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It has been two years since we returned from our first adventure in our van, Sheila.  A lot has happened in the last two years.  Let me give you a little run down.

1. Four months after we returned from our van trip, we moved from San Francisco to Santa Cruz, CA.  After the van trip, we spent a lot of our weekends in Santa Cruz and after a job opportunity presented itself, we felt like it was the right move for us.  And it was.  We have both enjoyed living in Santa Cruz so much.
2. John got a job at Santa Cruz Bicycles.  After almost a year at Fox Racing Shox, the job that brought us down here, John got an offer to work at an awesome mountain bike manufacturing company.  He gets to ride his bike to work every day and still has time to go surfing after work in the summertime.
3. I (Emma) am following a dream of mine to becoming a Pilates Instructor.  When we first moved to Santa Cruz, I was unemployed and ended up finding myself taking pilates at the studio across the street from our new apartment.  Eventually, I returned to work at Mike’s Bikes (after quitting for the second time to move down to Santa Cruz) and filled the role of Sales Manager at the San Jose location.  If you have never driven from Santa Cruz to San Jose, you should know that a literal mountain range sits between the two cities.  My commute was on average a short 45 minutes but reached a top duration of 5 hours.  My frustration with the commute led me to start examining my priorities.  After a long commute one day, I came home beyond frustrated and John asked me, “What is your favorite part of your week?” “Pilates,” I replied. “Then you should see if you can do that all the time,” he said. I had toyed with the idea of being a fitness instructor in the past, but I had not considered it with Pilates.  After some research, I realized that now was the time.  I found a studio to do my training at, gave my notice at work and got a part-time job to cover some of the expenses.  And now, I am here.  Almost a year later and I am four months from becoming a Certified Pilates Instructor.  And it feels good.
4. Oh.  And we got engaged this summer while on vacation in the Caribbean.  It was awesome and we are getting married this coming October (hurray!).
5. Lastly, we are starting to build Shelia Version 2.1.  We have run into a few hiccups, but otherwise, progress is moving along nicely and we should have her done in time for some summer camping trips. We will share a build post soon.

Until next time,

Emma

We then headed to Jackson Hole, WY.  We stayed right on the Snake River, where John spent some time freezing as he went fly fishing 50-feet from the campsite.  It rained most of our time in Jackson Hole but gave us a bit of break while we explored Yellowstone National Park, which blew us away!  We will definitely be heading back!

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

Our friend, Adam, came with us down to San Jose to help finish the build.

The bed is all but made!

Under bed storage. Configuration subject to change.

Taping the carpet in.

The bed all loaded up for a mini vacation!

The bed made. Lights from Goal Zero.

The view from our room.

Checking out the roof rack system.

And checking out the sunset.

John and his dad, Jack, installing a new stereo head unit.

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

Getting the van registered in CA!

We’ve been to Home Depot about 5 times per every 2 days that we’ve worked on the van!

We had to use an angle grinder in order to remove the bench mounts from the van.

John testing the bed frame!

Key chains from http://weheartphilly.bigcartel.com