Week 4: This Ain’t Texas

This week marked one month of living in the van! Trevor and I feel like these first four weeks have flown by. We’ve learned a lot about van life and about each other and I know we’ll learn even more in the months to come. Here’s a few things we’ve learned in the first month:

1. The floor is ALWAYS dirty. I’m the type of person that despises my feet feeling dirty. I can’t stand when I feel crumbs and dirt sticking to my feet so this really bothers me.

2. There’s always something to fix. Although we haven’t had any major van issues, I don’t know that there has been a single day that everything has been working the way it is supposed to. Some issues are more urgent than others, but is it too much to ask to have a day or two where everything works perfectly??

3. We’re always hurting ourselves. When you have two people living in 70 square feet with corners and door handles, injuries are bound to happen. I told Trevor we need to have one of those signs that say “_ hours since last injury” and see how long we can make it.

4. The van size does not limit us in where we can go. We’ve both had a good amount of experience in an RV and know that it can be very difficult to maneuver through cities and parking lots with such a big rig. We’ve been super happy with how easily the van drives and being able to maneuver around tight spaces. Even I drive it around and I was one point away from failing the maneuverability portion of my driver’s test 😜

5. Starlink was the right choice. Before we left, we were debating about trying to make a hotspot work for our needs, but we were worried about being limited in where we could go. We have been so happy with not having to worry about our cell service, except for the last week that the Starlink hasn’t been working. I’m sure we could have made a hotspot work but we have a lot more freedom in where we can go and we love it.

6. We live in a beautiful world! We already knew this but it’s worth mentioning. We love being able to experience the diverse beauty that the Creator blessed us with.

This week we enjoyed the beauty that New Mexico has to offer (hence the title of this blog - Beyonce’s song has been stuck in my head for the past few weeks and now we can actually sing it while it is true).

Sunday morning we made the drive from Guadalupe Mountains/Carlsbad Caverns to White Sands National Park. Along the way we stopped at a coffee shop in El Paso (as we must according to Trevor 😉) and then drove the rest of the way to the park and ate lunch at the picnic tables in the park. We stayed at a campground about a half hour from the park the first night since we needed to fill water and dump. We made a fire that night for the first time since we started the trip. We enjoyed it but were pretty wary of the sparks that were flying due to the wind. We didn’t want to be those people who start another wildfire.

Monday morning we enjoyed showers at the campground and then made our way to Holloman Lake. This lake is just down the road from White Sands and has free camping. It is connected to the Holloman Air Force Base which neighbors the park. Unfortunately we quickly realized we didn’t have much cell service at this spot, and our Starlink was still not working. Trevor attempted to find spots in the Starlink cable that seemed like they could be broken and fixed them but still no luck getting the Starlink to work. Since we were forced to not be on our phones or watch our show for the night we played a game together. One of our recent favorites is a game called “Trails” which is very fitting for our circumstances right now. The concept of the game is to hike trails, collect resources, and take pictures along the way. We won’t say who won the game…

Tuesday morning we made our way over to the park to explore. We walked a few short trails and walked around on the dunes for a bit. As alluded to in the name, the sand in the park is white and clean and beautiful! There are tons of giant dunes that appear untouched. After spending the morning in the park, we headed back to the state park campground we were at the first night to get some work done since we knew we had cell service there. On our drive out of the park, a fighter jet was taking off from the Air Force Base and ended up flying right over our van. I expected it to be loud but holy cow, it scared me half to death!

Wednesday we went to Home Depot to buy a new tire inflator. For the last week or two we had a slow leak in one of our tires and had been inflating it every morning with our portable tire inflator. On Monday when I had been filling the tire, our inflator just shut off and started smoking so I think we worked it a little too hard 😬. After our detour to Home Depot, we headed back to White Sands. We hiked the Alkali Flat Trail. This was a strenuous five mile hike through the dunes. We learned quickly that hiking in sand is NOT easy - especially when you’re hiking up and down 40 foot dunes. It was a beautiful hike although we were pretty pooped by the end. The interesting part about this hike is that there is not necessarily a designated trail to hike on. There are red markers sticking out of the sand that mark the trail. You are supposed to always be able to see the next marker from the current marker you are at. It would be very easy to get lost without those markers as all of the terrain looks very similar. And since the dunes shift often with the wind and weather, we saw rangers driving around moving markers so that they are clearly visible.

Thursday was our errand day. We headed into town to get our tire fixed and get an oil change. We sat in the waiting room and worked most of the morning while that got done. Next we went and got some groceries and then headed to a laundromat to get our big pile of laundry done. After buying so many groceries last week, we had told ourselves we weren’t going to buy groceries again while we were hungry - and then there we were at lunch time shopping for groceries 😑. But this time we tried hard to stick to the list and didn’t do too bad.

Friday we started the drive to our next destination - Amarillo, TX. It was an interesting drive because as we left our campground the temperature was in the 50s and sunny enough that I was sitting outside soaking in the sun that morning. About a half hour into our drive though, we started heading up into the mountains and the temperature quickly dropped so we were driving through ice and snow for a good 45 minutes. We stayed the night at a campground on the way to Amarillo. We took showers and then talked with my family for a bit before relaxing for the evening. It got down to 26 degrees during the night but we stayed warm enough without running our space heater. We’ve actually been very impressed with how warm our van has been able to stay on cold nights! I’m a little more worried about it staying cool on the hot summer nights we will have coming up.

Saturday the only plans we had were to finish the drive to Amarillo. We slept in until 10:30ish that morning. That felt a little crazy as I had pretty regularly been waking up around 7-7:30 every morning. Trevor can always sleep in late 😊. We did some cleanup around the van to get it reset for another week - cleaning out our toilet, doing dishes, filling and dumping water, etc. Then we finished the drive to a free campground just outside of Amarillo on a wildlife refuge.

Something I’ve been reflecting and working on over the past few weeks is not letting worry/fear stop me from enjoying these new experiences. I’m naturally a worrier, and if I let it take over, I can easily find myself imagining the worst case scenarios for everything. Committing to trying van life was definitely a step into some fears. So many questions of - What if I hate it? What if something happens to our van and we lose all the money we put into it? What if something happens to a friend or family member while we are gone? I had so many of these questions running through my head over and over. And while we’re out hiking a trail, if I’m not mindful I can find my thoughts wandering away from the beauty and joy that surrounds me to thoughts of - What if an animal attacks us? What if someone breaks into our van while we’re out? What if we get hurt or lost and stranded out in the elements? And I’ve realized that I can easily allow those fears and worst case scenarios to steal the joy away from some amazing moments. So I’m working on finding the balance between having a healthy amount of caution while also not letting the worries and worst case scenarios taint this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we have. (Thanks for coming to my TED talk).

Thank you for continuing to follow along on our adventure. We love you all ❤️