options in Coffeyville – but at the time the only spots left were spack dab in the middle where we’d have neighbors on all four sides. While the commute would have been nicer, we opted for the open meadows and lakes that Elk City State Park offered, which is also where another Oliver owning friend of ours was staying as they workamped too.

Amazon.com

The month of December was mostly working at Amazon.com’s fullfillment center in Coffeyville, Kansas. It was a physically intense experience that left us with a lot of illumination on many aspects of American culture we might not have otherwise received.  We’ve already written some of our initial impressions about the experience, and did an interview with Gizmodo that has been since featured on Slashdot. We find it a bit humorous that us normally tech-enabled nomads taking on a manual labor job gets us so much publicity!

We will be following up in the coming weeks with a lot more information on our experience at Amazon – mostly we’re just waiting on our final paycheck to make it through our forwarding system so that we can show exactly how much money can be made at these sorts of gigs.

St. Louis

We’re  now in St. Louis spending the holidays with Chris’ family.   Mostly we’ve been catching up on sleep, readjusting back to daylight hours and catching up on all of the chores that can accumulate in a month.

In a few weeks, we’ll start heading south to warmer climates and time with Cherie’s family.

We’re quite pleased with the featured article about us –  Secret Lives of Amazon’s Elves and honored to be able to share our experience with a wider audience.  We would have never thought that our experiment of doing otherwise mundane manual labor would catch the radar of a major tech journal!

The elves at Technomadia wish you a very Merry Christmas, and hope that your season is filled with joy, love, laughter and harmony.

Digital Nomads at Slab City - Photo by Sandi Wheaton

Working 12 hour days at Amazon’s distribution center over the past month has forced us into a digital fast.

And it was good.

The first couple of days we’d spend every last second in the parking lot with our iPhones, soaking up as much bandwidth as we could. We’d both grimace as we turned them off and put them in the center console to enter the gigantic warehouse.  And then we’d rush out as quickly as possible after our shift was over, checking e-mail even before we’d start the windshield defrosting the ice that had accumulated overnight.   And as soon as we got home to our campsite, we’d both be online trying to catch up with the world.

An interesting thing happened about 2 weeks into our gig – the iPhones would stay in the center console until we almost got home. And we’d both hop online just long enough to answer e-mails from loved ones and make an occasional twitter update or blog post.  Our reliance on staying connected had been broken.

At the end of the gig, when we could resume our normal constant access to the digital world – I found myself more centered on the reality in front of me. Dinner with friends was not interrupted by my constant urge to check e-mail, Facebook and Twitter.  I didn’t get the disconnected twitch, and I was more engaged with the awesome people in front of me.  The iPhone stayed tucked away until it was actually needed to check weather forecasts and routing directions to our next destination.

From this perspective, our time at Amazon could be compared to going to a digital addicts rehab center or a mediation center – and getting paid to have treatment!

We wish all our followers the very best this holiday season … and urge you click the close button above and divert your attention to things more precious right in front of you. After all, there’s no prize for the most amount of bandwidth consumed. The only true reward in life is the quality of experience you create for yourself.

Today – I am living in a 17 foot long trailer with around 80 square feet of living space, spending a cold December in a trailer park in South East Kansas. I am walking distance to a bath house, a lake, and not much else. (Ok – technically it is a state park and not a traditional trailer park, but…)


Four years ago, my fridge had ice and water dispensers in the door. My shower had endless hot water. And I had laundry machines and dishwashers to help with the chores. I even had a cleaning service!

Today I make ice cubes in small trays, and drink water supplied via a hose from outdoor faucets. Showers are cramped and brief, or involve a walk through the cold night. Laundry is done at laundromats. And dishes are done by hand.


Four years ago I drove a new Prius, and got 50mpg.
Today I am driving a used truck, and get 15mpg.


Four and a half years ago, I was working in Silicon Valley making a hefty six figure salary and earning gobs of stock in a high profile leadership role at one of the most recognizable companies in the tech industry.

This month I have been working for one of the most recognizable companies in the tech industry – as an anonymous and generic cog on the night shift, doing menial labor in a rural Kansas warehouse for near minimum wage.


Five years ago I would spend my days plotting competitive strategy versus the likes of Microsoft and Nokia.

Last night, I was plotting how to fit a “Christmas Story Leg Lamp” into a properly sized box for shipping.

======================

From a certain perspective, it might look as if my life has taken a significant turn for the worse over the past few years.

As if!

Happiness comes in diverse packaging, and following the traditional formulas chasing after wealth and success is rarely the best way to find it. And other than wishing for better Tundra MPG, I wouldn’t change a thing.

*grin*

Our intentions for the first quarter of 2010 seem to be coming together, and currently are looking something like this:

Late December thru mid-January – St. Louis, visiting with Chris’ family
mid-January – mid-February – Meandering around Florida, catching up with Cherie’s parents and our community there
mid-February – March - Head to Texas, where our NuRVers community is starting to plan a rally, visiting with Cherie’s brother and we’re contemplating attending SXSW in Austin.

The rest of the year is pretty unplanned except for attending Burning Man and hosting Camp Nomadia in late August. We imagine we’ll try to hit as many regional Burning Man style events as we can too, amongst whatever other adventures serendipity guides us towards.

My circadian rhythm has totally adjusted – however it stills feels odd to go to bed after sunrise, and wake up just before sunset. We picked the night shift as I needed to be at least available to my regular clients during normal business hours (I can at least check e-mail and receive calls if I’m awakened… whereas I can’t even take a cell phone into Amazon.com). And, because we were coming directly from California and still mentally on PST, we figured the night shift would be easier to adapt to than the evil get up at 4am to work a day shift option.

Our shift starts at 5pm and we’re now getting off at 5:30am the next morning. Amazon has us on 5 12-hr days this week (however, we’re opting for four 12 hrs days and two 6 hr days which amazingly feels like more time off to us) – the final push to Santapalooza. We stay up until 8 or 10am after watching a sunrise (and usually to the sounds of gunfire of nearby deer hunters – deer which greet us in the dark as we enter our campsite earlier in the evening.. er.. morning ), sleep until 2 or 3pm. Rinse. Repeat.

On many days I’ll squeeze in my work and online life into the hours of 2-4 pm (even later on our evenings off). Which I have to keep reminding myself when I get home the next evening.. err… morning.. after working a night shift, that while a ‘day’ has transpired for me since sending an e-mail – that for most folks, they’ve been mostly asleep and likely not even read my e-mail yet, let alone had time to act and respond.

Meals are odd. We have dinner food for our wake up meal, a lunch break at 11pm and then sometimes beer & donuts for our ‘dinner’ when we get home. Only two options for food that early in the morning that don’t involve us cooking – donuts and McDonald’s breakfast.

How we reference days has been totally weird. Terms like ‘tomorrow’, ‘yesterday’ and ‘today’ generally require further explanation and clarification – because there are now two possible definitions available to us. Our experience of a ‘day’ traverses two calendar days to the rest of the day time working world.

And, I find myself hesitating when I refer to the first half of our shift (5p – 11p) as ‘this morning’ – which is a very natural thing to call the first part of the working day.

It’s really odd to experience just how culturally engrained and abstract the whole concept of time vocabulary really is.

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes our bodies to adjust to going to bed earlier in the .. umm.. day, night, evening.. whatever.

One of Amazon’s staffing agencies, ExpressPro, has for the past several years organized bringing in hundreds of RV-living workampers to help out in Amazon’s peak season. Express and Amazon pay camping fees, and provide a “honey wagon” tank dumping service for sites without full hookups. Some of the workcampers have been here for months already, but we were part of the last batch to start, just before Thanksgiving.

The Huffington Post today published an article: Inside The Lives Of Amazon.com Warehouse Employees: Long Hours, Long Walks, And Heavy Lifting. For those wanting more info on the workamping gig that we’re currently checking out, this provides a closer look. For the record, we are in no way connected to the Huffington Post article published.

We’re here mainly here to checkout this workamping thing, as we’ve never done it before – and to experience what its like to work inside Amazon’s warehouse. It has been a fascinating and exhausting experience so far.

A lot of the other seasonal employees are here to earns some exrtra money, or to try and transition into a full time job at Amazon. Several of the “locals” are commuting from as far away as Joplin, MO or Tulsa, OK for the job. We even met someone who is paying almost as much as he earns each day to stay in a nearby motel – hoping his investment will eventually turn into a full time job offer.

Thank goodness money is not our motivating factor – as it’s not all that much (we’re making $11/hr).

Since an article has been published about exactly what we’re doing, we’ll take a moment and tell a bit more about what we’re up to and give you the perspective of someone actually there.

Our Gig

Photo from Huffington Post Article - General Amazon Warehouse Photo

We can concur with the Huffington Post- the job involves long hours and long walks, but only moderately heavy lifting.

We’ve  both been assigned to the ‘Sortable Singles’ area, which is a relatively new area of the warehouse designed for packaging just orders with single items (that aren’t DVDs, etc.). Cherie has been a packer since day one, and Chris has been assigned to be a jack-of-all-trades, occasionally doing packing as well as various support tasks throughout the department. On various days he has been helping sort packages, supply boxes to packers, and “problem solving” mis-sorted packages.  From what we’ve gathered, Sortable Singles is one of the physically least demanding departments in the facility, and ExpressPro goes out of their way to place their workampers – most of whom are of traditional retired age – in this department.

Cherie stands next to three conveyor belts all night long pulling totes, scanning and boxing items to be sent to the shipping department. She has a department goal of 130 items boxed per hour – and she generally chooses to work the front of the line which tends to get all the big toys and difficult to box stuff (thus, slower to box).  After just over 2 weeks on the job, she’s keeping pace with the average units per hour of her teammates of 105.  Hardly anyone is making the management goal of 130 in the department (and those few that do are long timers and/or have to cherry pick the ‘good’ totes of easy to package stuff) – but our department  managers seem quite pleased with productivity, and have continually praised our group for our work, and we seem to be keeping ahead of the totes coming down the line.

The Time

Photo from Huffinton Post Article - General Amazon Warehouse Photo

We selected to work the night shift, as it better fits our sleep schedule, and allows us to be accessible during day hours to our normal technology consulting clients.

For working nights, we are getting an extra 50 cents an hour. Originally we were working 4 – 10 hour days a week. After Thanksgiving, Amazon switched everyone to ’scheduled overtime’ of 5 – 11 hour days (which ExpressPro had pre-warned us about).  The overtime is not optional, and you will receive a point against your record if you miss a day of scheduled overtime.  For those of us just working a short temporary peak season, points don’t mean all that much to us. But for those wanting to attempt to be hired on full time by Amazon, points mean everything.    All warehouse workers start out via temp agencies, and it takes quite a bit of dedication and persistence to get hired on directly by Amazon.

As of this week, Amazon has authorized everyone an additional 5 hours a week of optional overtime – and is luring workers in with promises of ‘pizza and beer’ (root beer) on Fridays (we’ll be checking that out later this evening). That means everyone is expected to work 55 hours a week, and they will pay up to 60 hours a week.  Everything over 40 hours is at time and half (for us, $16.50).

During our 11 hour shift, we get two paid 15 minute breaks – plus an unpaid 30 minute lunch.  There’s no time to leave the facility for lunch, you must bring in your own stuff – microwaves, vending machines and refrigerators are provided.  They also provide water, tea, coffee, gatorade-type substance and ice for use during breaks and lunch. During the holiday season, every Tuesday and Saturday (we’re scheduled to work both), Amazon provides a hot catered lunch for everyone.  Last week was a chicken dish, this week a ham dish.  Those working Thanksgiving day also got given a whole pumpkin pie to take home.

Our Experience & Impressions Thus Far

Thus far, we’ve been paid as agreed via ExpressPro – they even hand deliver our paychecks each week to our workstations, and someone from ExpressPro checks in with us daily.  Our camping has been paid for. We’ve selected to stay at a beautiful state park about 20 miles away – so we do have a bit of a commute each day.  We’re not actually here/awake enough to enjoy it, unfortunately. The nearest camping options were about 5 miles from Amazon, and when we arrived they were very full, very muddy and all the units were parked very close to each other.  Apparently last year Amazon actually provided a shuttle bus to the campgrounds, but this year they aren’t.

The beauty of temporary gigs like this, is that there’s really no penalty for leaving early if you feel called to.

All and all, it’s physically demanding work that is not for the most part not mentally challenging in anyway.  Everyone we’re working with is extremely friendly and accommodating.   Our direct managers that we interact with daily are great at keeping us on task, without being too demanding. We’re working with a mix of other workampers (who are all awesome) and locals trying to make ends meet.   We both come home at the end of the day absolutely exhausted. Our feet ache from being on them for so many hours. Cherie’s hands in particular are suffering from the repetitive motion – she actually took a day off earlier this week to recover better.  And when she mentioned her hand issues to our manager, she was taken care of by Amazon’s ‘AmCare’, a safety incident report taken – and has had follow-up visits since. Physical safety seems to be an authentic constant concern for Amazon, and we’re lead through group stretches twice a day and given daily safety tips.

This experience has given us a fascinating peak inside this side of America from multiple angles – and we’ll be writing more when we’re done (on Dec 23) on these perspectives. Stay tuned.

So, here are some folks we’d like to introduce you to this month:

HiTek Homeless – Johnny and Jenn are two 30-something geeks who got fed up with the cubicle world and set off adventuring in a truck camper. They just celebrated their two year nomadiversary, and are currently workamping like us at amazon.com – but in the Nevada location.  They  also run the website FreeCampSites.net – which is an awesome resource for finding cheap and free camping. We are thankful that a fellow reader introduced us, and hope to cross paths in the future!

Mobile Kodgers – We were introduced to Randy via a post featuring us over on MyShrikingLife.com. I spent the other evening reading back over months of his posts, and was quick to determine that Randy is awesome – he’s traveling in a stealthy boondockable trailer out meeting amazing people and getting their stories. And it turns out, when I wrote him – he was at East Jesus, where we just left after being introduced to Container Charlie!  How’s *that* for nomadic serendipity??

Mountainborn Chronicles – Larry and Betty are fellow Oliver Travel Trailer owners who we met on the trailer’s forums when we were considering ordering ours.  They have always been so generous with their time in helping us. Part of the reason we came to Kansas was to finally meet up with them, as they’re workamping here too.   We’re actually parked just down the street from them.  Larry retired from the police force earlier this year, and now they’re out traveling the country workamping and geocaching along the way.

Live Collar Free – Many folks who frequent nomadic and lifestyle design blogs are familiar with James Schipper aka NomadRIP.  A nomadic spirit himself, he’s invested a lot of effort in being a frequent contributor to the twittersphere and blogoshere around these topics – and we’ve been honored that he pokes around here.  He’s recently quietly launched his own blog where we can start returning the gratitude!

If you know of other nomads or are one yourself – or even if you’re aspiring to be and starting to blog about it – don’t be shy about introducing yourself!

Lots of folks getting cameras for the holidays.. here are some that are most frequent buys and apparently incredible deals right now:

Canon PowerShot SD1200IS 10 MP Digital Camera with 3x Optical Image Stabilized Zoom and 2.5-inch LCD (Dark Gray)

Nikon D90 DX 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera with 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6G ED AF-S VR DX Nikkor Zoom Lens

Canon Digital Rebel XSi 12.2 MP Digital SLR Camera with EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 IS Lens (Black)

GPS’s in general are shipping out by the truckload.. here are just a few that I frequently see in large batches.. incredible deals on these things! Just a couple months ago when we were investigating options for ourselves these same models were selling at 2-3 times the price.

Garmin nüvi 265W/265WT 4.3-Inch Widescreen Bluetooth Portable GPS Navigator with Traffic

Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS Receiver With Heart Rate Monitor

Garmin nüvi 855 4.3-Inch Widescreen Portable GPS Navigator with Speech Recognition

And while I tend to grab the tech stuff (it’s my way of keeping sane.. I love my tech!), I do get crates of toys too. Here are the ones I’m most noticing, and that look both techy and educational:

Vtech Tote and Go Pink Laptop

LeapFrog Scribble and Write

LeapFrog Clickstart My First Computer

And for my least favorite item to package but lots are shipping

Apple iPod touch 32 GB (3rd Generation) NEWEST MODEL
(It’ difficult to package because Apple has made the UPC code so incredibly tiny on the package, that it takes for ever to get a proper scan on it. Otherwise, their packaging is uber beautiful.)

And in the department of the weirdest and most entertaining item I’ve packed lots of:

The Mooning Garden Gnome

Disclaimer: The above are not our endorsement of any of the items, as we’ve not used any of them. The links are affiliate links.

However, I didn’t anticipate just how little ‘free time’ we’d be getting working at amazon.com’s distribution center in Kansas this month.  We’ve now completed our first full week (working 11 hour days – 5 days a week), and it’s exhausting. It’s not mentally challenging by any means, but it sure is physically challenging.  And it’s quite an experience and peak into this side of consumer culture and America. We’re all about experiences and learning about things we’re not normally exposed to – so it’s definitely worthwhile from that perspective.  Hopefully when we’re done with our time here in a few weeks we’ll have the energy to post more indepth about what we’ve learned (without violating the terms of our NDA we signed about the specific processes.)

So back to wonderful antithesis of consumerism – Slab City and East Jesus. When we met up with Route 66 Roadtripping Sandi Wheaton in what seems like so long ago now, she was thrilled to be able to play tour guide for us around the Salton Sea – an area of the country we had not yet explored, and were quite curious about.

We posted previously about our afternoon at Salvation Mountain.

However, we also explored The Slabs, and were introduced to her awesomely cool friend Container Charlie who has created an experimental artistic habitat constructed out of found materials and made into art – he calls it ‘East Jesus’. It came as no surprise to us that he’s a fellow burner (Burning Man participant) and vagabond. We instantly clicked, and new friend found.

Sandi just saved us a ton of writing by posting her write up of our visit to East Jesus. So instead of trying to muster the creative energy to post about it ourselves, I’m going to refer you to her awesome post – East Jesus, Pop 1, Elev 75.

Before starting at amazon, I also managed to complete a video piece about The Slabs in general (not focused on East Jesus) to give you an overview of our time there.

In case you don’t see the video above if you’re on RSS – here’s a direct link to the video.

So, I wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of posting for a few weeks from us as we complete our time at amazon – we hope you enjoy your vacation from our stories, and we look forward to continuing sharing our adventures after the first of the year with you.

As a gentle reminder – aside from working there as temps this season at amazon, we’re also affiliates.  If you’re going to be shopping at amazon anyway, if you start off your shopping session using this link – we’ll get a small cut of your purchases.  Every little bit helps to pad the meager hourly wage they’re paying us to package your stuff.

Most never act on this.

But a rare few are overcome with purpose, and devote their lives to the call.

Artist Leonard Knight heard such a call (“to my knowledge, it was on a Wednesday, about ten-thirty in the morning in 1967″), and has dedicated his life to nothing else since.

And for the past 25 years, Leonard has been toiling tirelessly in the California desert – building a monument to his message – that “God is Love”.

I have met tenacity and it’s name is Leonard Knight.

When the simple message of ‘God is Love’ hit Leondard in 1967, he was inspired to stitch together a massive colorful hot air balloon to fly the message to the people. But after 14 years of work, he was never able to get his balloon inflated without tearing. And eventually his patchwork of fabric had become a lost cause, beginning to rot.

When he gave up on the balloon project in 1984 Leonard was passing through Slab City in the southeastern desert of California – a fascinating no man’s land that we will feature in a story all its own. Before leaving, Leonard decided to stay one more week to make a “small statement” – a monument to his message built into a local hillside.

Decades later his “small statement” has grown into a 150 foot wide by 50 foot high mountain built out of adobe clay and buckets of paint, and he’s still going at it.

This kaleidoscope of colorful hills, limbs, arches, flowers and scripture became known as Salvation Mountain, and it marks the entrance to Slab City today.

When the county tried to tear down Leonard’s creation in 1994 locals rallied to his defense, collecting hundreds of signatures to stop the monument from being torn down.

Today no one even thinks of tearing down Salvation Mountain, and it has become a treasured landmark and tourist attraction that has become famous around the world. The Folk Art Society of America has declared Salvation Mountain a national folk art shrine, and in 2002 the US congress officially recognized Salvation Mountain as a National Treasure.

And all the while, Leonard has continued to work on it.

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.

We visited Slab City and Salvation Mountain recently with two photographer friends – Sean “Epic” Mahoney (get your website up already, dude!) and Route 66 Road Nomad Sandi Wheaton.

When we arrived, we were immediately greeted by Leonard Knight and taken on a personal tour of his amazing monument. We even got to witness adobe being made for further construction. (And we couldn’t help but giggle when he asked us Photoshop proficient photographers if we “knew anything about adobe?”…)

View our guided video tour of Salvation Mountain with Leonard Knight.

While none in our group are particularly religious, we were all overcome by Leonard’s energy and enthusiasm and sheer joy at being alive and sharing his message. And the mountain itself beautifully embodies his joy and love. Taking a tour with Leonard (free, btw), and then climbing the yellow brick road path to the top is an experience not to be missed.

Leonard started off alone in the desert, and through faith and tenacity his message has now touched millions.

Inspiring indeed.

In addition to evaluating usefulness, geek-factor and quality, we have several unusual but critical considerations to take into account when choosing technology – particularly size and power consumption. Living in around 80 square feet of space, stuff has to be carefully considered for fit. And since we are often attempting to live off of just 200 watts (at high noon on a clear summer day!) of solar power, we try to get the most out of every amp hour we consume.

We’re constantly updating and evolving our technology, however here is what is in our current arsenal:

Computers

Cellular Services & Connectivity

Navigation & Weather

Cameras & Printers

Disclaimer: Yes, all of the above links to Amazon are affiliate links.

Jan 15, 2010 – The owner of this trailer just let me know that this unit is now sold.

As many of our long time readers know, we absolutely LOVE our little 17′ Oliver Legacy Elite Travel Trailer (and no, it’s not ours that is for sale) that we live, work and play out of full time. These are extremely rare trailers that are each hand crafted, made to order at the factory in Hohenwald, Tennessee.  To add to the rarity of these trailers, the Oliver company is currently on hiatus from actively producing these rugged / luxury molded fiberglass travel trailers – with production on hold until at least after the first of the year.

We regularly get asked to give tours of ours (which we love doing.. don’t ever hesitate to ask!) and how to go about getting one.  People fall in love with ours, and we’ve been offered top dollar to sell ours on the spot.  And unfortunately, the only option we could offer is:  ’Call Oliver, let them know how badly you want one, ask to be put onto the waiting list, and hopefully in January 2010 they can make you one.’

There has never been a used Oliver offered up for sale.

Until now.

Due to unfortunate circumstances – a barely used 2009 Oliver trailer – very similarly configured to ours (infact, I believe this owner ordered the unofficial  ’Technomadia Edition’ after we worked with the factory to custom spec ours) is up for sale.   It’s fully loaded – 200 watts of factory installed solar panels, entertainment system, 220 AH of AGM battery goodness, 2000w Tripp Lite inverter, cell phone booster system and bunches of extras!   This was one of the last Oliver’s made before they shut down the lines earlier this year. It’s currently located in Phoenix, Arizona. 

This trailer has now been sold.

Disclaimer:  We are listing this simply because we know we have good Google-foo for keywords related to fiberglass trailers and Oliver and want to help a fellow Oliver owner out. We have nothing to gain from helping the owner sell this trailer other than fostering adding a new member to the Oliver community.

When I first started living on the road in April 2006, I traded my beloved Toyota Prius with a friend for her 2002 Jeep Liberty. Her Jeep was the perfect match for the small Tab Trailer that I had set up to be my nomadic home, and no matter how much I wished otherwise – the Prius was just not meant to tow.

As fate would have it, the farewell post I made about my Prius in an online Toyota Prius community is what prompted Cherie to first contact me – starting an online friendship that eventually blossomed into our ongoing life partnership.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with the size, style, and practicality of the Jeep Liberty during my first year on the road. It was the perfect small go-anywhere SUV. But I never loved the awful 12MPG fuel economy I would typically get while towing. The Liberty’s gasoline engine just wasn’t up to the task of pulling around a trailer full time.

In May 2007 the universe conspired to push Cherie and I into upgrading to a 2006 Jeep Liberty CRD Diesel, and my love affair with the Liberty began anew. The awesome little four cylinder diesel engine in this rare Liberty (only manufactured in 2005 & 2006) was amazing, getting 27+ MPG around town, and nearly 20MPG while towing our Tab.

The new Liberty served us well for the past 2.5 years and 40,000 miles. We have had amazing off road adventures, our photos have been featured in Jeep newspaper advertisements for embodying the “true spirit of Jeep”, and our Jeep was even shown off in a YouTube marketing campaign.

It wasn’t all wonderful though… We have had more than our share of odd glitches and maintenance issues over the past two years, including needing the transmission overhauled twice (our extended warranty proved to be a wise investment).

And ever since upgrading from the small Tab to the larger and heavier Oliver last summer, our Jeep has occasionally struggled. We still often managed an amazing 17 – 19 MPG while towing, but the engine would sweat more on long hills, the transmission was always working harder, and over time the trailer hitch was beginning to develop a slight downward bend from holding up the Oliver’s tongue weight.

The hitch problem is what proved to be the real killer. The Jeep carries its spare tire on the back door, requiring an extended ball mount to reach out from under the tire to hitch up with our Oliver trailer. This extension was putting too much leverage onto the Jeep’s hitch receiver, and the bending was actually starting to damage the Jeep’s frame.

After consulting with some trailer supply places and body shops about what it would take to continue towing our Oliver safely, the conclusion was that the only way the Jeep could do it was if I removed the spare tire to avoid needing the extension. Otherwise, any repairs made to the bent hitch would end up being just expensive temporary band-aids.

Our Jeep and Oliver were just not made for each other. It was time for something new…

One of our ongoing annoyances with the Jeep has been that it also doubled as our storage closet, and to carry passengers we would have to shuffle cargo from the Jeep into the Oliver to make space. It also always felt cluttered having so much “stuff” just a few feet away from us in the front seats.

To remedy this, we decided to start searching for a Crew Cab pickup truck with space up front for passengers, and a camper shell providing secure “closet space” in the back. This way we could easily carry around passengers without needing a major reshuffling, and we would also end up with even more storage space than we had before.

Because there is seemingly a conspiracy to keep small diesels off the market in the US, we knew that we would have to give up on the joys of having a fuel efficient diesel engine unless we wanted to go for the overkill and expense of an overly large F250 sized truck. Large SUV’s were also quickly ruled out – we liked the idea of having a clearly separated cabin and “garage” in the back.

Cherie had two additional requests – that we find something red to match our Oliver, and that we get something with more than two easily accessible front seat cup holders. Tall demands indeed!

After a quick survey of the options, we both found ourselves drawn towards Toyota – perhaps not surprising considering our Prius-catalyzed history. We spent an afternoon checking out Toyota Tundras and Tacomas at a nearby dealership, and left impressed with both – but not at all with the traditional dealership games around price and trade-in value. We actually felt as if we were being held hostage until we insisted we were NOT open to “making a deal today”…

Next we decided to check out the San Diego CarMax location, and we were very honestly blown away. As their tag-line says, the CarMax experience is indeed “the way car buying should be”.

Our sales consultant (Clinton Land – awesome guy, ask for him) had no biases towards any particular brand, and he did not try to push us towards more expensive options. He was refreshingly knowledgeable and patient, and he spent an entire afternoon with us showing off a range of vehicles. Best of all, we never felt any pressure to rush into a deal.

The CarMax appraisal for our Liberty came back thousands higher than the Toyota dealer had offered earlier, and we were impressed that CarMax’s policy is that they will buy your trade-in whether or not you purchase a vehicle from them. The buying and selling parts of the company are totally separate – the way it should be. And I loved the very reasonable no-haggle prices on all the CarMax listings. It never felt like they were playing games with us, and the contrast with the more traditional dealer was striking.

One of the first trucks we checked out on the CarMax lot was a red 2006 Toyota Tundra SR5 Double Cab, in perfect condition. Unlike almost all other used trucks, it came already equipped with a matching camper shell. And to Cherie’s delight, it had a total of eight cup holders!

It was almost as if once again the universe was serving up our perfect next vehicle on a silver platter. The price was exceedingly fair too.

I was most concerned about giving up our 4×4 off-road ability (this Tundra was 2wd), but seeking out a Tundra with 4WD would cost us thousands more, and we would pay a constant extra price with an overall reduced fuel economy.

I also knew I would miss the Jeep’s amazingly nimble turning radius and ability to zip around dense cities. The Tundra may not be huge, but it is still a pretty BIG truck compared to the Liberty. The Toyota Tacoma was a compelling slightly smaller option, but smaller trucks are in higher demand right now, and used Tacoma’s were selling for thousands more than comparable Tundras. And while the smaller engine in the Tacoma would be more fuel efficient around town, my research indicated that it would have no fuel economy advantage while towing.

In the end after a further night of research, we returned to Clinton at CarMax to complete the transaction. Having the ideal color with a camper shell already installed was just too perfect for us to ignore.

Introducing our new Toyota Tundra:

So far we have driven from San Diego to Lake Havasu City, AZ. We love how the Tundra cabin is so quiet and comfortable, and so far it has proven to be exceedingly easy to to drive. And the Tundra seems to be able to tow our Oliver without breaking a sweat at all. The engine temperature gauge didn’t even budge on the long climb up I-15 heading north from San Diego.

Of course our fuel efficiency has been nowhere near what we used to get with our Jeep. Our first tank was a distressing 11.53 mpg, but our second was a much improved 13.62 mpg. I expect that as I get used to driving the Tundra conservatively, things will improve even more.

One final note of praise for CarMax… When they noticed that we would be registering the Tundra in South Dakota, they offered to transfer it to a CarMax outlet in Las Vegas so that we could avoid California’s mandatory sales tax since Nevada does not tax vehicles purchased to be registered out of state. In the end though, the hassle of routing through Las Vegas and waiting a week for the transfer was just not worth it. Still – we are amazed that they offered it!

The entire CarMax purchasing experience exceeded our expectations in every way. I could not recommend them enough. Their website rocks too!

Whether you’re tired of the clutter, doing seasonal decluttering, wanting to make over your wardrobe or preparing your life for full mobility – purging is both freeing and … scary.  I’ve discovered that I have a knack for it, and enjoy coaching people through the process. When I decided to scale down from a 1600 sq ft house and move into a shared 80 sq ft of mobile space, I had to get ultra efficient at purging my stuff.  I actually started a small side hobby business called Purge Genie that targets guiding people through this very task – and I’ve been putting the systems I found for myself to the test with others as I travel.

I find that most people get stuck when approaching purging. There is fear that you might one day need that ‘thing’, emotional attachments tied up with mementos, a societal training to be attached to acquire and collect stuff, misplaced value on stuff we may have spent a lot of money or resources on –  and the pure exhaustion that comes from approaching the task.

The first stumbling block is to recognize that purging is not a chore – but rather a mindset shift from seeing possessions as attachments to seeing stuff as baggage.  If you can make that shift, the rest can be a fun game!

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.

And then, follow these steps to begin your session:

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 20 to 40% – knowing you can do future sessions.).

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 and see as part of your normal rotation of 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 firm 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, the fabric more worn than I like, 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 regular use 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 more inclined to weed out the stuff 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. Not 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 role shedding like crazy. Most folks I coach can’t help but double their purge goal for the session and keep going. It becomes an addictive game with each item you shed rewarding you with a sense of freedom. You’ve successfully avoided initial overwhelm by starting with simple easy to reach goals that aren’t as scary as ‘get rid of a lot!’  With each round, the brain adjusts, and it becomes easier and easier to want to get rid of things. You get used to 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?’ .. and you get yourself down to a streamlined grouping of stuff you actually love and use.

The next step is of course, what do you do with all this purged stuff?  I have some tips in my ‘Answers to Common Excuses’ series.

Our projected nomadic path forward might look something like this:

Tomorrow – Depart our technomadic rendezvous in San Diego with Ben Willmore and rendezvous with Route 66 nomad Sandi Wheaton before she heads back to Canada.
Nov 11ish –  Hang out with some other cool Oliver Travel Trailer owning folks in Lake Havasu City, AZ.
Nov 14-18 – High tail it to Kansas, perhaps exploring some of Route 66 ourselves.
Nov 19 – Dec 23 – Trying our hand at ‘workamping’ at the amazon.com distribution facility in Coffeyville, Kansas.  With so many of our RVing friends signing up for the gig, we decided – what the heck? Camping is paid for, the money is relatively decent and it’s on our way to St. Louis.  Worst case, we get to meet some other full time RVers and get paid to workout for a month.
Dec 24 thru ?? – In St. Louis visiting Chris’ family for the holidays and reconnecting with our growing community there.

As always, if we’re going to be passing by you – let us know! We love meeting up with people.

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PS. Did you know that we’re an Amazon.com affiliate? If you’re going to be shopping online anyway this holiday season, starting your shopping on Amazon.com off with this link will support our travels in two ways: 1) We’ll get a small cut of your purchases at no extra expense to you and 2) you’ll be providing work to many full time RVers working at the distribution centers this holiday season, including us!

Because we’re such a small set up, have solar panels and ample battery capacity—we also don’t often need hook ups. We tend to favor non-commercial campgrounds as we enjoy being off the beaten path, more in nature and spending less.

Whether you plan in advance for your camping or wing it, here are the tools that we use in our search for ideal camp spots. Unfortunately, there does not yet seem to be one unified resource listing all camping opportunities, so we utilize many different resources.

Types of Camping

It’s good to have some familiarity with the types of camping available:

Commercial/Private Campgrounds: Privately owned and operated campgrounds, they can be easy to find. They offer a full range of amenities; from bathhouses, laundry, WiFi, hook-ups, pools, hot tubs, recreation activities, gas/propane, stores and cable TV. These also come at a price, and can be quite crowded leaving little to no room between rigs. There are also membership RV Park clubs that you can join and have access to their park systems.

Public Campgrounds: These a government run (city, county, state and national) recreational parks that provide developed camping. The amenities and costs vary widely from just providing a spot to park with a picnic table to full bathhouses and electrical hook-ups, so do your research first if you have requirements. They’re usually a bit off the beaten path in gorgeous non-crowded places and less expensive than commercial campgrounds.

Boondocking/Dispersed Camping: Boondocking refers to camping without provided amenities. Some public lands allow for dispersed camping, which are not developed campsites. The rules vary by agency and location, but generally you just need to find a spot off the road, away from water and leave no trace. Popular boondocking spots have primitive roads or worn trails leading to them.  Other boondocking options include staying overnight in Wal*Mart, Flying J, truck stops, rest areas or city roads.

Check Maps

Online Maps

We primarily use Google Maps on our iPhones and a Garmin StreetPilot 2720 for our navigating, and will utilize these resources to scope out potential camping locations. Sometimes, just doing a location based search for ‘campground’ or ‘RV Park’ will yield results for us, and then we can further research options from there.

Microsoft Streets and Trips

When we don’t have internet access, we use Microsoft Streets and Trips for offline navigating. Streets and Trips is good about listing commercial and state parks, but can be lacking in campgrounds at national parks, recreation areas, BLM and forests.

After identifying a potential, we check for information about the campground online to get pricing, seasonal openings and reservation requirements. Usually just googling the park name brings up the information we’re seeking, and even sometimes—useful reviews from other campers.

We also take note of any nearby National Recreation Areas, National Forests/Grasslands, lakes and anything that might look like a dam—as these are likely candidates for additional camping resources.

Paper Maps

Yes, even in a digital age – paper maps can be a valuable resource.  Some maps are quite good about marking public campgrounds, even if only with a symbol.  We carry the Rand McNally Road Atlas 2010,USA/Canada/Mexico with us, as well as a variety of state maps we pick up at welcome centers when we cross into new states.

You’ll still need to research the area to find out the name of the campground. We’ve also found it’s quite often the case that national forests have far more developed campgrounds than maps show, and talking to a ranger is most helpful.

Check for Free/Cheap Campgrounds

Free ACOE Camping near Junction City, KS

Surprisingly, there are places where you can legally stay for free. These are a mix of boondocking and developed campsites—usually run by small cities (to attract tourists), counties or national services. Some of these have been our most spectacular campsites along our journey.

Some retail locations—where allowed by local ordinances—have also opened their parking lots to overnight stays by RVers, most well known being Wal*Mart, Travel Centers and Casinos. Also, in many states, staying overnight in a rest stop is permissible. Sometimes, you can get away with parking on a public street for a night or two.

Some of our favorite resources for finding free camping:

OvernightRVParking – A wonderful collaborative resource of places for free or cheap overnight parking locations. The cost is $17.95 a year to join (and then you get free extensions when you add information to the database). Our favorite parts about this site are that they show the parking spots on a map (very useful) and provide very detailed information.

FreeCampgrounds.com—a searchable database of free and under $10 camping locations, entered in by other campers. Many listings also have reviews and additional tips on finding the place and confirmations of details. They also keep a database of WalMarts that specifically do not allow overnight parking (usually due to local ordinances.)

FreeCampsites.net – A well designed site with interactive maps cataloging free camping by state run by fellow younger RVers.  We love that they utilize maps to find locations. They specialize in scenic public spots, as opposed to retail parking lots for convenient overnight stays.

Boondocking.org—Run by our friend and fellow nomadic-soul, Andrew Koransky, contains a database of coordinates to legal boondocking sites.

These options require some familiarity with the area you’re in or going to, so be sure to know the names of local cities to help in your search.

Check Online Resources

Developed camping at Cedar Breaks National Monument

Of course, just searching online via your favorite search engine (Google being ours) yields great results!  We find a lot of our great camping by just searching for ‘free campground <city name>’ or ‘free camping’ or other such variations. You’ll find personal blog postings and websites that might mention great places people have found.

The next step we do when researching camping options in an area is to look for resources that might not be a easily findable. We make notes from our map research of other potential camping areas (lakes, National Recreation Areas, National Forests/Grasslands, etc) to help target areas to research. Here are some of the resources that we’ve found to be quite useful:

State Park Guides—Most states have a central website that lists all their state parks, using Google to find them is generally quite easy. A lot of states have gone to using ReserveAmerica for their online reservations—which is another option for researching. Reserving your site (and paying the ‘convenience fee’) isn’t always necessary unless it’s peak season or a popular spot.

National Park Services— Use this search tool to find information on camping at National Parks (including National.Monuments, National Recreation Areas, etc.)

National Forestry Services—Use this site to look up a forest or grassland for information on both developed and dispersed camping options.

Recreation.gov- The source for reserving government run campsites. It generally only covers the more popular and reserveable campgrounds, so it’s not nearly comprehensive.

Army Corp of Engineers – These are some of the most under promoted campgrounds, and they’re usually quite spectacular —and free to cheap. You’ll have to use their website to track them down, and it’s often times not intuitive to do. Our trick is looking on maps for lakes and dams (where most ACOE campgrounds are), and then searching based on local cities and landmarks.

Bureau of Land Management (BLM) – A government agency managing land in many of the western states of the US. Dispersed camping is generally allowed on BLM land, unless otherwise noted and some even have developed campgrounds.

RV Park Reviews—A great resource of reviews of RV Parks that we use to find commercial and public options, as well as reviews.

Trailer Life—Affiliated with Good Sam Club, this is another review and information site that can come in handy.

Useful Campground Books

We carry a set of campground books in our tow vehicle that give us a quick way to look up relevant information about public camping options we’re considering. Sometimes looking something up online is just more frustrating than it’s worth.  The books give us directions, amenities available, descriptions and prices.

The books we carry with us include:

RV Camping in State Parks

Corps Camping

Casino Camping – Guide to RV-Friendly Casinos – 4th Edition

National Park Service Camping Guide, 4th Edition

(Some links above are Amazon.com Affiliate links – if you end up purchasing some of the products we recommend, we’ll get a small cut of the purchase. We only recommend products we actually use ourselves.)

When all else fails: Trust Nomadic Serendipity

Sometimes, ideal camping spots just manifest themselves when we need them. There have been several times when we’ve found camping spots without looking for them – either by stopping and talking with locals and other travelers, following those handy little campground road signs or not being afraid to peak down a little dirt road into a forest.

Taking away our option to move our house creates an interesting feeling that we’ve not felt in quite a while – being stir crazy! And it’s not like we’re not trapped in paradise – where we’re at in southern California, is simply fantastic.

So, without a way to change our physical surroundings, fellow nomad and lifestyle designer – Cody McKibben of Thrilling Heroics - released his new free WordPress Theme, ThrillingTheme, as the exact right moment!

Using my stir-crazy energy, I put it to use to give Technomadia.com a make over that I had begun contemplating with much help from Chris to get the theme installed for me. Our old site was great, but we were starting to reach the limits of what the theme could do for us.

So, we’re pleased to announce our new look and feel on our virtual home (for those of you on RSS, you’ll need to click through to see it) with much gratitude to Cody for providing an excellent theme! I’m looking forward to what this new foundation can help us build upon.

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In other news, during our Jeep’s maintenance they discovered some frame damage where our tow hitch attaches – likely caused by going over too many speed bumps or something. We’re currently in search of a body shop and/or welder in the San Diego area to fix it up next week.  More than likely we’ll be relocating to San Diego this weekend to rendezvous with a whole gang of awesome folks, and then moving eastward with an aim to St. Louis for the holidays.

Packing everything you need!

One of the advantages of traveling with your house, is that you generally never have to pack.  Most full time RVers have painstakingly considered every single item they travel with for its use, space and functionality.  Everything they think they could need is quite literally within an arm’s reach.

When packing for a vacation or business trip or backpacking adventure, most folks have to consider the weather and type of events they’ll be attending to determine what clothing and shoes to bring.  And, they have to make some firm decisions based on what they can fit in their luggage.  When you get used to traveling with your whole closet however, the ritual of packing is something us full time RVers can quickly forget. And then there’s the technology that you think you need to bring with you – laptop, chargers, external batteries, camera, cables and more.

For many of us, it’s a great balance of exploring wanderlust while having all the comforts of home.

However, despite preferring to travel with our house – we do occasionally choose other forms of travel for convenience or necessity.  In the past month we’ve actually had two adventures that required actually packing a bag. At the beginning of the month we joined some friends in Las Vegas for Photoshop World – and it was just easier and cheaper to carpool up together and split a hotel room.  And this past weekend, I traveled up to San Francisco for a conference while Chris stayed behind with our house in southern California to attend a different conference.

While the adventure of other modalities of travel is fun – I have to admit, thinking through packing a bag and having to make decisions ahead of time as to what I think I might like to wear and what technology I need, is a challenge.   I’ve definitely grown spoiled by always having everything I own with me, as in both cases – I overpacked.

Time Period: September 6 – October 24
Miles Driven: 1179
(not including non-RV trips)

Post Burning Man we only had one specific goal – to make it to Hemet, CA for much needed down time. We had met some folks in the area during our travels earlier in the year that we only had the opportunity to visit for a few days back in April – and we were anxious to return to their beautiful home.

We stayed at Burning Man late, helping with the clean-up efforts and taking responsibility for our camp achieving a ‘green’ rating for leaving no trace behind.

Directly from Black Rock City, we went back to Fallon, NV to pick up Kiki and wash some dust off.

Afterburn at PermaBurn

Eyeing a handout we received during our clean-up days, we were intrigued by an opportunity to visit PermaBurn for their Afterburn event.  PermaBurn is 600+ acres that were purchased about 85 miles due west of Gerlach, with the intentions of being an intentional full time Burning Man inspired community. Well within range of the playa, it’s an ideal place for testing out and staging art projects.  The vision is one of community effort and manifestation.

Always in search of nomadic ports with like minds, we were intrigued enough to divert up to Northern California for a few days to check it out. It was a small gathering of folks for the weekend and we had opportunity to meet many of the folks behind the project. It was just what we needed – an opportunity to chill with community post Burning Man, before returning to the ‘real’ world. And bonus, there’s cell phone signal out there!

For just $200, interested folks can buy in with a lifetime membership – which gives you a vote in how the land is used. It also gives you full access to the land for as long as its held as part of PermaBurn. An awesome opportunity, and one that we definitely recommend checking out if you’re so intrigued. The folks behind it are awesome and well intentioned.

Sacramento and San Francisco

After PermaBurn we returned to Sacramento, where we have dear friends – Sean & Lindsay, as well as our storage unit. We spent a few days putting our Burning Man gear back in storage and getting our house reorganized and prepared for potentially not returning to the area for a while.

And then it was on to San Francisco for an evening to spend with our dance community – Rhythm Society. It was their quarterly All Night Dance Celebration. Not even a fire marshall could keep the event from happening, and it was quickly re-tooled to take place at an alternate location right on time. It was definitely worthwhile to make the stop on our way south.

After lunch on the Presido munching down on our favorite burritos from Taqueria Cancun, we started our southward journey.  We opted to take the interstate instead of a slow meandering way – anxious to get to Hemet.

Hemet, CA

There are definitely places in our travels that feel more like a homebase than a stop,  and Hemet is amongst them. It’s not so much about the place, as it about the people. Fortunately for us, this place has both!  Beautiful scenery and awesome people.  Here they also have a little porch with RV hook-ups right off of it. We’ve taken it over, giving us a beautiful outdoor living room and office.

Another reason for hanging out in this area of the country was its proximity to Las Vegas, as we had been invited to attend Photoshop World as a guest of our technomadic friend Ben Willmore (who is a presenter there).  Deciding it was cheaper to carpool up and split a room with our friends from Hemet – Sean & Helene and us made the trip together up to Vegas.

We had a lot of fun, including participating in the iStockPhoto party invite process – which involved decorating Munny dolls. We made ours to resemble Ben with his rocking mohawk – which he boldly decided to keep from Burning Man where we last saw him.

Upon returning to Hemet, we each got invitations to attend two different conferences in two different places.  Cherie was invited to the Experts Academy up in San Francisco, and Chris to the Los Angeles Idea Project.  For the first time in our 2.5 years of travel together – we went our separate ways for a few days – which is probably a good thing for traveling couples to do every so often.  With no rush to be anywhere, Cherie opted to take the Coast Starlight train back – enjoying a relaxing and scenic adventure.

We’re now hanging around Hemet for a few days more as our Jeep has some maintenance and warranty issues taken care of.  Chris has been practicing his paragliding, a sport he’s not done in a couple of years.

We anticipate in the next few days we’ll embark on the next adventure – which we actually have no clue where we’re headed yet.

• Picture Route 66 – Photographer Sandi Wheaton was laid off from her job with GM earlier this year, and took the opportunity to explore her wanderlust along Route 66 and explore a possible full time mobile lifestyle.  She bought herself a small A-liner trailer and is currently traversing Route 66 doing time lapse photography and photo documentation using obsolete infrared film along an obsolete highway.  We’re making plans to greet her at the finish line here in Southern California in just a couple of weeks.
• Living In My Car – Jennifer is currently in the process of selling her home in Austin, TX and embarking on a solo adventure to the Artic in an RV.  We’re inspired by her courageous attitude to actively explore her own internal journey.
• Kaleidoscopic Wandering – JoAnna has been gearing up her career to be location independent.  She’s just taken the leap from office worker to freelance writer.  We loved meeting her via the Digital Vagabond Road’s Scholarship program over the summer, and camping with her at Burning Man.
• We Go Far – Jonathan and Dasy have broken free of their home and jobs in the Washington, DC area, and just launched off on their adventures of full time RV living!  We enjoyed meeting them earlier this summer while we were in DC and are so excited for the adventures ahead of them. Hope our paths cross again soon!
• Where is Ben? – Our good friend Ben Willmore is embarking today on the next major adventure of his long term full time traveling lifestyle – retrofitting a vintage 1963 Flxible Starliner bus to be his new full time home.  For the past 3.5 years he’s been traveling in a 40′ luxury tour bus.  We’re so excited to see him getting his wheels spinning on this project after many months of searching for the right bus.  He’s picking up the new old bus today in Ohio, and then driving the full length of Route 66 back to California where the conversion will occur over the next year or so. We can’t wait to see it – what an epic project!

Best wishes to all our nomadic peers – see you out there on the road!

We can often fit unobtrusively in a driveway. (Sacramento)

Some people travel primarily to spend time visiting cool places. And we absolutely do love finding amazing campgrounds, quirky small towns, wonderful boondocking spots, stealth city camping, incredible scenic overlooks, and the thrill of visiting National Parks.

But much of our nomadic lifestyle is motivated less by visiting cool places, and more by visiting cool people. Nothing beats spending time hanging out with awesome folks, and when we have the opportunity we absolutely love being able to stay with family and friends (old and new) as we travel.

Staying with people gives us an opportunity to share stories, be part of a household, share meals and drink and get a local’s perspective on an area. And not to mention, it also helps keep our costs down.

However to the folks we stay with, hosting nomads who bring their own solar powered house with them is a bit different than hosting a more typical guest traveling through. Oftentimes when we arrive, we’re offered use of the guest bedroom so that we can sleep in a ‘real bed’ or ‘indoors’, and given invitation to help ourselves to anything in the fridge.

While we greatly appreciate the hospitality, what folks don’t immediately realize is that our trailer is our home and we’re not lacking in comfortable accommodations.  Unless there are unusual circumstances (such as zoning regulations that prevent us from sleeping in our RV), we will politely turn down offers of a guest room for the following reasons:

• We like our bed. It’s ours and what we’re used to – and it’s super comfy.
• We’re not anymore outdoors than you are – sleeping in our little home on wheels is not like camping in a tent. We’re watertight, have heating and ways to cool. We’re used to a variety of noise levels – from ultra silent to being in the middle of a 50,000 person party in the middle of the desert.
• Staying in a guest room requires us packing an overnight bag and thinking about everything we might need. It’s generally a lot of unnecessary hassle, and we end up making several trips to ‘move’ into a guest room from our house.
• We actually will get homesick not being in our house, especially with it parked so close by.
• We have a fully stocked kitchen with everything in it that we might like to eat or snack on. In fact, if you’re short on an ingredient, we might just have it.  Heck, we’d love to cook dinner for you too!

The best campgrounds are often backyards! (Indiana)

When we explain to our hosts to think of us more like a temporary neighbor than as a guest – it generally makes a lot more sense.  Our visit is really as typical everyday as it gets for us – we’re not taking time off of our normal life to be there. And we don’t want our hosts to go out of their way for us either. We really do prefer to feel like neighbors, and not guests that you need to play host to.

However, while we’re completely self-sufficient – we do appreciate sharing time and space. We love sharing in meals and having an opportunity to socialize and be part of a household. Other amenities we do not need but appreciate the use of include: a “real” shower, laundry facilities, wifi, a hose to top off our water tank, and a power cord if we’re parked in shade. And of course, we always love a soak in a hot tub. *grin*

So go ahead.. invite us over to be your temporary neighbors!