Update! (9/8/20)
So y’all probably figured as much, but: I made it to Maryland! This was weeks ago, and it seems like I’ve been inundated with life stuff and work stuff ever since. But it still feels like I just got here three days ago; it also feels like I’ve been here for three months. For 2020, that sounds about right.
Here’s what happened:
August 17: Denver to Hoxie, Kansas
August 18: Kansas to a state park somewhere in Illinois
August 19: Illinois to Indiana in a rainstorm, COVID test, drove to western MD
August 20: Did some work in western MD, socially-distanced visit with my parents and brother after my niece and nephew were in bed, spent the night in their driveway
August 21: Left before 6, drove back to western MD, did some work in a state forest parking lot, got negative COVID test results; turned around and drove back to parents’ house. Spent the weekend with family.
Since then, I’ve just kind of been here. I officially sold my condo on the 28th — which probably won’t seem fully real to me until I go back to Colorado and can’t stay there anymore!
It seems a little anticlimactic, maybe, to go through all the work of making the van into a self-contained cross-country travel machine and now I’m just staying at my parents’ house like I’ve been doing for years. But the pandemic has made everything weird. I’m assuming that it’s going to get a *lot* worse this fall, so before it does and before there are more widespread outbreaks or travel restrictions, I want to make sure I check in with family/friends. So right now is about spending time with people while I can, and hopefully later this year/next year will be more of the parked-in-a-forest-for-a-week kind of stuff.
Here’s how the trip went:
Overall, great! There was a weird moment when I was looking for a campsite near a small lake in Kansas, and I was going downhill and the brakes locked up and made a weird noise. I later realized that this may have just been because the dirt roads around the lake were very muddy and slick. The next morning, the tires and tailpipe were caked solid with like half an inch of mud. I haven’t had any weird brake noises since, even when driving in heavy rain.
The bigger issue, though, became obvious during that same torrential downpour west of Indianapolis. The cab leaks… a lot. But only when the van is moving. By “a lot,” I mean a steady drip. Water dripping into the passenger side footwell. Water splashing on my left arm. Water darkening the industrial gray headliner above the windshield, starting from the right and left sides. The funny thing is, I thought I fixed this. There was some leaking in a rainstorm as I was driving around Denver a while ago. So I caulked over a seam between the van’s fiberglass topper and its old metal roof, figuring that was where the water was coming from. But either I didn’t fix it well enough, or the water is coming from somewhere else — like the above the corners of the windshield, where there are some patches of rust.
Fortunately, when the van is parked, there are no leaks at all. When I spent the night in the woods in western Maryland, it rained during the night and I stayed dry. Even the roof fan that my brother and I installed by ourselves (more on that in a while) has kept the water out, miraculously.
And there were no breakdowns, no mechanical issues. The bed was comfortable, the nights were dark and quiet.
It was definitely a weird sort of trip. I was traveling in quarantine, essentially: no going inside at gas stations, no public restrooms (with one exception where I was 99.9% sure the outhouse hadn’t been used in months and no one else would come in), no fast food or snacks on the road. (I subsisted on some chocolate zucchini bread my sis-in-law made, protein bars, and dehydrated chili mix, and I cold-brewed tea in a Nalgene bottle.)
The choice to get COVID tested rather than do a 2-week quarantine was kind of a weird one. My brother, niece, and nephew were visiting my parents but couldn’t stay very long. With all future plans very up in the air, this visit might be the most family togetherness we’ll have in quite a while. And I got the test through a private lab and paid for it out of pocket, so I wasn’t using public resources. But on the other hand — resources are resources. So I feel ethically murky about it.
What’s next?: While I’m in MD, I’m hoping to do some repairs to the van and build some more storage. In about a week or so, I plan to head south, possibly stop at my brother’s place in Atlanta, and visit my friend Ron in Florida.