Getting Your Edge: How to Rightsize your Home and Life.

Our Van Life Adventures

• Dennis Day • Season 2 • Episode 53

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What happens when you swap a traditional home for a 19.5-foot van and hit the open road? Join us as we chat with our lifelong friends, Don and Gae Taylor, who took the leap from their West Seattle life into the world of van living. After years in the software development industry, Don decided it was time for a change, supported wholeheartedly by his wife, Gae. Together, they embarked on an adventure across the U.S. and Canada, sharing with us the emotional rollercoaster of downsizing and the unexpected pause their journey faced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Dennis Day:

Hello everyone. This is Dennis. I've got a great show for you. I have a friend of mine who I've known since eighth grade, maybe seventh grade, and they have taken a trip around the US many times. They're here to discuss their van life and their experiences. Tell you some. Gratton, hello, judy, hello, hello, you're looking great, thank you. And here's my friends from a long time, don and Gay Taylor, say hi. Don and Gay Taylor, hello, hello. I'm really excited because Don was my best man at my wedding and we've been friends forever. We've managed to stay friends since like 13. That's pretty amazing. We've managed to stay friends since like 13. That's pretty amazing. He had.

Dennis Day:

These two folks had experience of a lifetime driving around the US and Canada in their van. They had sold their home. So we're going to talk about that. Before we do that, I want to mention that the Edge Group team is the premier downsizing real estate team. We know how to do downsizing real estate team. We know how to do downsizing. If you're ready to downsize, give us a call or go to edgegroupteamcom and let us know. We say more, less house, more home and discover downsizing with us. That's it for the promo. Let's get going. Don and Gay Taylor, tell us about your experience of switching from a home in West Seattle to a van life.

Don Taylor:

In 2013, I'd been in front of a computer for a minimum of 40 hours a week for 33 years, writing and developing software systems. It was a good job, it paid decently, we had a nice life, our family, and I was absolutely sick of it 33 years. I asked for three months off and my boss said oh, we couldn't possibly let you leave for three months. So I went home, wrote a resignation letter and I quit. I had talked with Gay, my wife, earlier about how much I was sick of my job and she said why don't you quit? And I said we have a mortgage. She said we'll sell the house. All of that played into my resignation letter. I submitted that and we set off to sell our house, emptied it out, hired a realtor.

Don Taylor:

In May we had a small 19 and a half foot camping van, a road trek that we had used on numerous trips and enjoyed quite a bit.

Don Taylor:

So we decided that we would drive around the country and go visit friends and family and see new sites, and so that's what we did. We put all of our stuff in storage that we knew we wouldn't be able to replace without me going back to work, and I really didn't want to go back to work and so we sold and gave away a lot of stuff and got a 10 by 12 storage space and stuffed everything else we had in. We hit the road in September, closed on our house sometime in late October from Vermont, kept going for seven more years until COVID put the kibosh on convenient travel through van. Everything closed and the things that you need, no matter what, are a place to take a shower, a place to dump the van, everything closed and the things that you need, no matter what, are a place to take a shower, a place to dump the van and, occasionally, a place to stay and plug in. All those became unavailable and everything shut down.

Don Taylor:

We put ourselves in Denver at that at her brother's house, much to his joy.

Judy Gratton:

Gae, were you working at that time? What were you doing when he came up with wanting to quit his job and do this great thing? How did you feel about that? What was going on in your world?

Gae Taylor:

I was laying out by the pool eating Bon Bons. What was I doing, Dan?

Don Taylor:

Taking care of animals, taking care of the house, taking care of everything except going to work for 40 hours.

Judy Gratton:

That's a lot.

Don Taylor:

As I found out, much more than 40 hours of work a week. Yes, I can vouch for that one.

Judy Gratton:

But to go you had to clear out the house. What were the financial and emotional effects of doing all this? Getting ready to go? Was it joyful?

Gae Taylor:

It was After we got going. It was joyful. I had spent a year writing down everything we spent, what we spent it on trying to figure out our bottom line. I went through room by room. I started with the spare room. I took a bag and just I got two of these. I don't need this one, I don't need this. And then it got easier and easier to throw things in the bag. We had the Goodwill box, the Save box, and saved way too much Christmas stuff. Oh yeah, I can't give up that.

Judy Gratton:

But it was fun. Wow, that's good to know. I know a lot of people. It's really hard to let go of things.

Gae Taylor:

It was for me too. But I talked to this lady who used to sell herself as the declutterer at church, so I invited her to my house to see if she could kickstart me, and I'll tell you, by the second bookshelf I was like I think I got it. I was really letting go. Good, I haven't missed any of it. I don't even remember what I gave away.

Don Taylor:

We stored a lot of artwork, books, tools, very little furniture, a few things that I knew we couldn't replace, but a lot of it was not necessary. I should have followed Gay's lead and gotten rid of more stuff. We wouldn't have had those things to move, which we moved twice. When COVID hit, we moved in with my brother-in-law and I thought let's quit paying on storage. We moved all of that stuff to Colorado and stored it in our crawl space in his basement. Then, when we got tired of sharing his space when he was working from home, we moved it all back up to Seattle when we found a place to live.

Gae Taylor:

But we didn't know we were coming back to Seattle. We thought we were looking for our forever spot out there in.

Don Taylor:

Colorado. Colorado is pretty central, so it could have been anywhere.

Dennis Day:

So your West Seattle home was 1,700, 1,800 square feet 1,800 square feet. And then you went down to.

Don Taylor:

We're in a 900 square foot home now.

Dennis Day:

In your van you went from oh 92. 92 square feet in the van.

Don Taylor:

There's an aisleway between the bed and the driver and passenger seats, with a third seat on the side, and then all the rest is either cabinet or countertop with sink and cook space, or toilet. Not much room.

Gae Taylor:

It's smaller than a beach towel size. Wow, you guys have to like each other. A lot, people told us when we started off. The neighbors were like I give you two weeks to be back. You'll be sorry, you sold your house.

Don Taylor:

Never reached that point.

Gae Taylor:

People asked did you fight a lot in the RV? No more than when we were in the house. No more and no less.

Judy Gratton:

So it was just the two of you then in your RV going down the road.

Don Taylor:

And a German Shepherd and two pugs. We had to rehome our cat. I refused to have a cat box in the same space I lived in, and so we had to rehome our cat. That was a heartbreaker, but we had our three dogs when we started out.

Judy Gratton:

They're all gone by now They've gone by now, okay, yeah.

Don Taylor:

But it's been a long time, over 10 years.

Judy Gratton:

That's true Three dogs and you. What were some of the other challenges that you encountered living in an RV?

Don Taylor:

When we initially moved in. You just have to get used to the space, and we weren't used to it. There were a lot of bumps and bruises and scrapes from knocking our heads and shins into things. That took a while to get used to. Fortunately, the design had a decent amount of storage space. We quickly established exactly how we could stuff everything in there. We needed year-round clothing. We needed winter clothes and summer clothes.

Gae Taylor:

Women's clothes and skiing clothes yeah.

Don Taylor:

All the usual things, the only thing we didn't. What's that?

Judy Gratton:

You brought all, then your wardrobe for all seasons.

Don Taylor:

One thing we didn't have was any kind of formal where we got invited to a wedding and I had to go buy some clothes to wear to the wedding because t-shirts and jeans wouldn't cut it.

Judy Gratton:

I love the goodwill. It's great for stuff.

Dennis Day:

Now did you guys set out Sorry, go ahead. Don, go ahead with your question. Did you want to explain more about transitioning?

Don Taylor:

We set up a mail forwarding service. That was one key thing. We needed to keep getting mail and there was a local mail forwarding service in West Seattle, just a couple blocks from our house. We set up a contract with them and then we used to getting the mail delivered. Our first mail delivery was to a tiny post office in Maine. We went out to Acadia National Park and had general delivery done and it worked like a charm. One recommendation don't ever general delivery across the border. We did it once in Canada and it took 13 days, but it's great for the US, Usually two to four days.

Judy Gratton:

Did you have to wait the 13 days, or did it just go on to somewhere else?

Don Taylor:

No, it made it and we waited.

Gae Taylor:

But we're in Alaska. No, we weren't.

Don Taylor:

We were in Whitehorse, british Columbia. They have an Olympic training center there with an Olympic-sized pool and lots of beautiful places. We didn't have a problem hanging out there. That's where we stayed the whole time. The mail forwarding was something we had to set up, nothing in particular. There's a shower in our RV, but it's set up so that you run a shower curtain around the middle of the van and we never used it. Using all of the water supply to take a shower seemed like a foolish approach for being able to stay in the van. So we looked for public pools. That was a part of our travel plan. Look for public pools or occasionally staying at RV parks. We've got a Passport America discount pass paid half price. There are a few things that you have to pay attention to get away with it without having to go back to home base, which we didn't have you had mentioned dumping the van and I'm like maybe we need to clarify.

Don Taylor:

It's a house on wheels, including the sewage system and the freshwater supply system and all that. Our particular model a 10-gallon black water tank, which is where the toilet goes. You don't want that to overflow. I can guarantee you that that's a bad idea, and so you have to make a point of tracking down a place to empty it. Ours lasts about 10 days, so every 10 days we would find a place in driving distance or less than 10 days. We'd plot it out whether it is a RV campground or some other public campground, a dump site.

Don Taylor:

There were places in the middle of nowhere in Wyoming that had public dumps. You pay $5 and you empty the van and that's probably the most unpleasant process of living in a van having to do that process. Our setup is so small, it only takes five minutes. It's not really a very big deal, it's just very pleasant.

Gae Taylor:

It's only a big deal if you screw up.

Don Taylor:

Take your foot off the side. I wrote it up in the. We had a blog and I wrote it up in the blog because it was pretty darn funny. We were trying to rinse the tank. It was a used RV, let's rinse this thing. So I had gay man, the little wand that sprays, to put down into the toilet to spray it out. I was outside making sure the drain was hooked up to the dump site. She didn't realize that the thing spun around and got splashed in the face. It was brand new so it wasn't foul yet.

Gae Taylor:

It was clean water. Don was mad at me.

Don Taylor:

And she was pretty mad at me too. And so then we switched places. I said, fine, I'll work the wand, you come out here. And I said here's the outflow pipe. It's pointing into the hole in the ground to dump the thing. Whatever you do, keep your foot on this thing so that it doesn't move. And apparently I said it too fast or didn't say it.

Gae Taylor:

I said pull this knob and pull this lever. I took my foot off to get to the knob. That was a bad idea.

Don Taylor:

And then I was flipping in, it wasn't. There might have been some swear words. So anyway, it was ugly a little bit, but thankfully for Gay he never had to do it again.

Don Taylor:

So there you go. It became my sole duty. So there's that. What about laundry and things like that? What do you do with your clothes? We have a big laundry bag that slowly got filled. When we got either convenient to a laundromat or down to a floor on clothes, we'd seek one out and use a public laundromat to clean everything up. We'd spend a couple of hours there every I don't know several weeks, two or three weeks.

Gae Taylor:

We met so many wonderful people at those laundromats. So many stories.

Don Taylor:

So that was another thing that you're dependent on. You need to look up and plan on taking care of.

Judy Gratton:

Now, did you sit down before you did this and plan all these things out? You mentioned the mail, which I would never have thought of. I'm sure I would drive off and never get mail again. The laundry I know I've seen in Washington state that some of the rest areas do have places to dump the dark water out of RVs. Did you find that all over the country or no?

Don Taylor:

There are some states that do have those. There's a public part that I use and it shows finds you on the map and then it shows various places that you can go to and whether they cost money. I use that extensively to find places. Oh yeah, water. Some went to the water treatment plant in Augusta, maine.

Gae Taylor:

Where do you get water?

Don Taylor:

So that was the other thing. We've gotten water from places, people's houses we've stayed at. We have gotten them from RV parks. We have gotten water from one convenience store in one town where we were staying. They had an outside faucet. I went and asked if we could get some water and he said help yourself. Water is generally available everywhere. Water is not as welcome. It's unchlorinated and so that's less welcome to put into the RV. And we did have to clean out the freshwater tank, put a little bit of bleach in it and flushed it once during the trip.

Gae Taylor:

But we didn't drink that water.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, we didn't have any issues with freshwater. You just have to watch your amounts. The tank on our van was, I think, 35 gallons, which is about 10 gallons too much. We would have to dump before we run out of freshwater. So all you're doing is hauling extra weight. So we would generally build the freshwater tank about half full and that would last for as long as it would take to get to a dump site, and almost all dump sites have a freshwater potable water.

Judy Gratton:

Did you not want to leave it in the tank because it would get old and make?

Don Taylor:

you sick? We were living in the van, so there was no chance of that. We cycled through the freshwater.

Dennis Day:

Did you go in and right at the time you sold your house or near it, did you sit down and plan your route?

Don Taylor:

No, we're not much on planning. Currently. Gay's brother and his wife were staying at a fancy resort on Cape Cod, across the country, about the time that we were.

Gae Taylor:

They called and told us that they were going out to Cape Cod and they had this really nice place. We invited ourselves, and then we drove as fast as we could. We got there right after they got the room.

Don Taylor:

Yeah. So we went there and our main driving force was the climate. We didn't want to have to deal with freezing climate. Our RV is not fed up to cope with that stuff. The lines and tanks are underneath, on the outside of the vehicle, so we did not want to have to deal with freezing lines, replacing lines embedded through the van and all that stuff. So we followed the weather north when it got hot and south when it got cold, and so that was the general pattern. But in between there's lots of places to go and lots of people to see. Our initial thing Gay called it our Christmas card tour, because my wife has kindly sent out 100 cards a year at Christmas time to friends and family and people we haven't seen in decades. We would show up in their town and call them up and ask them if they would like to get together for dinner, and so we got to visit with all kinds of people we hadn't seen in ages. It was all kinds of fun, it was really fun.

Judy Gratton:

Did you hit all the states? You said you went to Canada.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, we hit all the states. You said you went to Canada. Yeah, we hit all the states. We didn't spend any time exploring Kentucky, just by chance. We didn't stop, make a point of going into Kentucky. We hoped to go to Louisville, but we never did that. We passed through Kentucky and we went through West Virginia, went through all the states, including up to Alaska. Drove all the way up to Alaska, spent almost a month in Alaska and we'd like to go back because we missed some of the biggest national parks there. Made it up into Canada, toured all the way around Nova Scotia, went to Newfoundland, labrador.

Don Taylor:

I did not visit much in eastern Canada except Toronto We've driven across Alaska a few times or Canada trying to get to family reunions in Michigan, where it's from.

Dennis Day:

What are some of the highlights then?

Don Taylor:

We really enjoyed the trip up to Alaska. That was quite spectacular. You can't really drive anywhere without spectacular views and sights. We got up to Denali and we're one of the lucky 40% of visitors who actually get to see the mountain because it's not covered in clouds. It was beautiful when we were there.

Gae Taylor:

Tell me how we did it.

Don Taylor:

One thing if you travel with animals, you have to be careful about heat. If you want to leave them alone in the van, you've got to be able to keep them cool or open the doors or take them outside or give them whatever they need.

Dennis Day:

In.

Don Taylor:

Bali we can't, and the temperatures were quite hot. It was the springtime but it was already getting pretty hot, so we had to split up. There's a four-hour bus ride to the interior lodge at Denali. I went one day and then the next day Gay went and I stayed with dogs. If you have animals, you have to be in national parks. Don't allow animals out on any of the trails. National forests are great Wilderness areas.

Judy Gratton:

Sanrio, not even on a leash.

Don Taylor:

You can take them on a leash in the parking lots, which doesn't really play out well if it's hot with a pavement on. So there is a drawback to having your animals long in that regard. But Alaska was fantastic. We really enjoyed going up to New Brunswick. We traveled all the way around Nova Scotia, got to see Alexander Graham Bell Museum up there, gros Morne, some spectacular national parks. We happened to show up on Canada's I think it was 100 and some anniversary of the country. They opened up all of their national park sites for free museums. So we got to tour those for free. And then we ferries to Newfoundland. From Newfoundland we went to Labrador and spent more than a few days there because we had a broken brake line. We were there 15 days because we had to wait for a part which couldn't make it, because there's two ways in by air or by ferry and it was bad.

Gae Taylor:

You couldn't see. It was so foggy you couldn't see your hand in front of your face.

Don Taylor:

We were stuck parked behind a car repair base. They thankfully let us plug our van in, so we had electricity and we were snug. It was fine. It was just like anywhere else. Where you have electricity you can do pretty much whatever you can get away with. We carried probably 100 DVDs with movies and a few books, so we watched movies at night.

Gae Taylor:

When we were behind that automobile place waiting to be towed. We were towed there, but when I got out of the car the first street I see is Sesame Street.

Don Taylor:

I was like that does not sound like Sesame Street car repair place. We did haul our bikes along so we got to ride our bikes in some spectacular places on some great trails. Acadia National Park was gifted by somebody famous. There are carriage trails all over the park that are just absolutely beautiful for biking and we were there in the fall. So there's a trail that leads to Miami from Homestead, florida. That is a bus route with bike lanes. There's no cars and you can go for miles. We took that several times. That was really nice. Having some bikes was a great thing. We made runs to grocery stores and stuff like that bikes pretty frequently.

Judy Gratton:

Cooking in your.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, there's a little two burner stoveer stove. Originally there was a microwave. I pulled that out and replaced it with a toaster oven because we don't microwave but we do like toast. We did pretty much all of our cooking. We stopped to eat out maybe a couple times a month.

Dennis Day:

So that was good. So did you guys set a budget per month, or what did you? Do Couldn't go over $4,000 a month Was it easy to make.

Gae Taylor:

There were some months we went really high If the car or the van broke down, oh yeah, or the dog got sick. But we'd make up the next month and only spend $2,000.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, we did stay with relatives and friends and that lowered our budget. We weren't burning gas. The gas when we left Seattle was over $4 a gallon in 2000. It was the most expensive gas we ran into until we got to the last gas station before the Arctic Circle in Alaska and that was over $5 a gallon. The price went down as we went south and east. I don't quite understand how that all works, but it was pretty cheap back then. I'm guessing it would probably be three times the amount of gas budget now.

Judy Gratton:

How many gallons of gas did your RV hold?

Don Taylor:

32 gallons and it got about 15 miles to the gallon all the time. Wow, so when we were considering this we looked at somebody suggested a bus-based RV. It was a beautiful big old bus, all outfitted and painted really nice. He opened up the back end to show us the engine a diesel Cummings. The thing took up the whole back end of the bus and I asked him about gas miles. He says, oh, it gets about six miles to the gallon going up or down a mountain. We didn't realize that was not quite what we had in mind because we didn't want to travel. The gas budget wasn't too bad, that's good. Repairs caught us. The van is older and we had to have the front end on that. We've gone through two of these, the same model, different years. The first one, we had the front end rebuilt twice, and the follow-on van that was five, six years newer. We've had the front end rebuilt twice and those are expensive repairs.

Don Taylor:

We fortunately had people's friends' homes to stay at. On some of those and some of the repair times we slept in the van parked in the dealer parking lot while the repairs were being made. That's another thing that we saved a little bit of money on by dodging.

Judy Gratton:

So what are your best memories, would you say, over this? How many years did you do this?

Don Taylor:

Seven years, 2014 to 2020, about my best memories. Traveling through northeastern canada was so much fun. The people had a little bit of an accent. They were all super friendly. The culture just felt different. That was pretty cool. I enjoyed that a lot.

Gae Taylor:

We went to a viking village up there and it was really cold and the wind was blowing so hard. I bought this coat for $35 and it was the best coat ever. It saved me.

Don Taylor:

It was a site that the Vikings had landed a thousand years before Columbus came to the United States and they rebuilt a village using the technique that they discovered are six foot thick peat moss walls and they had guides dressed up in the original garb. It was freezing cold out. You walk through their little tiny door and it's just absolutely snug warm inside and it was interesting, just a lot of interesting things to see, so we did enjoy. We also went down through the Freedom Trail area to Alabama. Selma lucked out our timing. We arrived in Selma, thought we'd check and see what was on at the movies. Movie Selma had just come out and they were having an opening showing by invitation only. Since the movie was filmed in Selma, the filmmakers paid for free showings for a couple of weeks to the locals and the locals were really generous and really nice.

Don Taylor:

They got us a couple of tickets so we got to go see that movie in selma along with people, some of the people that had survived the tomorrow march. It was fascinating really. That sounds, yeah, a lot of beautiful places, a lot of nice parks and places we didn't really expect of interesting places. Went to hot springs, arkansas, the smallest national park, which is about three blocks long. Spas, more or less health spas, and that sort of thing. Wandered around there. Acadia was absolutely beautiful.

Gae Taylor:

We spent a month in Utah, went up to a place called Hanksville. Utah is great. You go up on this plateau and, oh man, the wind blew up there. It was a lot of fun up there. I could have stayed up there longer.

Don Taylor:

We bought a rockhounding book at a local shop in Moab, Utah. Let's check out these rockhounding sites. And so we traveled all over the state looking for rocks, and we found a lot of really cool rocks. Gay had befriended a young church who loved rocks, and so we took off on the trip. And she was shipping rocks back to this boy. His parents finally asked us stop sending rocks. His whole club is filled with rocks, and so we stopped.

Gae Taylor:

You know those boxes you get at the post office and it can weigh as much as you want it to weigh. I'd load that up with rocks and he wouldn't give up one rock. I'm like throw him in the alley.

Dennis Day:

Well, during COVID, you guys had to park yourselves in Denver.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, at our gay's brother's home, and so we tried to help out there, did projects around the house and ended up investing some of the money we'd stored with him so that we could help him out. We had a place to stay and he ended up paying us back for that when we wanted to buy a house. But we were there for two years and then we came back up this way and wanted to buy a house. But we were there for two years and then we came back up this way and started looking for a home.

Judy Gratton:

Can you explain why, COVID? What happened that made you stop traveling?

Don Taylor:

The RV parks all shut their doors. They weren't allowed to stay open. That meant we had no place to stop to either dump and or do laundry, take showers, so that made that part of it much more difficult. The pools all shut down, all the public pools, so we had no place to take showers and everything was closed. We could have driven around but had been driving in circles. We couldn't really stop to see anything.

Judy Gratton:

Was it hard to get gas at that time, it seems to me I remember that gas became cheaper, but it was also harder to find, wasn't it?

Don Taylor:

We had landed, so we had gone to Denver for a ski outing with her brother and some friends, and up in the mountains while we were on that trip, up in Frisco, Colorado, Breckenridge, we were staying there and actually that was one of the first outspots up there. So we were in Denver when it hit and we just stayed parked because there was no heading back up.

Dennis Day:

How long have you been at this place in Port Angeles? Your current we?

Don Taylor:

bought this in December of 2020 and moved in in January of 2022. So it's been two years, right? Is that right?

Judy Gratton:

What made you decide to stop going, to come back to a house?

Gae Taylor:

Don was a baby and he wanted to stop traveling and live in a house and vegetables and watch his plants grow. And I wanted to keep on traveling. See how that went.

Don Taylor:

That's a pretty good summary, and I convinced her to come up to Seattle. We rented a friend's basement for three months while we searched for a home and found a place here in Port Angeles. We'd always come out here, or frequently come out here, to go mushroom hunting and camping. I liked the area and it was probably the most affordable place that we knew we liked. We couldn't afford to go back to the Seattle area and buy a house and we wanted a property. Anyway, that's how we ended up.

Gae Taylor:

We decided the best places we decided to live was Peoria, vermont or Port Angeles, washington Wow. But Vermont had so many ticks that no way we were staying there with three dogs.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, I will throw that warning out. If you are going RV lifestyle and you are going to visit eastern United States forests and that sort of thing, get your skills up with dealing with ticks, because they are. And we each got ticks at various points and thankfully we were able to discover them and get rid of them before they had a chance to poison us with anything foul. But I tell you, we visited some friends that we knew in Colorado and they lived in Massachusetts and we were telling them about the ticks. We said, oh, we just can't deal with it. I hate the whole tick thing. What's the point of having a beautiful forest if you can't go out and enjoy them? And she said you were in Colorado. What about rattlesnakes? I take a rattlesnake over a tick, any tick. They're awful.

Dennis Day:

Okay, so have you guys got plans for hitting the road?

Don Taylor:

No, not really. We've taken some relatively short trips to state campgrounds and things like that. We made one longer plus long trip to Colorado and Arizona to visit family and we don't have anything in the works except maybe escaping the winter gray. I need to get hit of sun for at least a few weeks, so one way or another we'll head someplace sunny. I don't know how warm it'll be, but it'll be sunny because I need a dose of that Do you still have the same van, or?

Don Taylor:

We do. We have the second one. It's a 2004 Roadtrek 190 popular. It's 19 and a half feet long and fully outfitted with all that good stuff Generator and furnace, cork lane furnace and all the things you can jam into a camper, into one 19-foot van.

Gae Taylor:

We're looking for a new one right now, but we don't like the design of any of the new ones. Yeah, yeah, they're not nearly as efficient as these older designs. You open the back door of the new ones and the toilet's right there.

Judy Gratton:

Open to the world. Oh my, oh my.

Gae Taylor:

I'm like, I don't like that.

Dennis Day:

Yeah no, how did you stay connected to the internet?

Don Taylor:

So we paid extra for our phone service to have our hotspot space and so we could run a hotspot anywhere we had a signal and so we used that extensively. It was a bit of trouble when we crossed the border and all that went away. I had to track down days or restaurants with hotspots available in them to do stuff. I maintained a blog. It's still going. It's not nearly as interesting as 10 years ago but at any rate, break from work on the blog that I tracked all of the places and people and things we saw.

Judy Gratton:

We need to make sure that's on our site.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, I mostly did it for my mom so that she could stay in touch, because we were only a phone call away. But towards the end she wasn't capable of doing much of that stuff. My sister kept her.

Judy Gratton:

So what do you think is different about your life now versus when you started this journey beyond?

Don Taylor:

the fact that you live in a stick-built house now versus a RV van. It's not as exciting when you wake up in the morning and pick a direction to go. I'm far cry from waking up in the morning and doing my coffee routine for an hour in the morning and driving my wife crazy Gay's engaged with the community much more than I have.

Don Taylor:

She's joined. We're both in the garden club now and do volunteer work locally. She does different things than I do, but I'm still plugged in and making friends, meeting people. I volunteer at the local community college to help out with their ceramics room up there so I get a chance to keep my hands in play, which is a big favorite thing of mine to do. For play. It's just different. Focuses are different. They're not about looking for new things that we're going to go find or see. They're more about what to do locally, what the weather looks like, what might be available. Enjoy coming up and then plotting short trips to visit with friends and family back in Seattle, the other side of Mexico. That's my take, gay.

Gae Taylor:

That says it all. It's nice going to when you live in one spot. When you go to church, you see the same people every Sunday. When we were on the road we'd always stop at church and it was just meeting all the new people over and over again.

Don Taylor:

It was one of the consistent things we did, though. It gave us a place to park. Every Saturday night we would park at a church and Gay would go to church the following day and learn things about things to do locally, as well as meeting the people. It was a really nice addition to our travel, actually when we were in the van. It had some consistency, did you make?

Judy Gratton:

some new friends along the way. Do you have people, new people in your life from your journeys A?

Gae Taylor:

couple, wendy, who lives in Toronto her and her husband and we've been up to visit her. And then our friend Larry Case. He lives, like I think, in Calgary now and he was living or had a girlfriend down in New Mexico, so we visited him down there and kept in touch with them. Oh good, Good.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, we did have family and friends stops. We had a regular route where we'd see my sisters and mother in Arizona, gay's brother in Colorado. She's got multiple brothers and sisters in Michigan and Detroit area so we would stop there my brother in Minneapolis. So we generally made longer stops to visit with family and that kind of saved us a little bit of money and it gave us a chance to also connect a little better Because in the past we might see them once every few years. We got more visiting in the past?

Judy Gratton:

How many times do you think you went around the country over these years?

Don Taylor:

We spent time in the south on our first time around. We did get back down one more time, so twice down all the way through Florida, probably across Texas. We went three times, so maybe three times all the way around. Otherwise we tended to keep to the north, where most of our family is, and it's a bit cooler. Heat was really the first thing to cope with. We got caught in freezing weather a number of times. You don't have to drain all the tanks, drain the fresh water using bottled water to live in the van. We did that a number of times as well, and the van is so heavy that it worked and I was driving through five inches of snow and it was fine. Oh good, yeah, which, which pleased me immensely, because it scared me to death initially, and then I drove it. It was great.

Gae Taylor:

One time we were leaving out of Denver and we were going up to Wyoming to get on I-80 and come across west and it started snowing. It was bad and blowing. And blowing hard. And we stopped and asked this Wyoming guy does it blow like this all the time? What do you say? The wind isn't blowing. You're not in Wyoming. Yeah, so bad that we had to pull up on the side of the road like a exit and all the semis were lined up. And then here's us.

Don Taylor:

Yeah, they closed I-80. So there was no going anywhere. We were stuck overnight and I thought that's just so ridiculous. And then I got up in the morning and I looked outside and there was a quarter inch ice on the blades of grass outside the van so it was an absolute sheet of ice, and so it was good that they closed it on us, because I would have been stupid to drive through it, I'm sure, yeah, yeah we started driving in the morning.

Gae Taylor:

The first thing we saw was the RV tipped over on the side of the road.

Judy Gratton:

It was like oh yeah yeah, that was, and you were stuck with a good group of people. I've always really trusted the truckers on the road.

Gae Taylor:

One of the things about traveling with dogs is a lot of times we'd park at walmart. You get out at three in the morning in your bathrobe to let the dogs go to the bathroom and all these truckers are out there. You're like, don didn't have to do that, but I did.

Dennis Day:

Ah you had the bathroom duty, yet yeah, yeah, we created different things any lessons or words of wisdom for somebody who might be thinking about hey, this sounds good that was good and was good, and carry some tools, tools, tools, so you can't deal with stuff.

Don Taylor:

Duct tape, spare fuses. We had a fuse go out in Sydney, nova Scotia, that wouldn't allow, stopped the van from starting and I didn't have any of those kind of fuses.

Gae Taylor:

So you just went out of one spot and put it over in another spot, yeah, so we could at least keep going.

Don Taylor:

But make sure you've got some spare things that won't keep you from going, for sure. What else? Yeah, if you carry some tape, that is like we had some leaks and I used electrical tape which sticks, but you can pull off when you want to fix it permanently. If the water's like we had a gap on the back door, I put a piece of tape across the back door so that the water would not drip down inside of the frame. Stuff to carry Some rubber-type tape for leaks, tools for fixing things and don't even sweat. I sweated it all the time. Don't even sweat it when things go bad on the van. Get it fixed.

Judy Gratton:

And there are places to get them fixed. All over the country We've had repairs done north south east and west Sounds like plan on knowing repairs.

Gae Taylor:

Yeah, and when you go over to Canada, make sure you don't say you want to stay. What I told the? I asked the guy at the border crossing what do I have to do to stay here? You got any paperwork over there and he said pull over here. And they tore our van apart, top to bottom, hitting it, went through our shoes and everything but they let us in.

Don Taylor:

We were clean, so it was okay. Don't mess around with the border patrol on either side.

Gae Taylor:

They they are not joking around no, they're not funny, they're no they have no sense to you really that one guy up in alaska, far up as you could go the border cross, and we were coming back in into can. We're going into Canada and they're like we've got to have your eggs, eggs.

Judy Gratton:

Eggs. They took the eggs. I thought it was fruit and vegetables.

Don Taylor:

Really Well, they took our dog food which we bought in the United States that was made in Canada. And when we came back in the United States they said oh no, that's made in Canada, but we bought it in the US. He said nope.

Gae Taylor:

Doesn't matter Out of there, but it was funny, the car next to us, they were taking his firewood away and I'm like we had firewood. They didn't take our firewood, but they took our dog food, Don't you wonder?

Judy Gratton:

if maybe they were just like shopping yeah.

Dennis Day:

I admire you guys for doing this dream trip. And also, you're still married. That's just amazing. For now, okay, any last words of wisdom or advice you have for listeners?

Don Taylor:

I would say go for it. You'll relax on the trip. Don't sweat it. I was worried about things all the time and it was all fine and everything worked, and so my advice would be don't sweat it and go for it, because what a great experience People, the places. It's amazing how nice so many places in this country are. I had no idea. All right, I'd do it again.

Judy Gratton:

Thank you, guys, so much for sharing this with us and our listeners. You're welcome.

Dennis Day:

Thanks for having us. Yeah, and we'll put the link to your blog so people can see way back to 2014. That was how I kept track of you Occasional call, but I was like, oh they're here, oh they're there, and I'd see great pictures of places and family and friends. It was really a treat. So that's another thing I would suggest people do is keep track of it with a blog or something and your family can follow along. So, anyway, that's it for this episode. Thank you, don and Gay Taylor, for sharing your experience in van life and we'll see you next time. Bye.

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Dennis Day

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Judy Gratton

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