Let the Van Adventures Begin!

iterating the challenges of traveling in a small van with two big, barky dogs

Over on Sluggish, Jesse fondly calls their readers slugs, and I’ve been wondering what to call you all, dear readers of The Spiral Lab….

…how about lab rats? 🐀 🤓 ꩜

I do think of this newsletter as the place where I experiment with “prototypes” (in the language of design) of work that may eventually become something … else … so I guess it fits?

So, hello my lovely lab rats! I want to say thank you from the bottom of my broken little heart to those of you who have recently joined the ranks of my paid subscribers. You are a special species of rats who get the most experimental work—the stuff that is too personal, too rough, too “how the sausage gets made” to share widely. I have recently embarked on a new and larger writing project (which-shall-not-be-named), at the same time that I really need to make some money to keep my family safe and stable, so I will be experimenting with putting some works-in-progress and personal essays behind a paywall. If you have the means, and find value in my work, I hope you will consider upgrading your subscription.

This past weekend Joel and I went on our first camping trip in the van we bought last summer and have been fitting out over the course of the past year. Our friend Gray has generously and patiently worked with us in between various health crises, surgeries, and recoveries to design and build a platform bed with storage underneath, and this weekend we finally had the chance to test it out. I was quite anxious, as there were any number of ways this quite expensive and time-consuming project could fail, leaving us stranded in the heat and noise of the city for yet another summer.

Things were not looking good even before we left as I had failed to put together that the weekend we intended to embark was also Memorial Day—notwithstanding the fact that the very reason I had picked this weekend was because Joel had Monday off. Somehow in my parallel universe theory of how time works¹, it made perfect sense that we had a long weekend to go camping, even while it hadn’t occurred to me that everyone and their sister also had a long weekend to go camping.

To my shock and dismay when I tried to book camping spots at nearby state parks, they were all full. In fact, every state park within a few hours’ drive of Philadelphia was full. But my son, who is an intrepid adventurer, told me about an app called HipCamp, where we found a site on private property about an hour and a half from Philly. It was the perfect distance for a first trip, in the Pocono Mountains, and it turned out our site was on the grounds a retreat center amidst ponds, creeks, and gorgeous gardens full of blooming rhododendrons (of course I failed to take pictures). We were camped with our van in a large field under some lovely shade trees, next to a burbling creek. We had perfect weather: sunny days and rainy nights.

The biggest challenges were 1) staying organized and 2) the dogs, Sammy (the bridle lying on the ground in the photo above), and Georgia (the black and white standing above). Staying organized is easy enough, I just needed to spend our first morning there sorting things out in a way that made sense for actually camping, as opposed to what I thought made sense while sitting in my living room dreaming of camping.

The dogs, however, are a whole different category of challenge. We love our dogs dearly but they are not … well, shall we say that when we got the dogs, none of us (me, Joel, and my son) were in stable enough mental health to be consistent about training them. They are also rescues and came to us a bit neurotic (and in that way, they fit right in). In an ideal world, we would leave the dogs behind, but kenneling the two of them for long periods is almost as expensive as renting accommodations for ourselves, and the whole point of the van was to travel on the cheap. They are also very loud—they bark at Every. Little. Thing—so I don’t even feel like I can in good conscience lure someone to house/dog sit while we’re away.

So, we need to find a way to make travelling in a van with the dogs work. This is one of those situations that is not ideal, but we are surrendering to it. We figure we can find some doggy day care if we want to go to a museum or on a longer hike, but mostly what we want is to hang out in beautiful places, reading, writing, chatting, snoozing, cooking around a campfire, taking short walks. It’s the beautiful places that are key—I just desperately need, deep in my soul, to get out of the city in the summer and feast my senses on beautiful landscapes.

Our first night in the van was … not good. We realized in after getting all settled in that our heads were going downhill, but we were in too foul a mood to do something about it. And, as I had feared, the bed in the back of the van is not really big enough for two large-ish humans and two large-ish dogs. It was not comfortable.

The next night I figured out how to make a dog bed across the two front seats for the bigger dog, Sammy, and the “little” one, Georgia, fit between our feet quite comfortably. I didn’t think Sammy would go for it, and she is a indefatigable whiner when she doesn’t get her way, but to my surprise, she just went to sleep without any fuss. From then on we slept blissfully, serenaded by frogs singing in the ponds and rain falling on the the metal roof.

As the weekend wore on, more and more campers arrived, and while all of the sites were quite private, everyone had to walk right past ours to get to and from their cars—which meant that we couldn’t really let the dogs roam free. They are not dangerous dogs, but the do run and jump and bark, and generally scare people to death (we are working now on training, with quite a bit of success, actually, but there’s still a long way to go). Some clothes line fashioned as longer leashes gave them some freedom but still kept them out of trouble.

After figuring all of that out, we basically had a perfect time. We found a state park nearby and took a lovely walk through the woods along a sparkling lake. We took a drive through gorgeous rolling countryside where practically every house had lushly blooming purple rhododendron. I started reading, simultaneously, both of Jenny Odell’s books (How to Do Nothing and Saving Time — more on those soon), and sat by the creek and wrote ideas in a journal about the project-that-shall-not-be-named.

The next challenge is to figure out how to make it technically and ergonomically feasible for Joel to work remotely from the van (he gets a whopping 15 days of paid time off, including sick, personal, and vacation) and then we can really hit the road. That will be our next design challenge sometime in June.

The interior of the van would have been very fashionable in the gray days of the 2010’s, but you know how I feel about minimalism!

And of course, some interior design projects are in order, as things are pretty minimalistically bleak inside right now. I’m hoping to make a little video about it, so stay tuned!

1. You may be familiar? When you book two different events for the same time sometime in the future, and it’s not as though you had completely forgotten about one when you booked the other, it just seemed like the two events were happening in parallel universes, until time bends the closer you get to the actual date, and suddenly they are colliding. Does anyone else do that?