January 26, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 14.5: New Orleans

After a fantastic time at the beach in Destin, Florida, we headed further west on I-10 towards New Orleans.  We generally try to stay in every state we pass through, but unfortunately we didn’t really have time to visit Alabama and Mississippi, since we had to be at a wedding in about a week.  Sorry, deep South!  We’ll have to take a rain check until our next yearlong RV road trip.

The drive to New Orleans was entertaining for these Yankees, traveling over and past long, flat bridges through marshy terrain.  We saw the longest docks there we have ever seen.  The drive into New Orleans was a lot less fun, since we arrived on a Thursday afternoon at 5 p.m., and needed to get across the entire city in an RV pulling a car.  Luckily, having a giant vehicle usually driven by the elderly, with out of state plates, tends to earn a certain… caution from the locals.

Plus, as we discovered, if you really need to go across five lanes of bumper traffic in about 1/4 of a mile, it helps to be driving something huge.  Who’s going to stop you?

We stayed in an RV park just on the other side of the Mississippi River from downtown New Orleans and took a ferry across to the French Quarter.  We did your classic New Orleans tourist things:  ate beignets and drank chicory coffee at Cafe du Monde, then headed down the street for a muffuletta.  Heather says that muffulettas are “gross,” but objectively, she is wrong.  They are delicious.

(Ed. note: Heather would like to clarify that the “olive salad” on the muffuletta is what makes it gross, the rest of the sandwich is fine)

Black dress + powdered sugar = beignet badge of honor

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We had fun walking around downtown New Orleans and observing the revelry on a Friday night.  Since Louisiana has an enlightened policy towards open container laws, we were able to engage in a little revelry of our own as we walked.  As the night went on, we paused near a large group of teenagers in prom clothing, a group you might describe as “literally falling down drunk,” and just people-watched for a while.  Sure, the French Quarter is dirty, expensive, and crazy, but not many places party so well (or serve such wildly alcoholic drinks).

 

We promised our friend that we would be try to be cultured and not just visit the French Quarter in New Orleans, but of course that is exactly what we did.  We did salvage things somewhat, by doing an activity Jake had been dreaming of since his previous visit to New Orleans (six weeks earlier):  RIDING IN AN AIRBOAT!

Yes, we took an airboat ride through the bayou, and it was pretty great! The airboat we took was a little bit lower to the water than the one pictured below (read on for why that matters). And the swamp we toured actually bordered the state park that we were staying in, which was somewhat alarming.  So, we figured that the airboat tour, aside from being an exciting ride, was a good way to scope out any potential visitors to our RV.

Unfortunately, there weren’t actually many alligators out because the weather was unusually cool (70F), but it was fun just to ride around in the airboat.  There’s no motor sticking out below the water, so there’s nothing to get caught underneath as you drive around.  As we quickly learned, that means the drivers can and will drive them over and through anything:  lily pads, tall grass, logs, the shoreline, even giant piles of sleeping alligators (probably).

Our tour guide was a crazy redneck from the Louisiana bayou with a complete disregard for his own personal safety, in a good way.  He drove us to, and then parked directly on top of, the spot he claimed he saw a mama alligator with her babies earlier that day.  He then told us how that mama alligator had almost grabbed him unawares after he took one of her babies and posed with it for a picture, all the while just repeatedly poking the tall grass and the water with a stick he found.

Everyone onboard scrunched as far away from the menacingly opaque swamp water as possible.  Our guide then told us how a large alligator had actually jumped onto one of the boats earlier that year.  “Don’t worry, it didn’t get that close to the people, so nothing to worry about,” he said.  “Although… this boat is actually much, much lower to the swamp.”

Perfect.

It went on like this for a solid hour, blasting through creepy swamps at unnecessarily high speeds.  It was certainly a memorable tour.  We did get to see a few gators – they draw them close to the boat by tossing marshmallows into the water.  Apparently, gators like to eat marshmallows because they look like turtle eggs.

Unfortunately, that was it for our visit.  Just like most of the places we visited during this stretch, we wish we could have had more time in New Orleans.  We liked the taste we got, but there is a whole lot more we didn’t get to see.

However, we did have one final bit of excitement on our way out of the city, when the clips holding up our exhaust pipe broke after a long stretch of bouncing on Louisiana’s crummy roads.  We thought we heard people honking us at, and figured it was because we were driving too slow.  Turns out they were honking because we were dragging our exhaust pipe on the highway!  We eventually figured out what that scraping sound was, and pulled off at a Flying J, where we bought bungee cords and automotive tape.  We proceeded to MacGyver the shit out of that pipe.

After successfully strapping our exhaust pipe back into place with the bungee cords and a roll of tape, we headed out towards Texas.  With all the tape-related excitement, we didn’t make it as far as we had planned, so we stopped for the night about halfway there.  The town we stayed in?  Cannot make this up:  Sulphur, Louisiana.  Oh, and you know how we mentioned Louisiana’s “enlightened” attitude towards open container laws in New Orleans?  Well, in Sulphur (and elsewhere in the state), you can actually get drive-through cocktails.  Margarita for the road, anyone?

We figured we probably shouldn’t do much driving in a place where you don’t even have to leave your car to get you drink refreshed, and we ended up parking for the night at the Wal-Mart.  (Interestingly, the money-transferring station inside the store was preposterously busy – a lot of oil workers, we guessed.)  We rented Mad Max: Fury Road from the Redbox outside the store, made popcorn, watched the movie inside our RV (5 stars!), and then returned it, all without leaving the parking lot.

Night out without actually going out?  Check and check.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now:  We’re staying for two weeks in Riverside, California, where instead of blizzards it’s 70 degrees and sunny.  Your move, Northeast.

What’s next:  We don’t know.  Umm… stuff?

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  If you don’t like them, we’ll refund what you paid!

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.  To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 15: Rocketing Through Houston

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January 21, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 14: Flo-Ride-Ah

We left beautiful Savannah behind and turned the corner on the United States, officially transitioning from I-95 South to I-10 West near Jacksonville, Florida.  Exciting!  At least if you’ve basically been driving on just two highways for the last six months.  In fact, we’re still on I-10 today, very close to Los Angeles, after (slowly) taking it across the entire country.

Tallahassee Rain

The first stop on our westward journey was Tallahassee, Florida, basically just as a quick stop before heading somewhere more interesting.  We stayed for two nights, which is about the minimum we try to stay anywhere, since packing up and moving the RV can be kind of a pain.  Two nights turned out to be more than enough:  it rained continuously the entire time we were there.

At least we had a pretty campsite.

The RV’s bug shield is constantly tilted, making it look even more like a moustache.

Incidentally, there was a private walkway down to the lake we were parked above, but we never headed down there.  You see, Florida has a certain reputation for… crazy.  And not even just crazy, but ultra-, bath salts-level crazy, the kind of crazy that earns Buzzfeed lists and an entire section of the Huffington Post.  (Our favorite headline at writing time?  A toss-up between “Florida Man Breaks Into Jail To See His Friends, Police Say,” “Escaped Monkey Goes Bananas On Police Car; Eats Neighbor’s Mail,” and “Florida Man Bitten By Shark Kills It And Eats It As Revenge.”)  It’s the land of sunshine, alligators, and bad judgment.

All of which is to say that we are pretty sure we know what was down by the lake, and we weren’t going near it.

via GIPHY

Speaking of bad judgment, we visited a grocery store in Tallahassee that happened to be right next door to Florida State.  The shopping carts inside were amusing:  female college students with little but vegetables and diet soda, males with chicken breasts and protein powder, and an unwholesome amount of Easy Mac and boxed wine all around.

The parking lot was a zoo of a different kind, with the drivers displaying a combustible mixture of inexperience, obliviousness, and entitlement that made it one of the most harrowing drives of our entire trip.  Seriously – we narrowly avoided three accidents in a single row of the parking lot.  We might have driven across a mountain in the dark, but college kids with cars are a whole other level of danger.

Destin Sun

After narrowly escaping from Tallahassee, we headed farther west along the Florida panhandle to Destin, Florida.  Destin is a bit off the highway, and getting there required navigating past some giant, muddy puddles spread across the state highway.  Since we drive the equivalent of a war rig, we of course blasted straight through.  The RV was fine with this, but our poor tow car ended up covered with mud by the time we got to Destin.

“No problem,” we thought.  It had just been raining continuously for two straight days; we were still on the Gulf coast, and we figured another storm would wipe it clean soon.  Just kidding!  It didn’t rain again for 2 months, shortly after we gave up and got the car washed.

Muddy car aside, Destin was great.  It’s a beach town, with pristine white sand and gorgeous, warm, blue-green water.  We sunbathed on our awesome pirate towel (see picture in gallery), played frisbee, and considered never leaving.

I was trying to take a hot dog legs beach pic, but then Jake happened… #devotionstothefrisbeegod

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We stayed at a state park that was built right on the beach, in a space previously occupied by a freeway.  It was beautiful, quiet, and surprisingly private, and we wholeheartedly endorse the road-to-beach conversion.  However, we got hilariously lost on the way back from the beach to our camp site.  A long boardwalk connects the two halves of the park campground to the water, and we accidentally missed our turn.  We ended up on the wrong side of the park, and since it looks virtually identical (the park is symmetrical), it took us a while to realize it.

Fine, it happens.  Well, the campground on each side is built in roughly a figure 8 loop, and we walked the loop about 3 times before realizing what was wrong.  As it happens, the center-point of the 8 is a laundry station, and the people doing their laundry there expressed quickly-increasing bafflement as we proceeded to pass by six times while trying to find our RV.

Yeah… let’s just say we’re grateful to have GPS when we drive.

A happier highlight for us was having dinner and drinks right on the water, at a bar made from an Airstream trailer.  We sat outside where a local musician was playing the guitar and singing to, well, nobody else, and he was so grateful for our polite applause that he ended up playing some of our favorite tunes.

Listening to Sublime and drinking delicious craft beers by the ocean – does it get any better?

(That’s not rhetorical.  The answer is no.)

We can’t lie – this trip has been pretty awesome.

RECENT NEWS

What’s now:  Currently, we are staying on the Salton Sea in Southern California, a saltwater inland lake that looks pretty but has become extremely toxic.  A beautiful sunset over a shoreline covered with dead, rotting fish; it’s an interesting juxtaposition, to say the least.

What’s next:  We are staying for two weeks just east of Los Angeles.  San Diego and Death Valley await.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  We promise, no rotting fish pictures.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.  To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 14.5: New Orleans

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January 14, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 13.5: Walking in the Savannah

After a couple of days in Charleston, we continued our trek down south to Savannah, which is very close by.  We only spent 1 day walking around Savannah, but it was a city we’re definitely eager to visit again.  We’ve traveled all over the United States and to more than a dozen different countries between us, and Savannah is in the top 5 of prettiest cities we’ve ever seen.  (Prague and Singapore are the current leaders.)  If Charleston felt like a racetrack at times, Savannah is the mansion earned with the winnings.

Savannah claims the distinction of being the first planned city in the United States, and we wish more cities had copied its design.  The downtown grid features 22 civic squares, gorgeous spaces which are essentially manicured, shaded public parks.  The buildings are wonderful too, and everywhere you look, you can find expensive antebellum mansions with worked iron gates and fences.  (Of course, as civic plaques occasionally acknowledge, the city’s considerable pre-Civil War wealth was built on the backs of slaves.)

One local legend is that General Sherman of the Union army, who famously torched Atlanta and most of the rest of the South as part of his “March to the Sea,” refused to do the same to Savannah because he considered the city too beautiful to burn.  Probably false, but hey, if the “History” Channel can air a documentary claiming that aliens killed off the dinosaurs, we can choose to believe this one!  At least we have photographic proof that Savannah is, in fact, pretty:

We didn’t have much time in Savannah, but we made a few stops worth noting.  Namely, the great BBQ lunch we had in a converted travel trailer:

And our visit to Fort Pulaski, a former fort turned national monument with a rather amusing history.  Built in the 1830s and 1840s, the fort protects the entrance to Savannah from the sea, and it was designed to be impregnable to attack.  It sported an impressively thick wall, a moat, and close to 150 heavy cannons.  The fort was considered invincible once finished.

Of course, it is a historical truism that any story about something “invincible” always ends badly for that thing.  (See, e.g., The Titanic.)  In the case of Fort Pulaski, the fort was seized by Confederate militiamen prior to the beginning of the Civil War, but it wasn’t held long.  The Union army landed on a nearby island about a mile away – slightly longer than the range of the cannons inside the fort – and quickly installed a battery of newer, bigger guns there.

These new guns happened to have a much longer range than those installed in the fort, and like a man with a sword fighting a man with a spork, it was pretty one-sided.  After less than 36 hours of continuous barrage, the Union cannon were close to breaching the powder room and blowing everything to pieces, and the “invincible” fort surrendered.

It was over in less time than it takes to binge-watch every episode of Game of Thrones; unlike Game of Thrones, though, most of the people involved survived.

LAST BITS

What’s next:  We are still in Phoenix, making baby steps towards planning the rest of our trip.  We’re planning to head next to Quartzsite, Arizona, which is apparently some sort of crazy winter RV meetup location with pop-up vendors.  We’re envisioning a cross between a Moroccan bazaar and Iowa.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  You are statistically unlikely to regret it.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.  To see every road trip blog post, click here.

Next Post: Week 14: Flo-Ride-Ah

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January 12, 2016 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 13: Charleston Style

Happy New Year from Nothing Mundane!  We’re back with another blog post, covering our visit to the friendly Southern city of Charleston, South Carolina.  We were planning to write about Savannah, Georgia, as well, but the post was getting way too long, so we’re going to publish that one separately.  Of course, we’re way behind as usual, this time around three and a half months; we were there in late September.  We’ve thought about jumping to the present time, but for now we’ve decided to keep writing about the past.  For more recent adventures, please check our Facebook and Instagram feeds.

In case you are curious, we figure that if we don’t write about our past travels, we’ll probably forget about them, and that would be a real bummer.  In some ways, then, this is all just a love letter to our future selves.  Hope everything is going well, Future Jake and Heather!  Sorry about all those life decisions we’ve been making.

Drinking In The Town

Charleston is a great Southern city with a lot of history.  The city is a lot of fun, and we had a good time walking around downtown and taking photos.  The water is lovely, as are many of the buildings, although quite a bit of the area looks like it could use a new paint job.  We had some incredible food in Charleston, and even went on a mini-pub crawl for Heather’s birthday.



Birthday cupcakes for Heather!

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We took a million pictures because it was just so pretty. So many palm trees, bright colors, and beautiful buildings.

One highlight of our visit was over-stuffing ourselves with some traditional Shrimp & Grits and a “Charleston Nasty Biscuit” from the iconic Hominy Grill. It was probably the best fried chicken either of us has ever had.  We then tried to work off some of those calories by walking around the city, including through the beautiful campus of the College of Charleston.

We are total suckers for Spanish moss.

We were hoping to get a beach day during our visit, but unfortunately the weather did not cooperate. So, during our final, overcast day, we decided to check out Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island. We joined a tour group with some children, but decided that was way more learning than we wanted, so we ditched the tour group and just wandered around on our own.  A highlight was the long tunnels underneath the fort, where other visitors were taking advantage of the echoing and trying to imitate a wolf. We give them an A+, very realistic howling!  (Howling… howling… howling…)

Race Problems

While we had a wonderful time in Charleston, we must also mention that the drivers in Charleston are kind of insane.  Now, we grew up in the Northeast and lived for years in New York City, so it takes a lot to raise our eyebrows when it comes to driving.  The NYC metropolitan area, along with Boston, features some truly terrible, selfish, impatient, and unnecessarily aggressive drivers, but we haven’t see much of that type elsewhere in the country… except in Charleston.  Everybody drove fast, and simple things like making a left turn always seemed to require some pedal-to-the-floor madness.  Driving the RV through Charleston felt like pushing a car in neutral across an active NASCAR track.

But that’s all in the rearview mirror, and we managed to make it out of Charleston with nothing more than a couple of spilled coffees.  Plus, we coined a term we’ve been using ever since:  the “Charleston style” turn, for when roadways leave no choice except to gun the engine, close your eyes, and merge into a stream of cars that doesn’t seem terribly interesting in avoiding you.

via GIPHY

No Place Like Home

We did have one other interesting experience while in Charleston.  On our final night there, at about 1 a.m. in the middle of a thunderstorm, a tornado touched down about 5 miles from our RV.  We know this because we were awakened in the middle of the night by screeching alarms from our phones, which warned of an imminent tornado threat in our area and advised we seek shelter.  Our motorhome is, of course, not terribly tornado-resistant – maybe we should start attaching it to the ground using tent stakes – so we headed to the campground bathhouse, which didn’t seem all that strong but was at least made of concrete.

Now, there were close to 100 RVs at this campground, and we doubt any of them would hold up against the Big Bad Wolf’s huffing and puffing.  So we were more than a little surprised to only find about 4 other people, total, seeking shelter.  We guess everyone else decided it would be better to go down with the ship?  Or perhaps they were just hoping to be sent to Oz, where maybe they can find a brain.

via GIPHY

LAST BITS

What’s next:  We just got back to our RV in Phoenix, Arizona, after driving approximately 6,700 miles for the holidays.  (You read that right.)  We’re taking it easy for a few days.

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  All the cool kids are doing it.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Week 13.5: Walking in the Savannah

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December 15, 2015 In Road Trip, Travelogues

Week 12.5: Drinking & Driving in Charlotte & Asheville… Respectively.

Welcome back friends!  If you didn’t see it, we just posted a… post… about our RV renovations, where you can get a glimpse of our high-ambition, low-skill interior remodeling. The renovation was certainly a learning experience, and as the days go by, and our memories fade, it’s something that we might take up again in the new year. The bedroom won’t renovate itself!  [Ed. note:  Heather added those last two sentences unilaterally.  They do not represent the opinions of all Nothing Mundane affiliates.]

Returning to our road trip, we traveled from Richmond, Virginia to North Carolina, “Ol’ Northy,” and the metropolitan regions of Charlotte and Asheville.  Our mission:  have fun and mooch off our friends.

Charlotte

We’ve been to a lot of places on this road trip, and sometimes it can be difficult to find a good place to eat or fun things to do.  Well, we stayed in Charlotte with our friends the Casses, and one of the great things about visiting people is that they already know the cool things to do.  For example, we had dinner at a pretty sweet bar and grill called Lebowski’s, where the food was good and the excuse to run a picture of Jake’s “The Dude” Halloween costume was made plausible.

A surprising favorite stop in Charlotte was the Lost Duffer mini-golf course, which we tried on a whim.  The first half was hilariously easy, each cup placed at the bottom of a hole resembling a giant funnel, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel humiliated.  The second half of the course then went underground, into an “abandoned mine” that was definitely not “the basement of the building.”  It was dark enough that we sometimes had to play by phone flashlight, and the holes were humiliatingly challenging, but hey – you don’t play mini-golf to feel successful.

The whole experience was charmingly insane, and we would definitely go back.

We also toured the hip areas of Charlotte, stopping in for some iced coffee (served in a mason jar) which we foolishly ordered “to stay.”  Have you ever just sat around in a stylish coffee shop, drinking delicious coffee out of a mason jar, with nothing to do but talk to your good friends you haven’t seen in ages?  So boring.  We quickly pivoted to a game of 2-player reactor.

Let’s face it, human interaction is overrated, and if we’re being honest, we drank and/or gamed our way across the city.  We had great German beers at a local beer hall, combined with the first of many games of Carcassonne (a Nothing Mundane favorite and a great addition to any board game collection).  One highlight of this beer hall:  there was a corporate event being held there, and although almost everyone was dressed normally, one guy showed up in full German mountain-man regalia.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have!

One thing we’ve found on this trip is that, thanks to the craft brewing revolution, you can get fantastic beer anywhere these days.  (The tiny grocery store in Marfa, Texas – population 2,000 – had an entire refrigerator devoted to microbrews.)  And in a big city like Charlotte, the options are endless – we visited several great breweries just within a few blocks of each other.  Not a bad time to be alive!

Also, there were donuts.

Mmm, doughnuts #donuts

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

We made one final sightseeing stop in Charlotte, heading to the Wing Haven Garden and Bird Sanctuary to make some avian friends.  The founders of Wing Haven were a husband and wife who gardened extensively, nursed baby birds back to health, and did many other do-gooder type things. This resulted in a bird sanctuary that was overflowing with beautiful birds, right in the middle of the city.

At least, that was the impression given by the mandatory 15 minute introductory video, which looked suspiciously like it was shot in the 1970s.

Here in the 2010s, the founders passed away many, many years ago, and in the course of a half-hour walk around the property, we did not see a single bird.  We didn’t see any wildlife at all, actually, not even a squirrel.  We can’t complain too much, since the garden was pretty, and admission was free.  But would it be too much to ask for them to tie a bird to a tree or something, just to keep up appearances?

Is that a bird on the ground? Oh… no, just a rock.

Asheville

We hung out with the Casses for a few days, but before we left North Carolina for good, we took a day trip west to visit Asheville.  Asheville is a quirky, fun mountain town with fantastic 1920’s style art deco architecture, thanks to a decades-long economic depression that prevented any new buildings from being constructed.  Nothing preserves like bankruptcy!

Those days are long gone, and Asheville today is pretty trendy.  The brunch spots were jammed, but we persevered, and ended up having the best fried chicken biscuit of our lives at Southern Kitchen.  There were loads of cool shops, too – we wandered into a quirky gift store that had a display on RV living.  (We are trendy by association!)  It’s also extremely liberal, and it strongly reminded us of Ithaca, New York, where we lived for three years – particularly when we wandered by a streetside hippie peace festival, which aimed to stem the power of corporations via tambourine.

However, there’s certainly still a bit of Appalachia present.  Outside of one restaurant, we saw a guy in a bluegrass band playing an actual washboard, which is all it takes to make our day.

Blue Ridge Parkway

Our final adventure in North Carolina was on the way back from Asheville, as we drove along the Blue Ridge Parkway.  We only saw about 35 miles of the Parkway’s 470 mile length, but what we saw was insanely beautiful.  The scenery is gorgeous, with pristine rivers, lakes, and forests in front of endless mountains ridges.

We can’t possibly recommend this one enough, with one caveat:  the Asheville-to-Charlotte leg doesn’t have a clearly defined end point, so be careful where you exit.  We left the Parkway at a random point, and found ourselves more or less on top of a mountain in the deep wilderness, driving down the most switchback-y road in the history of switchbacks.  It was cool!  But it also took us an hour to go about 3 miles.

Photographing the photographer. #blueridge #blueridgeparkway #asheville #northcarolina

A photo posted by Jake and Heather (@nothingmundane) on

Dammit, Joseph!

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, “Ol’ Phoenie,” which is surprisingly pretty but disappointingly cold.  Tomorrow, we’re ditching the RV for a month and beginning a 5-day, several-thousand-mile drive back to the Northeast for the holidays.  We’re planning to stop in El Paso, Roswell, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Nashville, and who knows where else.  Wish us luck!

Obligatory social media self-promotion:  If you want to follow along and you haven’t yet, please Like us on Facebook and/or follow us on Twitter (@NothingMundane) and/or Instagram (NothingMundane) to make sure you get all the updates.  All the cool kids are doing it.

Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

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December 12, 2015 In Road Trip

Intermission: Renovation

We’re taking a break from our irregularly scheduled programming for some exciting news:  we renovated our RV!  Now, this may not be a surprise, since we’ve posted a few pictures on Facebook and Instagram, but we haven’t posted the full set anywhere yet.

The majority of the work was done over the course of about 3 weeks in El Paso, Texas, while staying with Jake’s mom.  We installed everything ourselves.  There will be some more details below, but a short list of the renovations includes:

We also added a throw rug and a new, custom artwork by Heather.  We may end up making some additional renovations, but we’re waiting until after the new year – 957 Home Depot trips in 21 days was enough for now.

Enjoy!

Before & After

Here’s a few pictures showing our RV before and after the renovation.  Our RV is from 2002, and although it was in good shape when we bought it, much of the interior looked very outdated.  Even if it were new, RV furniture and decor tends to look pretty crummy.  While the floor and countertops took a lot of work, many of these fixes were simple and relatively inexpensive.

As you can see in the picture above, we took up the ugly old green carpet and replaced it with vinyl “wood” flooring, along with a colorful and inexpensive rug.  Heather sewed new slipcovers out of fabric for the couch and the dinette cushions, and she also made some artwork to replace the mirror in the upper left of the “before” picture.  She also covered the window valances with new fabric. Oh, and we replaced the broken cupholder!

Another shot of the dinette renovation.  You can see Jake’s gigantic computer in the first picture, which he moved into a slightly less gigantic case. We also have plans to upgrade the table, and maybe replace the carpeting under the table with vinyl planks too.

The kitchen is where we did most of the work, and we’re really happy with how it turned out.  We installed a new laminate countertop, which basically glues onto the existing countertop, as well as a new kitchen faucet.  Laminate sheets are the worst thing ever to work with (all they want to do is chip and slice your hands), but we showed it who was boss. We also added a backsplash, which is really just a bunch of stick-on panels (shh, don’t tell anyone), and changed out the gold hardware with oil-rubbed bronze handles with a more modern profile.   Our favorite part is the new faucet – the old one wasn’t even tall enough for our pots to fit underneath!

A close up of the new countertop, faucet, and backsplash.  The countertop was purchased from Lowe’s, but we got the faucet and backsplash online.

Our tiny bathroom definitely looks a lot better now.  We removed the old sink, which was really small and cheap, and put in a new, copper sink we purchased online.  We also installed a “waterfall”-type faucet and a new countertop.  Because of time limitations, we didn’t extend the new flooring up and around the toilet, but we have some extra planks so we may do that in the future.

Close up of the new sink and faucet.  Amazon links for the interested:  sink, faucet, drain.

An overall shot.  We think it turned out great!  Note, we didn’t have a good overall “before” picture so we used a stock photo from the manual, but it’s extremely close to what it looked like.

DIY Fun

We haven’t tallied up the total cost of all the renovations, but it was probably substantially less than $1,000.  In part, this is because we did the work ourselves – we ripped up carpet, cut and laid flooring, glued countertops, and Heather even hand-sewed the slipcovers.  (It helps that we could only use the lightest, and therefore cheapest, materials.)  It was a ton of work, but we definitely learned a lot.

Here’s a gallery of in-progress pictures for anyone interested.  We included captions, and you can see the whole story by clicking on the first one and using the arrows to move to the next picture in turn.  Mobile users should also be able to swipe to get to the next picture. (Unfortunately, it looks kind of crummy on mobile – that’s something we need to figure out. For now, we recommend looking at it on something with a bigger screen.  We also uploaded the album to Imgur which may look better.)

LAST BITS

What’s next:  Currently, we are in Phoenix, Arizona, enjoying unseasonably warm weather and unreasonably pretty sunsets.  Soon, we’re headed back to the Northeast for the holidays.

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Shamefully missed a prior post?  We made a list of the most recent ones, just for you.

Next Post: Week 12.5: Drinking & Driving in Charlotte & Asheville… Respectively.

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