Our Accidental Home Base
Junkyard set up, circa Spring 2019.
Now, this is a story all about how
Our life got flipped-turned upside down
How in a a moment that
Was a bit chaotic and hard
We created a homebase in a place called the Junkyard.
Chris and I don’t know anyone else who “full-times” in the same manner that we do. In fact. While we know of several people who have RVs, we don’t know anyone who currently lives full time in their RV. Youtubers don’t count. And even if they did, for the purpose of the blog post (i.e. sharing the odd way we ended up where we are) while a Youtuber may share some of their story, there is always a lot more to it. This is all to say that we don’t know how people who live in RVs typically make life decisions. Maybe it’s hard to really understand how people make life decisions in general. But in this scenario we can’t even pretend to know.
Let me tell you a story about the Junkyard.
In 2005 my dad purchased this piece of property, 5 acres, as a place to store extra construction job stuff - both big equipment, leftover lumbar and job site material. He was familiar with the property. As a kid himself his dad, my grandpa, would bring his cars (everything from his gem a 1957 Chevy Belair 4 door hardtop to decades later his 1982 Chevy Silverado pick up) to the Bidwell’s auto shop that was on the property - that shop has since burned down.
The property also had, and still has, a barn on it, and the people who owned the auto repair shop had renovated the upstairs of the barn on the property into an apartment that they lived out of. We would live on the property for a year before we saw the apartment. It is both a creepy and fascinating step into the dusty past.
It’s a shame my dad didn’t own it when I was little. My sister and I would have had a blast playing make believe in that apartment and exploring the untamed acreage. But, lucky for me I instead get to watch my kids explore it just as I would have. I guess exploring this property as a kid skips a generation! So while it has been owned by my dad and rented by my dad’s business for fifteen years, my first introduction to this land happened 3 years ago in a moment of pressure and panic as an RVer.
Our annual site at La Conner Thousand Trails circa 2016.
It was the tail end of 2016 and Chris and I were just nearing a full year in Lady Jupiter. Our annual Thousand Trails site in La Conner, WA was about to expire. We knew we weren’t going to opt to renew the site, and in turn we assumed this meant rotating between 3 local Thousand Trail parks over the course of each month and spending one week “out of the system” as our membership required. But true to our life structure we didn’t have a lot of time to sit down and talk about our new plan of attack. We were in the crunch of Christmas with little ones, and on top of Chris’s full time work at his own company, I was still working 4-6 days a week at my own acupuncture clinic.
My dad had generously suggested we check out boondocking on this property of his a couple of weeks prior. I had eagerly driven by and found myself not at all interested. Compared to the sheer beauty of La Conner, the Salish Sea lapping at the beach, and full hook ups to rely on, the idea of being parked next to a run down barn did not appeal to me. It didn’t help that it was dreary out and I just wasn’t excited about much at all with 4 more months of rain ahead of us.
When the pressure truly began to apply itself, the clock ticking, and Christmas carols reminding us more and more that we were due out of the park just days after the festivities, we went and took another look. This was Chris’s first look and he saw potential. Neither one of us thought for a second that this would be home base, but he saw it as a real means to an end. Plus he saw the convenience of being so much closer to work - it was at least 15 minutes closer to work for both of us.
There was one outlet that we found that we could hook up to. No sewer, no water, but yes, 15 amps of power. Our rig much prefers to run on 50 amps. And on New Years Eve of 2016 we drove into the Junkyard and plugged in. We ran on our fresh water tank (40 gallons sitting in there at the time), ran our propane as our primary source of heat, and stayed until our tanks were full and we needed to both dump our black & grey tanks and fill up our fresh water. Or at least that would have been the moment we chose to leave if we hadn’t tripped the fuse on the one outlet we had access to just 5 days into being there.
We had been vlogging back then, which helps me keep track of dates these days, but we didn’t vlog consistently enough to fill in all of the blanks. I know for certain we left after we tripped the fuse (we didn’t have access to the inside of the barn to flip the breaker), and there is a very high probability that we then launched on a trip down to California for Chris’s work. By end of January we came back, settled back in for a few days, out of sheer ease I suspect, and in the process we filmed a vlog about the barn (soon to be referred to as the junkyard) and how it would never be a home base but would be part of a series of locations we would rotate through as we needed time outside of the park system. Ironic that not only did we make that comment in that video but that I also made an off-hand comment about how even though we had just 15 amps of power our batteries would supply the rest - only to have Chris point out that that type of technology was not built into our RV, that we would not be able to use any of the battery’s power while hooked up to shore power. That technology, that I just assumed was a thing that we had is called Load Assist - and we JUST got that installed as part of our solar upgrade two weeks ago. Just goes to show you that there are some things that new RVers just expect in their rigs because technology is at a point to support it, it exists, but that the RV manufacturing companies aren’t implementing. I guess they aren’t yet feeling the pressure to create a product nuanced enough to support their growing (and younger, more techy) consumer base
Junkyard set up circa spring 2017.
Anyhow. This time we found a second outlet to utilize and we were sipping pretty on closer to 30 amps. Still no other hookups, but we made it work. Sometime that spring we got permission to hook into the sewer system (there was a drain beside us that we could tap into). And by October of 2017 our friend Jeff drove up from Sacramento to build us a 50 amp hook up off the existing power box on the outside of the barn. Now we had 50 amps directly as well as access to two 15 amp outlets for external use (we use them for an auxillary heat dish as well as LED lights under the rig and now for a pest deterrent sound machine).
The concrete slab setting circa 2019.
Our final two site upgrades both finalized in 2019, first a lovely cement pad was poured for us to park on (thanks again to my dad and his crew), with gravel all around it and a soft slope leading up to it on all sides, and last by not least water was brought over from the road and a pedestal set up for us to hook up to. Up until that point we had been using a 30 gallon water bladder in the back of my little car to fill up at either my office or Chris’s with water via a hose, drive back to the Junkyard and then pump it into the RV.
Pumping water into the rig.
Each of these upgrades has been phenomenal. NOT having full hook ups had been a defining feature of our lives. We made decisions about our day, our week our weekend with the kids based on what basic needs we needed to meet. Did we need to dump tanks? Okay, that meant we were packing up the RV that week. Was it so bitterly cold that we needed 50 amps of power so we could run not just the propane but also our electric heaters? Then we needed to be at a campsite for the coldest weeks of that month. Or maybe we were running out of water, again, and I’d have to set aside time to haul water home or bottle feed the RV, liter by liter to get us through a day or two until I had time to go get water. By the way, that solution is far more pleasant in the middle of summer than it is in the middle of winter, but I’ve done it multiple times in both conditions.
Living in an RV isn’t just about travel and adventure. And it isn’t just about breaking down and upgrading to super cool solar power. It is a different set of problems. I really would only suggest it to people who like puzzles, or at least don’t mind being a little over their head, or living rough for a few days while you try to solve a problem. You have to be a little light on your feet, and preferably, perhaps essentially, you have to have a good sense of humor.
Although we didn’t intend to do it at all, we have been using the Junkyard as our home base, aside from travel, for nearly 2 years. By that I mean, our first year at the Junkyard, we also stayed quite regularly at other Thousand Trails campgrounds, though not nearly as often as we originally expected. The hook up situation could be mentally and sometimes physically exhausting, so going to a campground was sort of a luxury. After we got the electricity sorted out (but before we had running water or a nice elevated cement pad to park on) we found we preferred the Junkyard, and we’d stay there for a week or two before going back to a campsite.
But why? What had changed so much to make it feel like home? It wasn’t a perfect set up for us. Whatever the reason, it seeped in slowly, and I can only recognize it in retrospect. Ultimately I think it comes down to how the kids embraced it, how much we ended up loving the neighborhood and town, and finally the sense of familiarity and freedom that bloomed unexpectedly as we came back again and again.
The kids, of course, adore the wild aspects of the property. The more run down the better, the more antique, the more fascinating it is to them. And with monster blackberry bushes eating entire tractor tires in the summer, and us eating our weight in blackberries it’s no wonder we found such enjoyment here. For me, this is where my routine life as a bonus mom set in, and perhaps no matter where we were these years were bound to be extra sweet. We got settled at the junkyard by the end of 2017, early 2018 and I had been with Chris for 3 years. We were a cohesive unit, him and I and the kids enjoying our weekends together. When we finally got access into the barn and the kids discovered the abandoned apartment upstairs their imaginations went wild. Best of all, they found quick and steadfast friends in the neighborhood. Two sets of kids nearly identical in age came out of the woodwork to join in the adventures that can be had in an old barn and sprawling property full of lumbar, work trailers and shipping containers. More than the big houses the neighbor kids lived in, or the tidy yards, it has been the Junkyard that most appeals to all the neighborhood kids. It is not uncommon for us to have half a dozen kids coming and going from our 200 square foot abode (every 15 minutes no less, Chris would like me to add). There is no way we could have known what a gift this would be to the kids, and what a crazy intimate sense of connection, family and friendship this would afford us.
Being less than a 15 minute walk from downtown, albeit a small town, has also been very satisfying. Once we adopted Levi, our little pup, it has been even more enjoyable to walk a loop into town and back, to watch the town shift from season to season with adorable lights twinkling in the winter, the street festival in the spring, and less than a block away each summer the county fair sets up. When I took the older kids on the Zipper ride two summers ago, each time we got to the top we could see the RV, tucked just half a block away. It was a unique kind of magic.
What is most unexpected is how nice it is to have a home base. And yes, we really like that it doesn’t have a 5mph speed limit, or neighbors parked next to us. But mostly, it feels good to have a known entity to come home too after travelling. Even back when we had such limited resources here, we still knew how to pull in, where to park, how long it would take us to get to work, and which grocery store sold my favorite coffee.
We have been here for 3 years - and this place we quite clearly stated would not be any sort of home base, has become perhaps the best place I have ever lived.
My dad is getting ready to sell the property, it’s time as an overflow work site nearly done. Chris and I have shared several long looks at the place, running numbers and day dreaming - trying to see if we should be trying to find some miraculous way to purchase it, and boy we are tempted. It certainly doesn’t seem doable at the moment, but I always leave a little room for a miracle. I also like to think that this place may be where we learned a lot about what we want out of a home base, and how to recognize a good opportunity when it arises. Or how not to judge one that doesn’t look so ideal but is safe to try. Peek behind all the doors, my mentor tells me. It doesn’t hurt to look.
We may not be here for the rest of the year, we may have to say goodbye to this place that has given us so many great moments that will be weaved into our future blogs, podcasts, and deeply embedded in the childhood memories of our kids. It's okay. Life is an adventure, and maybe our next home base will be back on the water, or closer to where the kids go to school, or will be part of a community of tiny home dwellers, who knows. There are so many aspects to life that are important to Chris and I. I like to think of the essences that make us really thrive, rather than just the form they take - and from that I can find the gifts each form or situation gives us.
La Conner gave us: Safety, Beauty, Camaraderie.
Life on the road gives us: Adventure, Wonderment, Growth, Friendship
The Junkyard has given us: Freedom, Ease, Familiarity, Connection & Friendship.
There is absolutely more for us to experience, in our life in Lady Jupiter. Living in an RV requires that we move, and in that nomadic aspect of our lives we invariably help ourselves to all sorts of essences that we might otherwise not appreciate. In reality we never expected to stay at the Junkyard, or call any place a “homebase”. In the end we found that while we don’t want the commitment and immovability of a sticks and bricks home, we do really enjoy familiarity - as long as we get regular doses of novelty, beauty and adventure. We want it all. And we are lucky enough to be forced to imbibe in it all, even if sometimes it can feel forced upon us (travelling when we’d rather be stationary, or being stationary when we really want to be on the road). They both offer us unique gifts, and each new place that we park offers a subset of gifts that we are so appreciative of.
Who knows where we will be next. Maybe we’ll be here, calling this old barn property our homebase for another three years or maybe we’ll be trying to figure out where we want to park in three months. We don’t know. But then again, we didn’t know this would be a good fit for us to begin with, so maybe not knowing isn’t such a bad thing after all.