Tony and Dane bought us a special wine bottle meant for easy breaking. Now the Tinker Trailer is officially christened and ready to go!

Aaaaaaand, we're off!

November 18, 2017 by Galia in before the trip, san diego

The last few days were pretty rough. Most of them went something like this:

Wake up early, after not enough sleep. Galia runs errands or squeezes in a business meeting while Mike packs up stuff. Cobble together something resembling a meal from the fridge using whatever ingredients don't require a microwave, toaster oven, or other portable appliance because we've given all of them away. Galia lists some more stuff for free on craigslist, Mike tapes together boxes and carries full bins to the walk-in closet to make it feel like we're making progress. We hang out with a close friend, force them to take some of our possessions which they amazingly keep doing with a smile (again, great friends!), try not to cry while saying goodbye and promising each other we'll text all the time even for no reason. Stay up packing until way past our bedtime. Sleep on the floor. Repeat.

We had given away all our lamps, so the last few days, Mike plugged a light bulb directly into a power strip and we moved it from room to room as we worked. Wednesday morning, the movers came to pick up everything we were taking to storage. All that was left over was the stuff we're taking with us, and the junk. The place finally felt empty. And it finally felt like something was happening.

We were struck and confused by how strange it DIDN'T feel. It felt like we had a project, sure. And sure, we knew in our brains that we were giving up this apartment we love. But I think it's a life change so big that you just can't process it in advance. It didn't feel real. Still doesn't feel real. Might be a while until it does.

On Thursday, we had our apartment inspection, picked up the RV, and packed up the rest of our stuff. Before we left the apartment for the last time, we sat on the floor and hugged and looked at the view we'd probably see many times more but never from that exact spot... never again from that apartment... and I was surprised at my tears.

There are few moments in life that you can look at and know with such certainty that this moment, right here, is a moment that divides my life. It is the moment where the last chapter ends, and the new one begins, and everything will be different now. And to purposely give up a known good for the unknown -- even an unknown good -- is scary. I know the next chapter will also be amazing, but it's such an unknown that I can hardly even think about it. In any case, I was overwhelmed by how many emotions you can carry at the same time: grief, sadness, nostalgia, but also excitement, joy, curiosity. The discomfort of jumping into the unknown with the comfort of doing it with your best friend. The discomfort of not having a home with the comfort of knowing that your home is wherever you are. And the gratitude about having a partner who's up for this mad adventure, and pride that we're living our lives in a way that when we look back, we'll feel like we've really truly lived it.

That night, we went to an RV park about an hour south of San Francisco. Once we got there, my grief was out of my system, but then it was Mike's turn to be sad, and it finally hit him. It's not ours anymore! We don't live in San Francisco! We don't live where so many of our chosen-family lives, and we'll really, really miss them. We'll miss birthdays, and weddings, and babies being born. And sitting on the couch playing Drawful and eating Indian pizza. Goodbye, and hello to the next chapter.

The next morning, I set up my workstation for the first time while he was out running the final errands. I got a portable external monitor, so with the help of a portable laptop table, I was able to basically have my full two-monitor setup with extra keyboard and mouse and wifi and it was no different from working at the office or anywhere else. Except now I'm sitting on a comfy couch and the coffee refills are even closer.

We drove to Santa Barbara that night, with an obligatory stop at the Madonna Inn to check out the waterfall bathroom. We got amazing Mexican food (shout out to my brother, Eyal, for the recommendation) at Super-Rica, drove around SB a little bit, and passed out early.

And now it's Day Two.

It still doesn't feel real. We travel so much that so far it just feels like we're on a normal trip, booking it to Oceanside to visit my parents, and we'll still just go back in a few days and get back to work and life and routine. So I wonder if it'll just feel like that all the time, but for a year.

In any case, we're excited, and exhilarated, and happy, and bewildered. And can't wait to see how the next chapter unfolds.

Next stop: Oceanside, CA, to stay with my parents for a month. Onward!

To celebrate our new beginning.

Believe it or not, this was progress.

Huge TV: sold. Luckily, we have too many extra monitors lying around the house...

Taking down the workbench.

Our cache of stuff to store.

It's amazing we never accidentally burned that apartment down.

Flipped-turned upside down.

Final sunset.

Temporary office.

Mike befriended a Lyft driver who took a bunch of our stuff.

Last time driving off the lot.

Last dinner! Pizza with a view.

Our trusty traveling lightbulb.

Working late.

Last sit in the hammock.

Old home, new home.

Squeak!

A lovely gift from a lovely person! Home sweet mobile home.

If it's got a name like Trailer Villa, you know it's gotta be fancy.

New office.

Not for human consumption.

RV Overwhelm

November 04, 2017 by Galia in before the trip

We've got a couple weeks to go, and we're still busy to the point of exhaustion. We decided to pick a day to spend down at the RV to measure, clean, shop, and prep, so I blocked off my calendar and we drove the hour there. And then we realized that neither of us remembered to bring the keys, so we got to drive all the way home and come back the next day instead!

We measured every inch of the place and were perplexed and frustrated that basically no two cabinets in the entire place are the same shape and size. Cabinets that look square or rectangular end up having an angle or a cutout or something that creates unusable space, which is frustrating when space is your main concern. Other cabinets are just so weird shaped that we can't find organization tools that would even fit in there. I don't know how such a strangely-designed thing comes to be, but we'll make do with what we have!

After measuring everything, we headed to the store to try to get as many useful containers and gadgets as we could find. We were promptly confronted by another frustrating reality: we can't know what organizational containers to buy until we know what stuff we're bringing and where we're putting it. We won't know what we can bring and where to put it until we have a sense of the organizational space available. It's a chicken and RV egg problem that made the day feel pretty overwhelming, but we're trying to take things a little at a time and do what we can with what we know. One thing I know for sure: no matter how much we prep and plan, we are guaranteed to bring a ton of stuff we don't actually need, and will have to buy a ton of stuff we didn't bring with us. Might as well not worry about it too much now, then!

We took that day as an opportunity to put our brand new RV cover on for the first time. I wish I had taken a time lapse, so we could run it in fast forward with clown music playing. Short version of lesson learned: there is no benefit that this cover could confer that would make that comical misery worthwhile. RIP, RV cover.

Also, why are there so many slippers to choose from? Who needs this much of a slipper selection?

We've gone down to the RV a couple of times since we put the cover on, and the chicken/egg problem persists. Meanwhile, at home, packing up is also more stressful than we anticipated. It's not just like a normal move, where your only decision is keep vs don't. For each item, it's: do we bring this with us, or store it? If we store it, is it worth storing, or would it be cheaper in the long run to just get rid of it and buy another one when we get back? If we have too much stuff to store, we'll have to pay for a bigger storage space; but if we have the space, we might as well keep this thing.... If we get rid of it, do we trash it, recycle it, give it away, sell it? And in each of those situations, to where, whom, or how? And then, do that process a thousand times in a row for every single thing in the house. The decision fatigue alone is a lot to handle.

But we've been able to spend some good quality time with most of our closest friends, which gives me warm fuzzies. It does, of course, also make me sad. It's pretty strange saying goodbye and not knowing when you'll see this person again, and when it's one of your favorite people, it's hard to think about. Mike's also turned into quite the salesman... Any time someone comes over, they're forced to endure a tour of our stuff, and inevitably walk out with something we had convinced them to take. It's also nice to know that some of our things will stay in the family, though, as it were!

Final Tester Weekend: Dry Camping

November 02, 2017 by Galia in before the trip

So far, we've only stayed in the RV when we had water and electrical hookups. When you stay at someone's house and run a regular electrical cord to the RV, you can't really use high power things like the microwave, but you have an unlimited supply of power for charging things, small appliances, etc. When you're at an RV park, you can use your 30 amp extension cord instead, which gets you basically all the power you could use, including microwave. You can also hook the RV up to a hose with (hopefully) potable water, which then also gives you an unlimited supply of running water instead of just the stuff in your holding tank.

Dry camping means that you don't have access to an extension cord of any kind, nor to outside water, so you can only use whatever you bring with you in the water tank, and can only use low-power electricity that runs off the RV coach battery (the battery that runs the "house" part of the RV, not the engine). In normal circumstances, that means in our RV we'd still be able to use 1) the coach battery for low-energy stuff like lights and for charging devices, 2) the potable running water that we bring with us in the holding tank, and 3) things that run off propane, like the heater and the stove. So we were looking forward to dry camping and testing out the RV without the hookups to see how it would go.

We met up with our friends at a campsite called River Ranch (which also got us out of the thick, smoky, dangerous air caused by all the NorCal fires), and quickly learned two things: 1) our running water was for some reason coming out of the faucet foamy, as if it had soap in it. So apparently, to err on the side of caution, no potable water. And 2) our propane tank is empty -- perhaps a leak? So no stove, and worse, no heat. All we had was enough electricity to turn on the lights, and presumably-non-potable water to wash our hands with.

I hate to call it roughing it when we're still sleeping on a king size bed and have a working toilet at all times, but as far as RV life goes, this was as close to roughing it as it gets.

Luckily, our awesome friends let us use their propane stove to make dinner and coffee. It did get into the 40s at night without a heater, but we bundled up and it was perfectly fine. And it finally gave us an opportunity to try running our generator for the first time, which we had been a little intimidated to do. We learned that we can't use it at night if there are people nearby, because it's incredibly loud. (Sorry, friends!) But we also learned it takes about 45 minutes to heat up the RV in case of necessity, without having any noticeable difference on the gas gauge, so that's good to know!

RV life is a funny life. Back when I was in college, I did some pretty hardcore hiking and camping. I spent an entire summer backpacking all around California with nothing but a 50 lb pack. We would stay a night at the trailhead and poke fun of the people with their beds and boxed wine and bacon, before hiking in 13 miles the next day to camp without even a tent. As I started getting older, I switched to softer mats, and shorter hikes, and comfy tents, and car camping, and a part of me fought it for a while. But eventually I realized that sleeping on the ground hurts, and sleeping outside when it's 35 degrees is not fun, and I started embracing the fact that, really, comfort is okay. If it comes down to nature in comfort versus no nature at all, I pick nature. So on the way to River Ranch, we had to laugh and acknowledge... man have we gone soft. And I don't even care. Bring on the bacon.

Most of all, it was a really nice time to sit around with friends and do nothing for a few days. We'll definitely miss all of our people up here, and we're trying to get in as much quality time as we can.

Mike was also able to test out his new drone! But we're too busy packing, so those photos and videos aren't processed yet. We'll post them when they're ready!