I think today is Wednesday. I left Asheville for a trial run of the new car camper setup. I'm still waiting for the cargo shipment from Brussels to arrive, but the shipping agent said that I will be unloaded in Charleston today and that it might be ready to be trucked to Asheville as soon as Thursday.
I am currently in Georgia near the border of Tennessee in a wildlife management area. Whatever that is. Getting here was driving through some really rural parts of Georgia. There were some pretty extreme differences in income along the way. Huge glowing white mansions and then trash surrounded mobile homes all within a few miles of each other. It was a fascinating drive. The inequality of wealth and quality of living was staggering.
I'm using an App called TheDyrt to help me find free places to camp. For some reason it's called boondocking. I have yet to figure out why. After crawling along about 6 miles of a pretty rocky dirt road I landed at an area with 6 primitive campsites. At one end is the party crowd with lots of muscle vehicles and yappy dogs. They graced me with shitty loud rock music that played late into the night. Next to them was an old woman who spent the day shuffling around in a hair net and house dress. Again, kind of surreal in the difference between people out here.
But I'm right next to a beautiful babbling stream and it's been really enjoyable. I found myself just sitting and looking at the trees. Later, unable to move, I did nothing but watch a Beatle wander throug
h my field of vision. It just felt so nice not to have to really do anything and just let time just wash over and through me.The car camping is going to take a bit of fine tuning but it's a good start. The rooftop tent is the coolest thing since sliced bread. It super roomy inside. Think like a twin bed. There are mesh windows on 3 sides and the top so it feels open and airy. When I got a little cold at night it was super easy to button everything up by closing the mesh panels and it quickly got cozy inside.
When the shipment arrives, I'll grab a bit more of my camping gear and probably another table. There never seems to be enough room to put stuff down on when you're cooking. It's a weird thought that hasn’t quite settled in yet. That I live in my car. No home. Just my car. I know lots of people do it. Some because they have no other option. But for my privileged self, it's still very strange. Strange that I've made the choice to do so and and strange because until recently, the idea of it never crossed my mind.
In the final months of living in Europe, I had decided that I was going to come back to the US, buy a van, build it out for living in, and then hit the road. I researched extensively what it takes to do this and spent way too much idle time watching van build videos. I narrowed down the van type to a Ram ProMaster or the smaller Ram ProMaster city. When I bought a ticket back to the US, it only went as far as Washington, DC. It's a big enough metropolis that should have been able to find the van I wanted and then drive it down to a friends house south of Asheville, buy some tools and start the build. I had an airbnb rented nearby and estimated that I could start living in it within two weeks. I assumed that I would still be working on it for the next 2 weeks to a month, but had planned to park it near my friends shed and just keep working from there once I had the bed built.
Maybe it was because I was so used to driving small cars in Europe or maybe it was because I realized that it would take forever to get on the road, but after driving multiple vans I gave up on the idea of van life. 3:00 AM Geoff had different ideas. 3:00 Am Geoff decided that what I really wanted was a vehicle that could take me into the backcountry. 3:00 AM Geoff wanted a Jeep, or a 4runner, or gasp, an even smaller Subaru.
I had come across the glorious idea of a rooftop car tent. Think of it. At tent that lives on top of your car. You can park anywhere, pop the top, pull out the ladder and crawl into your own personal car cave. No searching for the perfect piece of land to put your tent down on. Just find a relatively level piece of earth and bingo, you're in business. So I set out to find the perfect car tent to fit on a car. Then I found the perfect small Subaru to put it on. Ladies and Gents, I was in business.
But then I realized that I needed to figure out how to store my gear in the car. There would be no slapdash throwing my gear into the back of my car. I needed a custom built kitchen box and shelving unit. So luckily, my amazing and generous neighbors of old, offered to put me up in their basement for a few days and more importantly, lend me their tools. It took me the better part of 3 days, but in the end, I had a custom made system in the back of the car with drawer slides for the cooler and the stove, ample storage space, a splashy coat of terra cotta paint and a compass in the stock. Wait there isn’t a compass. Damn, I need to fix that.
So now I sit in the forest in the eastern edge of North Carolina drinking tall boys of PBR and I wait. Starting tomorrow, hopefully the rest of the pieces like shipment arrival will start to come together, and I can truly start this new adventure.
