Van Life Begins

So, #vanlife has begun. We are packing for our first trip, a two nighter, departing in about 24 hours. I am so excited about the adventure that I don’t have the good sense to be panicked our lack of preparedness and general knowledge. I will save that for another post, because this is a story about the van pickup.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this long considered but somewhat impulsive purchase in late July set the clock ticking on the inevitable reality of van ownership. Previous commitments prevented us from getting back to Dayton, Ohio to pickup the van until this past week, thus providing seven weeks to ruminate over the pickup details.

I don’t think we thought much about ownership during those weeks though we did buy insurance, pay taxes and pick up our new license. I even booked a couple of camp trips. What really felt stressful was the pickup details. Details such as driving to Dayton and driving two vehicles home, or a one way flight early in the morning, do our walk thru and overnight on the drive home. Maybe we should take an afternoon flight and overnight in Dayton and do the walk thru the next day. So much worry over small details. Honestly, this was us trying to avoid the fact that we had made the purchase and now owned a van.

Finally a decision was made and an early morning, one-way flight happened, even though we flew north by first flying south to Atlanta. After a NYC expensive taxi ride from the Dayton airport to Lewis RV, we faced our current biggest fear, learning how to operate our new van in just 2 hours. Looming behind that was a 5.5 hour drive home. Yes, we were going to try to do this in one day, a 17 hour journey.

Rick, our walk through guy was pretty darn good and absolutely everything made sense when he was talking about it, but we knew that the next day, when examining all the knobs and twisties, we would remember about 1/2 of what he said. “But you can always call,” he assured us, “or check the manuals.” Ha!

Then the walk through was over and it was time to drive home. We took a deep breath and pointed the van south. Luckily, the traffic was light, even Cinci traffic. After the 1st hour, John was relatively comfortable behind the wheel.

So far we have had only one serious argument about the van and that was the night we brought it home. We couldn’t figure out how to turn the running lights off or lock the doors. We were more than a bit accusatory of each other for not carefully listening during the walk thru. As it turns out, we had left 2 of the 4 key fobs for the van, in the van. Doors won’t lock and lights won’t turn off with fobs in the van. Lesson #1.

So here we are, “living the dream”, #vanlife has begun.