travel
It’s getting real (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 8 days)
That moment when you realize there’s no going back? I can tell Gary’s there. It’s a good thing his friend Tom Kwas is hanging out today, distracting him with jokes and cold beer. I’m getting on his nerves with all my checklists, budget fretting and what-if’s. This trip will test our new marriage in a way that shooting videos together never has. In that life I’m the organizer too, but of other people’s schedules and money. He had to sell his camera to buy this truck; his lighting kit for the camper. If we can’t make this work, we have no jobs to come back to. Or a home, at least one on solid ground.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Downsizing dilemmas and delights (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 10 days)
Remember that day-planner-from-hell I showed you a few weeks ago? This is what happens to it when you quit your job and contemplate living on the road for a year. Suddenly I have space to doodle and daydream and it’s driving me to distraction. I’ve never NOT had appointments and meetings and deadlines. I feel like I’ve overslept and forgotten my real life. My job today? Figuring out how to downsize my entire wardrobe to fit next to groceries inside the tiny Avion cabinets. I wish I had discovered this downsizing blog earlier. This so isn’t going to be “glamping,” despite what the brochure implies.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Franken-camper (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 12 days)
Gary thinks the Avion, propped up as it is on adjustable jacks and four skinny columns of bricks because we need the truck to run errands, looks like an elephant on toothpicks. My mother-in-law doesn’t want her only grandson Alex working inside it in case it topples. The precarious hassle of backing a truck under a jacked-up camper is the one main drawback of truck-bed campers. You can’t just unhitch it like a trailer or fifth-wheel and zip off to the grocery store empty. Still, the Avion looks a lot steadier than the camper my father built for the first road trip down the Pan-American Highway in 1973.
Of course it helps that the commercially built Avion doesn’t weigh north of 14,000 pounds, like my father’s mad laboratory contraption.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Hardest Father’s Day Ever (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 13 days)
The Geboy men don’t talk about feelings much: they demonstrate their love and appreciation for each other by pitching in on whatever work needs doing. It’s also how they put off impending goodbyes. In 2003, three generations spend Father’s Day measuring carpet, building under-camper lawn chair storage compartments, waterproofing the riveted seams of the all-aluminum Avion and teasing Alex about his new girlfriend back at college.
Fourteen years later, one’s missing. And life will never be the same.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
How much does the ultimate road trip cost? (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 15 days)
I have a sassy producer answer when clients want to know how much a video will cost: what does a fish weigh? But ball parking budgets for every type of video imaginable isn’t practice for a year-long road trip down the Pan American Highway. The credit card is already adding up: a $400 awning to shade Wipeout when we’re parked during the day, $2,000 satellite phone for emergencies and $1,500 for a year’s worth of storing everything that won’t fit in a $1,200 camper.
All I can do is subtract the credit card bill from our savings and divide what’s left by twelve months. Street market grocery shopping can’t be more than $10 a day. Propane tanks to cook the food… maybe $20 a month? If I allow another $10 a night for campgrounds that leaves about $6,100 for diesel. My head hurts…
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Meeting the Avion (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 17 days)
We’ve entrusted the job of finding, buying and restoring our only home for the foreseeable future to Gary’s 81-year-old dad Joe. This sounds crazier than it is: Joe is a WWII vet with depression-era spending habits who built the three brick-and-mortar homes of Gary’s Wisconsin childhood. He has been kid-with-a-secret dying to show us his best find ever: a 1968 Avion truck camper advertised in the Milwaukee classifieds. Only one owner, only $1,200 and complete with the original glossy sales brochure.
It’s stunning, or will be when Joe’s done with the finishing touches. In roughly two weeks we’ll test the brochure’s Mad-Men claim, “This compact castle lets you live like kings and queens wherever you go – even way back in wild bush country!”
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale now. Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Licensed to Thrill (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 18 days)
Gary always wanted to be a race car driver as a kid. Right now he’s pushing 70 on I-76; feet navigating around a tiny white cat who thinks the area between the brake and the accelerator pedals is the perfect place to hide. He’s behind the wheel of a brand-new diesel Ford F350 four-wheel drive. It’s a truck that’ll never win Le Mans, but this road trip? To quote Steve McQueen, “Anything that happens before or after… is just waiting.”
Hence what the hell, an international driver’s license. We’ve got just about every other piece of paper imaginable, at least this one’s got some street cred.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. It officially goes on sale TODAY! Get yours through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
Hasta la vista, DC! (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 19 days
I thought it’d be a relief to put Washington DC behind us. But this is our city and the capitol dome is the sight we rejoiced to see still standing after the 9/11 attacks. I’m already homesick, even though it is no longer my home. For the next two days, less if we can stay awake, we officially live in a truck. All four of us are on our way to Gary’s parents in Wind Lake, Wisconsin where we will put the finishing touches on the camper that will fit inside the bed of the truck. Wipeout has a tricked-out ride: Gary replaced the skimpy back row of seats with a built-in, lockable storage cabinet topped with a padded cushion all the way across. Rosie howls from inside a cat carrier at my feet until I let her out to cuddle up to Wipeout. It’s a sorry consolation prize: she doesn’t get to come along for the rest of the road trip. She doesn’t know it but she’s not going any farther than Wisconsin.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale tomorrow, June 13th! Pre order through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
My Podcast debut, and how to follow podcasts for the uninitiated (it’s called pod catching, fyi)
Out of the blue, the guys at Adventure Sports Podcast found out about The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan-American Highway and interviewed me. Apparently driving a sometimes-impassible road for a year is officially “adventurous!” The podcast airs on Monday, June 12th – which is the day before the book hits stores. You can go directly to the podcast’s site and listen there. Each post has something called an embedded listening applet.
The thing with podcasts is you can download and listen to them whenever you want. Like, on a road trip, for example. So most people subscribe. I’m new to podcasts too, so I read how Curt’s partner describes how to subscribe on his website, which is a great one to check out anyway (the article’s on the left of the page that opens when you click this).
I tried out the iPhone way first and here’s how it worked:
- Look for this symbol on your phone.
- Look for the magnifying glass search symbol and type in Adventure Sports Podcast.
- A bunch of single episodes pop up (on Monday you’ll find mine) and you can download just that one and listen to it through your phone. OR
- Swipe down to the bottom, past all the episodes, until you see the subscribe button. That way, any time you go to your phone’s podcast icon you’ll see what’s new and can play or download episodes.
So, what if you don’t want to do this podcast search on your phone? My fabulous interviewer, Curt Linville, describes the process of subscribing and listening. “Search for Adventure Sports Podcast on Stitcher or iTunes, and hit subscribe.” So, on my laptop, I found the i-Tunes symbol:
I had to open my “menu” and click on Podcasts so it didn’t just show me music:
Then in the search bar I typed Adventure Sports Podcast and when it came up, hit the big subscribe button.
Okay – now for the Sticher thing. Apparently, it’s something called a pod catcher – an app that searches the universe for cool podcasts you’d never otherwise know about and offers them to people who use their apps. Here’s a link explaining how it all works and ranks the best ones. Curt, my interviewer, recommends #19: a pod catcher cleverly titled Dogcatcher that works great for Android users.
Now you officially know everything I do about podcasting and podcatching. Try it out for my debut on Monday the 12th. Here’s the website again – tweet, post and snapchat about it to your heart’s content.
Foils and forgeries (Drive Day 1 minus 14 years, 22 days)
Each consulate that forces me to guess the dates Wipeout will enter and exit a country ratchets up my stress level. I have to put something on paper but if I get it wrong her certificates and visas will be invalid. Not one official will tell me whether border guards will let her in if the dates are wrong.
It is the elaborate, embossed gold foil on Nicaragua’s canine visa that solves the problem. With a little nudge from the steam of an iron in Gary’s apartment, we can peel it from the paper. The same technique dislodges stamps and stickers on the other visas. We are left with naked forms and handwritten dates that I know won’t be correct when we arrive at each border.
Gary carefully covers the dates with white photo-mounting tape and puts the now non-committal documents face down on his professional scanner. I watch, fingers affixed with steam-removed stamps and foils, while perfect, dateless reproductions emerge from the machine. One by one I re-glue the official seals of approval. When we arrive at each border I’ll fill in the actual date and Wipeout will be the most punctual passenger in the history of road trips.
Follow this bonus-material blog and ride along on a one-year road trip that inspired the memoir The Drive: Searching for Lost Memories on the Pan American Highway. On sale June 13th. Pre order through the buy-the-book links at the bottom of the landing page on my teresabrucebooks.com website or here or here. Like The Drive’s Facebook page and tweet back at me @writerteresa.
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