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New to Trippin’ With StanleyNew to Trippin’ With Stanley Who is Stanley? Well, Stanley is our RV! He takes us all around the U.S. to taste delicious craft beers and meet new friends along the way. We work from the road, Brian is a graphic designer and I am a...

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Austin = hashtag epic, hashtag awesomeAustin = hashtag epic, hashtag awesome As I type this I sit on a beautiful outside patio on S Congress at a coffee bar called Jo's. I am surrounded by Mac Book Pros and I can almost see all the tweets swarming around my head. I am sure...

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Sedona I'm glad I got to knowya!Sedona I'm glad I got to knowya! Here are some pics from our time in Sedona. We stayed with our good friend Brenden and his girlfriend, Britta, in Cottonwood, about 20 minutes from Sedona and Jerome. They were the most excellent...

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Golfing and Hashing in PhoenixGolfing and Hashing in Phoenix We had plans to meet up with our Nu friends Bill and Debbie in Phoenix after we left our troubles in Tucson. Maria was able to convince Debbie that it would be a good idea for all of us to go golfing...

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B-C-YessB-C-Yess In between our stops in Quartzsite we made a detour to Tempe to visit my friend Kevin and enjoy a long weekend of sports. The main reason we wanted to be in the Phoenix area was that the BCS National Championship...

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Happy Love Day

Posted by msdesign21 | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 14-02-2011

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The Stanley Crew wanted to share one of our favorite videos/artists/love songs with you today. I absolutely love Adele, if you don’t have her album it is a must have!! Her voice rocks my world, the song also has dual road warrior meaning.

Here are some other things we love:
Jayhawk basketball
Lawrence, KS
Our friends and family
Buddhas underbite
Ernie’s cuddling
Traveling in Stanley with friends!
Softball – especially Snakes on the Plains
The World Cup
Warm weather
hot tubbin’
Nu Friends
Good food
Great beer
St. Patricks Day
And comments on our blog!! 😉

Season’s Greetings

Posted by Brian | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 24-12-2010

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Buddha, Ernie, Maria, and I wish you and yours a happy holiday season.

Lesson Learned

Posted by Brian | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 05-10-2010

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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.

Renovations Pt. 1

Posted by msdesign21 | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 17-08-2010

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Ok, so I am waaay behind on these posts but if you can believe it or not, I’ve been kind of busy lately. I did successfully finish my thesis last week for my masters in Design Management. (I can do another post about that topic if people are interested) And now that we are on the road I have some catching up to do!

So the last time we talked about Stanley I introduced you to Gare Gare. The steps after the purchase seemed to be endless, so where do we start? The ugly fabric, that’s where! Ripped all that out of there, took down all the blinds and then started to remove all the cabinet doors for painting. Basically the rest of the steps that follow was to take out everything that was yellow/dirty (which was EVERYTHING) and prep it all to paint. Ripped out the carpet, took out the queen size bed in the back, attempted to remove the dinette benches so we could lay the laminate down, but that didn’t work, so they stayed in. The steps went on and on and on. One nice little idea we had, when taking everything out, we put all screens and hardware into individual plastic bags labeled with a sharpie so we knew what each screw went with. Right when you think you are done taking everything out, you realize there are about 20 other things you’ve missed.

The garage was a mess!

Ok so fast forward about two weeks, everything is out, we’ve begun the soaking process with OxiClean, by the way, the best cleaning solution EVER! It worked on just about anything i could fit into the small baby pool! I had been scouring the RV blogs and found two very helpful posts on soaking the Day/Night blinds in OxiClean and painting the inside of your RV. This forum provided a great tip, purchase PVC pipe with two end caps for soaking the day/night blinds as the longest ones we had were over 68″ and were too long to fit in our baby pool or the bathtub. Once we got the right size PVC pipe, this worked like a charm. I’d recommend at least 4″ pipe, 5″ if you can find it.

Dirty Yellow Blinds

filthy vent covers!

The second RV renovation tip comes via Jim on RVhobby.com for painting the interior of your RV. Turns out RV’s don’t have walls like you would typically find in a home, instead most RV walls use a technique that bonds a vinyl sheet to luan board. What does this mean? Well, it means that priming the walls takes a little more attention and effort that normal.

Scrubbing the walls

Scrubbing away, beer never too far away 😉

The TSP cleaner that Jim recommended really did the trick. Gare Gare must have been a smoker because everything in the RV was yellow, before the TSP and OxiClean got a hold of it anyway. TSP is nice because it doesn’t suds up and it cuts right through all the grime and grease on the walls to ensure the primer sticks. After cleaning the walls it was on to sanding

and masking.

Luckily we have incredible friends and were able to barter beer, baby haircuts and food in trade for help with all our steps. Big thanks to Scott, Ann, Angel and Jen for lending a hand!

Van's first haircut

Trading haircuts for labor 😉


Now everything is cleaned and prepped, so its on to the priming. We ended up going with Kilz Primer. This was the first time Brian and I have ever painted, so as it turns out, we weren’t very good! Luckily, it was just the primer and it didn’t really matter if you could see brush strokes going every which way. This experience did however trigger 1 of the 2 best ideas we had for the entire renovation, we ended up hiring a professional to come in and paint everything white. This was a great decision as the painter used a spray gun and everything was nice and evenly covered. It is always nice to do things on your own, but if you can pay $400 for a professional to come in and get it all done in 2 hours vs. your 2 weeks of time, it becomes VERY worth it.

Masking and painting help with Ann

I think the fumes were starting to get to us... goofy times ensued

maybe it was fumes... and beer!

Primed for paint

The white paint has been applied

White paint in the back as well

ah, white bathroom...

the white was soo refreshing after all that brown and yellow!

This concludes our post on Renovations Pt. 1. Part 2 will include applying the green and fast foward to the finishing touches. Thanks for following!

Old and Ugly!

Posted by msdesign21 | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 29-07-2010

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Some people ask, what made you decide to go on this RV adventure? Well, the story goes like this…

The idea was born the last night KU played basketball in the March Madness tournament, March 19, 2010. I was so disappointed in what was a huge upset by Northern Iowa and that night a friend, Johny Arkin, was watching the game with us. (Check out his cool video blog at nevernorm.com) He was talking about his plans to purchase an RV over the summer and ride around for a few months. Well, I just thought that sounds like the coolest idea ever and so it was, come August when our lease was up, it was time to make the road our new home. Needless to say that was the only thing that could have made me feel better about that night. I redirected my attention from our poor performance to how in the hell do I find, afford, purchase and work a RV?!?!

The story gets a little better from here. I spent the following month researching all kinds of RVs on Craigslist. I learned about the A Class (big ASS motorhomes) B Class are the vans and C Class are the slightly larger ones with a van chassis (van in the front, house in the back) with a bed above the cab. I knew there was no way in hell I could call home and say, I bought a van and we are going to live in it for the next 6 months, and the big ass motorhomes kind of intimidated me, so I figured C Class was the way to go. Well, I looked and I looked, from Craigslist Topeka to Wichita to Omaha all the way to San Francisco. I pretty much scoured every large city west and every small city in the midwest. I got a really good idea of exactly what I wanted. There are many different layouts, some with couches, some with double beds in the back, even some with the toilet in the back with no door!! I also got a good idea of price range and knew I could look past a crappy interior if the mechanics were sound.

FF two more weeks… One day Brian and I were driving to softball practice and I was complaining that I couldn’t find anything in the area for us to just go look at to get a better idea of size. Then we literally came to a detour in the road, had to take a right and there it was, just sitting on the corner in a parking lot with a for sale sign and all. We called on it and it was pretty much go time from there. We had the mechanics all checked out and two-toothed Gary had told us about a known fix for the generator. Gare-Gare as i like to call him bought the 1999 Jayco three years prior for $27,000 and was originally asking for $14,000, which takes me back to the crappy interior comment. It sure was a mess! He was a smoker, everything was yellowed and covered in ugly laminate. We sure got what we asked for, something to flip with sound mechanics. I talked him down to $10,000 and the rest will be in the following posts.

For now, here are some ugly yellow glimpses of what we were dealing with…


The one nice thing in the RV are those two side chairs. They are super comfy and were surprisingly in good condition.


Here is an up-close look at the lovely pattern that was vomited all over the RV. First things first, that has GOT to go!


Dinette on the left…


Dinette on the right…


At some point there was a leak on the roof. But before we purchased and after we starting talking to Gare-Gare we had some pretty torrential storms with no new leaks. I think they were able to seal it up a long time ago but since Gare just let it sit for so long it stained the walls and blinds up pretty good.


Here is a little before and after for you on the blinds. I never knew smoking could make something so disgusting. Just think what your lungs must look like! Thank god for OxyClean and the many RV blogs I scoured to find that it cleans ANYTHING!


Here is a glimpse of the kitchen, and yes that is Gare-Gare hiding in the back there. Isn’t the laminate just to die for! Yeah, I about died thinking of staring at it for the next 6+ months.


Back in the bedroom, where (I’d like to think with Gare-Gare) NO magic happened.


Probably one of my favorite old shots of Stanley. I love the tiny baby jail above the blinds. I mean REALLY?! what the hell is that for and who the heck thought they should put that on a wall. GOT TO GO!


Fridge with an ice maker! And yes, one more shot of the lovely Gary.

Thanks for following!

Meet Stanley

Posted by Brian | Posted in You trippin! | Posted on 26-07-2010

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Height: 11’4″

Length: 28′

Width: 8′

Stanley was born in 1999, but is mature for his age. In his short time on this earth he has lived in California, Kansas, and places in between.