My cousin, Scott, posted some cool videos on a comment to our renovations which reminded me of the VW Beetle/motorhome we saw last week. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to snap a pic but fortunately a Google image search came up with the great expanded view of how to meld one together.

Which then led me to this cool post about Carlos Benevedes, a radio host, on a road trip in this:

Who I guess found this on his trip:

Yes, random, I know. But I think cool nonetheless. I think Brian and I are intrigued enough to do a product review of the Bacon Bubbles Gun for English Bulldog Toys.com

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One of the questions the always seems to come up when we tell people about our trip is “What did you do with all your stuff?”. This can actually be answered in four stages.

1. We packed everything we needed for the trip in Stanley. We made a point to try and distill this down to the absolute essentials.
2. Sell everything possible. This took a bit a leap to admit that most of the stuff we have collected over the last 10 years is not really important. We figured anything that you can easily buy later was not important and sold quite a bit of our stuff through garage sales, eBay, and Craigslist. What we couldn’t sell that we didn;t need was donated to Goodwill or the corner for trash day.
3. Some things we couldn’t part with were left with friends in Lawrence including our 47″ TV and the bed. Thank you Scott, Ann, Mike, and Andi.
4. Everything else was loaded up in a U-Haul and stored in Overland Park at Ma and Pa Devine’s Storage Center (the basement).

So far we have actually dropped a couple items that we realized were not important and plan to send some clothes back home soon to free up some space. It has been nice to reduce the amount of “stuff” we have around us and I can say we both don’t feel we have lost any level in quality of living.

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Wow, I didn’t realize it has been so long since I posted last. A lot has happened, but it is probably more interesting for me to summarize anyway. Here is the path since our last post…

My last post mentioned Port Townsend, a great little coastal town. I have a few pics from our primo parking spot by the water and a day trip over to another old port town. Stanley’s spot, right next to an old Allegro, like my Grandma and pa Byers use to have!

Our view

Walk on the beach

Day trip to Port Angeles.

Our Octapose

The beach

We went downtown Port Townsend Saturday night to watch the outdoor feature film: The Princess Bride, part of the film festival going on all weekend. Luckily, the rain held out, it stayed decently warm and everyone had a great time. The next day we took another ferry across to Deceptive Pass. Here are a few good ones from that day…

Next we got some beach time in. This was Brian, Buddha and Ernie’s first ocean beach experience. Buddha drank a lot of ocean water and proceeded to throw up all the way down the beach. As many of you probably saw or heard our Long Beach, WA beach experience wasn’t so successful. ;)~ But never fear, Hill Auto was to the rescue!!

Whooops!

Our facebook album will tell the rest. We are chillin’ in Bend, OR for a few then will head back to Portland for the weekend. They have a great Saturday market for us to hit up and I have tickets for the M.I.A. show on Monday. Yeah MEEE!!!

From Long Beach, end of Washington – Pacific City, hello OR, posted by Maria Scarpello on 10/12/2010 (50 items)

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We had a bit of a hitch in our travels last week as we learned Stanley has his limits. We found our selves on a beach for the first time this trip and were struck by how many cars and trucks were just driving up and down the beach. So we thought “Hey, we should take Stanley for a beach cruise”. The bad news is he weighs about 10 times most trucks and we picked the loosest sand to enter the beach on.

After some weak attempts at rescuing it ourselves we had to call a tow truck. It just so happened that the tow truck driver video tapes all his tows and posts them on YouTube.

About an hour after we got stuck we were back on the road. Lesson learned.

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As we were driving yesterday it occurred to me that we are constantly posting about all our tastings but we’ve rarely gone into what we’ve learned about beer tastings and what makes up different types of brews. Well, interested or not, this post is going to delve into it. People always ask us, “what is your favorite kind of beer?” And our answer usually is “the better question would be: which ones aren’t!”. It’s not to say that we like all beers but there are certain things we have learned to look for in a brew and even if we aren’t the biggest hop fans we can typically appreciate what say, an IPA, is trying to do.

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Well we were planning on going back up to Canada to Whistler, but we changed our minds and took a ferry across Puget Sound to Bainbridge Island instead. It was quite the trip! The views of downtown Seattle were very nice. I am guessing it was Stanley’s first time on a boat, I wish I could figure out a way to get him down to the Caribbean!

The day before we left Seattle we visited the Experience Music Project suggested to us by our good friends Lauren and Chris who went this summer. The building and exhibit was incredible! You really should check out pics on Google. I guess there was a guy in Seattle who collected a ton of different music memorabilia and the majority of it is his. They had an exhibit on music from the Northwest featuring the “controversial song” Louie, Louie and the birthplace of grunge as well as a whole exhibit on Seattle born, Jimi Hendrix. There was a video section with over 500 interviews of influential music figures, we watched videos on Santana, the inventor of the solid body guitar, Afrika Bambaataa and the producer of Me and Bobby McGee to name a few. I feel like even if we spent the whole day there we probably wouldn’t even of seen 1/2 of it.

After the ferry ride over to the Washington peninsula we found a great little town to spend the weekend, Port Townsend. It was really nice here Wednesday, yesterday was windy, cold and rainy, just what we would expect Northwestern WA weather to be like. We had a fantastic meal the first night at the Fountain Cafe, which seemed to be the locals favorite, as I asked people at the brewery yesterday for suggestions. This weekend there is a film festival in Port Townsend so that should bring quite a buzz to this otherwise small, quaint, port town. Here are some photos from our last few days and I will post more about this cute little hippie town after the weekend. Thanks for following!

From Seattle and Ferry Ride to Bainbridge, posted by Maria Scarpello on 9/24/2010 (32 items)

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And we are still together!! 🙂 Things are actually going great still. We aren’t feeling cramped yet, despite what many of you may think, we are super cozy in Stanley with the two boys. Well, that is, until Buddha drops a bomb on us, no where to run from it! Luckily matches are never far away. We might have the quickest draw in the west when it comes to lighting one up!

As we look back on our first month there are some things we have come to realize…

1. Best idea ever.
2. The highways and back roads of America are much MUCH better than the interstates. SO many little cool cities and sights to see. I still remember driving through the back highways of Kansas being soo surprised that everyday people miss all these cool sights driving what is possibly the most boring 8 hour stretch of I-70 to Denver. Highway 2 in Washington was similar. From Spokane to Everette, much better views and small towns than what you would normally see on I-5.
3. If we boondock (don’t plug in at night, i.e. pay to park) half of the month we will be spending roughly $800/month. We have averaged around $40/night when we pay to park and plug in. If we fill up on water and dump at a pay sight we can go 3-4 days without having to refill or dump.
4. Most all gas stations cap you at $75 credit card charge per transaction. Which sadly meant on our last fill less than half a tank!!! 🙁 Luckily enough we have gotten most of the longest drives out of our way and when we are just around a city we typically fill 1-2 times a week at most. I actually underestimated what we would spend to park at RV camps and overestimated what I thought we would pay on gas, so we are still on target.
5. About 25 breweries in… I still need to get an official count since the last post and we still have what is probably the best breweries in the US left to go… Oregon, here we come!! From Brian: “There are a lot more breweries than I would have imagined”.
6. We need to ditch the beer mug once and a while and start going to wineries.
7. We are not alcoholics, we promise!
8. It’s time to get down to business. 100 days, 100 ideas launching soon, along with some planned progress on EnglishBulldogToys.com and BrewBuddy.com
9. From Brian: “Life on the road is a lot easier than I had expected. It is a lot more natural than I would have thought. It’s not as lifechanging as one might expect, I feel it’s like business as usual.”
10. Did we mention, best idea ever?!?! oh yea, we did.

Vancouver still makes my list of best city yet. We had to come back down to Seattle for the weekend, our tailgating plans went awry but luckily we had additional weekend plans for the Red Hook Brewery SausageFest (“and yes for the hundredth time there were girls there” – Festival t-shirt quote). We met up with Brian’s friends from the KU Industrial Design program, Tim and Kyle and their girlfriends Christine and Sarah and had a great time. The sun decided to shine on us for a majority of the day and we continued on with a little after party in Stanley once it started to spit again. The best thing about driving an RV around? Your bed is never too far away… 😉

We are going to spend one more day in Seattle then head back north over the border again. We didn’t get to do the Sea to Sky highway drive from Vancouver to Whistler so we need to head back up. I am hoping we can also get a day of sunshine to enjoy some zip-lining in the mountains.

Here are some more photos from Vancouver and our SausageFest activities. And as always thanks for following!

From Vancouver and a little more Seattle, posted by Maria Scarpello on 9/20/2010 (59 items)

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Why hello everyone! We are having a wonderful time still and have made our way up north to Vancouver. This is both Brian and I’s first time in Canada and the drive in yesterday was INCREDIBLE. We headed straight up to Stanley Park to check things out and I am really glad we did. Once you come over the bridge into Vancouver probably has to be one of the coolest cityscapes I’ve ever seen! All of a sudden out of no where these apartment buildings and skyrises jut into the sky overlooking the water. Flippin’ fantastic I tell you!! But I have fast forward a bit too much… we were in Seattle earlier in the week visiting our friends, Nick and Drew and making new friends with Carina, Drew’s girlfriend. I don’t have much internet time unfortunately so I am going to let the pictures do the talking. We are going to take the skytrain now back into downtown Vancouver and hit up more sights.

Thanks for following!!

From Washington up into Vancouver, posted by Maria Scarpello on 9/14/2010 (33 items)

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Helllllooooo again. Boy have we been busy travelers, covering well over 1,000 miles in the last week. There has been soo many things we’ve seen, we are both still scratching our heads as to how we never knew all these incredible places even existed.

Our last post was just the beginning of our Jackson, Grand Teton, Yellowstone National Park adventure. The first night in Jackson we met up with our good friend Lizzie G’s good friend Katie who so conveniently worked at our other good friend, Jen O.’s sister-in-laws ranch (did you get all that?!). We met at where else but the local Jackson brewery, Snake River. We had a great dinner and was given a tip about a remote camping spot not far from Triangle X Ranch that made for a most excellent backdrop and free 2 nights stay. The plateau is a favorite hangout for the Triangle X employees and they all joined us on our second night for a bonfire. It was definitely needed to as temps were really getting low up here over the weekend, the lowest at 24°.

Katie and Maria sampling the brews

Katie treated us to a float trip down the river along the tetons. Most of the photos below tell the story better than I can. The views have just been amazing, but when you come from Nebraska/Kansas a 10ft hill looks impressive. After the plateau we headed north to spend Labor Day weekend in Yellowstone. Thanks to some great tips from Brian F. and Adam M. we had a whole itinerary planned with plenty of must see stops to hit. Old Faithful was first, followed by the Prismatic Springs and numerous other “hot” destinations, as well as the waterfalls in the canyon. It was so cool to see how the scenery changed a number of times all within this one park. We are very happy we rounded through here and met some cool couples our last night from Colorado and Tennessee. Mark and I got to talking about Longmont, CO where he is from, and how we had stopped at Oskar Blues and Left Hand in Longmont on our way through and he was nice enough to share a fantastic bottle of barrel aged Brown Ale from Odells (Ft. Collins). We sat in their little pop-top van and shared the beer while their 2 year old Levi (super cute kid) finished his mac and cheese with hotdogs.

Monday morning we ended up leaving pretty early 1. because I thought i’d get to see more animals, but I didn’t and 2. because we had to make our way up to Spokane, WA, 12 hours away, where the closest Sprint store was located. That cool little Sierra Wireless 4G mobile internet hotspot I purchased just about 30 days ago broke and we aren’t too useful working from the road without it. Fantastically enough, Sprint was kind enough to inform me that without including a $7/mo. insurance plan there was simply nothing they could do and I would have to purchase a new device, this time for $300 (my first purchase was $100 bc I was a new Sprint customer and got a mail-in-rebate). Got to LOVE Sprint, so I kindly gave the manager some very polite choice words, walked out of the store and called customer service to add the insurance plan. Now we will wait 30 days for the insurance to take effect so we can get a replacement device like we deserve. In the meantime we will rely on coffeeshops and free wifi signals to get us through our days. Luckily, now that we are up in Washington a coffee stand is not hard to find at all.

almost to the coast!

Here are our photos from the past week. Thanks as always for following along!! 🙂

“Sept. 2-6 was a gooood time”

From Jackson Hole and Yellowstone, posted by Maria Scarpello on 9/09/2010 (100 items)

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Ok, so many of you have been sitting on the edge of your seats waiting to see the final touches. I appreciate the interest and now you can wait no more. The last time we talked about the renovations I left you with a wonderful white shell of a beast. This post is going to pick up where we left off, adding color and putting Stanley back together again. Last time I mentioned 1 of 2 of the best ideas we had while working on Stanley was hiring a professional painter, well the 2nd was hiring a professional to install our floor and quarter round. That only cost us $250 and it took him 2 days, which means it would have taken us 4 weeks. SOOOO worth it and the guy did GREAT work. At first we thought we would buy wood laminate but after looking and looking at all the cheap crappy looking laminate we found a cool new product called cushion vinyl. Its like that nasty tile pattern your grandma would have installed in her kitchen 30 years ago but this is backed by 1/8″ of foam and comes in a number of different patterns like stone and yes, still tile. We purchased the quarter round already primed from Home Depot (I believe that was trip #43 on our renovations endeavor) and painted it ourselves to save a little time and money for the pro installation.

We also painted the color in Stanley, green in the kitchen, dark grey in the overhead cab bed area and yellow in the restroom. That wasn’t so hard and it was nice to get some color back in Stanley. The reupholstery helped too. I found a shop that makes furniture for RVs and Boats so I had him make us a couch that folds out into a bed for the back room and he made us new seat covers for the dinette with the same fabric. And then we reupholstered the dinette accents and all of the valances for the top of the blinds. Donna, Brian’s mom, helped make the wonderful blinds in our kitchen and after all that we were pretty much done. Sounds a lot simpler now that I retell the story than when we were actually doing it!

And now what you have all been waiting for the final pics…

Looking forward

Kitchen Dinette new upholstery and accents, notice the nice white blinds! The kitchen light is also new. Brian spray painted everything that was gold, silver, including the puck lights beneath the cabinets. The dogs like to cuddle below the table.

Another view of the dinette and green wall. You also get a glimpse of the curtains Brian's Mom made us to the left.

View from the front towards the back. Here you can see the TV that our good friend Dane helped us mount. It is connected to our Wii, a Mac Mini (which is a tiny computer) and 2TB harddrives with tons of movies and TV shows to keep us entertained. I also have Rosetta Stone and have started to learn Italian on the trip. Il bambino mangio means the boy eats. 🙂

Another one looking towards the back room. We painted the fridge green! Brian is working away on the new couch that folds into a bed. If anyone wants to come join us for a few days on our trek, that is where you can sleep!

Brian's view from the backroom. You will notice our newest addition is the map! This is also a good view of our new Bamboo flooring and the quarter round.

Our route thus far analog style, in pink.

Newly upholstered valance framing the Tetons.

This is where we sleep. We replaced the foam in the bed and topped it with a memory foam mattress. The duvet cover is from Target. It's soo comfy.

A view of our side chairs next to the dinette. These are pretty much the only things we didn't have to touch for renovations and they are super comfy too!

Here is a view of the shitter. 🙂 We hung a shoe organizer on the door as a catch all for all our random stuff like batteries, headlamps, scissors, tape, velcro and the like. Velcro is like my new duct tape, it works for soo much in a RV!

And last but not least the decal on the outside of Stanley comes from WhatIsBlik.com its a Bodhisattva holding lotus flowers and spinning on the 1s and 2s.

Thanks for following!!

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