Hovenweep National Monument

On our trip out, we made plans to meet my parents, aunt and uncle, and family friends in Durango, Colorado.  It was a great place to stop, charge batteries, eat amazing food and rest for an afternoon. Bright and early the next morning we got up and drove to the Colorado/ Utah border to hike at Hovenweep National Monument.  We did an eight mile hike through the beautiful spring desert to some very remote ruins.  Being able to see these unique ruins so well preserved was amazing.  Thank you Susan for planning this expedition!

Lee's first desert hike!

The Utah desert was blooming, and we were lucky enough to hike with a friend who is a biologist.  It was awesome to be able to have plants and animals identified, even with the Latin name!

I'm just waiting for one of the dogs to step on something like this...

 We took full advantage of this, and stopped at every new flower and shrub.  The flora here is so different from New England, and beautiful in a very different way.

The collared lizards were out! 

The most amazing part was reaching the ruins and seeing how people lived in this area 750 years ago. The climate here keeps everything so well preserved that there are still the original wooden beams in place!                                                                                                                                                        

Beautifully preserved!

All of the mortar was filled with these tiny stones, I'm guessing to make it stronger.

Still hanging on, 750 years later!

A good hike was the perfect antidote to four days in a car, and a great way to get to know southern Utah.  I can't wait to keep exploring this area!

We're in Utah!

Hey there!  The past few weeks have been an insane blur.  In two months, we finished each finished a full semester of graduate school, did the majority of the renovations on the Airstream, worked, and packed up our whole lives to move to the Wild West!  To say it has been overwhelming and stressful is putting it mildly.  We were asked if we would ever do this again, and honestly I would never undertake what we did in the past two months again.  Given a year to complete a project of this size, I'd think about it.

There were, and will always be, roadside repairs

Anyway, we have arrived in Utah and have officially started living full time in the Airstream with little support.  Last night we parked at the Chuckwalla Trailhead right outside of downtown St. George.  It's a beautiful spot which was recommended by some rock climbers I contacted through Facebook.  It is very handy to have a Starbucks right down the road (thank god for free internet!) and a town large enough to get the things we need for plumbing and electrical projects.  Last night we meet the coolest couple who also have a 1977 Airstream!  We were messing with our inverter when another Airstream pulled into the lot.  They gave us tons of advice about the area, a heads up on a camping spot near a lake just up the road, and were a nice welcome to a new town.

More importantly, there is an In-and Out here!

Free campsites are the best!!!

Honestly, I am most excited about being in one area for more than 12 hours.  The drive out here was pretty intense, and 9 hours of driving a day was a bit much.  I passed a lot of time with audio books and arguing with the cat, but I'm glad to be here.  At this point the plan is to stay in the St. George area for the next few days, and then head north this weekend.  Lee started work today, and I start next Monday.  Here's hoping we can get a shower up and working in the next 24 hours!!

We finally begin to build!

We have owned "Lucy" since mid-November.  We leave for Utah on May 8th.  We just started building things.  No, this is not stressful at all.....

It only took six months to get to this point...

After months of talking about how the layout of the trailer was going to go, we finally have gotten to the point where we are actually putting it back together.  Walls are going up, cabinets will go in, and a bed will be built.

The framing of the first walls is in!

Because we intend to live in 31' of tin can, we are setting it up to only accommodate two people.  While some trailers are designed to sleep four to six people, we would rather have the extra room for activities.  If you want to come visit us, we will supply all the hot water and electricity,  but you will have to sleep in a tent.  Unless you are our parents (or Aunts/Uncles).  Than we will sleep in the tent (yeah, we'll rent a condo).  Our plan is to keep it as open as possible still, so most of our walls are only 24" deep.  The bathroom walls are deeper, as we also have built in wardrobes included in that area.  

The shower area

One of the exciting things to happen recently was the creation of the shower area.  I found this cool spray on epoxy that would seal the wall that will curve around the shower pan.  Because everything is curved and aluminum, we have been finding a lot of alternative ways solve problems.  Soon, a 32"x 32" shower pan will be installed here, a wall will be built and a hot water heater hooked up.  

Wood (and teacher) from Cornville!

We also have cabinets and countertops that will be going in before we leave.  We stumbled upon an "Airstream restoration" sale held by the one and only Mr. Hamilton (my 6th grade teacher) and now have beautiful live edge pine boards that I am sanding and finishing to be our kitchen countertop.  It is already looking beautiful, and I can't wait until I get to use it every day.  Our cabinets are a combination of pre-built cabinets purchased from the Habitat for Humanity Re-store and apple boxes that we got from Sweeter's orchard in Cumberland.  I love that there will pieces from the Maine towns I love permanently installed in my new little home.  

A rough idea of how things will end up

The Systems

Our hauling device.  Big, Dodge and Diesel 

One of the ways that RVs are classified is by what type of system they use.  Are you a propane and hook up RVer?  A portable generator type crew.  Or are you one of those hippy solar panel people?

You guessed it.  We're hippy solar panel people.  Lucy will be equipped with a 300 Watt Complete System from Renogy Solar.  We did a lot of shopping around, and this system was the best bang for our buck by far.  Since we do not own a coffee maker (French press only please....), a microwave, or a hair dryer, we should be fine with this amount of power.  To start we will have a set up of 6 Volt 225 Amp Hour deep cycle batteries.  By putting them in a parallel set up, we will create a 12 Volt system at a reasonable price.  If need be, we can always chain in another set of batteries, doubling our storage amount.

Besides solar, our other energy will be propane.  At this point, we will just use propane for cooking and our 5 gallon hot water heater.  There will be a mini propane heater in the bathroom, but we hope to do the majority of our heating this winter with a tiny wood stove.  The exact model has not been decided on, but there has been a lot of research into what we will need.
In addition to heating, we have also done a ton of insulating.  The way an Airstream is built leaves an inch and a half gap between the outside panels and the inside panels.  We chose to fill this with rigid foam insulation.  The endcaps were removed, spray foamed, and put back up.  That gives the whole trailer (other than the windows) an approximate R value of 6.5.  Hopefully this will keep us warm through Utah winters!

The most expensive piece of plastic ever...

The other significant modification was to remove the old (gross) RV toilet, and replace it with a new (clean) composting toilet.  While there are lots of DIY composting toilets out there, I am very adverse to.... smells.  We purchased a Nature's Head composting toilet (don't look at the price tag) and hope that it eliminates the smell issue.  We will report back once it is in full time use.....

At this point we are undecided about refrigeration.  Both a full electric and electric/propane refrigerators made for RVs are about $1000, and we aren't quite ready to commit to either of those quite yet.  We are going to see how a plug in "dorm sized" fridge works for now, and keep our eyes open for a deal that will make the decision for us.

So that is how we have set up the Airstream to run.  Trial and error will be the only way to see if it goes the way we hope!  As we begin actually living in it, we will probably make some modifications or scrap our plans entirely. We shall see!

Demo days 1-100

Originally the plan was to pull up the carpet in the bathroom, take out the dead mice, and roll with it.  However, the more we pulled things apart, the more we realized that a whole colony of mice had taken up residency and then used the walls as a mass grave.  We needed to take it completely apart...

It was still 1977 inside!

After two days of demo!

We also began to realize that the original interior made everything seem dark and small.  There were several renovated Airstreams that we had seen online that had fewer walls and overall just a lot less stuff inside.  Those were the ones we liked and felt like we could live in.  So we started ripping out everything we could!

The rear endcap was about to come out

The more we ripped out, the more dead mice we found.  And that slight smell of mouse droppings?  It never quite went away, no matter how much we cleaned.  So we kept removing more and more and more..

The front endcap taken out

This may have been the most stressful part of the renovation.  It was the end of March, we had a set date of May 8th to leave Maine, and there was water pouring into the interior every time it rained.  We still had to seal all of the holes, insulate and put the walls back up before anything else could happen.






 Thankfully, Lee has a great friend, Nick, who came and helped us replace flooring, put endcaps back in, and gave us a jump start on getting panels back up.  He has also let us borrow tools, which has reduced the overall cost of renovating and kept us from adding to the pile of things we just can't fit into our new home.













While gutting the whole trailer added several week of work onto this project, I'm so glad we did it.  There is no smell of mouse or mouse remnants, and we have high quality insulation in the whole trailer.  We also were able to inspect the frame and were happy to see that 90% of it is in awesome shape.  The sections that have rusted we treated with rust remover and painted.  Only one section needs some additional support welded in, which is pretty impressive for a 39 year old trailer.

So how can you afford this?

Probably the most common reaction we get, is people wondering how we are going to manage to actually survive, in a monetary sense.  Unlike a lot of full timers, we are not planning on having a traveling business, or moving far distances every month.  Also the fact that we haven't quite finished graduate school makes it a little more unique.

Hoping to see this view a lot this summer!

I have signed a two year contract with Apex Behavior Consultation, a in-home ABA based program.  This will provide (and pay for!) my 1500 supervised field hours that I need to sit for the BCBA (Board Certified Behavior Analyst) exam.  The graduate program I attend through USM is all online, and I will be able to finish my last four classes from Utah.

Lee has a summer internship in southern Utah at RedCliff Ascent, a wilderness therapy program.  In September he will return to UNH to finish his last semester of graduate school, and then come back to the Salt Lake area to find a job.

With our goal to "boondock" as much as possible (basically camp for free) and a solar system for electricity, we are looking at our regular costs being propane for cooking and heating water, and a monthly cell phone bill.  Not too shabby.


By keeping the Airstream mobile, we can follow the BLM regulations that require you to move 28 miles every two weeks.  Also, if we want to pack up and take a trip to the Grand Canyon or Colorado, all we have to do is secure loose items and hitch up.  While we may not put a ton of miles on the rig every year, we should be able live simply and play even more!

Two Airheads

Hey there!  I'm guessing if you are reading this, there is a pretty good chance you already know who we are.

Two Airheads on a mountain

If not, we are Molly and Lee, the Two Airheads who decided to buy an Airstream travel trailer for full time living.  About a year ago, we were sitting on the couch in our apartment and started talking about alternative living situations.  At the time, my aunt and uncle were traveling up the California coast in their Volkswagen van.  Both Lee and I brought up the fact that we wanted to do something like that.  Somehow, one of us mentioned an Airstream travel trailer, and a dream was born.  

Anyone who knows me, knows that I come up with a lot of ideas.  I think I say "Hold on, I've got an idea" at least ten times a day.  Rarely do those ideas every come to fruition.  Anyone who knows Lee knows that once he decides to do something, it's going to happen.  Put this together, and in November of 2015, we bought our Airstream.

The Rig in all it's glory!

"Lucy" is a 1977, 31' Airstream Sovereign with a rear bath.  We were fortunate enough to find her in Bath Maine, and fell in love, despite the yellow carpet in the bathroom and bright orange slipcovers on all of the furniture.  There was the scent of dead mouse inside, but not as terrible as one would expect from a 39 year old lady.  Because it was in such great condition, our original plan was to remove the grossest stuff, spend a summer living in it, and then renovate more. If only.....

The more we ripped out, the more we realized there was always a grosser level below what we had just removed.  Once we finally had it parked in our back yard, we went to town on it and stripped it down to the bare wires and exterior aluminum sheeting.

All of this had to go

And that brings us to now!  We are in the process of rebuilding and have less than a month until we are living in it full time!  This blog will be a way to show people what we decided to do with renovating our new living space, and as a way to stay in touch as we start our mobile adventure.