Pete & Teri’s Next Big Adventure

With more serious road trips in mind, I decided to move the bed over to one side and have nice wide cabinets, rather than skinny ones to either side:

As you can see, there’s now plenty of room for a milk crate, but I’ll be building cabinets all the way to the back door on that side now. Only up to window level, though – I don’t want to make a blind spot.

That done, I rescreened the window – had pulled it too tight last time and it didn’t fill the frame – and did some more “make it livable” work; added a paper towel holder, put a railing on top of the chest of drawers so things don’t slide off onto the dog’s head, and created a prop on the side of the sink cabinet so its door can be removed and used as a table:

The table will be nice for food prep and the like, and there’s just exactly enough room beneath it to open the lid on the refrig. Still need to figure out dining tables usable from the seatbed.

The blue “kerosene” tank is actually fresh water for the sink. Right now, the water just drains out the bottom of the van – must find a gray water tank to fit the odd space between frame rails – and it does so WAY too fast…the pump I got was intended for a bigger system, I guess, and drains the 5 gallon tank in seconds. Have to put some kind of potentiometer on there to slow it down.

This weekend we went to Rip Van Winkle campground outside Saugerties, NY. It’s a nice place, though the “privacy” mentioned in their website is nowhere to be found – there is very little vegetation between campsites. Fortunately the people to one side of us were friendly Deadheads with whom we spent pleasant hours chatting and sharing food and drink. The ones on the other side…well, they were pretty much what one goes camping to get away from, but it didn’t get us down.

Only problem with the trip was that we had very little time and didn’t get to visit friends in the area as we usually do, but we’ll be rectifying that situation soon.

Here’s the view at 7:15am on Sunday: