Just less than a week after I moved out of our rental house in Chiapas, we moved into our new home on wheels. I was glad to have gotten out of San Cristóbal when I did. Not that I was in any danger but certainly would have been inconvenienced a bit by the protesters when they blockaded the road to the airport.
When I arrived in Salt Lake City, it was evening so I wasn’t going to be able to get much done but I did stop and check-in on Moby to make sure she was still safe and secure. Indeed she was. I then went to Brigham City and reunited with Cate. The next day we met my dad for breakfast, worked in a few preparatory tasks, picked up all of the things that we had ordered for the trip at our temporary mailbox in SLC and did my best to squeeze in some work. It was a hectic day to say the least. The following day (Thursday, 4 August) we had designated as our move-in day. There was heaps of work to do and we also wanted to cover some miles so we got an early start. Move in day was also our first real test of challenges that we will face together on this trip. We had to mount the camper on the truck since the two pieces had to be separated for storage. Neither of us had ever really done anything like this before and we definitely hadn’t worked as a team like this. We allowed ourselves plenty of time for the task. Getting the camper positioned correctly is a bit of a precision job and Moby is most definitely not a precision instrument. All in all it went well and about 3 hours after we began, the camper was mounted and all of our things were packed inside.
We had some non-negotiable stops to make and the first one of those was in Wyoming to get the title/registration in both of our names as well as say hello and goodbye to some of my family in Wyoming so we pointed the truck east and stopped at a campground in Evanston, Wyoming for the night. While in Evanston we went to the truck pulls at the county fair. I’m really glad we got to have that experience and there’s something special about being a foreigner in one’s own native country. We also had our first post-move in purge of stuff. This purge was easy. There were some items that were bulky and we couldn’t anticipate ever being used. They weren’t worth the space they took and we don’t want to burn fuel carrying useless weight. There will be more purging, but for the most part we’re pretty well set.
Once our business in Wyoming was done, we did a 180 and headed back to Brigham City. Cate’s mom wanted to see what our living quarters looked like and it was nice to have somewhere familiar to park for the night. After that we pushed hard for two days to the last of our non-negotiable stops which was to visit a dear friend of Cate’s and meet his family. They live in Eureka, California and have a nice big driveway with an RV hookup so we settled in for the workweek and got a nice little tour of the area. We went to see the redwoods (awe inspiring), took a cruise on a historical boat in Humboldt bay. I was also able to make a few modifications to the camper and we did another, albeit much smaller, purge of stuff.
Today we will be leaving Eureka. We’ll put the Pacific ocean on Moby’s right side and beyond that, we really don’t know. There’s something resembling a plan but from here on out it’s flexible and fluid. We do want to cross into Mexico as soon as is practical but as of today, I feel the adventure is beginning in earnest.