Hi Friends,
I'm posting a series in photos and videos of mine and @Dashie travels from last year, or what we call the first loop, as we are currently on our second loop, in our second year of traveling full-time.
I decided to split the series up by states or regions, though we did spend more time than intended in Florida last year, (Dec '16 - Apr '17) dealing with a lot of mechanical issues in our Rialta, which were something of an apparition for months!
What's Inside:
By viewing the posts you will be able to follow along our maiden journey (albeit retroactively) through space and time, as we traveled from Chicago to Florida, from Florida along the Gulf Coast to California, north up the West Coast as far as Seattle, and then back towards Chicago (our home) through Montana, Yellowstone, South Dakota, Minnesota & Wisconsin.
You will be experiencing our trip all through my lens, including photos, videos (some original music and cover songs I recorded on the road) and some details on the hi jinx we got ourselves into.
So come join me now, and prepare to enjoy the first installment of "My Life in a Van - Loop 1" - Florida
Dinner Island Ranch WMA:
Dinner Island Ranch is a Wildlife Management District in South-Central Florida. WMA's in Florida are great places to boondock, if you are looking to kick back and live on the cheap. They offer few - no amenities, but what they lack in comforts they make up for in beautiful scenery and wonderful people from all walks of life.
The WMA's all have different guidelines for when you can camp, (though it is always free) generally depending on the season, but Dinner Island allows you to camp for 14 days consecutively just about any time of year. You just need to make a reservation, which is a simple process: http://myfwc.com/viewing/recreation/wmas/lead/dinner-island/camping/
The first photo above is from our first campsite at DIR, where it was beautiful and serene under the Spanish Moss, but we had to move regularly to ensure our solar panel was feeding some love to our batteries.
Aside from the serenity and beauty of the WMA's, I found the people most lovely and inspiring. Part of my wanting to live the nomadic lifestyle stemmed from an urgency I felt to reaffirm that the narrative I'd been fed for years by the news and other media, of people (in the general sense) being bad, or out to get you, was false. I knew intellectually that the brainwashing messages were not true, but emotionally they began to weigh on me.
So I knew that setting out and traveling the country would be the perfect opportunity for us to meet all different sorts of people from all different walks of life, and that would afford plentiful opportunities for communication with people outside of my echo chamber.
I was excited and nervous at the prospect, what if people really were shitty? Well, instantly, we were besieged by an 80 year old Saskatchewan man named Sonny who was on a bicycle, carrying lemons and grapefruit. We had only been introduced for about 30 seconds when he offered us a portion of his wild picked bounty. He later gave us some oil that he said was good to put in our gas tank time to time upon fueling.
Another temporary resident at DIR, Bruce, helped us with the surprisingly terrible task of removing one of our coach batteries, which for some reason sits in a battery box that you have to be a puzzle master to remove them from. I jammed with another Canadian named Pepe around his campfire, and gave him a joint I was gifted by a friend, and he helped us fix an issue with our outdoor grill.
We were experiencing a lot of trouble with our engine, which was stalling regularly after a few hours of driving, and Bruce gave us his laptop to use the diagnostic software during our next stall so we could try and figure out what was going on. Of course, we didn't figure out the two unique issues causing the same stalling until months later and many more serendipitous encounters and blessings of help from strangers, but more on that adventure later.
I could go on about the kindness we received from total strangers. There was a real sense of camaraderie within this tiny community of drifters, ramblers and roamers, and I felt lucky to be a part of it for the month we spent there in total. As everyone was older than us, they all imparted sage advice about living on the road, even though most of them only did it half of the year to eschew the cold.
As I'm writing this post, I'm realizing that a post per region will not suffice, especially when it comes to Florida, where we spent nearly 6 months last year. I'm going to stop here, and call this the WMA section of the Florida post. Of course, I haven't yet mentioned the baby alligators we have a time-lapse of somewhere, or the snakes Dashie scared away as they slithered into our camp, or the time we herded hundreds of cows with a YouTube video of a Scandinavian woman singing a herding melody, which we played through our wireless speaker while Dashie held it above her head.
And so I'll leave you with two short videos. One of me playing a short diddy in front of our campsite and the more impressive one of Dashie driving our Rialta around the 17 mile loop at DIR, which was also the last time she drove it :)
Onward Indian - Love, Glowmo