PP #2: Giavana takes a hit, the stage is set, prep the covered wagon!
Project: Pioneer #2, September 29, 2023 (Friday)
We’re another month down the road on this journey to our new modern pioneer life. This train is moving down the tracks. Some days it feels like an out-of-control roller coaster, other days like a lazy river, carrying us onward. We split our time between the normal responsibilities and the pioneer tasks at hand.
Project: Pioneer is the live reality journal of a couple and their small dog as they leave their ‘normal’ life in a luxury apartment for a new semi-off grid life in a small recreational vehicle, just at the start of winter. The audio podcast is on Substack, Apple, and Spotify!
People show up and hand over cash for our things; we watch them drive away through our rain-splattered windows. We use Facebook Marketplace, Nextdoor.com, OfferUp.com, and craigslist.org. Each departing item is a memory, a piece of our history together. The rain doesn’t seem to stop, day after day.
Occasionally, a slight moment of doubt creeps in. Have we lost our damn minds? Giavana and I believe almost everyone around us has, after COVID. We see examples every day. We’re all post-traumatic, whether or not we realize it.
My 87-year old mom (the basis for the angel mother in Farawayer) saw post #1 and weighed in immediately. Her predictions:
We’ll freeze to death
Spiders and snakes will eat us
High wind, floods, deep snow and ice will take us out
A bear will tip the RV over and eat us
Come to think about it, one theme of Farawayer was that she was always right and I should have listened to her. We never learn. It’s not doom and gloom, though. I don’t want a Donner Party vibe. Giavana keeps smiling and joking. We’re excited, and pushing on. We want this new life and are excited about what’s ahead. Please Lord, make it a mild winter!
The climate folks say the northeast is becoming the new Carolinas, we’ll see. We’re aware climate change isn’t just about the Earth's warming. It’s about increasingly unpredictable, unusual, and violent weather. The good news now is that if danger is approaching, we can just hook up and go. Like turtles or snails, but hopefully faster. Are there any fast animals that carry their homes with them? They say the slow ones always win the race, on a positive note.
On Wednesday, I swapped my earth-loving, tree hugging plug-in hybrid for a pickup truck. It took days of posting the hybrid on various sites (the aforementioned, plus autotrader.com which was horrible!), and doing battle with the legion of scammers who swoop in. Kiss Your Money Hello has a great chapter on buying and selling cars, and some resources to use.
Trading in is easy–an easy way to get played out of thousands of dollars. For example, the various “we buy your car” sites like Carvana, Vroom, and CarMax offered about $10k for the hybrid. The dealers were offering $12k. But, watch–they’re notorious for offering a sweet trade-in price to lure you, but then tacking more on to the price of the vehicle you’re buying. I sold it easily for $17k. There are great new sites like keysavvy.com and escrow.com to facilitate safe transactions between private party buyers and sellers.
On the downside, this week we also sold our big-ole 65” TV to a neighbor. She’s an older, single-mom nurse who works the graveyard shift. We sympathized and offered to bring the TV to her. Off we went, lugging the beast down the sidewalk, Giavana carrying just the stand. Giavana is a tiny, delicate flower, and I didn’t realize it would be too much for her. Now she’s got some pain, and is going to a physical therapy session today. No more lugging, no more deliveries! I feel terrible about it. Lesson learned.
I digress. We also bought a used pickup (Ford Ranger), after much haggling at a dealer that said they don’t haggle (ha!). It’s a smallish pickup, like my beloved late dad used to drive. It’s growing on me. Maybe that’s why. Some in the online forums say it’s undersized to pull an RV. We’ll find out. I hate gas guzzlers. Part of this decision is understanding that we’re likely past the tipping point on climate. It’s time to swing the priority pendulum to survival.
We picked an RV, too, a fantastic deal from some wonderful people, but six hours away. Ironically, we had gone up there for work, and saw it. Karma or coincidence? We had looked and looked, wanting a Winnebago Micro Minnie, which has a kind of cult following. We found a local one, but the dude ghosted us after promising to let us see it first. So we bought the far away one and then found it isn’t a four-season Micro Minnie. Winnebago started doing that in the year after they made ours. Whoops.
We’d think about just pulling it to Florida for the winter, but there’s that whole thing going on with Dark Ages anti-science leadership, leprosy, malaria, and alligators walking around with human bodies in their mouths (Gaia!). Plus, every nut-job now being permitted to buy a gun and walk around with it, no sanity check or criminal check required. Giavana and I are well-armed, but legally and responsibly, and well trained.
We then spent days driving around to campgrounds and RV resorts before finally finding one that has an opening for year-round settlers. We’re not the only ones with this idea. Most of the sites had long waiting lists. Change is coming, people are adapting quietly, silently, on the fringes. They may be the apocalypse survivors. The place we chose is beautiful, a small lake (I grew up on one, so it’s like home) to swim in, skate on, enjoy the serenity. The owners have a reputation for being gruff and not taking any crap. That can be a good thing—people who don’t like rules are often the ones throwing their trash all over the place and blasting music at all hours. We’re interested to meet the other folks doing this. On our drive throughs, they seem a different breed, these fellow pioneers.
So, three big pieces of this adventure are settled. Tomorrow we’re on the road six hours north to pick up the RV, and drive back in the same day. I wanted to stay in a hotel and be rested to drive home. Giavana vetoed the idea, a tougher pioneer than I. She says she’ll drive the truck on the way up (spoiler alert: she always makes me drive).
I’m worried about hooking the whole mess up to drive six hours back. Mistakes can be disastrous. There’s an integrated brake controller, chains, tension bars, weight distribution hitch, lighting, sway controller, the whole thing seems to be a big complex industrial old-school mess of metal and wires.
Next post, we’ll recount the trip! Any predictions? What should we name our covered wagon (hint: it’s red)? We’d love to see your comments in the chat threads. Maybe you can coax Giavana to chime in.