Gear & Equipment

We haven’t come up with a Getting Situated checklist for when we arrive at a new place. Mostly because the only negative consequences for failing to follow proper procedures might mean things take a little longer (= nothing too embarrassing or as life threatening) and, frankly, we haven’t yet been anywhere long enough to warrant pulling out all our gear. I would imagine our checklist would look something like this…

First order of business to get set up in our new space is the outdoor kitchen. All gear hauled out – complete. Portable grill/burner hooked up to the propane tank – propane off, connected, propane on. Prep table set up – complete. Pull out the tablecloth to cover the site’s picnic table – check. Fish out at least six doo dads to anchor said tablecloth to the table so it doesn’t blow away – complete. Pull out Instant Pot and genuflect before putting it on the picnic table (more on that later) – genuflected and set.

Second item, plug in to whatever amenities are present. Electricity – plugged in. Fresh water – line plugged in, RV water pump off (don’t need to compete with city water pressure). Sewage pipe connected – check. Cable input (I’m not making this up. We don’t have an appropriate cable yet, but intend to get one soonest – we need to catch up on Game of Thrones…) – check.

Davista’s business side: from left to right, sewage, electricity, and fresh water hook-ups.

Third task, set up outdoor living room. Before we left Maryland, we found The Clam. This piece of gear is awesome and the picture below (not the best, I know, but it’s the only one I have just now) is from our “Sea Trial” to Assateague Island earlier this summer. Essentially The Clam is a portable hexagonal gazebo (with mosquito netting) that provides an outdoor room for us to sprawl into, one that is comfortable in most of weather conditions we plan to encounter. The bonus is that it takes minutes to set up, even without kid assistance. It can be staked in anywhere and I’ve seen many of our fellow campers put theirs right over a campsite’s picnic table. Like I said, awesome. Clam set up – complete. Unroll outdoor rug and bamboo mats to cover floor – check. Set up five camp chairs – set. Hang lanterns in Clam – check. If suitable trees are present, hang double hammocks. Getting Situated Checklist – complete.

Up to this point we’ve been rolling into our next campsite just about dinnertime. Although we haven’t yet cracked the code on cooking en route (I’ve read that some folks will drive to their next destination with a crockpot bubbling away – !!!), we are doing reasonably well meal planning, especially given limited food storage and sporadic access to Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods, and arrive with a solid dinner plan in place. Our first night at Van Riper SP was no exception.

After the outdoor kitchen was set up, Flight got the bikes down for the kids who then promptly took off to explore. He also set up our outdoor living room while I made one of America’s Test Kitchen’s skillet recipes (we are huge fans of Cooks Illustrated). It’s important to note that, as a family of Foodies, part of our being able to thrive on the road has everything to do with enjoying good eats regardless of where we are. I have felt a little guilty when preparing such meals amidst campgrounds thick with the aroma of hot dogs on a stick and “Tacos in a Bag,” but then remind myself this isn’t a weekend foray into the wild – this is our life for the foreseeable future.

Fortunately, it’s been a fairly seamless transition to living in Davista, as far as the kitchen experience goes. We’ve baked Scottish shortbread and delicious brownies in the RV’s standard gas oven (using a small pizza stone directly above the heating element and an oven thermometer has made for consistent and accurate baking experiences – important for those of us whose foodie experience is incomplete without baked goods), grilled many a tasty morsel outside (swordfish tacos anyone?), scrambled eggs and made oatmeal on the stovetop inside (because they’re innocuous smelling enough), and witnessed magic happen in the Instant Pot.

A relatively thin pizza stone evenly distributes the heat and the thermometer keeps it real.

Because we are space and weight limited (we actually ran out of weight before space – !!!), looking for multi-function tools was an important part of the research phase of this evolution. The Instant Pot was raved about everywhere on line and they had me when I read “7 in 1.” Settings include vegetable steamer, rice cooker, slow cooker, yogurt maker, warmer, sauté, and pressure cooker. The latter setting allows you to dump in a brick of frozen raw morsels and, with the press of a button, a perfectly cooked meal will present itself in 40 minutes. “What sorcery is this?!” you may ask (I did). I have no idea how PV = nRT is used to make this so, but I have been blown away (fortunately not literally) by the result.

Instant Pot Tortilla Soup beats “Tacos in a Bag” any day…

After a delicious dinner and some more bike riding, there was a contented sigh as we settled into our new digs in Van Riper and called it a night. And then the alarm went off, almost before we went to bed. Kids were shuffled into the Outback and tucked in with blankets as we headed to the airport. I can’t speak to Flight’s commute experience this go around, but can tell you the sense of abandonment on my end was far less pronounced when we dropped him off.

Well this was unexpected.

So my first work trip went smoothly and I was back in Boston, about to board my commuting flight (as a passenger) to Detroit. It was getting pretty late; my flight was scheduled to land at 10:30PM. We obviously don’t have a groove yet with respect to getting me to/from the nearest airport when I work, so we’d been discussing how to go about it. I’m not crazy about the idea of loading the kids into the car to come get me if there’s another option. This time, however, Tacco had some things she wanted to do with the kids in Detroit, so she offered to hang out a bit later and come swoop me at DTW (you’ll have to excuse me, I tend to use airport codes a lot). Sure, I thought, why not.

Things started going south when I got a text from Keeper telling me that mom was having a problem with the car — “the clutch is stuck.” Stuck? Wait, so she can’t drive? “no, it’s OK now, she pulled it out.” Um, what??? Unfortunately I had to board the plane, so we went into a comms blackout after a few more short, confusing texts, but not before I was able to make contact with Tacco and ensure she was comfortable driving the car, even though I wasn’t liking the sound of things at all. I far prefer texts to phone calls, but sometimes they just don’t convey things well.

The next text I received, while airborne, and here I need to revisit this idea that I’m having difficulty imagining how we managed to do anything at all before cell phones and texts and in-flight wifi… anyway the next text informed me that the car was completely dead somewhere in Detroit with just about everything I hold most dear in it. Immovable. Clutch will not engage. What’s more, and this was a confusing set of data, particularly since I was trying to put it together via clipped texts in the air while Tacco had her hands beyond full with the kids on the side of the road, the car evidently had been “braking by itself” and had died a few times before giving up the ghost entirely. Now, if you read some of the other posts you might remember that I had ventured solidly out of my wheelhouse to install a supplemental braking system in the Outback whose job it was to physically apply the brake pedal, and had been patting myself on the back for a job well done. And now I’m told that my family is stranded somewhere in Detroit with a car that not only had a worthless clutch, but was braking by itself.

This is bad. Potentially really really bad. Yet it made no sense. There’s no connection whatsoever between the clutch and the braking system, how in the world is it possible that they both failed at once? I kept getting drawn into that rabbit hole while trying (still in flight) to deal with the most important thing, which was to figure out how to get to them. Tried to make a rental car reservation but the website said they all closed at 11, and we were slightly delayed. I wasn’t going to make it. I could Uber to them, but then what? I’d been texting Keeper with all my questions since TC was busy, but he started answering cryptically and then not at all. I learned later that he became suspicious when I was asking so much about where they were, and thought someone may have stolen my phone and was trying to get their location. Excellent, Keeper, love the line of thinking, but I’m sure you could’ve come up with a way to verify my identity… After getting their location from Tacco, I booked them a hotel room nearby, or so it looked on Google Maps, thinking they could just walk there and get some sleep and I’d deal with the car. Turns out it was 2 miles away. And shoot, those brakes! How?!?

I could go on and on about the mental spinning gears and the chaotic way everything kept unfolding, because it kept going and going and going, but I’ll skip to the end, which was that I finally landed, managed to get a rental car and get to them after all, the USAA towing service took our car to a local mechanic, and we drove back to the campsite, thoroughly exhausted, pulling in at about 1:30AM. Everything else could wait until the morning. And once we were actually able to discuss it, we solved the brake/clutch mystery — there was nothing wrong with the brakes. It was all clutch. Relief.

Although, while I was relieved to have things settle out, it was clear that we were facing our first semi-major forced change of plans. We’d planned to drive to either Traverse City or the Upper Peninsula (“da U.P.!”) in morning, now we were stuck in Detroit somewhat indefinitely without a guaranteed place to stay. We do have family near Lansing, but that’s even farther away from the car and the airport (rental car return) and let’s just say we haven’t yet reached the level of comfort to rise to a Christmas Vacation level of imposition. “Hey! You don’t mind if we drive up today and park our RV and car in your driveway a while do ya?” Though we may get there…

Final thoughts on this one. We got off light. Things never spun off into extremis, but I was beginning to be able to see it from where we were. One dead cellphone to shut off comms, a less auspicious place to break down, more serious equipment failure, severe weather, an actual accident… it’s making us think about applying a bit more forethought and “what if?” planning to our times when the two parents are in different parts of the country. You know, like we used to do before we counted on all our “stuff” working as advertised and being able to contact anyone and everyone instantaneously. Whether we would’ve even attempted this trip without that level of connectivity is another question altogether.