Anyway, this is the story of Doc Baxter, not how we camped in a pay area on the Texas Coast for free due to outdated paperwork.

One afternoon, while walking Rain, I ran into a man fishing with a kitten at his side. Rain took an interest in the kitten and the guy seemed cool with it. We started to chat while Rain and the kitten play. Nothing too memorable. Just small talk.

Later that afternoon, he stops by and offers us some fish. We’d already eaten, so we declined. He takes a seat, and we chat for a while. At one point we talk about camping down on Padre Island. That’s when he tells us his story.

A couple years back, he had let a couple of Navy SEALs camp in his rig on South Padre Island. They had to go somewhere in a hurry and didn’t want anyone to break in. They wrote a note and left it on the door. It said that the camper was booby-trapped and anyone trying to gain entry would be maimed. They taped a fake grenade to it.

Someone got curious and wanted to see what the sign said. They called the police and reported it. It became a huge deal. The area got shut down. The bomb squad was called in. It was all over the news.

He said that while all this was going on, he was sitting in the hospital unaware of any of it.

We sat around joking and talking about other things that don’t really stand out anymore. Eventually, we called it a night and he headed home.

The next morning he shows up and asks if we can help him. His RV was stuck in the sand. Of course we said we would.

We ended up hooking our van to his truck that was connect to the RV. One of us manned each vehicle. After a few tugs and some broken straps, we got the RV out. We helped him get it to his new spot and then parted ways. We’ll probably never see him again, but I’ll never forget the days spent with Doc Baxter. He’s had quite a journey.

Ever since Rain was about 6 months old, I knew I was going to get another dog. I wanted to wait until she was about 3 years old. I subscribed to the Save a Heeler page on Facebook and would glance at the pound puppies who were up for adoption in many of the towns we visited. Rain’s third birthday came and went. No second pup.

Rain is half BC and half Australian Cattle Dog (Blue Heeler), but she is a BC in personality. I was pretty sure that I was looking for another Border Collie. Then, in September of 2013, I ran across these photos.

He was allowed out of the cage at our request. He was sweet and calm. Loving. We took him outside and played. Upon introduction, he and Rain got along. They played well. They lady working there said he’s never been that open with anyone else. That, he acted like he was abused. She said he obviously picked us. I figured she was giving us her usual spiel. Either way, Rowen knew how to do all the right things to be adopted. We signed the papers. Johnny didn’t even try to talk me out of it. I am soooo glad he didn’t.

Rowen had to go get snipped. While he was at the vet, they told me that he was a bit older than I was led to believe. He was going to be a small dog. I was hoping for a dog Rain’s size (55#s). I also wasn’t sure if he was going to adapt to our lifestyle. I considered myself a foster for a while and put the word out about him. That’s when Johnny came up with the name Snowden. A character from Catch 22 that wasn’t around long.

I couldn’t understand why anyone would drop such a loving, smart, and fun dog like him off at the pound. After we got Snowden home, we got our first clue.

He had zero control of his little, tiny bladder. He wasn’t house trained. He would pee if you tried to pet him from above. He would pee as he came to you. Sometimes, he would roll over on his back and pee. That’s was the best.

For the first two weeks, I stopped his bedtime water intake and took him outside to pee every two hours. I knew there was no way he was ready to live with anyone else as long as he had this issue. He would end up right back in the pound. So, he was with us until we worked it through.

Snowden had a big mouth. He would bark at everyone. He would bark when he was excited. He would bark when he was scared. He would bark during play. He would run up to people, barking at them. They would lean over to pet him, and he would pee on their feet.

He was a bit of a squealer. Sometimes, he would squeal with the lightest touch. He and Rain played a lot and there were always plenty of squeals.

After a couple of months, he almost had complete control of his bladder and was ready for a new home. By that time, I had already fallen in love with him. He had no problem adjusting to our lifestyle. I didn’t care if he was going to be a tiny dog. He was staying with us. Because he was still a bit of a leaker, had a big mouth, and squealed a lot, the name stuck. A hero’s name for a fantastic dog.

Afterwards, we went back to an area we had found and camped at the day before, though in a different campsite. It’s a neat area. There are campsites on the cliff of a mesa, 400ft above the valley below. The views area vast. At night, the distant lights of Montrose shine bright and beautiful. We had planned to stay there for a few days and take care of some business. That is until it was time to go to bed.

Snowden couldn’t get into the van on his own. He had a big day of hiking and playing with our friends at the park. I figured he was just stiff, so I picked him up and put him inside. Then, he acted as though his legs didn’t work and was collapsing. I put him in bed.

Being me, I thought the worst. I checked him for a snake bite. When I put him into a sit position to check the rest of him, his body swayed so much that he almost fell over. I laid him back down and tried to give him liquids. He acted like it was fire, flinching erratically. That’s when I freaked and called the after hours, emergency vet.

It was near midnight and the vet talked me out of bringing him in. We went over the symptoms. He said that it didn’t seem life threatening. I thought otherwise but the vet’s calm, gentle voice won me over.

Alarm set, so I could check on him every two hours, everyone went to bed. Not much sleep happened. Snowden sat up and looked so sad and pathetic. Eventually, I went and held him. Later, my love took the helm.

In the morning, he was better but still in a very bad way. We decided to leave the campsite. If there was something there that made him sick, we didn’t want Rain to get into it too.

Since we were going past the vet I had called anyway, we stopped in. They checked him out and did a test for toxins. They found something. THC!

The little dog must have found a discarded edible and was stoned out of his mind! It took 12hrs for him to return from his dream world enough to drink water, but he still wasn’t walking. It was 20hrs before he would eat.

Little stoner totally freaked me out. Snowden was Stoned’n. He was on a vision quest.

He’s completely back to normal now. No damage. Thankfully, the ordeal only cost $100 and one night’s sleep. We had to move before we had planned, but our new campsite has even better views and stellar cellular connectivity. It’s all good.

Not mine but here to show the ip90’s size

It’s been a great travel printer except for one thing, the ink. It was always dried out. I don’t print every day or even every month. When I did try to use it, I’d have to get out a new cartridge ($5-10 each) and then use half of it cleaning the print head. Then, I would have a binge printing session where I printed everything I could think of that needed printing. The rest of the cartridge would eventually dry up and go to waste.

Tired of throwing money away, I decided to give refilling my own cartridges a try. It was so easy and just a little bit messy. They ones for the ip90 are refilled with a syringe. All you do is fill it from the ink well and dispense the ink into the pad on the bottom of an old cartridge.

The kit that I bought came with a bottle of cyan, magenta, yellow, and three bottles of black ink. The bottles are so big that I think they will last me a lifetime. It came with a syringe for each color. There were some loose ball bearings in the package. I imagine that they are to put into the ink and aid in mixing it. Unfortunately, they were stuck in some of the syringes instead, rendering them unusable. I ended up using the same one and rinsing it between colors. No big deal

I was totally afraid to actually go the whole refill route. I had been filled with FUD and stories of giant messes, hands being stained for weeks, the inside of the printer being flooded in ink and colors that were horribly wrong. In reality, it was easy and cheap without any of the foremetioned issues. The colors are good, the cartridges aren’t drying out in two weeks like the canons ones,and I have lifetime supply of ink. I feel like a fool for spending so much on cartridges and listening to anti-DIY rhetoric.

It wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, a bunch of overlanders sitting around bonding, telling stories, and planning future endeavors. But, it was exactly what I was expecting, a ton of cool rigs and accessories. I posted a whole lot of photos over on Free Campsites: http://freecampsites.net/overland-expo-2015/
Our friends posted videos of the event over here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gs2zD7lfHPo

As a telco, we ran a very large file server that handled all of our users web sites in one central location. It was nice because we could scale out to multiple web servers for redundancy and scalability. However, when the NFS server went down, the ENTIRE cluster had to be massaged in the right order to bring it back online. Talk about your nightmare scenario: send a new tech over to trace cables and just wait for the network wide outage to occur.

Our new infrastructure is a much smaller filesystem – we only have a couple of websites on it. However, we have three (3!!!) servers acting as redundant file servers. As they are all mirrors and geographically separated from each other, we can lose two entire regions before we have a real problem.

MySQL has been the defacto standard for sql servers on a budget for years. We ran this in an ISP environment and had the forethought to have a master-slave setup. In the budget telco world of a decade past, when we lost a SQL server, everything crapped out until someone manually logged into the slave server and told it to become master. Yay… we didn’t lose everything. Boo, it was still an outage.

Our new infrastructure has clustered master-master sql servers. I can bring a new one online without even telling the existing servers about it! We also have three of these running in different geographical areas. We can lose an entire region and keep chugging along. If we lose two regions, someone has to login and tell the remaining server that it’s ok to think for yourself. It’s quite an upgrade from the old days, but not quite as nice as the fileserver.

Then there’s the whole web server thing. It needs to talk to the sql server and file server. Thanks to modern magic, it can seamlessly talk to either service even if it’s own closest server crashes. It would be hard to mention all the differences in our new implementation versus the old way of doing things, but our new web server software is a) f*cking fast as sh!t. b) has built in caching to reduce the overall work load c) is really good on memory usage.

Back in the telco days, budget was always a thing. We simply couldn’t get the money for load balancing hardware and didn’t have the people/time to do it properly in software. Today, that’s not even a concern. I can get multi-region load balancing that let’s me put all of the above infrastructure in 4 different data centers for less than the cost of a 12 pack of microbrew once a month. Compare that to round robin DNS – where an outage means that users can keep hitting ‘reload’ and get a working server if they are persistent. I’ll take dirt cheap load balancing over DNS hackery!

Want to know the best part? All of this costs about half as much as we’ve been paying every month to run a single server at our current hosting provider. That’s right.. one big server, with no redundancy, a broken serial console and backups that don’t even boot if we have an outage. I’m TERRIFIED of rebooting our server because the console doesn’t work, our backups don’t boot and tech support says ‘pay for OS support and buy more capacity’ any time I mention that their services don’t actually work.

Meanwhile, I’ve intentionally rebooted 1-2 servers on the new system in the middle of SQL imports and filesystem modifications without a hiccup. Everything just works. Better yet.. I can add systems to the cluster if we need the capacity or upgrade the existing servers to larger systems anytime I want. We can literally get 3x the redundancy and twice the capacity for the same price. Yet, I only need half the capacity we currently pay for.

We also have to ability to add auto-scaling. That means we’d boot servers that contact our sql/file server and just serve web pages. And we could do it magically as needed and only pay for it while they were needed. Fancy.

Currently, I think or backend cluster has the extra capacity to handle our web services as well. But, if we need it in the future, we can boot thin web servers on-demand and kill them overnight to avoid unnecessary charges, Talk about the icing on your chocolate covered doughnut,

FYI, google is offering a $300/2 month credit on compute engine. Don’t be like me and sign up before heading to Baja – losing your credit!

UPDATE (8:30am, 5.5 hours after cutover completion):

Cutover went well this morning… there’s nothing like a 1am maintenance window to remind me why I don’t want to work for the telcos again.

However, I had to scale up our servers in the middle of watching a movie as they were starting to lag a bit. 20 minutes of rebooting servers, without even a blip of an outage, and we’ve scaled our capacity vertically 4-fold.

Sadly, this raises costs. Now, our hosting costs are closer to 3/5 of what they were prior to cutover. Still, a nice savings. Did you see the part where I took the fileservers and sql servers offline and replaced them each in under 5 minutes with bigger servers and couldn’t even tell anything was happening from the client side? That’s pretty fancy for a couple of home-brewed websites about camping in the woods and where to dump poop.

UPDATE 2:
After looking at the costs of inter-zone bandwidth and just how much of it we were using, I got to thinking about how to lower that cost. A little filesystem hackery was enough to drop our inter-zone bandwidth to 1/3 or less and reduce the CPU overhead enough that we could scale servers back DOWN! Who’d think the lowly symlink would be capable of saving 2/3 of our server costs as well as 2/3 of our bandwidth costs. Crazy!

I’m learning that the real power in cloud computing is in getting the smallest building blocks you can and using them as efficiently as possible.

If you’ve spent any time researching travelling in Baja, Mexico, you’ve surely run across these “rules”. According to the Internet, if you want to stay alive in Baja, Mexico, this is what you have to do or not do:

1. Don’t drive after dark.
2. Travel in groups.
3. Don’t cross at Tijuana.
4. No weapons (not even a bullet), drugs or anything illegal.
5. Cross the border at in the morning and drive as far south as you can.
6. Do not exit your vehicle before you get at least 400 miles south of the border.
7. Drive on the toll road. The bandits are on the libre.
8. If you are written a ticket, don’t pay the officer (it’s a bribe) for it. Go to the station instead.
9. Don’t drive after dark!

You’ll notice that one and nine are the same. This is because it is a very important rule!

Our plan
Meet part of our group near the border at 8am (Rule 5). Then, go to the border to meet the rest. Once there, we’d get our tourist card “visas”. Then, we’d drive as far south as we could in the remaining sunlight and find a lovely little place to stay (while following rule 6). We would get off the road before dark (Rule 1 and 9). The next day, we would enjoy a beach sunrise and spend the day driving as far south as we could. Rinse and repeat until we hit Mulege. Fish tacos and cerveza.

What really happened
Our group didn’t get together until about 10am. We all sat outside of a Starbucks programming our walkie-talkies and catching up. It’d had been years since we had seen each there. It was so good to see everyone and talk about the adventure ahead. It was going to be a great trip. We love you Bestest Bri and other guy.

We met up with the second part of our group at about noon at in a parking lot on the US side of the border at Tijuana. The boys walked across the border to get pesos and visit the immigration office. When they returned, they said that the office was closed (or didn’t exist I can’t remember which) so no tourist card at the border. Our friends assured us that it wasn’t a big deal and that we’d pick them up in Ensenada. No worries. OK.

We all got into our vehicles and went across the border, being careful to stay together. The Mexican border patrol had their own way of doing things. They had each one of us pull into separate parking areas in anticipation of a full vehicle search. They searched everyone differently (that’s a story in itself). By the time our van was done, three of our five car caravan had already been sent on their way. Then it was our turn.

With no where to wait for each other near the border, we were thrust onto a fast moving network of roads that had obviously been designed by someone enjoying a plate of spaghetti. Everyone was heading south on their own. Thankfully, we had all turned our radios (walkie talkies) on.

I still don’t know which way we went.

We were able to get Brightest Bri on the radio. Hurrah! We were not alone. We were also able to locate some of the folks that we had joined at the border. But, where was our other friend?!?! He wasn’t with the rest of our group nor was he answering our calls on the radio. I was soooooo worried about him. He said that never drives anywhere, and it was his first time in MX. He was no where to be seen or heard. OMG OMG I knew we weren’t supposed to cross at Tijuana (Rule 3)! We, and Brian the Wise, scanned the sides of MX 1 for our friend’s white Ford van. An easy find for sure.

After freaking out for about 10km, we spotted our friend just as we were entering the first toll booth on the Carretera Escenica. He had pulled over at what he thought was the immigration office where we were to get our “visas” at. We told Festiva Bri we had seen the other guy. And after a bit of driving/radio magic we were together again. Now, the “other guy” had his radio on. All was good. Then, we saw Jesus. He was standing over a bunch of expensive houses on the beach. I have no idea what he was thinking about.

After three plus years of wanting to sell the camper (it was way too big for our lifestyle), we finally put our backs into it and got it done. Yeehaw!

With that (4 hours) behind us, we were free to move about the country again. I knew that our friends were heading down to Baja California, Mexico in just under two weeks, so we decided to crash their caravan. That’s right 10 days to get everything in order and drive from Florida to San Diego. Go!

We had just spent the last few months getting the van expedition ready (huge thanks to Shawn and my folks) so the only vehicle related prep we had to do was get Mexican auto insurance. That part was so easy. We signed up over the internet and printed the paper work out at a truck stop in route. It cost about $500 for 6mo. There are also plans for half that amount. We weren’t going to the mainland, so importation paperwork wasn’t necessary.

It took us about five days to make the trip from across the country. Once there, we proceed to get our ducks in a row for our journey south into Baja.

This being my first time camping in another country (Canada doesn’t count), I wasn’t sure what to expect. Everything the media feeds us about Mexico sure puts the place in a bad light. So in a moment of paranoia, I opened a travel account with my bank. I considered it a disposable account that I could move small amounts of cash into as needed. They gave me an on the spot, temporary debit card. My bank offers these accounts without minimum balances or fees for up to 90 days. There are no fees or penalties to close it.

I got my bills set up on auto pay so that things would churn along without me. I wish that I had thought to put some of my accounts on hold. It would have saved me $100s.There’s no reason to pay for services I’m not using.

We have a lot of things that we didn’t feel needed to come south with us, so we rented storage bay near the border to store it until our stateside return. It’s $45/mo and the first month was free.

To be on the safe side, I got the required health certificate for the dogs. You are supposed to have one dated no earlier than 10 days before your border crossing. In order to get one, all you need is proof of current rabies vaccination and a healthy dog… oh and cash  I got our certs at the animal clinic in El Centro. They charged around $75 for Snowden’s booster shot and health certificates for both dogs. Much better than the $100 per dog the other vets were quoting.

The rest of our stateside time was spent shopping to fill up all of the space we made, by putting things in storage, with food and toiletpaper. I guess I just subconsciously assumed that, since I’d never seen TP in any of the Mexican bathrooms I’d been in, the whole country must be devoid of it. Oh and I bought tortillas… really?!? Haha I’m not quite sure what I was thinking.

The camping area in on high ground and dappled with scrub pine shade.  There is plenty of room for several groups

There’s picnic tables, fire rings, a little shelter, portable toilet and water via hand pump

It was just us and the tent. We’d see people on horses once in a while. I never saw anyone in the tent, but they had obviously taken over the shelter, and were into bushcraft, as we found items such as this bow made from a windshield wiper all throughout it.. As we were leaving we passed a snake venom guy, presumably out trying to catch some rattlers.

For more reservation info, maps, reviews and pictures of this free Florida campground, please visit freecampsites.net.

Oh, look! Van pictures.

That’s dinner cooking in the outdoor kitchen/shower. To turn it into an indoor kitchen, just close the door. Indoor showers are not suggested.

The propane fired stove (Coleman PowerPack 1-Burner Stove) is attached to a board which folds down when not in use. We’d been talking about doing this before we even got the van. It is just as cool as we thought it was going to be.

The shower (Eccotemp L5 Portable Tankless Water Heater and Outdoor Shower) is also propane fired so the insulated wall behind it is covered in aluminum for fire protection. Between the shower and a 31 gallon water tank sits a water pump (Flojet 03526 144A Triplex Diaphragm 3526 Series Automatic Water System Pump).

Open the door, throw up a tarp, turn on the water pump, get naked and fire up the shower. It’s soooo much nicer than a solar shower.

After Rain and I ran away from home (well, from Jenn and the idea of working for a living), we made our way through Arizona, New Mexico and most of Texas before finally arriving at Corpus Christi and finally got to see something besides desert and high desert for the first time in months.

Padre Island National Seashore
I made it to North Padre Island the last night of February – a couple weeks before Texas spring break started. North Padre Island is part of the national seashore and allows beach camping on 60 miles of unimproved beach. The first few miles are accessible to passenger vehicles, after which things get a bit hairy. My advice to anyone wanting to go far down the beach is to pay attention to the tides and drive in and out during low tide. It’s best to match up low tide and daylight hours so you can drive as fast as possible and watch out for humps and debris in the damp sand. This is a really nice couple of hours driving at the right time. During high tides, you’ll need four wheel drive and be going very slowly.

The rules for length of stay at Padre are really friendly for snowbirding. 14 days in the park, 48 hours out. Rinse and repeat until you’ve stayed 56 days in a year. Expect rust. Expect salt spray to foul up electronics. Expect unicorns to attack (true story).

I drove about 15 miles out upon arrival, cooked up some sausages and made dinner. It was a beautiful clear night; just a mild chill in the air considering it was the end of February. The only lights I could see were a few oil rigs out on the Gulf and a couple of boats. We slept with one wing open to lessen the wind blowing through the rig all night. I do like having a toasty sleeping bag and a little dog with sharp ears.

The next morning, I got up and took my time making breakfast. It was Saturday, so there were a few people driving out past us. The van with the wings open and off in the high sand drew a LOT of stares. It took a while to get used to this, but the Texas beaches are kind of a cruising scene.

The day was gorgeous and the weather report from NOAA (I was picking it up via a handheld radio my buddy Phil gave me this winter) gave me a pretty good idea of when to expect low tide. About an hour prior to low tide, I broke camp and we continued on down the beach on the hardpack. I drove a bit too fast and the occasional hump snuck up on me, but we made it down to Big Shell. In fact, we made it there before anyone else that day.

Rain and I goofed around. It was her first time on the beach and she absolutely loved the soft sand after a season in the rocky desert. The ocean became something that we HAD TO DO at least twice a day. As usual, there was no running into the ocean on her own, it was all about chasing sticks and saving them from being swept out to sea. She did, however, run around like a crazed lunatic in the sand while I was talking with one of the locals that showed up a bit later. Fun to watch.

A few more people showed up and I ended up sharing a camp with a New Englander on his way home (the long way, obviously) from an aborted trip to Panama. It turned out that he uses freecampsites.net. Small world. I was disappointed that he had to take off the following day, but I really couldn’t complain about the sheer serenity of my camp. The only people I could see were the fishermen across the channel at South Padre Island. Come Monday, there was very little of even that until the following weekend.

I fell into a simple rhythm of waking up sometime after the sun was up and having breakfast before taking Rain down to the beach for a swim. The rest of the day was spent reading or just staring out at the pelicans feeding or dolphins swimming up and down the channel. I might have a snack at mid day and supper around dark.

I still don’t have any refrigeration in the van, so I developed the habit of buying a pack of sausages or some other meat and cooking it all right away. It goes from the grill/frying pan directly into a ziplock. I would typically make a meal with one sausage for dinner the night I cooked a pack of five. The next two days I’d have a sausage with breakfast and one with dinner. After that meat was scarce until the next trip to town.

Meals were very simple affairs. I alternated grits and pancakes for breakfast. I’m from the South, so grits actually means grits, eggs, cheese and sausage if there was any. Lunch was usually just a peanut butter and honey sandwich, ramen noodles or a couple of quesadillas. Evenings, I alternated beans and rice with pasta. Boring fare I suppose, but it was all simple to prepare, no refrigeration required and really cheap.

All told, I ended up staying 10 days out at Big Shell before I ran out of fresh water and had to head back to town. About a week into my stay, I got an email from a friend and former coworker. It seems his current employer has an opening in one of those ridiculously high-paying jobs doing some bleeding edge work that I would probably enjoy quite a bit. Try as I might, I couldn’t think of it as anything but a temporary position that would give me a financial cushion so I could continue doing exactly what I was already doing.

The more I examined the situation, the less it seemed that taking a six figure job working for someone else would actually benefit me long term as much as continuing to sit on a beach and stare at the pelicans. Sure, I have to work a bit to get by, but I don’t actually need a hundred grand a year to live, eat and enjoy life. I can live on such a small fraction of that corporate income. Mostly, I work when I actually feel like working and on whatever pleases me.

There I was, sleeping on a beach with the windows open curled up next to an awesome dog and spending my days doing exactly what I wanted to do. Meanwhile, my buddy was up in Colorado slogging to work in the snow and sitting in a cubicle a minimum of 40 hours a week. More likely, he was salaried and pushing 50+ hours. How much money would it take to actually make that change in one’s lifestyle? And what the hell would you do with the money when you had it?

After thinking about it for a couple of days, all I could really come up with was to buy a newer version of the same van and have some customization done. So I could drive to exactly where I was and watch it rust. So here I am. Still poor. Still happy.

57 miles down the beach I ran into the first of many people I’d run into stuck on the beach. This guy was out camping over the weekend with his girlfriend and her kids only to find he had a dead battery Sunday morning. They had two vehicles but no jumper cables. I can’t really say much, I didn’t have any cables either as I’d left them with Jenn. I did have a battery charger and a solar system though, so we sat in the van BS’ing while charging his battery. He offered Rain and I a gallon of water which we accepted happily as we’d run out of water that morning.

The last few miles off the beach I noticed there were a lot more people around than on the way in. Spring break had begun while I was sitting at the end of the world navel gazing. Nothing like a scruffy hippie roaming the beaches in a creepy white van while kids from every school in the state are out partying.

I filled up on water, bought some more meat and headed back to Padre, but I didn’t feel like going terribly far out. I found a spot about 8 miles out where I could just barely get a trickle of internet access. There was a group of guys a little ways down the beach that Rain fell in love with. I think it was the boomerang they were throwing really. I’d look up from a book and notice that she was off visiting the neighbors again. They were nice kids and seemed to like her, so I let her go visit periodically.

After a few days in this spot, we had a relatively calm evening that seemed perfect for a little fire juggling. Before I tossed the first torch in the air I had a couple of Federal agents out there enforcing the county’s fire ban (the county beaches had bonfires left and right). As the torches were freshly lit and there were two park rangers standing watch, the ‘senior’ one tells the trainee to let me do it so he can video tape it with his new sunglasses. (WTF?) The neighbors cheered from the safety of their own camp; the hall monitors had come by to run all their ID’s the day before.

Five minutes later, Federal agents start asking for ID, about weapons, illegal aliens and heroin – I really can’t make this crap up. We established that I am not required to carry ID to juggle, that there are certainly weapons in the van, that I’m not going to talk about them any further. No, I didn’t see any illegals, but I’ll keep extra food and water on hand since you seem so concerned with their welfare. Did you really just accuse me of smuggling heroin as an excuse to search my home? Also, it is illegal to juggle fire during a fire ban even if you are standing in knee deep water.

After determining that they really didn’t want to get a warrant, they left with a large bag of trash I’d picked up from around my camp just in case a ranger stopped by. They seemed a bit upset that I asked them to perform such a menial task. I actually had to argue with these ‘public servants’ to convince them to put a bag of trash in the back of their truck and haul it to the dumpster that they drove past ten times a day.

The next morning, I found my neighbors had gone and left a giant box of ‘groceries’ outside my open window. I think they were living on chips and trail mix all week. Yummy snacks.

I was getting close to my fourteen days, so I decided to explore a bit. I didn’t make it all that far after breaking camp. I went as far as North Beach, which is still part of the park, but doesn’t require a permit to get in. The weather was still amazing and the wind was pretty light, so I spent most of they day just juggling on the beach with the occasional splash in the ocean to cool off.

TL;DR: I won a four month, no-expenses-paid, vacation on the beaches of Texas. Park Rangers hate fire and don’t like to touch icky trash bags.

Being in central FL, we decided to head to the beach and stay the night in a nearby neighborhood. We drove around for a couple of hours and never found a place we felt comfortable staying overnight. Finally, and way late a night, we just pulled into a Lowes parking lot. I heard every car that drove by that night. We expected to be rousted at any minute. Thankfully, it never happened.

All that is still in my mind somewhere, but what really stuck out the most was our first real interaction with another traveler. While having the hardest time trying to maneuver the camper in the extremely full, tiny beach parking lot, we saw a woman with a trailer so small it was hard to believe she could lay down in it. On it’s side, in plastic roadside marquee letters, it read “My Heart is a Big Red Dot”.

The woman, who was a bit forward for this conservative southern girl, beckoned us and told us of her travels. She said that, as she goes from place to place, she helps people deal with the grief of a passed loved one by helping them make a quilt from said loved one’s clothing. I must admit, I found it odd.

Her camper was dubbed “The Mantra Trailer”. She asked us what our mantras were. She told us that she had a recording studio inside of the trailer where she records people speaking their mantras. She invited us in. We declined. Apparently we weren’t the only ones. Later I found her blog and, it seems that she hadn’t had much luck with getting Floridians to open up and come inside.

I think back to that day and who I was. The road has really changed my perception of things and people.

This image is from her blog. You can see the cab over of our camper behind her trailer. Her trailer had a recent someone’s mantra on it.

On the inside, we pulled out all of our furniture, ripped out the plastic, took up the rubber, and removed floor padding to expose all of the metal. All surfaces received a good cleaning. Then, all flecks of rust and bad paint were removed. A good spray of primer was followed by glossy white rustolium. The inside of the van was a beautiful white palette.

It was time to consider the insulation. For the floor, we tossed the old compressed, and probably original carpet padding that was under the rubber mat and replaced it with a layer of 6# carpet padding. We tripled it up in the “living area” for extra comfort. The rubber mat was in good condition, paid for and easy to clean, so it was a keeper. We layed it right back down where we found it.

The roof is done. We are still working on our walls. At this point we feel a little envy for those folks who have cargo vans with out windows. They can just slap whole sheets of insulation and wall cover up. We’ve had to think of ways to deal with the wings and the parts that make them work. We’re still trying to figure it out. We are trying to use a lot less wood this time around and that makes fabricating a lot harder. When we pulled everything out of the van, I swear the body gained three inches of clearance. A decent amount of the weight was wood furniture.

Right now, we have placed a layer of reflectix. We followed it up with Polystyrene. We threw canned foam into the frame holes and any gaps around the styrofoam. Lastly, we are covering that up with insulation board. All together, it was the best weight, R-value, price ratio we could find on the spot.

The trail went a few hundred feet and then seemed to end at an overlook. I wondered what was below me. I was definitely standing on a rocky outcropping. I know there are know caves within 10s of miles, so I thought that I might be on top of one.

As much as I wanted to go down, It was just Rain and I. Johnny had no idea where we were. The ridge was very steep and covered with dead leaves. If I slipped and hit my head, rescue wouldn’t show up for hours or even days. It would be foolish of me to go by myself. So, after taking a minute to weigh my choices, I decided to head down.

I plotted my decent. Most of the trees were too far from the path to offer much support. The support they did offer came in the form of dead limbs. I was stuck using thorny vines for balance. No matter. I made it to the bottom where I wanted to be. Rain had little to no trouble.

Once there, I found what was going to be, or what used to be (before a collapse) a cave.  Actually, thinking back, it had the precision of something man made. It was a roughly cut rock shelter 3 feet deep and 8 feet wide with a 6 foot ceiling.  Limestone walls shot out along the ridge on either side of it. The sight of which pushed all recognition of danger out of my head, even if Rain acted like she wanted to go back up the trail. It was time to go ridge walking and look for caves!

We scrambled over rocks and climbed under downed trees. I poked my head in holes. Rain sniffed leaves. While fun, it was pretty uneventful. I saw this spot on the ridge below us that looked very promising. We started heading down. Then, I saw it. I picked it up and examined it. I looked at the seemingly concave, rocky wall that was our destination. I looked at the object again. As bad as I wanted to go further, I couldn’t. In my hand, I held a sun bleached femur with a bear’s teeth marks etched into it.

I turned back. Kicking myself the whole way, I retreated. We both made it back up the gorge much more quickly than we had descended it. No more poking my head in holes. No more exploring. We now had a destination.

We weren’t in any real danger. Only perceived. While it crossed my mind, the bone surely was too thick to be human. I assume a camper had brought a cow bone for their pup and a visiting bear lifted it from the campsite. It was old. Just because there WAS a bear there doesn’t mean that there IS a bear there. Hiking around here, you pass all kinds of bear scat, marking and dinning locations.

I chickened out. But on the bright side, I lived another day. I am planning on returning in the next two days. I moved the bone, so hopefully I wont get spooked this time Haha I just know there is a cave a little ways down that ridge around those rocks. Cavers last words? Or, perhaps their first.

So many trails – so much rain… and not the dog kind. Due to today’s torrential downpours, I am trapped inside instead of on a trail with my pup like I should be. It’s OK. There’s lots of work to be done and the view from the office isn’t too bad. The sounds of birds chirping, the stream below, and hail on the roof make for a superb work soundtrack.

Campsites Mentioned In This Post

• Blue Valley Dispersed Campground

It seems like all we do anymore is work. Today, we are perched up on an old decrepit highway listening to the waves crash just a few feet from our door as we code the day away. Tomorrow is going to be a long day. We are going to launch a new version of FreeCampsites.net. Silly Johnny always wants to work 20 hrs on his b-day.

Campsites Mentioned In This Post

• High Island Texas Beach Campsite