July 2015
Oakland, CA
If it were just up to Dave, he probably would have opted to sail around the world, or at least through a good part of the Caribbean. But I’m not a strong enough sailor really, and his health and strength are too precarious for us to be that far away from civilization, alone, on a boat. So we decide instead to spend two and a half months driving cross-country and back in a camper van with Hannah and Monster, the kitten we just adopted, to visit various friends and family along the way. It remains unspoken that this may be the last time Dave sees many of them, but it’s palpable as we decide on our route, marking possible stops with thumbtacks on a map of the United States that hangs in our bedroom. We have to visit his family of course, his sister in Texas and his mom in Colorado. And my mom and Ernie and my sister in Massachusetts, my dad and his family in Pennsylvania. But there’s so many others we want to visit, places we want to explore together.
We plan to head up the coast to Oregon first, then out through the Columbia Gorge, retracing a route we took on a road trip we both loved a few years before, soon after we first met. Then we’ll go through Idaho and into Montana where we’ll visit his aunt and uncle by marriage in Helena before spending a few days at Glacier National Park. From there we’ll meander east as we can, with a goal of making it to Montauk, on the farthest tip of Long Island, in time for a weekend with my friends from college who we’ve vacationed with in Mexico a couple of times. And then we’ll head up to New England to see friends and family, then back down through Pennsylvania to Kentucky and Tennessee before we book it west to Texas and Colorado, ending up eventually at the Grand Canyon and back up through the Mojave to home in Pacifica. It’s an ambitious trip, but we’ve always been overachievers, so we jump in with both feet to make it happen.
Dave spends a lot of time that spring and summer on Craigslist looking at camper vans and joining #vanlife communities for pointers. We want an eighties Vanagon that’s in decent shape, ideally one with a pop top for extra space. Our budget is about $12k based on the loan amount we get approved by the credit union Dave has banked with for years, so we won’t be able to get something fancy, but it should be sufficient for camping weekends and to get us back and forth across the United States at least once this fall. Dave also hopes that it will make it easier for him to go back to field work, which he’s hoping his doctor will allow soon.
We check out a red Westphalia in San Mateo one day, a little over our budget but it seems like we could make it work. It’s cute but the mechanic we take it to says the engine will need to be replaced before we take it anywhere, so we pass. A white Sprinter van with a retrofit bed and kitchenette is briefly an option, but someone else snaps it up before we can get ourselves to Fremont to see it.
Finally Dave finds a blue 1985 Vanagon with a white pop top. We go to check it out on a Saturday afternoon at the owner’s apartment in Oakland. She’s an Asian electrical engineer with extreme attention to detail who still has all of the original manuals, and has made curtains and re-upholstered everything inside. She lets us drive the van through a quiet neighborhood. I stall out in the middle of an intersection (I’m not the greatest at driving manual, and this particular stick shift takes both strength and finesse), but Dave is able to keep it going and purring. We offer her $12k contingent on getting it checked out by our mechanic, which we arrange to do on Monday. By Tuesday it is ours.
