After Washington, we headed through Idaho into Montana and spent a couple nights in Whitefish. We fell in love with the area and found our favorite brewery of the trip: Bonsai!
We explored a little bit of Missoula, MT and then headed out to a campground down a 3-mile dirt road at Placid Lake. It was absolutely beautiful!
We again need to apologize for the delay. We’ve been having a lot of fun and haven’t found the time to update everyone quite as often as we thought we would. We also should apologize because we have been taking less and less photos as we have gotten deeper into the trip.
Here are the photos from our time in Washington state. We spent time in Olympia, WA with John’s aunt and uncle. We then made our way up to Bellingham, with a stop just outside of Marysville, WA. We checked out the Kona Bike Shop in Bellingham and John checked out some of the world famous trails. We then headed for a night to Spokane, where Emma’s cousin just started college.
We left Bend and made our way to Hood River, OR. We were told, while in Bend, that the riding in Hood River was pretty awesome, and we were not disappointed.
We headed up the scenic route to Crater Lake, on our way up to Bend, OR. Although it was much colder than we were expecting, it was absolutely worth it.
We then made our way to Bend, which yielded some awesome trails, some awesome beer and some awesome food. Not to mention, we found our favorite campsite so far: Tumalo State Park, just 15 minutes outside of downtown Bend.
After Lake Siskiyou, we left California and headed up to Ashland, Oregon. Below are the photos from our second and third nights of the trip, which we spent up at Hyatt Lake, just above Ashland. The campground had the best ranger ever and the hottest showers we’ve gotten for free. We highly recommend checking out Hyatt Lake, in a few years, there may not even be water there.
We sincerely lack for the delay on posts. We’ve been a little preoccupied.
Please enjoy the images below from the first part of our first week:
We went back and forth for a while on how to go about this trip. We had planned on buying a van from the get-go, but money quickly became an obstacle, so the plan changed to us driving around in my car, a Subaru wagon. A couple months thinking about that and we both looked at each other and realized that it would be fun if we weren’t constantly setting up and tearing down a full campsite. So we went back to the van idea.
John had one criteria: cheap. I had two: reliable with windows. We ended up both getting our way. All I wanted was either headroom (which would mean getting a sprinter van) or windows (which meant getting a passenger van). My craigslist searches only consisted of vehicles that met those criteria. John limited his budget in his searches. The van we ended up purchasing was one of the only ones that landed in both of our searches.
As we were looking, I did a lot of a research on how other van dwellers had done the conversion. On one forum I found, a user shared his bed build. He used steel tubing in order to maximize the storage space under the bed. I showed it to John and we started designing our bed frame.
We used one inch steel tubing with a plywood platform to hold the mattress up. We had a lot of issues with our bed frame. The steel tubes were all threaded in the same direction, which meant that every time we would thread one end of the tube into the fitting, the other end would unthread. It turned into quite the balancing act filled with a couple of iterations.
First, we build the bed too long. We didn’t account for the fact that the tubes wouldn’t thread all the way into the fittings. Second, we built the bed too high. At first we allowed for two feet of storage space under the bed, not realizing that that would allow for only about a foot of head space.
Now, our double mattress fits perfectly on the frame and there is about a foot under the bed. We have about 2.5-3 feet of head room when sitting on the bed, which now feels like a luxury. We have a ton of storage space, which I’ll dive into more detail next.
We finished the build and headed up into the Santa Cruz mountains to camp in Henry Cowell State Park. It was nice to take a break and to share a shake down with some really good friends.
Only ten days until take off. We are excited and nervous and can’t wait.
Thanks again for checking in!
Emma
When John and I met, our main topic of discussion was adventures: where we have been and where we couldn’t wait to go. Both of us had always dreamed of an epic road trip. When we realized the common dream, we started planning.
While the start date changed about a dozen times, the plan was always the same: buy a van and head out to explore the continent. We started making a list of all the places we wanted to go and all the things we wanted to do. This adventure has been about a year in the works. And now we are a month away from departure.
We purchased Sheila (the van) almost a month ago and have spent every single day off since working on making it our home away from home. Sheila is a Ford E-150 12 Passenger van. We purchased her from a guy from Washinton, D.C. who used it as a gig-mobile for his ska-punk band on the east coast. He drove it with his fiancé back to California to be closer to family. It was time to do a little growing up, so he sold it to us, two 23-year-olds planning to stay young for a while longer.
The van was in great condition. We spend about $1000 having it serviced so that we wouldn’t have to worry about any unknown problems while on the road. That may seem like a lot, but we were expecting it to be much more.
Over the next month, I will be posting more information about the build process. Next week, the bed will be finished up and the carpet will be taped down.
Thanks for checking in on our adventure,
Emma
Emma and John by Van 