RVgapyearJason, Author at RVgapyear

Home for the holidays…and then some

16/02/03 at 12.24pm / by Jason / 0 Comment

If you’ve been following along with us on Instagram it’s pretty clear that we are “home” now. We arrived in Casar, NC in mid-December, low-on-funds, tired, cold, and eternally grateful for 2015 on the road. We loved it. It wasn’t always easy and certainly there were some surprises but it was everything we’d hoped and planned for. And so much more.

I suppose with the start of this new year I’m officially unemployed. I’ve begun my job search knowing that it will take some time to find the right professional fit. Jessie has the good fortune of being highly employable and began an open-ended/temporary position in her medical field in Shelby, NC. This should allow us to continue to eat, pay bills, and give us some flexibility moving forward.

I have been spending a significant amount of time at the local YMCA training for my upcoming triathlon season. It’s been good to get back into workout routine. I’m officially in the best “winter shape” of my life. I guess that is the major plus of being without work. If I can avoid injury I’m hoping for my best season yet. I plan to cap it off with Ironman North Carolina. Problem is the entry fee is $715. Yep. You read that right. So I’m in the process of trying to justify that expense while I’m out of work all for the privilege of propelling myself through 140.6 miles of pain. When not at the Y I’m spending time at the county library where internet is slightly faster and more reliable than the satellite internet at my in-laws.

Being “home” has been more challenging than we anticipated. The holidays were great but now that Jessie is back to work and I’m working hard on finding meaningful employment we feel greatly unsettled. Much more so than at any point last year. This is counterintuitive to us. We almost never knew where we were headed next in 2015. We frequently started the day not knowing where we’d sleep. Yet now that we are somewhere familiar and have more of a routine we feel out-of-sorts. Perhaps this is/was to be expected. We underestimated it.

That said we are happy to be home. Catching up with family and friends has been wonderful and while we ate well on the road, nothing can beat home cooking.

Real Life on the Road: What We Eat (a.k.a. Meals)

15/10/23 at 11.02am / by Jason / 0 Comment

In our previous post in this series, we wrote about our RV kitchen set-up and factors surrounding meal prep. Here, we provide specific insight into what we actually eat on the road.

Overall, our meal selection is slightly limited, but mostly, it hasn’t changed much since we’ve been on the road. We eat a lot of fresh food, and we cook nearly all of the same meals. However, we definitely eat fewer baked items and goodies due to our oven situation (click on the link above for more information on this) and limited storage space for all the from-scratch ingredients Jessie requires for baking (she is well known for her homemade baked goods). This has been the only significant adjustment, as Jessie misses baking and I miss eating what she bakes! Otherwise, our meals have remained pretty similar. Here’s a quick run-down of a typical week’s worth of meals on the road:

Breakfast:

Cereal
Fresh Fruit
Oatmeal (we like the quick-cook steel cut oats) with walnuts, crasins, local honey, cinnamon, and a dash of almond milk
Greek Yogurt with granola
Biscuits
Scrambled eggs
Blueberry pancakes
French toast
Whole wheat pita with peanut butter

Lunch:

Peanut butter and jelly or honey or banana (we eat a lot of these, as they pack well for hiking and we’re almost always on the go at lunch time)
Turkey sandwiches
Chips
Apples and/or pears
Carrots and/or raw broccoli
Almonds
Hummus with pita and veggies
Trader Joes Snickerdoodle Cookies (me)

Dinner:

Grilled turkey burgers, hamburgers (rarely), chicken, veggie kabobs
Grilled fish (mahi or salmon)
Soup, sometimes with grilled cheese
Grilled sweet potato and/or zucchini
Salad
Spaghetti/penne with Italian bread dipped in olive oil mixture
Fresh, frozen, or canned beans (green, baked, etc.)
Other fresh, frozen or canned veggies
Fresh or canned peaches/pears
Black beans and rice with pineapple and avocado with chips and salsa
Breakfast for dinner
Salmon, tuna, or chicken salad
Fried egg and avocado on grilled bread or toast

Snacks:

Clif, Hammer, Lara, and/or Luna bars
Homemade trail mix
Fruit (fresh, dried, or canned)
Nuts (almonds, walnuts, peanuts)
Hummus and carrots
Cheese and crackers
The occasional Snickers bar (me) or scoop of ice cream or fro yo (Jessie)

Final and important notes:

We tend to make bigger meals at dinner and eat leftovers for a day or two. One very important consideration is water usage when cleaning up dishes. Early in our trip we were very surprised to find out just how many gallons of water we were using to clean up after a meal. Since we have limited capacity to collect our grey water (aka: sink water) and must find an appropriate place to dispose of it, this has become a daily consideration for us. Another consideration is propane usage. Generally propane is cheap so we don’t worry about this too much but it is sometimes difficult to find a good location to get our propane bottles filled. Simply put, bigger meals and eating leftovers mean less grey water and less propane use.

Time:

We are rarely in a hurry these days. Without a work schedule or camping reservations, it just isn’t a big deal if we take an hour or more to prepare and eat a meal. This is a luxury we’ve taken full advantage of this year. And we’ve taken the opportunity to eat 50%+ of our meals outdoors. A picnic or three a day is a lovely way to enjoy a meal.

Dining Out:

Well, we’d like to do it more often. But it is expensive (for us) so we generally don’t eat out more than a few times a month. Since we rarely stay anywhere long enough to find the best local spots, we have been frequently disappointed by $20-$30 meals out that aren’t as good as we could make in our RV kitchen for $5. As I like to remind Jessie, Panda Express and Five Guys will never let you down.

We admit to getting stuck in a food rut every once in a while. What are you cooking up these days? We’d love to hear!

As always, thanks for reading! What else would you like to know about our real life on the road?

Real Life on the Road: Culinary Arts

15/10/20 at 6.54pm / by Jason / 0 Comment

Welcome back to our series about real life on the road! Several people have asked recently about meals on the road: how we make them, what our kitchen set-up is like, what our limitations are with meal prep while living in an RV, and simply what we eat. We’ll tackle the first few questions here and write a separate post about our typical meals on the road. Enjoy and stay tuned!

The other day I was talking to a friend and colleague about some “real-world-reentry-ideas” (yes, we are starting to consider what happens when we get back to NC in December) and she mentioned that she really likes our blog posts about our everyday life on the road.

So with this in mind let’s talk cooking. If it were up to me we’d subsist on a steady diet of Panda Express, Krispy Kreme Doughnuts, and Five Guys Burgers & Fries. But it isn’t up to me, we are on a tight budget, and I would like to live to see my 42^nd birthday so we tend to make the vast majority of our own meals.

The Refrigerator:

Our refrigerator/freezer is about 1/3 the size of a normal household refrigerator which means we can’t go too crazy grocery shopping. But if we are efficient in our packing of said refrigerator we can fit a lot in there. Think of all the empty space in your home refer, subtract that out and you’ve got something about the size of ours. It runs off electricity when we are plugged into shore power at a “fancy” campground (a rarity for us) and propane when we are not plugged in. Don’t ask me how it works; it has something to do with boiling ammonia.

The Stove:

It’s a simple three burner stove that runs off our propane supply. It basically has three settings (1) the sun, (2) slightly less hot than the sun, and (3) off. It works well if you want things hot in a hurry. Not as well if you want to simmer something. There is no simmer; just various states of boil. That said, we’ve learned our stove and have become pretty good at cooking on it.

The Oven:

It’s about the size of an easy bake oven but doesn’t work quite as well. It too is powered by propane. It doesn’t heat evenly and its temperature control is very much a game of culinary roulette. We did add a pizza stone above the heating element that has helped a great deal. We don’t really bake with it but we do use it from time-to-time to “prepare” frozen or cold items such as a take-and-bake-cookies or frozen biscuits. It is also a bit of a propane hog so it just isn’t very efficient to make small portions. As an aside, on cold mornings it is nice to leave the oven door open and let the pizza stone radiate heat for 30 minutes or so as you enjoy a hot biscuit (once the propane is turned off, obviously). For the most part our oven gets used for bakeware and dishware storage.

The Microwave:

We have one! But unless we are plugged into shore power (again, rarely) we can’t use it. So, it typically serves as a very nice extra cabinet. When we are plugged in, it works quite well.

The Sink:

We really like our sink. It’s a double-basin model with big, deep bowls. It also has a tall, pull-down faucet. This combination makes preparing meals and washing dishes quick and easy.

The Grill:

Perhaps the best purchase we made before leaving home was our Char-Broil Grill2Go Tru Infrared grill. We generally use the grill several times a week. It fits neatly into our “basement” (the storage space under our RV) and runs off small, 16oz propane bottles (think small green cylinders you can pick up at any big box store). I’ve owned my fair share of grills and this is by far my favorite. It’s easy to cook on, clean, and works extraordinarily well. Best of all, it’s small enough to go just about anywhere. Simply put, we love this thing!

Plug-in Appliances:

We use our individual-size blender for smoothies somewhat frequently. We can use the inverter (i.e. battery power) to run this just about anytime we want. Our toaster requires shore power, as does the crock pot we still haven’t used and should have left at home. Jessie’s tiny coffee maker that also requires shore power has all but been replaced by her Melitta pour-over, meaning that the coffee maker should have been left at home as well. You can imagine that when we pay for shore power we go a little bit crazy using the toaster and microwave. It’s a bit like Christmas and we feel like kings as we eat toast (TOAST!) and reheat leftover food in the microwave (after we empty its contents).

Cabinet and Counter Space:

For an RV/Travel Trailer of our size (roughly 25 feet), we have a ton of cabinet and counter space. Most RVs our size are designed for weekenders and vacationers, and the kitchens reflect this reality in a lack of storage space. Our unit and its spacious storage can easily store 1-3 weeks of “dry” food and 1-2 weeks of fresh food and allows ample counter prep space. This was a priority for us when we were RV shopping as we knew that due to our limited budget we wouldn’t be eating out very often.

Stocking the Kitchen:

For the most part we simply brought a limited supply of pots, pans, and utensils we’d been using daily since we got married five years ago, supplemented by the occasional $.75 item from a thrift store. Certainly there are times when we’ve thought “we should have brought the _________” but those are infrequent. In fact, we find ourselves saying “we should have left that at home” more frequently. For the most part we did a fantastic job bringing just enough of everything to make life in the kitchen quite functional.

It took us a few weeks on the road to really learn to use our kitchen, pay attention to water and propane use, and figure out a good storage plan. We are now quite comfortable with our kitchen. In fact, all three components of the infamous “kitchen triangle” (cooktop, sink, refrigerator) are all accessible within one step. It is the most efficient kitchen we’ve ever used. I guess that’s what you get when you live in 168 sqft. We’ve just got to be sure there aren’t too many cooks in the kitchen.

PS – Read our previous post in this series here; for a tour of our RV check this out; for other lessons learned visit us here; and for our story of finally figuring out our energy vampire in the fridge, click here.

Running from Smoke and Other Recent Misadventures

15/08/21 at 10.08am / by Jason / 0 Comment

Sometimes we might be guilty of painting too rosy a picture of our travels. We feel fortunate to have this opportunity, and we don’t want to sound like we’re complaining. But we also want to present a true account of what life is like for us on the road. With this in mind, we present a brief (each of these could be its own blog post) account of our five days after being driven out of North Cascades NP by wildfire smoke:

We needed propane. Like good citizens, we turned off our refrigerator (active pilot light) before pulling into the gas station where we’d buy propane. The problem here is that we forgot to turn the refrigerator back on. When we woke up the next morning we realized we’d thawed about 2.5 lbs of expensive salmon and 1 lb of grass-fed ground beef. All of this went into the refrigerator and needed to be cooked ASAP!
We tried to drive through Seattle on Friday afternoon in a downpour, which also happened to be the evening of the Seahawks first preseason game (and they take their NFL football VERY seriously in this area, even preseason). After creeping along at 30mph on the interstate for way too long, we saw a casino, Wal-Mart, Cabela’s, Panera, and Home Depot within a quarter mile of one another. We decided we’d try driving through Seattle on Saturday and settled into the comfort of suburbia for yet another night of parking lot slumber. As an aside, we are surprised by how bad Pacific North Westerners seem to be at driving in the rain.
We found a spot among the 50 or so RVs who would call the casino parking lot home for the night and headed into the casino looking for a cheap meal.We opened the door to the casino only to be met by a wall of cigarette smoke. Jessie turned around and walked back to the RV in the cold rain to make some soup and read her book. I soldiered on into the casino bound and determined to find a cheap meal. In many casinos this is a fairly easy task (they don’t want you to leave!) . Not this one. Not a single meal under $13 in the whole place. So I went back to the RV to have some soup and a Snicker’s bar for dinner.
On Saturday morning, after waking up in the middle of the night to an overeager LP alarm, we decided enough was enough. We needed to install a roof vent cover that would allow us to leave our vent open even in bad weather or while driving. Our LP detector simply doesn’t like air that is heavy/humid or doesn’t move (and it hates Jessie’s shampoo). Most of the time you have to buy these covers at an RV dealership (expensive!) or order them online. But, we found one at our local (for the day) Wal-Mart. So while parked at Cabela’s, we took 30 minutes to climb up on the roof and install our new vent cover. Classy.

Jessie walked to Panera for some coffee and wifi while I did some grocery shopping at Wal-Mart. She was ecstatic to find that she had free coffee for the month as part of the Panera rewards program. So she proceeded to drink way too much coffee and spent the day with a sour stomach.
We made one more stop before looking for camping on Saturday. Trader Joe’s. Good place for grocery shopping. Terrible place for navigating a 25 ft travel trailer.
So after our soggy, noisy night at the casino and getting our shopping done and roof vent installed, we left north Seattle and headed south through town. There was a seemingly strange amount of traffic for a Saturday which leads us to believe that folks here spend a lot of time driving. And the city does sprawl north and south for hours. Our goal was to find a spot to grill our fish. How about a city park? Seemed like a good idea. Enter low hanging trees and tight parking lots. We didn’t incur any damage, but we do have some new “kisses from nature” on the roof of the RV.
Clearly the parks idea didn’t work, so we headed to yet another casino to park, inspect the RV for tree damage, grill our fish, and sleep/camp for the night. Apparently, standing on your truck to inspect the RV and then getting out your grill will earn you a “welcome” visit from casino security. No grilling. “You are welcome to eat at one of our restaurants and see the Elvis show”. So we left hungry.
Fed up with the suburban sprawl of Seattle, we pointed the truck southeast determined to get into the national forest near Mt. Rainer, find a campground, and grill our damn fish. We drove through two overpriced campgrounds, neither of which had any availability for us anyway, and finally parked in a picnic area to grill our fish. So at about 9 pm, Jessie with a sour stomach, we both ate a hastily grilled-in-the-dark gigantic piece of salmon after spilling salmon juice all over the RV during the preparation phase of the meal.
Not allowed to camp at the picnic area, we pulled out just before 10pm to find “dispersed” camping along a gravel national forest road. We just needed a semi-level 40 ft piece of dirt to park for the night. In the pitch black, we turned off the highway and onto a gravel road. After turning the RV around utilizing an 18 point turn method taught nowhere in Driver Ed., we finally got the RV parked for the night despite the fact that Jessie, “the spotter”, feared a fatal bear attack the entire time.
On Sunday, we left our lovely-in-the-daylight “campsite” hoping to find camping at a campground near the Sunrise area in Mt. Rainer National Park. We made it there easily. And they had availability! And a sign that said “no trailers over 18 feet”. It would have been nice of the Park Service to put this sign on the main road BEFORE we made the turn. So we backed out and turned around. Homeless yet again.
We left Mt. Rainer and headed south into yet another national forest and another overpriced campground. But we backed into site A6 and debated staying anyway. Nope. Let’s go find free camping in the national forest. So down another narrow forest road we went. Dead-end. So we backed out, uphill about a mile, turned around in what amounted to a shallow drainage ditch and headed back to site A6 eager to pay $20 not to have to be in the truck any longer.
Jessie now has reoccurring dreams/nightmares about finding free dispersed camping, and Jason is sick of backing up the trailer.

Clearly the more confident we feel in our travels, the more willing we are to take risks (i.e. drive down narrow gravel roads with no real idea of where we are going). These risks often mean great rewards, but sometimes they mean eating fish off a paper plate three hours later than you planned and in a location you never knew existed.

Dodging Wildfires Version 2.0: North Cascades National Park

15/08/19 at 9.01am / by Jason / 0 Comment

On day four (of seven) of our time in North Cascades National Park, we picked up* the two smelliest individuals we’ve ever met. These chaps were from Wales and were ten weeks into a twelve week backpacking adventure in the western US. I’m not sure they’d bathed since arriving. Jessie had a very polite and seemingly delightful conversation with them as I drove as fast as was prudent with my head out the window (perhaps a slight exaggeration, but you get the idea). About 30 minutes later, we parted ways with our foul but enjoyable new acquaintances and were on our way to Mt. Baker National Forest and Recreation Area.

We’d decided to leave North Cascades National Park for the day for less smoky hiking conditions after winds shifted overnight and sent a lot of smoke our way. You see, there were three separate wildfires burning in the southern part of the park. Not that these fires made CNN headlines like the Glacier NP fire with all of its fancy video footage and road closures. North Cascades is the second least visited National Park in the lower 48, so it isn’t exactly newsworthy the way the more popular parks are.

Mt. Baker National Forest is located about 40 miles west of North Cascades. During the winter of ’98-’99 Mt. Baker received a world record 95 feet of snow. It boasts a peak just under 11,000 feet and seven massive glaciers. The glaciers were the big draw for us, so after winding up 15 or so miles of dirt road we arrived at the Mt. Baker National Recreation Area Trailhead. As we pulled into the small gravel parking lot, we saw two guys hiking into the wilderness with skis. I looked at Jessie and said, “I think we might be in over our heads”. But we decided to press on, determined to get in some hiking. Up we went through alpine forests and boulder fields, across streams and waterfalls until the Easton and Squak Glaciers appeared before us. As we arrived at the fork in the trail where we had to commit to a route for the day, we came upon a lovely French-Canadian gentlemen who recommended one of the two trails we were considering. So we skipped the more popular Park Butte trail with its smoke-limited panoramas in favor of Railroad Grade, which promised an up-close-and-personal view of Mt. Baker. It did not disappoint. This hike is easily in the top ten for the year.

While at North Cascades, we learned the park is really about three things: (1) amazing, rugged, dense, unforgiving wilderness, (2) glaciers, all 300+ of them, and (3) hydroelectricity. Yep, there are three dams in the park established and maintained by Seattle City Light. These obviously predate the creation of the park. The one and only paved road, Washington Highway 20, that winds through the park follows the valley floor through most of the park where the dams and river/lakes are found. There is no road that leads to stunning vistas of glaciers or panoramas of the mountain ranges. In fact, you can see only one glacier from Highway 20, if you know where to look, the weather is perfect, and you squint real hard. Think of it as the opposite of the famous Going to the Sun Road at Glacier NP. This is the beautiful and frustrating thing about North Cascades. It is absolutely stunning, but to see it you’ve got to hike. And the hiking here is hard. Many trails start below 1,000 feet and gain 500-1,000 feet per mile. These trails will make you think your heart will pound out of your chest on the way up and your knees will shatter on the way down. We prided ourselves on being in good hiking shape before arriving at North Cascades and we were thoroughly humbled by the hiking there. It’s also the first park we felt truly disadvantaged by not having overnight backpacking gear with us. To see the best of what the park has to offer, you need a minimum of 2-4 nights in the back country. We simply can’t do that with the equipment we have with us. Next time.

While in the park, we had the opportunity to camp in two separate campgrounds (one of them totally free and lakeside), complete one tough 10-mile hike, take in a lovely 7.5 mile hike to Cascade Pass, and enjoy several smaller hikes. We saw the strangest “park film” of the year (we’ve seen about 14 of them). We took an official tour of one of the small towns built to service the dams and took an unofficial tour of another one of these towns that is about 70% abandoned and looks like the set of the “Walking Dead”. At dusk it’s downright creepy. We also marveled at how few people were in the park. At times it felt like we had the entire park to ourselves. Having your own national park is a pretty special thing. We just wish that the smoke hadn’t driven us out earlier than expected.

*We’ve observed that hitchhikers are more common in and around the national parks than most places in the US. In fact, we had to hitch a ride ourselves while at Arches NP. While in Glacier NP, we picked up a man and his backpack. At least it appeared to be a backpack from afar. In reality it was his two year-old daughter in a child carrying contraption meant to work like a backpack. He and the rest of his family had missed the last bus back to their campground and weren’t prepared to hike seven miles back to camp with a gaggle of young children in tow, so here he was catching a ride with us back to camp to get the car and pick up the rest.