June was crazy but we’ve finally hit the road!
Wow. We have officially been living in the van for three weeks and been on the road for two.
The month of June didn’t even feel like 30 days if we were being honest. This last month was crazy busy, it’s no wonder why it went by so fast. It was filled with last days of work, moving out, turning over our keys to the new renter, finishing the build on our new home-on-wheels, moving into said home-on-wheels, taking a test trip to figure things out, coming back home to offload what we didn’t think we needed, my sister’s wedding, and then hanging out waiting for Amazon shipments to arrive.
Selling all our belongings
I was finishing up the last of my projects at work while also trying to down size and move out. Man, talk about stress. At the beginning of the month, we ended up hosting a garage sale and posted all of our big ticket items online for sale. This hustle felt wildly successful as we sold most everything for a whopping $3,500. Though selling almost everything we owned felt weird and a little crazy, it felt better knowing we made such a killing and we could use that money more wisely for this next stage in our life, like paying for a custom roof rack that houses all our toys such as our CVT tent, water toys and snow toys come winter. The value of being able to bring our toys to make memories over some furniture we don’t know when we are going to use again was really important to us.
Moving out of the house we once called home
Moving out ended up being a bittersweet moment. We moved out the same week we moved in just two years prior. We had remodeled our place from the ground up, really only keeping the bathtub and water heater. It was one of our rental properties so we knew it wasn’t going to be a long term home, but the fact we took that place from ‘6 untrained chihuahuas in 1000 square feet’ to what the new tenant called ‘the Taj Mahal’ after looking to buy for 6 months and now we were moving out… hits the heart just a little. Andrew helped me come to terms with this phase by looking at it in the sense of steps. That remodel was our first one, meaning we were able to use it as a stepping stone to get to where we are now of being capable of finishing out the build of our van.
Building out the last of our new home-on-wheels
While I was finishing work, Andrew was finishing the build. He spent multiple weeks building and configuring every inch of our new home to be able to maximize all storage possibilities. He custom built benches inside that hold a ton of items including our pantry and toilet (don’t worry… they are different benches), and thanks with the help of my dad, they were able to get the main storage underneath the bed built out to it’s full potential. The ‘garage’ space in the back now has another 30 gallon water tank and two custom pull out drawers, one for our bikes and one for our cooler/workout items/hammocks. It’s a great design. Inside the van, we now have two custom drawers reaching 40 inches long which holds all our clothes. Not going to lie, the amount of space for clothes was still a concern when moving in, even after getting rid of 10+ bags and boxes of clothing, but it seems to be doing the job just fine, though I still my have a sweatshirt or two roaming around the van when all the laundry is clean.
Moving into the new home – such a process
Moving into 80 square feet should have been easy. It sounds like nothing, right? But holy smokes… that was a long few days. We expected to be out exploring on our test trip on a Wednesday and we didn’t leave until Saturday at 7pm… that maybe was because when we moved out of our house, we THOUGHT we were pretty well organized. Boxes were actually labeled and things were (for the most part) separated into what was staying and what was going. Well, that all went out the window as soon as all our stuff was offload into Andrew’s parent’s garage. I mean, we took over that space (thanks Mike and Robin for dealing with that for a week!).
We had to spend several days sorting and figuring what exactly we needed and what was actually going to fit. One big pile turned to 7 small piles of going, staying, getting rid of, toss, want to take, really don’t have room but going to try and make it work, and Andrew’s going to hate me for trying to bring this so we are going to place it in the bottom of the box in hopes he won’t go through it. Spoiler alert. He went through the box. There was a lot of back and forth on what we were going to use on a regular bases and those 7 piles got put into 4 smaller piles, which eventually just moved into one medium pile that just didn’t make the cut. Honestly, I think it was because we just didn’t want to deal with it any more.
Our test trip definitely tested us
Once we were all moved in we were off within the hour. We were going to head to Eastern Oregon and hang at Wallowa Lake but being a couple days behind, we decided to just head to our favorite spot – Central Oregon. We spent our first night in the forest of Sisters, getting in after dark. Naturally, when we pulled in, there were a pile of bones in the middle of the entrance… and when we pulled in further, more bones. A little uneasy at all the animal bones but extremely tired, we decided this is just how it’s going to be and that we needed to get some sleep. Waking up the next morning felt good. We went on a bike ride and puppy was loving it after he figured out how to run along SIDE the bike, not in front of it. We spent the rest of the day in sisters walking around and then headed on towards Bend, where we ended up hitting the curb of a roundabout a blew a tire… yes, the real day one and already we had to figure out how to repair something on the van. That was fun. Not. Luckily we have a dualy and the outside tire in the back was the one that caught the curb. So we were still able to get to our spot for the night and deal with the tire in the morning. The rest of our Bend trip ended up consisting of the tire run around and replacement, hanging by the river, figuring out what we actually didn’t need and learning how to live in a small space without being on top of each other. Let me just say that Ziggy was in the way A LOT and 80 square feet is NOT the amount of our walk space.
Finishing up June
The last two weeks of June were filled with my sister’s wedding, where she was able to marry her soul mate at the coast in a gorgeous backyard wedding, and the attempt to get out on the road. After a long weekend of setting up, hearing I do’s and playing at the beach, we took off towards Eugene to hang with a friend who graciously let us ship a couple Amazon orders to his house. After a sketchy situation trying to spend the night on the rim of the Willamette National Forest, we spent most of our time in town hanging out, running errands and putting the final touches on our new home. Once our Amazon shipments (finally) arrived, we took off for Wallowa Lake to start our journey.
On our way we unexpectedly discovered The Painted Hills, which was awesome since it was one our To-See list, so it was extra special when we happened to stumble across it. We spent just a few nights in Wallowa, doing laundry for the first time at a laundromat, seeing my sister and new brother-in-law for dinner, Andrew figuring out he wanted to start fly fishing, practicing said fly fishing, hiking and hanging around the lake. We hit Idaho for a few days after that, finding an awesome lake that had free lake side camping, and stayed in Sun Valley for a night or two until an annoying squeak below the driver seat ended up being a faulty ball joint on the front wheel and it needed replacing. On our way to Wyoming, we also stopped at Crater of the Moons National Monument Preserve, where the hay fields swaying in the breeze quickly turned into 6,500 year old lava.
Now that we are on the road and trying to immerse ourselves in this journey, all this seems so long ago. This way of life doesn’t even feel real to us either. Are we on an extended weekend trip, getting an adventure fix for the week? Are we gone for just a week or so and expected to be back home, participating in our daily life? What feels the weirdest is that both those seem true, yet we set out further from Oregon each day.
Current Update:
We are in the Tetons! We rolled into Wyoming to enjoy the fireworks of the 4th against the mountainous backdrop and have been enjoying the mountains, rivers and lakes since! A new blog post will go up soon talking all about our stay here, so stay tuned!
