#vanlife Tester Weekend Vol.1

In the ongoing effort to figure out how much space we want/need -- and to give ourselves an excuse to take a mini-adventure weekend around town -- we rented a van for a night and pretended like we couldn’t go home. In a move that worked out perfectly but was really only because we were too busy, we didn’t plan any of our van weekend in advance, and only decided what to do from moment to moment. Here’s what happened, and what we learned:

1. Pick up van from small company on Treasure Island that apparently customizes, builds out, and rents camper vans for a living. The van was a Dodge cargo van, and was big enough to fit a queen mattress but small enough to fit in a normal parking spot. When the inflatable mattress was deflated and stowed, the back was built out to have padded seating for 4 (with storage under each), and a table that folded down from the wall. It included a small generator to help fill up the mattress, but which wasn’t powerful enough to power our stuff overnight without the car running. One useful feature was the custom window shades which attached via magnet -- super easy to put on and take off to provide privacy. Also came with a built-in backup cam, which seems pretty indispensable when not able to see out the back.

2. Pick up groceries and lunch. Hang out and kill a few hours with our friend Tony while he works at his wine tasting room on TI. Feel generally like badasses. Relaxed badasses.

3. Sunset time! Take the van over to Middle Harbor Shoreline Park in Oakland, watch the sunset and Mike sets up his camera and does a timelapse.

4. Decide to head to Berkeley, as we almost never hang out there. Even though the van isn’t super long, still pretty hard to find street parking that we can fit in. Makes me appreciate my tiny Fiat, which we’re now calling my Fire Truck (or Fire Hydrant), copycatting the hilarious dude we rented the van from, and which can basically bend time and space to fit into any parking spot that has ever existed. End up getting mediocre fondue and amazingly delicious dessert waffles. (Why aren’t waffle bars a thing yet?)

5. Sleepy time! After a little bit of asking around and a little bit of internetting, we decide to check out a spot near the Northern base of the Golden Gate Bridge. Said spot turns out to be an incredibly populated rest stop, which, even at midnight, is overflowing with tourists taking pictures and bored teenagers blasting music. The bathrooms are gross but at least there are some available. Challenge 1: blocking visibility from the front windows. The van guy gave us a curtain rod to put up, but a) it’s not staying up, and b) you can still see over the top and around the edges. Must come up with a better way to do that. Challenge 2: the van is so small that you have to get out of it to inflate the mattress, and once you do, it takes up every inch of the entire back space. That means that there’s nowhere to put stuff, including dirty muddy shoes. That also means that come morning, when we discover it’s raining, we have to deflate the mattress while standing outside in the rain. Feels surprisingly secure in the van with the doors closed, despite creepy guy who looks like Ron Jeremy hanging out by himself in the rest stop parking lot. Slept surprisingly well, and felt like we were in some sort of secret club. Would have been difficult/awkward/creepy to get up in the middle of the night to go to the rest area and pee. Woke up, took some pictures, drove north for our favorite French Toast (funnel cake for breakfast? Yes, please), and dropped the van back off.

6. Onward!

Lessons learned:

1. Magnetic windows = useful and fast. But find a way to easily block from seeing in front windows.

2. While the smaller size of the van was really handy for parking and being incognito, it was just too small, especially when the bed was inflated. Need to be able to store things like shoes, cell phones, etc, easily while bed is out; shouldn’t have to set up the bed from the outside; ideally should be able to keep bed out 24/7 because it takes a lot of time to set up and tear down every day.

3. Need electricity source that works when car isn’t running

4. Van feels surprisingly secure once inside, but make sure it’s easy to lock/unlock if one person is inside and the other is out, to ensure safety

5. Needs to be easy to come in/out and set things up if it’s raining

6. Get a backup cam

7. Waffle bars should be a thing

So, the quest for a perfect van continues, but now we know a little bit more about what we want (and don’t want) for the trip. The same company we rented from is planning on deploying a bunch of bigger vans soon that will be closer in size to a Sprinter, so our next plan is to test those out in #vanlife Tester Vol.2. And then, if there’s time, Tester Vol.3 in an RV!

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What's In A Domain Name

Our site has been basically good to go (at least to share with close family and friends) for about two weeks now, but only one thing is holding us back: the name!

For almost as long as we've been planning the trip, we've been half-jokingly calling it the Millennial Falcon, as a wink to the fact that we are completely self-aware that leaving our respectable jobs and beautiful apartment in a wonderful city in order to live in a van for a year is a totally obnoxious Millennial thing to do. (Insert argument here about whether we really qualify as Millennials because we remember Life Before The Internet and we're different than people more than five years younger than us but we're not Gen Xers either etc etc etc.) Problem was, every time we said it out loud, it induced a collective groan (and not in a "that pun is so bad it's good" sort of way). Plus, see note above about whether we're even Millennials.

In the meantime, the Millennial Falcon was made into a (pretty terrible) meme, and now it seems off the table for good. 

But oh, what shall it be? A rose by any other name...

We've spent hours combing through domain name sites trying to come up with something that sits in the middle of the Venn diagram of clever, unique, and available. Such witty options include: happycampervan, vanomads, vanderers, vanfrancisco, vantasticjourney/vantasticvoyage, thevanimals, runrunrunjump, van solo (keeping with the Star Wars theme), vanderlust (like wanderlust but with a van pun), schmooze cruise, gallivant schmallivant, and datvandoe. 

...We may have our other strengths, but coming up with puntastic names may not be one of them.

Route Planning

Mike spent hours yesterday planning and organizing our potential route.

Because the main goal of this trip is to create time to bond and spend quality time with our family, including the ones we haven't historically had many opportunities to really get to know, we're planning the main stops around all of the places where we have family. Which turns out to be a lot.

When we put those into the map, along with all of the places we'd like to sight-see and be tourists, it put our trip at 14 months! It's pretty difficult to decide how long to stay in each place. Even on such a long trip, there are so many places to go, and so many people we'd like to spend time with; it never feels like enough. And it's really hard to anticipate how we'll feel in each place, and how long we'll want to stay once we're actually there.

Mike would like to stay a full six weeks at his family's cabin in Michigan. I've never even been there, so it's hard to know whether I'll find it peaceful and relaxing or whether I'll get stir crazy and feel isolated if we're there for so long. I'm hoping we can convince some family and friends to come visit us up there; that would be a blast.

We also realized that, after Chicago, there are no specific places we need to be or people we need to see, so there's no point in planning where we go after that. We can either keep going, and hit Wyoming, Seattle, Portland. Or we can come back to San Francisco and try to do those places later. Or we can go back to places we want to revisit, like places where my family lives, since at that point it'll have been almost a year since I saw them last. Or we might even decide to move somewhere else to settle down!

As of now, with the tentative route we've laid out, we'd be leaving in Oct 2017, hitting Texas for Christmas, Atlanta in March 2018, the cabin in July, and ending in Chicago in September.

Uploaded by Tinker Trailer on 2017-09-03.