We spent yesterday at the Omaha zoo, since a friend paid for our tickets for us. We were there from open til close and we had a huge blast, but it was also very taxing on us physically, I think. I managed to get sunburned through my shirt (hooray, again) and I’m dealing with the way my skin gets oily and tight because of it.
We were smelling terrible and were exhausted so we decided to indulge in a shower but as soon as we got back to the van, we were coated in sweat again. I already wasn’t feeling good, suffering from some mild dehydration, so I was feeling pretty sour and wanted to just lay down for bed. This turned out to be a wasted effort.
We don’t have a roof vent right now and the way the bed is set up, we just have no way of getting any ventilation. So picture if you will two guys with mild heat exhaustion laying in bed with nothing but a small usb-powered fan to cool us. Tobi lets off.. a lot of heat; he just naturally runs hot. I run cold and don’t do well in the heat at all, so I’ve already been irritable and uncomfortable in the last week. So last night I woke up out of a dead sleep after only resting for 45 minutes and something was wrong. Y’know how you can just tell something’s wrong with your body? I woke up to that.
I had to crawl over onto the ground and open the side door to let some semblance of a breeze move through so i could cool down, and not a lot else was helping. We can’t keep ice for more than a day and a half (even 20 pounds just disappears) and we’ve barely been able to spend any time in the van at all. which, honestly understandable given circumstance but its hard to feel like you’re at home when you can’t spend any time at home. Everything about our van is designed to withstand cold temperatures, not hot.
The first trial week we ran our water jugs froze over because it was so cold, so we figured it’d be more of a problem than it is. Guess we overestimated.
So with it being too hot to cook, we’re eating out a lot (as cheap as we can get), trying to find colder weather where we can, and spending a lot of time in public libraries, stores, etc to get some relief. It sorta figures that the summer we decide to move into the van is the summer that we experience one of the worst heatwaves in memory.
Nebraska is humid as balls and i hate it. It’s awfully unpleasant and sleeping at night has become impossible. And unless we want to do laundry every single day, we’ve succumbed to smelling like van hippies. Which, I guess, isn’t the worst thing we could smell like.
We’ve been in Nebraska for half a week now, having left Wyoming just in time to end up on a hill that overlooked all of Sidney. Which, as it turns out, Sidney has a massive fireworks display on the 3rd of July, funded by the city and put on by its volunteer firefighters. Which meant that from where we were sitting, we were getting the view of an entire city’s worth of fireworks going off all at once. There were 6 or 7 different sites that were just lighting up the sky. It was honestly a magical and unique experience. We stayed at that Walmart another night and got plenty of work done that day, but we wanted to not overstay our welcome, since the Walmart employees had been kind enough to not ask us to leave when we’d been parked there over a day and a half. We left in the morning as soon as we could.
I also saw fireflies for the very first time two nights ago (Tobi calls em ‘lightningbugs’). I started to tear up immediately because the only time I had ever seen them was in cartoons or things like that, but I was watching this awfully large beetle fly by the open door of the van and while I was staring at him he just... lit up. Flashed this green-yellow light and then faded again. And I watched him twinkle in complete and utter awe for a few minutes. The more I looked, the more of them I saw and it was amazing. I hadn’t even considered fireflies as being a thing; we just don’t have them anywhere I’ve lived before. There were maybe 50 of them that night and i cried. I also scratched myself to high hell, because apparently fireflies are the warning bug. They come out, so do the mosquitos, and I have to run for cover because I swear I have never in my life realized how much of a mosquito magnet I am. I’ve got 3 big purple bruised bite marks right now, and that’s just from having the door open for a short while.
So far, this continues to be a very hard life. I maintain that I think I would enjoy it more if we were doing less dry camping; something more out in the boonies would suit me just fine but honestly we’re not getting a lot of that right now. We’re trying to get to the east coast in time for a friend’s big life event, and that means just straight-shotting it towards the east coast via the i80. Which means a lot of walmarts, since they’re the easiest and most accessible thing for us right now.
We’re getting better about getting out of our shell, I think. I’ve been more willing to chat with folks we meet in certain situations (folks at tourist centers, people we pass by, etc). It’s not like I’ll ever see them again, might as well chat it up. It’s been pretty nice, actually. Met a couple of girls today who told me some cool stuff about Colorado, had a nice Nebraska guide suggest some art museums, had another guide at a different station offer to let us fill our water tank and water bottles (which was so kind of her; she didn’t have to do that and we’re so grateful).
I think there’s some very stressful days for me. I panic a lot about my work, because in order to do it I need to be able to sit down and focus a lot, for hours at a time. Right this second, I just do not have a place to comfortably work in the van; I can come close with some finagling right now, but it’s unpleasant. I think as soon as we’re able, I want to tear that bed apart and build us a new one that allows for us to both sit and work, and maybe if I can get away with it install a roof vent as well (although that would require just a bit more than we can do right now; we’d have to hook it up somehow and I am not an electrician). The summer is just... sweltering, in the van. Trying to sleep just leaves us sticky and miserable.
We’ve been talking about it and quite frankly, we think that we’d both be much happier with a class b. I recently checked my credit for the first time and it turns out that it’s excellent (700+) so getting a loan would be no problem whatsoever. We’d just be needing a small income boost in order to handle it, so I think I’ll double down on the work for myself and see about putting some savings away. It’d be an excellent goal for next year, or the year after.
So far it’s absolutely gorgeous seeing the different landscapes and everything but the further east we go, the more I’m missing the PNW. At least this is giving me a newfound appreciation for it.
It’s officially 1 month since we moved into Big Boi! I’ve got a lot of thoughts on it so far.
We’re in Wyoming right now, which is honestly great. Traveling through what little of Utah we did was awful; I’d never encountered a place so hostile in my life. The energy very clearly Did Not Want Us There. Which is fine, because we left as soon as we came, and Wyoming has been a lot better to us since. The weather is mild, the air is clean and the scenery is beautiful, everywhere you look. It’s not the PNW that I’m used to, but having never been off the west coast, this is an interesting and welcome change of scenery. I haven’t seen any wild rams though, so still not gonna give it 5 stars.
We stayed at Bear River State Park for a few days and on the last day I had an interesting conversation. I was charging my laptop at the north pavilion and a woman approached me. She seemed like she was talking to herself the entire time, but the closer she got I realized she was talking specifically to me. Normally I keep my head down when stuff like that happens but I sort of couldn’t when she was walking straight up to me. She came to stop in front of me and said “Sir?”
“Yes?”
“I-oh wow, you’re beautiful. Do you know that? Sir, I was wondering about this pavilion, it says reserved on it, does that mean we can’t stay around?”
I told her I wasn’t the one that had reserved it, I was just stealing the outlets for my laptop so I could get a little work done, and she nodded and we talked for a little while. She jumped topics a lot, but I learned quite a bit about her because of it. She was traveling with a bloke she’d met on the road, coming from Oregon (Eugene, too, can you believe that?) and she was on the way to a wedding for some gay folks. She mentioned that she wasn’t terribly fond of the guy she was with but he hadn’t hurt her yet and that was good, she was excited for the wedding. She also pegged me as having family from Germany, and was happy to hear that we were from the same city. She asked if I had a vehicle and I mentioned yes, and she seemed like she was interested in bumming a ride, but she got off that train of thought quickly I think.
That was the first time I’d actually spoken to a stranger at length since we had gotten into the van, and it was... while it was very odd for me, it was a wholly positive experience. And that never would’ve happened had I not taken this risk and gone out into the world like this.
We’ve seen tons of geese and deer and cows, and yesterday I saw a pronghorn antelope which was frickin’ amazing. We also saw the farm bison that were at the state park and picked up a couple of stickers. I’ve noticed in general that my attitude (at least in the van) is far more relaxed. I’m more willing to take my pants off and crawl into bed instead of staying fully dressed “in case something happens.” We’ve been having good luck with finding fresh water and bathrooms and wifi have both been rather plentiful. I still think I spend just a bit too much time killing time on social media, but I also notice I’m just as likely to pick up a book and read as I am my phone, since everything is so easily on-hand. My biggest struggle has been trying to find/make time to sit down and work and I like to think I”m finally getting into the right pace for that at least.
I know I keep waiting for this big shift in mentality when it comes to vanlife and so far and it hasn’t quite happened yet, but I do feel a little more relaxed. Things seem a teensy bit easier and I’m learning through this experience already, I know it. Things are getting better, just slowly.
