What happened to the Paddy Wagon Tales?

As many of you know, during the pandemic, we bought the biggest, baddest Ford cargo van we could find, and Pat spent nearly a year transforming it into a mini travel home on wheels. Since 2022, when we started traveling with our dog Maya, we have traveled over 50,000 miles, including not one, but TWO cross country trips in 2023.

So if you’re wondering why I stopped blogging about vanlife, it’s because I DECIDED TO WRITE A BOOK about the crazy adventures and misadventures that we have experienced traveling in The Paddy Wagon.

Here is a sneak peek at the descriptions for some of the chapters I want to include:

• How to choose and use your toilet wisely

Pat gets credit for everything because he did most of the research, planning and construction of the Paddy Wagon, but I PICKED THE TOILET. And even after experiencing both toilet triumph and trauma, I stand by my choice.

• House rules for living in 90 square feet
  • Be patient.
  • Be flexible.
  • Be skinny (if possible)
• Cracker Barrel or Crapper Barrel?

Cracker Barrel, the homespun restaurant chain that allows vans and RV’s to stay overnight in their parking lots, is a crap shoot. The restaurant has both saved us (from a tornado) and scared us (i.e. the guy selling drugs all night out of a beat up, Breaking Bad-style motor home.) 

• Traveling in a van with a dog

If Maya could talk, she would probably say that the best part of van life has been sitting on my lap to watch the world go by for thousands of miles.

• And then there were two

Dogs.

“He’s little. You can squeeze him in,” my dog expert/daughter-in-law said when we unexpectedly adopted a little orphan poodle mix named Cookies. That is true. And false.

• Winter travel
  • Pros: no snakes, mosquitos, bears or crowds
  • Cons: it’s COLD. And even colder when your heater stops working.
• Sketchy rest stop

I experienced an existential crisis when a pervert at an Oregon rest stop referred to my widening, middle-aged butt as “nice.” 

• Public apology

To the rangers at an unnamed National Park and anyone who might have picked up a bag of dog poop that dislodged from under our windshield wiper, flew by my window, and likely landed with a splat on the side of an interstate highway: Sorry.

• The Jelly Belly Bait-and-Switch

Dear Jelly Belly, can you explain why all the signs off of I-80 that say  “California Welcome Center” lead to the parking lot for the Jelly Belly Headquarters tours in Fairfield, California? We arrived late, needed a place to stay, and were tempted to sleep in your empty parking lot overnight anyway. Would you have “welcomed” us in the morning? 

• My vote for the most “unwelcoming” state?

Oklahoma! For repeatedly warning us that “hitchhikers may be escaping prisoners.”

• The boons of boondocking

Boondocking is the vanlife term for camping for free in your self-contained van or RV. Of all the places we have boondocked, the best was on top of a mesa in Utah with 360 degree views of snow covered mountains, miles of endless buttes, and spectacular sunrises and sunsets.

• The boondoggle of boondocking

It was already getting dark when a violent thunderstorm hit us so hard we thought the wind might rip off the solar panels on our roof. Traveling on a bumpy dirt road that wasn’t wide enough for two cars to pass, we had to rely on GPS coordinates to find a dispersed campsite we reserved in the Allegheny National Forest.

“You have arrived,” the GPS told us, but there was nothing there.

What a liar.

• The truth about Buc-ee’s

Of course we took a selfie standing next to the eternally smiling Buc-ee Beaver statue in front of the Texas-sized travel center. With 100 gas pumps, Buc ee’s is the service plaza mountain that makes a traditional gas station look like a mole hill.

• NOT naked but definitely afraid

At the Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, we attempted to hike the 7 mile Wilderness Trail, which, we discovered, is NOT a trail. The ranger handed us a stack of papers with written instructions and photos of landmarks that was supposed to represent the path. But after wandering aimlessly through the “wilderness” for miles without identifying a single landmark, and after I tackled a giant, unleashed huskie that was about to attack Maya, we gave up. “At least it isn’t summer,” the ranger told me. “During the summer, there is quicksand down there.”

• Highway to Hell

If Pat didn’t want to see redwood trees so bad, we would have skirted up Interstate 5 through Oregon, no problem. But what we thought would be a few extra hours to visit California’s Redwood National and State Parks turned into an unexpected purgatory when our GPA led us over the coastal mountains on a narrow, rocky logging road with jackknife turns. We never found the Visitor Center.

• Between Gen Y and Nomadland?

If you want to travel in a campervan, beware of watching too many YouTube videos that depict happy millennials living in luxury vans and avoid the movie Nomadland, which made me think that Amazon warehouses are a sign of the Apocalypse.

***

More to come… let me know what you think!

***