25 December, 2020: MERRY CHRISTMAS!! I'm enjoying Christmas with Gunner and my van, Galahad at a great campsite on the lake! I'm the only one here. It's quite cold out there so we've been cooped up in the van staying warm and calling family - thankfully I have a good signal where I'm camped.
As before, I wrote this blog the other day and I'm able to get it uploaded today.
21 December, 2020: Vanlife is interesting. It seems that it can take a variety of forms. In my planning, at this time, I had thought I’d be out west wintering in the desert. Turns out, as I type this, I’m less than 3 hours from Greenville – staying with a friend and I have been for most of the last week.
Since my last blog, I’ve spent a bit over a week with my brother and Mom (including Thanksgiving), traveled for a bit under a week to return to Greenville (via Washington DC) where I stayed with a friend near Townville, SC. Traveled to Edisto Beach and stayed with friends for almost a week, traveled for a couple nights coming back to Greenville, then on to this place, not far from Marion, NC.
It's been a great week. He’s got a log cabin and 10 acres of property. He’s got a fair number of projects in progress and I was able to help him out with some manual labor.
The first task I undertook was to move a stack of wood from where the tree fell, to a new wood shed that he’s been building. The shed didn’t have a roof on it, but it had the foundation, platform and uprights in place. I didn’t get a photo of the first pile before I moved it but here it is after I finished moving it to the new platform.
That stack is two deep. It took about a dozen loads with the wheelbarrow. It was fun. Gunner was a great help all along. He made sure he had good scratches all around his ears.
My next task was to make room for a second wood shed, to the right of the one shown in the previous image. I had to move two stacks of wood, on pallets, to a new location (one stack is visible under the black cover in the right side of the above photo). The second shed would be built where they currently resided. They were a bit of a mess, on four pallets. I unloaded one pallet into a pile, placed it’s pallet in the new location, then began to transfer wood from the other pallets, moving a pallet to it’s new location when it was cleared. The stacks aren’t high – about 5’ at the highest, but I managed to re-stack all of that wood on just 3 pallets, in their new locations.
In the photo, you can see the ‘new’ wood shed on the left and the ‘old’ wood
stacked in it’s new location to the right.
The 2nd wood shed will go about where I’m standing to take
that photo. In the next photo the 2nd
shed will go to the left side of the image, towards the background.
The next two tasks involved building the roof for the shed upon which I stacked the wood and burning down a huge yard debris pile created in managing his 10 acres.
Mike and I tackled the structure of the roof together. The uprights and cross-bars were in place so we needed to build the frame, add the trusses and the decking which would be the roof structure. Late in the afternoon, we lit the yard debris on fire. As the decking was built onto the trusses, I was able to work on the fire while Mike worked on the shed roof. The fire burned really well, and after it was dark, we threw a huge pile of pine logs on the fire. No photos of the fire. I’m not sure what I was thinking!
Monday morning I put up more videos for my van Galahad’s vanlife diaries while Mike finished up the decking on the structure of the roof. After that, playing with the fire interspersed with adding the paper and drip edge to the roof.
The fire burned down quite well, although there was still much left at the perimeter of the fire. I was able to rake it back into the center and it flamed up again. We pushed a few large stumps into the coals that eventually built up and it was still burning when I left later in the afternoon to run some errands.
Mike prepped the materials for the continuation of the roof project. When he was ready, I’d go over and help with the papering and drip-edges for the roof. After that we put up some chalk lines so Mike could continue with shingling the roof.
Mike was still in progress with the roof when I left, he sent me this photo a couple days later:
These last couple of days I’ve been working on my next trip – Up to VanDOit for a visit! That will be a future blog or video (series?). I have a lot of catchup to do on my videos. I’ve just completed posting up the ‘travel to the cape’ portion of my VLOG – <<LINK>> I’ll see what videos I have for the ‘travel from’ portion of my trip. The videos are fun, but I have a new-found respect for some of the youtube channels I’ve been following – the time required to edit these videos is significant. I’m sure, with practice, I’ll become faster. That said, it does require some skill that I’m just developing.
So, as the end of the year approaches, I’m finding that my version of vanlife so far isn’t quite what I had initially envisioned. It has been fun! I think Gunner actually is beginning to enjoy the travel. He gets to see and smell so much more than just sitting at home! This makes the times in the van super fun. I try to find good places to get Gunner out for a walk. We’ve had some great trails and parks to enjoy so far. I think I need to put together a blog with photos of Gunner and me out on the walks. Keep an eye out for that.
The other part of the driving involves route finding and finding places to sleep. Those have always been the fun part! Staying with friends has allowed me to spend some quality time with them and in some cases, do some work that helps them get house projects completed.
Whatever my version of vanlife looks like, I’m sure there are a thousand others out there. I’m still smiling so I think I’m doing OK! I wish all of you the Merriest Christmas and the Happiest of New Years!!
