On a train, somewhere in PA …

Yep, I’m writing to you today from an Amtrak dining car as we rattle through southern Pennsylvania. Beautiful! We’ve traveled through hours of scenes like this one along the Youghiogheny River, near Ohiopyle:

I’m on my way back to Virginia, after spending three weeks in Michigan and a week in Iowa. Matthew drove back to VA about 10 days ago. It’s been an eventful couple of weeks since our last update! 

First of all, THANK YOU for all the kind words and prayers for Iris. Her scan results showed partial response to the chemo; all of her tumors shrank, and she has the green light for surgery this Thursday (11/10). There were a couple of disappointments in the results, however: her hysterectomy will be an open surgery (as opposed to laparoscopic), and will require a longer recovery period. And, approximately five weeks after her surgery, she’ll start three more rounds of chemo. Your continued prayers for healing, peace, and strength would be much appreciated as she navigates these next hurdles and my family stands by to support her. I have to share one awesome example of healing therapy with you — Iris’ friends made a pinata of a Cancer “face” and Iris beat the s#*t out of it! It was full of Hersey’s hugs & kisses, lavender candles, and mini bottles of gin. And then we had Iris’ favorite: German chocolate (cup)cakes with coconut pecan frosting!

Oh yeah, then – a couple of days later – we set Cancer on fire!

In the meantime, a very special family birthday was coming up: our dad was born on Halloween and his 91st birthday was last Monday! After we got Iris’ scan results and knew what the next steps were going to be in her treatment, we decided it would be good for us to make the trip to Iowa, so Iris and Dad could spend some time together and we could celebrate another year of his life! Our other sister, Ione, was already planning to come down from MN for Dad’s birthday; so we also asked our brother Kevin if maybe he’d like to join us?? Indeed! He bought a last-minute plane ticket from Philadelphia!  

Matthew was eager to get back to work on our camper (and I was eager for that project to continue, also!), so he drove back to VA and Iris and I drove to Storm Lake, where Ione and Kevin joined us for a couple of joyful evenings together. 

In the midst of all this, fate provided me the opportunity to be present for the mournful celebration of my dear high school friend Sarah. After a long journey of navigating life with cancer and treatment trial after treatment trial, she finally found peace the night that Iris and I arrived in Storm Lake. We were able to stay a couple extra days so I could attend the services and mourn with our community of classmates and friends. She really was one of The Best, and I am angry and brokenhearted about losing this wonderful friend of over 30 years. And I’m unbelievably sad for her husband and three amazing sons (ages 16-21). But, if this had to happen, I’m extremely grateful for the opportunity to be part of those memorials. 

After all the intensity of this month, I decided to take the train back to VA and spend an entire day just sitting and watching the world go by. Iris and I drove back to Michigan on Friday; Saturday morning I took a train from Benton Harbor to Chicago, and I had 8 hours to kick around Chi-town before boarding the Capitol Limited to DC. I get a couple hours in DC today, then a 2-hour train to Richmond, where Matthew and Twyla will be ready to take me that last leg to Cobbs Creek. I’m looking forward to reuniting with Matthew and helping to get this camper project finished!! 

Here are a few more photos of the last couple of weeks:

  • We stopped at the World’s Largest Truck Stop on I-80 near Walcott IA.
  • It’s decorative gourd season!
  • I had an awesome 8 hours in Chicago, despite winds gusting to 60 mph and occasional downpours.
  • I ducked into the Art Institute, and – lucky day – I got in free because I have a Bank of America credit card!
  • The impressionists were very popular. (I couldn’t look at this painting without getting that Morrissey song in my head…)
  • I love this! It’s like a giant seashell craft you’d find in a beach house!
  • Sunday crossword, cup of coffee, and a placid countryside. Pretty nice way to start the day.

Meanwhile, in Michigan: Plan M

Before I dive into today’s update, I just want to take a minute to say THANK YOU for following along, and especially for your comments!! We’re not that great about replying to them (sorry!), but we really appreciate them and definitely feel your encouragement and support. That’s pretty neat-o.

It’s been 13.5 months since we left Sitka, and we’ve had at least a dozen “plans” since then, with variations on what type of trailer we would get, whether or not we would buy or make or remodel it, when we’d be able to hit the road, and where we’d go when we finally have something to pull behind the car and sleep in. Yes, we’re a little disappointed that an entire year has passed and we’re still not living the grand nomadic dream, but you know what? It’s truly fine. This is definitely one of those “it’s about the journey, not the destination” kind of stories. In a lot of ways, we’re still living Plan A: take a break from high-stress jobs, live each day as it comes, and spend meaningful time with family and friends.

That’s exactly what brings us back to Michigan, and “Plan M” going forward. As you may recall, my dear sister Iris is navigating a journey with cancer right now, starting with six rounds of intense chemo which began back in late June. Our family has been taking turns being with her during those chemo rounds, and I feel fortunate that I was able to be with her in mid-Sept for Round 5, and that Matthew and I are back here again for Round 6. Matthew mentioned some deadlines for the trailer in earlier posts: “Plans” K and L were to finish the trailer in time to bring it on one of these journeys to Michigan, and then continue west from here after spending time with Iris. But to the point of goals 1 and 2 above (no high-stress jobs and living each day as it comes) — we realized we didn’t HAVE TO meet that deadline; we can re-route our path in whatever way we need to! Awesome! So, on October 6 we decided to hit “pause” on the trailer. On Oct 7 we cleaned up the trailer work areas, cleared out of the Turners’ basement apartment (in order to accommodate other house guests while we’re away), and stored all of our stuff in the trailer. And on Oct 8, we pointed Twyla toward Grand Rapids, Michigan, taking two days to get here and enjoying an overnight rest in Uniontown, PA.

Most of our recent “Plans” have been oriented around launching our grand adventure from Michigan and heading west from here, hopefully having a visit in the midwest but also making it across the Rockies before winter sets in, and spending Sept-Jan in Colorado, California, and the Southwest. But “Plan” M shakes that up quite a bit. Now we’re thinking we’ll get back to Virginia for the last few days of October, spend a couple/few weeks finishing up the trailer, and then head south before pointing west. We have a date in San Diego in mid-January, so that’s the next real deadline.

If any of you have any tips or advice on traveling across the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona in Nov-Dec (or “must-dos”) please share!

Also, if you could please beam some prayers of strength, courage, and light toward Grand Rapids this week, we’d all appreciate it … we have a big week of truth ahead as Iris gets post-chemo scans this Tuesday and a consult on the 25th to see the effect of the chemo and determine next steps. Also, it’s her birthday next weekend. 🙂

In the meantime, here are a few photos of time in Michigan: from my visit back in September as well as this last week.

  • It’s harvest season! Peppers did VERY well in Michigan this year … any suggestions for what to do with this many habaneros?
  • Heirloom tomatoes make great homes for chrysalises.
  • Tomato processing station.
  • Three big pots on the stove! I canned 20.25 qt of picante sauce and 5.25 qt of habanero sauce! (which only used 1/4 of that pile of peppers)
  • Guess who came to visit?!
  • Dear Sitka friend Ed, who now lives in Michigan! This is on the bluff of Lake Michigan, across from Iris’ lake cottage.
  • Watching sunsets is a favorite activity at the lake.
  • Plus I had a nice little sunset cruise back to VA.
  • This week in Michigan: helping with house projects! A long over-due rearrangement of the study …
  • …. and the bookshelves.
  • But also taking time to enjoy the beautiful fall colors along the Grand River.

The Galley Hatch Just Might Not Work

Sad tidings on the galley hatch. But before we go there, let’s take a look at some more of the build steps for the hatch. One thing I wanted to share was this fantastic resource from a web page and great resource called Teardrops and Tiny Trailers. It helps take a lot of guessing out of getting gas struts to work. The strut design for the Wyoming Woody (from which the Bettie Mobile borrows from) used a different strut design – shorter struts anchored higher up in the frame – which we could never get to work. The TNTT design required us getting longer struts, but worked great. You saw that in a previous post.

So the next steps were to get the interior skins on and start doing some wiring and whatnot.

  • First we glued on the middle.
  • Then the outside skins.
  • It took every clamp that we and our neighbors had to hold it in.

Once the glue dried and everything was trimmed to size, I wanted to give the hatch another dry fit to to the camper. This was a good idea since now the roof was on the camper, so everything would be much closer to how the hatch would finally fit.

And that’s when things took a turn for the worse. The hatch contours just didn’t align with the contours of the camper. This is critical for ensuring that there is a water-tight seal back there.

What a disappointment! It didn’t make me feel like documenting the moment, apparently.

There could be a bunch of reasons why things didn’t fit. The interior skins had a really tight radius to fit, and that might have put enough pressure on the ribs to change the curve. When I did the initial dry fit, many of the components of the roof were not glued in yet, and so dimensions may have shifted. Mostly, the hatch is designed with a compound curve – which means that even 1/8″ of variance in one place can mean a full inch of variance somewhere else. Things just didn’t line up.

The timing of the Great Galley Hatch Disaster came just as it was time for us to leave town for a while. A little distance both in time and space is probably a good thing right now. In a couple of weeks, we’ll be back at the camper build and have a plan for moving forward.

The Roof and More Color!

The exterior of the camper got a lot more fun once we were able to start the painting and epoxy stages. We are using polymer boat paint for the roof and lower third of the sides. The part where you can see the wood grain got three coats of epoxy. The roof only has the primer so far. It will get a sand-tone for its final coat. The sides will eventually get a layer of varnish to give it a little more of an “antique” look, and to provide UV protection.

But first we needed to trim the sides with the flush cut router.

  • Primer on the bottom.
  • Wet towels and a heat gun helped get the Okoume to bend to shape.
  • Meanwhile dad did some electrical work in the galley.
  • Roof is glued on, with ratchet straps to hold it in place.
  • The roof and fan opening were flush routed.
  • The first coat of sea-foam green!
  • The epoxy on the wood really made the grain details pop.
  • The current state of affairs.

Side Skins On!

  • The sides of the camper have looked like this for a month.
  • Getting the styrofoam on the curved roof was challenging.
  • Then we added a layer of bubble wrap insulation.
  • The first side panel installed and clamped.
  • Dyeing the top-side panels.
  • And up they go!
  • This step took a lot of glue.
  • The center roof panel is dry-fit. We will show you how we got the curve in the next post.
  • This is what the trailer looked like last night at quitting time.

Interior Roof Liner Done!

  • The interior skin is installed. There’s a lot of bracing in the front because two end pieces butt on a tight curve. They really don’t like that.
  • Before I put on the skin, I had to take one last picture of the front, looking into the storage area. Look how many different elements all come together in this one place.
  • The front with the ribs installed. Those odd blocks of wood will be removed once the glue dries.
  • Dad custom made aluminum trim to cover where the three strips of roof liner join. The screws go into the ribs on the outside.
  • The aluminum trim looks great, and I think it adds to the structural integrity.

Multitasking Time!

This has been a week of keeping multiple plates spinning as we near the end of the build. Electrical, roof liner, and cabinetry are all coming together.

  • These wheel extensions move the tires a bit further away from the exterior wall of the trailer.
  • Here I’ve made neoprene gaskets for some of the wires that go through the walls to power the running lights.
  • Wiring routed under the bed platform and well guarded from getting knocked about by storage.
  • Galley light switch and usb ports.
  • I built a fantastic jig for holding the cabinet doors for sanding.
  • These ribs help form the roof, along with the map to tell me where they go.
  • Getting the first two strips of the roof liner glued down.
  • The beginning of the wiring that will power all the running lights and turn signals.

Rush Week

There was a hopeful plan where we wrapped up the major elements of the build in 11 days. Just a few days into this full-on build we realized it to be too ambitious. More than the physical challenges, it was the mental wear and tear that brought me down. Each step at this stage generally requires learning a new building technique, then applying it to some critical component of the build where there is no going back. It just about broke my brain.

So, we are taking a methodological approach, and hope to get the Betty Mobile road-ready by the first week in October.

  • We did a dry fit of the inner roof skin and bed platform.
  • Getting an idea of what the inside will be like once all the pieces are in place.
  • Something didn’t quite work with the CNC routing for the galley hatch ribs, so I had to make them from scratch.
  • The typical view of the shop table.
  • The weather has been great, so we took the Betty Mobile on her first trip out of the garage – about 20 feet!
  • Dry fitting the galley hatch. Turns out the struts we bought to lift and hold the hatch won’t work. I guess that’s what dry-fitting is for.

We love you, Sitka!

Good gracious, I can’t believe it’s already been TEN DAYS since we left Sitka! I feel like I’m in one of those cartoons where the days are just flying off the calendar.

It was FANTASTIC to be back in Sitka. So nice to feel that fresh, cool Alaska air, see the beautiful mountains and islands, catch up with our friends, and check in on our little houses. We played some music, took nice walks, ate delicious meals, had so much great conversation, gave and received oh-so-many hugs, and soaked up as much as we could from our sweet town. Matthew got out to our friend’s cabin for a little kayaking one day, and I got to do a radio show!

  • Our little houses are doing very well!
  • If you look closely, you can see many types of ocean vessel in this photo: cruise ship, kayak, and several types of fishing boat.
  • I got back on the radio! So fun to host a show again.
  • Lots of quality time with Grace and Charlie’s fur babies: Melvin the cat and Chloe the dog. (Opal the cat was around, also, but she’s pretty shy…)
  • Chloe in her most comfortable position.
  • It was also nice to check in on Stevenson Hall – site of the 9-year fundraising and remodel project I was involved with. Look at those awesome windows!!
  • Post-dinner walk around the block with Charlie, Grace, Cleo, & Scott, plus Oscar and Chloe.
  • Ahhh … Sitka. We’ll be back again.

The main reason we *had* to go to Sitka was to do some plumbing work on our houses. (And by “we” I mean “Matthew”. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help on this project, but our friend Scott sure was!) The goal was to remap the crazy pipe route from this:

To this:

Notice in the “before” picture how the water for BOTH houses goes through the purple house first (after several crazy initial jigs and jags), then takes a long journey practically out to the ocean before heading into the shed, where the hot water heater for the purple house is located. Then the hot water goes back to the purple house while the rest of it goes through a filter in the shed, then over to the green house (where the hot water heater is located inside the house). Plus, it’s all 1/2″ copper pipes, which freeze easily unless watched hawkishly. Oh yeah, and we currently have no shut-off valve, so if anything were to burst, we have to call the city to shut off the water for our houses AND our neighbor’s.

The new plan is much more straight-forward: The main heads directly to the shed (via a new shut-off valve!), where all the water is filtered, then distributed appropriately to each house. Plus, we’re swapping out that copper for PEX pipes and wrapping them in heat tape and insulation.

This work involved spending many hours underneath the porch, often on rather cool and damp days.

  • Hi Matthew!
  • Once upon a time, someone wanted to get rid of a wood stove. Apparently the best option was to just throw it under our house.
  • Matthew spent a lot of time with his head in the rafters.
  • New water hub central! All we need is a plumber to come hook it up and add a shut-off valve.

Now we’re back in Virginia, making a big push on camper-building this week. One way or another, I need to get to Michigan by Monday night (9/19) to be with my sister for her next round of chemo. The ideal scenario would be to hook our little teardrop up to Twyla, load ’em both up with all our stuff, and use this trip to Michigan as the first leg west in our grand adventure! I’ll let Matthew give you the updates on that progress … stay tuned!