Little Big Van
It’s 5 a.m. on a chilly Colorado winter morning. I’m wide awake curled on my left side with my feet squished against the storage cabinet wall at the foot of the bed. The backs of my hands are curled against the shiplap of a cold exterior wall. In between my lower legs and draped over my left calf is melted cat named Butch Catsidy. He is criminally handsome, a fugitive of the law, my manager and the most adaptable cat I have ever met. His body has flattened and spread to twice its normal width in his sleep and he could boil water with his body temperature. In between my freezing hands and my boiling lower legs, my blanket-covered body has formed a low-pressure system and is exuding a cloud of humidity that is threatening rain. Next to me, my hubby is snoring softly, peacefully dreaming of road trips to come. I think about staying put in my overheated cocoon so as not to disturb the roommates, but the need to tinkle is too strong. If I can just ease myself stealthily out of bed, I won’t wake them. I slowly stretch the charley-horse out of my left calf and begin inching it between the sheets, peeling, centimeter by centimeter out from under the liquid cat. He is unfazed by the change to his sleeping surface. I begin my turn carefully but overestimate the fluidity of my body movement and bang my elbow on the overhead cabinet. I stop breathing for a moment and freeze in place. No stirring noted. In my mind I am executing a Mission Impossible worthy escape from the twisted mass of enemy covers, my body and mind seem to have some trouble syncing up to my vision these days. After some awkward skooching and flailing, I unearth myself and begin to slowly turn onto my belly and hoist myself onto my hands and knees. This is not as easy as Tom Cruise makes it look in Mission Impossible. Granted, he is not an overweight granny with bursitis. I make it onto all fours without banging my head on the ceiling and begin to delicately back crawl through the gauntlet of sleeping roommates. I stretch my left foot over the edge of the bed until I feel the cold metal of the step ladder rung on the bottom of my sole. For my final Mission Impossible trick, I tug a butt muscle and silently swing my folded right leg over the puddle of sleeping cat. This is where the message self-destructs and the mission goes awry as my knee gracefully arcs through the air and directly into the corner of the storage cabinet. Instead of freezing silently, I emit an involuntary noise that sounds alarmingly like the call of a humpback whale. By the time my feet reach the floor, no one is sleeping, in the entire campground.
My name is Deb. You may have surmised from the title of this blog that I live in a van, a little big van we call Our Ramblin Van.
Life has taken a non-traditional turn for the Hatch’s. For the fist time ever, we are without a physical address. In this late season of life, we find ourselves untethered and caught between the end of an apartment lease and the beginning of mutual retirement. It is a time filled with excitement, uncertainty, anticipation and creative thinking. We are literally learning to live in a new way every day, something that is challenging for folks our age whose neuroplasticity has pretty much solidified by this life stage. We not only squashed our life into 54 square feet of space, but we have also concocted a massively ambitious 8 months long retirement trip plan to drive our little home from Colorado to the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska to Canada to the Arctic Ocean then down the Pacific Ocean coast and back to the Colorado. We get a lot of different reactions to our life choices these days. Ranging from, “Wow, that is cool, I would love to do that.” to “Aren’t you worried you’ll kill each other?” to “ I give the cat 6 weeks.” to “Okay, but where do you put your shoes?”
Well, to each his own they say. So far we haven’t killed each other or the cat and we’re down to the last 8 weeks before we embark on our journey. In the meanwhile, we’re figuring out how to live little in a big way. My intention was to write and try to sell a little book about the experience of little big van living, but as far as book writing goes, it turns out that I’m more of a blog writer. So, I am shifting all my ‘OK, NOW I KNOW THIS’ notes, van life tips and tricks and van cooking recipes right here to this page, for you, for FREE!!!
All I ask in return is that you like and follow Our Ramblin Van’s YouTube channel and social media pages and keep passing them along to others who might be interested. Blog entries are going to start coming fast and furious from now on, hope you stay on board with me and the roommates!
Greg Hatch (@ourramblinvan) • Instagram photos and videos
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