I’ve often wrote about community while on the road, and how I’ve had to adjust my expectations of it in order to appreciate the variability that happens while traveling full time. One of the greatest blessings has been connecting with other full time travelers that we get to rendezvous with in all sorts of locations.
One familiar shot that long time readers might recognize is us parked with this bus:
These past three weeks we’ve rendezvoused with our dear friends Ben & Karen of Creative Cruiser in three different locations – Burning Man, Las Vegas and most recently St. George, UT. And of course, we can’t forget our surprise rendezvous in Lake Havasu City, AZ at the end of our maiden voyage in our bus.
Since we met Ben in 2008, we’ve now rendezvoused with him and/or Karen (they connected 2 years ago) in Florida, California, Illinois, Nevada, Texas, Missouri, Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Arizona and now Utah. We have a goal of meeting up in all 50 states and beyond together. We’re off to a great start!
We can go months (or even near a year) without seeing each other, or it might just be days in between our rendezvouses. Sometimes it’s just a quick passing over lunch, and sometimes it’s hanging out as neighbors for a week or so. Whatever it is.. it’s always worthwhile and draws our friendship deeper. (And somehow, we all end up buying new cool techy gadgets during our visits.)
It’s a special bond us travelers share in which our friendships can thrive with ever changing proximity.
We’ve been blessed to have spent so much time with them recently, and having a chill catch-up week in St. George together was just what we needed.
We accomplished bus projects together.
We watched water boil.
(We technomads have all the fun – don’t ya wanna be one too???)
But wait.. this just in. We took video of it to share with you…
If you’re interested in our new Induction cooktop, ours is the Spt 1300-Watt Induction Cooktop, Silver.
And we helped Ben with some light painting shots for an upcoming project of his.
… and there may have been a bottle or two of wine and beer consumed.
Sadly, Ben and Karen left out earlier in the week ending our rendezvous. Who knows when we’ll next see them.
More projects!
We decided to stick around St. George RV Resort a bit longer. For one, the resort asked us if we could present on a couple more topics – which went over really well.
And the manager & fellow bus nut Michael (pictured above in the hinge shot) hooked us up with a local craftsman to construct our dual desk office for the bus. It’s one of the last major interior remodeling projects on our list, and we had grown tired of sharing our temporary surface space.
After extensive planning, measuring and pondering, the new desk was installed last night – and we’re THRILLED with it. Especially considering we only just put out a call on our Facebook Page on Sunday to find a carpenter to build it during our upcoming routing. Ya know, that’s almost as good as Amazon Prime in delivery time.
Even more amazing is that it was custom handmade, and at an extremely reasonable price. We’ll eventually finish it out with a super spiffy paint job and two large screen computer monitors.
Before we leave, we’ll also have a fold-out table built that will serve as a multi-functional table space for dining, gaming, projects and entertaining guests. After that, the major remaining interior modification is re-apholstering the couch, chairs and valances in our ‘get rid of the pink’ mission.
Our Travel ‘Plans’ Forward
We’ll be leaving out of St. George sometime over the coming weekend and be heading eastward towards St. Louis, aiming to be there by mid-October.
Serendipity has not yet revealed what our route will be, so we’re open to suggestions and invitations. (Pssst… this means if you’re anywhere reasonably between St. George and St. Louis and have bus parking, re-apholstery talents, wifi, beer, hot tub and/or something else cool .. invite us over! – us@technomadia.com 🙂 )
Changes Coming!
One of the other major projects that we’ve been working on these past couple of weeks is a long overdue re-branding and re-design of this blog. So you may experience difficulty accessing our site over the coming days as we expect the normal hiccups when deploying a new design.
But don’t worry, while our look is changing, we’re not changing anything about our intent with this blog. It’ll remain a sharing of our personal journey of tech & travel without commercial endeavors aside from occasionally launching one of our mobile travel apps or such.
We look forward to debuting our new look to you shortly!
Don’t forget all the long time readers and Twitter friends that aren’t mobile that we get to meet up with too! We have met many of our’s in our travels too.
Travel and social media go so well together.
Wes and Kathy
Indeed.. and we don’t forget about them either. We have written about that aspect of community on several occasions, and a big part of our joy of traveling is all the meet-ups.
But there is something unique about the continuity of depth of friendship that can form with people you have a chance of seeing over and over again – and other travelers seem to fit that niche for us, as we rendezvous all over the place.
We had such an awesome time with you guys last week (as always!) The St. George rendezvous was definitely the best as we got a lot of QUALITY time in 🙂 I’m loving watching your bus progress… cant wait to see some big ass monitors in there! Hopefully our next meeting is sooner rather than later!
If you’re not too far east yet check out Zion national park if you never have…..a hike in the narrows is worth the stop regardless of how far you make it….
Zion is awesome, indeed. We went through there a couple years ago. If we end up routing that far north, we’ll definitely be taking a swing through again.
Glad to hear you’ve experienced it – Went there for the first time this summer and can’t wait to go back!!
Save Travels!!! 😀
I do so love meeting folks on the road! It’s a whole community I never expected. So cool that you guys have met-up in several states. Definitely look forward to crossing paths at some point.
Nina
Don’t mean to be a know it all pain in the ass here…. (Wait! Too late!)
…however, don’t strain your brain trying to come up with a plural for “rendezvous”.
There is none.
It’s a word like “chassis”. or “deer”.
or “moose”.
OK, I’ll stop now.
Just thought I’d mention it.
Don’t roll your eyes.
Google recognized ‘rendezvouses’ as a word and provides a definition of it when you search for it. That’s good enough for me and our blog.
So yes.. I will roll my eyes 🙂
I just wanted to say thanks for stopping by Cheaper RV Living! You have been an inspiration to me and i was happy to share that inspiration with others.
Hope to catch up with you out on the road!