On Time

Estimated Departure Date: 7 weeks and counting

Mike's been off work for three weeks now and cannot believe how little time there still is in a day. We've been SO BUSY. I'm trying to cram as much in-person work as possible before I go. Both of us are trying to cram in a year's worth of appointments. We're trying to see all of our friends at least once each before we go. We have to clean out as much of our stuff as possible, and sell a ton of stuff on Craigslist. Mike has a lot of his own personal projects he wants to work on. Eventually, we'll need to start figuring what to bring and what to leave behind, buy anything else we need for the RV, and make any modifications we need to make. And, the fun stuff, we're trying to cram in as many of the San Francisco must-dos before we go, too.

It's amazing how quickly the time flies, and how little of it there seems to be. 

We've hit the Premature Nostalgia phase, where we're starting to miss San Francisco before we even leave. We're trying to at least do all the SF things that we'd regret not doing if we left, one of which is taking swing dance classes which we now plan to do once a week until we go. We've also been exploring different neighborhoods, and hitting up a lot of the restaurants we've been meaning to go to. The exploration also leads to plenty of confrontations with the difficult things about San Francisco, too, though, all of which I will not miss. During these moments, despite the nostalgia, I look forward to a breath of fresh air that doesn't smell like pee.

And we're also starting to realize how much we'll miss all our friends. Our friends are awesome. I think that's going to be the hardest part about leaving.

As of right now, I don't have a night free for almost four solid weeks, and the days are almost as full. Mike's still sleep deprived, despite not having to get up to go to work every day. It's perplexing and chaotic but fun and exhilarating, and every day makes me more excited. 

The Best Way to Make Coffee in an RV

If you know me at all, you won't be surprised to find out that this is one of the first things I Googled after we got the RV. What follows is a thoroughly non-scientific analysis of the pros and cons of each remotely portable method of coffee-making suitable enough for coffee snobs (like me), ranked.

Honorable Mentions:

• Single-cup Keurig (or other single-cup brewer): convenient, fast, easy clean up, but expensive, mediocre coffee, and didn't want to rely on having electricity available in case of dry camping
• Pour-over: cheap, easy, good coffee, doesn't require electricity, but requires filters, longer brew time, and some mess (piles of soggy filters full of wet coffee grounds become more inconvenient when you have a tiny kitchen and irregular access to outside trash bins)
• French press: cheap, good coffee, doesn't require electricity, but moderate brew time and annoying to clean/makes a mess

#3: Stovetop Percolator

A percolator is one of these guys:

By Imm808 (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The way they work is you put the coffee grounds up top and water below, stick the whole thing on the stove, and then the boiling water evaporates into the top bit, soaks into the coffee grounds, and then filters back down below. I was surprised to find that the vast majority of RVers online said they use a percolator for coffee (or they use instant coffee, but we won't dignify a discussion about instant coffee...). Percolators come in both stovetop and electric.

Pros:

• Small and portable
• No filters required
• No electricity required
• Cheap
• Aesthetics (it's pretty adorable, isn't it?)

Cons:

• Makes mediocre coffee
• Even though there are no filters, you still have a bunch of loose, wet coffee grounds to dispose of, which could be difficult in a small kitchen. Can also get clogged, etc. Easy to make a mess.
• Only works with really hot/boiling water, which makes bitter coffee
• Moderately slow brewing time

#2: Cold Brew

Originally posted by Cory Doctorow on Flicr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/15522501666

To make cold brew, all you need to do is mix coffee grounds with lukewarm water and let it sit for a while. Proportions and timing vary depending on how strong you like yours to be, but I usually go with a ratio of about one cup coffee to four cups water and let it sit on the counter overnight. You end up with a coffee concentrate that's stronger than a regular cup of drip coffee, and the coffee is less acidic and less bitter than coffee that's brewed hot (so heartburn sufferers, give cold brew a try!). Now that cold brew is becoming popular, you'll see more and more products like this around for brewing, but I usually just use a big lemonade pitcher like this. 

I do love me some cold brew. I brew it fairly regularly at home in SF, and I usually drink it by adding cream and water and popping it in the microwave. Occasionally I'll put ice cubes and water or milk in it instead for some iced coffee. 

Pros:

• Can brew a bunch at once and keep in the fridge, so it's fast and convenient and no daily mess
• Cheap
• Easy to brew
• Yummy

Cons:

• While it's really easy to brew, if I want to make normal-sized batches of it, I'd have to lug around large plastic pitchers, which seems like a waste of space in a tiny RV kitchen, especially if I'm only using them every once in a while
• Clean up is messy; no easy way to dispose of coffee grounds
• I normally use the microwave to heat it up, which requires power. If there's no power, I'd have to reheat water on the stove, which, at that point, kind of defeats the purpose
• And yes, it's becoming popular enough that it's easy to buy in stores now, but I'm putting that as a con because buying cold brew every week or two would add up quickly
• While I love the taste of cold brew, if I drink it exclusively, I do miss the aroma and edge of a cup of hot brew after a while

And the winner is:  AeroPress

Look at this space-age beauty:

This image was originally posted to Flickr by Ldiggity at http://www.flickr.com/photos/97311086@N00/296877647/

Instead of using using time or gravity like the other methods above, the Aeropress uses pressure, which means you end up with something closer to espresso than to American coffee. The gist of how to use it: put coffee grounds and boiling water into the bottom bit, stick the top bit into the bottom bit, and push. The pressure created in the tube forces the water through the coffee and the small filter at the bottom and suddenly, coffee!

Pros:

• Really good coffee
• Doesn't require electricity
• Small, portable
• Really easy to clean
• Easy to use
• Fast brew time
• Cheap
• Durable/don't have to worry about breaking it

Cons:

• The force required to push the plunger thingie down isn't ideal for half-asleep, pre-coffee users
• The amount of YouTube videos of people giving their own "recipes" for how to use the thing is overwhelming. I don't recommend it. (The inverted method? What?)

Why the Aeropress? Well, I immediately crossed off the list all brewing methods that required electricity, just in case. The percolator, while easy and portable, leaves too much mess relative to the mediocre coffee it produces. And cold brew, while I love it, also leaves a mess and would require too much storage space unless I brew small batches at a time (which would be annoying). Plus, if I can't use the microwave to heat it up, I'd just be heating up water anyway, in which case it's not really saving me much time or effort. I'll probably still make it sometimes for variety, or if I want easy access to cold coffee in a hot climate. Which leads me to the Aeropress:

Favorite of obsessive coffeeholics around the internet. Easy, portable, good coffee, no electricity required. And most of all, an excuse to buy myself one after wanting it for years.

I used it for the first time on our first morning of the Epic Eclipse Adventure. Sure enough, it was indeed easy, portable, and good. So I'm officially a happy camper. Er... RVer.

Bonus plug: I really love this travel mug. It's the only one I've ever used that doesn't spill. You can even stick it into your bag when you're on the go.

First time using the AeroPress. Never thought I'd be posting a picture on the internet of me wearing my retainers.

Epic Eclipse Adventure: Epilogue (Days 4 and 5)

Last day of driving, and I’m struck by how beautiful California really is. After two days of flat nothingness, I’m able to see the mountains and pine trees with fresh eyes. We’re lucky to live here.

On our drive home, we reflected on the different lifestyle inherent in living in a place like Rexburg, particularly for the children. The kids (and adults) were so beautifully trusting of strangers, and had full access and ability to just roam freely. Even the surprisingly young ones were allowed to just pop into the ATV by themselves and ride it around wherever and whenever they wanted. The group of kids all rode their bikes down to the river to swim with free reign, and there was a beautiful freedom that just let them be kids. The mother of the family we stayed with remarked on what a great place it is to raise kids, but for one thing -- she wishes she had the ability to expose her kids to people who are different from them, and let them see the lives of people from different places and different backgrounds. So we wondered, is it possible to give your children both? A free range childhood full of trust and safety, and the experience of growing up around diversity, so they’re both safe and challenged? I hope so.

On our way back, we realized that our previous plan to park the RV in San Francisco is a bad one, for a few reasons. Mostly, we don’t want to have to worry about somebody breaking into it. But it’s also unclear what the laws even are about parking an RV in the city -- where it’s okay, how long it’s okay for, and whether it’s okay as long as you’re not living in it. So we decided to find a secure place to park it when we got home. We did some research online and found a perfect place nearby in Alameda, with covered parking and security.

We didn’t roll into the Bay Area until late, and we knew we wouldn’t be able to park it near our place, so we spent the night at the Golden Gate Bridge rest stop we stopped at during our hashtag van life tester weekend. In the morning, we called our perfect parking place, only to be told they don’t have any space for us. We took the RV to the apartment unload all our stuff, and spent two frantic hours Googling and calling places until we hit the parking jackpot. Our main concern was security, and the place we found happened to have one spot open up THAT DAY, and has TWO police officers living on-site. How’s that for security. There was still something strange about rolling up to the place and having a cop in full uniform there waiting to check us in… “Are you Mike?”

All in all, the four day whirlwind ended up being the best thing we could do for ourselves. All of our fears, hesitations, discomfort about the RV were forced out of us. We got a crash course in RV life, and learned lessons it probably would have taken us months to take us to learn otherwise. We still have some things to figure out, and I’m sure there are plenty more lessons to come, but for now, it already feels like home.

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