USA: A missing avocado, and tuna in the shoe caddy

Traveling light and shaking it all down

Make no mistake, Walter is a sturdy beast of a truck. He can carry a heavy load. But let’s be honest—how much does your whole house weigh? Walter has to carry our entire lives on his back and still operate safely when climbing up or—worse yet—careening down an 8% grade for four miles on a Colorado highway.¹

As a result, we’re trying to cut kilos² like a wrestler preparing for weigh-in. It started three years ago when we were first considering building materials for our truck’s habitat box; then it intensified last fall when we were preparing for three months of backpacking around Southeast Asia and needed our packs to be manageable. Now the quest for living light continues with the outfitting of our truck.

I didn’t realize just how much I’ve learned to value lightweight options to household items until we stopped to visit our friend Kayleen outside Denver this past week. It had been months since we’d last spent the night inside a bricks-and-mortar home, and I will admit, it felt a little luxurious to wander around her gracious abode—room after room of what suddenly felt like enormous, luxurious excess.³

For example, I took a glorious hot shower in her bathroom. When I grabbed the towel off the hook, I was amazed at its heft. I actually weighed it—over a kilo (2.5 pounds) of ultra-plush terry cloth. I retrieved my own little bath towel (more like a big chamois cloth) from our rig in her driveway and weighed it: less than half of one pound (.2 kg). Her towel weighed five times as much as mine! When your house sits on a permanent foundation, it just doesn’t matter.

My towel, her towel

Later, I used Kayleen’s laundry machines—another luxury of location-based life. She showed me where to find the jug of detergent pods. It was heavy! I compared a handful of her liquid filled pods to an equivalent stack of my dry, dissolvable laundry detergent sheets. Hers weighed eight times as much as mine for the same number of loads. But again, if your house will never be called upon to haul itself up a hill, then who cares?

My laundry detergent, her laundry detergent

There’s a Bible verse that might come to mind among those of us who are familiar with such things. It’s found in a first century letter to Jewish Christians who were facing severe persecution for their decision to follow the teachings of Jesus. The first verse of the 12th chapter of the letter, which is simply called Hebrews in the Bible, goes like this:

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith, let us strip off every weight that slows us down, especially the sin that so easily trips us up. And let us run with endurance the race God has set before us.⁴

Go back and read that again.

Appropriate for an Olympic year, don’t you think? The Greek and Roman traditions of sport—particularly wrestling and distance running events—were already well-established at the time this was originally penned.

You know what runners wear for a modern distance race—shorts, tank tops, and shoes. That’s it. And in the ancient world, they wore even less. How ridiculous it would be to show up to the finals of the Olympic 10,000 meters event outfitted like a construction worker with a tool belt and Carhartt’s, or perhaps dressed like a Cordon Bleu chef with the silly tall hat and everything you’d need to bake a cake.

No. If you want to run a good race, or climb an 8% grade for four miles, you strip off all the weight that would otherwise slow you down.

But if you are running an ultra event, like the Barkley Marathons I wrote about a few months ago, you can’t strip everything down; you do have to carry some gear.

If you, like Jasmin Paris and the other Barkley racers, must carry a load of your own rations and supplies, you need to secure what could shake loose. You don’t want to find your Cliff Bars or gel packs fell out along the way, or your water spilled, or your extra layers of clothing for the cold night are littered down the trail somewhere behind you. In the Barkley race, even losing a small piece of paper—a page ripped out of a paperback book at a required checkpoint—could cost you the race.

This first round of travels in Walter, our big, yellow expedition vehicle, is what’s affectionately called a shake-down tour. Basically, we’re setting out to find our mistakes—the hard way. What wasn’t hooked up properly and is now cascading into a multitude of problems? A shake-down tour will find it! Remember the posts from the last two weeks—the ones where we spent three days limping with engine trouble, culminating with three more days in the barren parking lot of a simple, rural truck stop, awaiting parts, before arriving at our planned destination two days late? In case you missed that saga, here’s part one and part two.

Our initial days on the road immediately showed us some things that needed fixing. But a shake-down tour is also a literal thing—a physical shaking down. The inside of the habitation box is designed to be secure, to keep things from rattling loose. But we left Montana under a time crunch. Not everything was finished yet, so we just secured everything as well as we could, laid the unsecured items on the bed for travel, and hoped for the best.

Ha!

Driving on the highways was fine, but our friends Kayleen and Tim took us out on some steep and rugged trails at 3,000 meters, way up in the Rocky Mountains of rural Colorado. After a couple of hours of bouncing over ruts, we crossed through a stream and parked in a level, open area for a little break. We hadn’t really thought to prepare for the amount of bouncing we had actually done, and I was nervous about the contents of the Snuggery, our habitation box carried on Walter’s sturdy shoulders.

Walter’s first time out to play

Like a line out of Robert W. Service’s “The Cremation of Sam McGee” (without the snow and dark of night), I gathered my courage to open the door and take a peek.

I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;

But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;

I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: "I'll just take a peep inside.

I guess he's cooked, and it's time I looked"; ... then the door I opened wide.⁵

Oh.

Oh, no.

It was a disaster, friend. The more Andy and I looked around inside our home, the more we began to giggle.

It looked like a tiny Walmart Supercenter after an earthquake.

Raincoats, towels, shoes, kitchen utensils, bags of dried beans and coffee, some canned food, the cushions from the dinette, even a few books were scattered on the floor, the bed, the countertops. Nothing was broken, as most of our belongings are not breakable these days, but the Snuggery was a hot mess—not nearly as secure as we’d anticipated.

Later that evening, back at Tim’s house perched on the side of a steep mountain, Andy went out to Walter where he was parked in the driveway, so he could make some guacamole to go with our chips.

Walter in Tim’s driveway at 9,500 feet

He came back in the house a moment later. “How many avocados did we have?”

“Three.”

“Are you sure?”

"Yes. They were in the dish rack, which I had assumed would stay on the counter because of its rubber base. Silly me.”

“Yeah, the dish rack got tossed when we were four-wheeling. I found two avocados. You’re positive there were three?”

“Absolutely.”

Kayleen chimed in with excited giggles. “It’s like an Easter Egg Hunt!”

“For really ugly Easter Eggs!” We all laughed.

Andy went out and searched some more, eventually finding the missing avocado, no worse for wear, tucked away in a corner (correction: it was in the trash can, haha!). The guac was delicious.

The next day, when I went to grab a pair of shoes out of the custom caddy Andy built, I found a can of tuna wedged at an angle among the sandals, hiking boots, and athletic shoes.

A wayward avocado. Tuna in the tennies. A detective investigating the scene would have noted: signs of a struggle.

The shake-down tour has accomplished its goal. We’ve discovered mechanical issues that need to be resolved. We found every possible way something could shake loose and wreak havoc on our tiny little home on wheels.

The fancy spice rack that Andy built for us a few days ago, however, stayed firm.

My spice rack in progress, out on the road

He designed the rack to fit the jars perfectly, with top and bottom layers of bungees holding everything in place. Like my 1970s Weebles,⁶ they may have wobbled, but they didn’t fall down. That spice rack, as well as the cupboards and drawers that already have sturdy slam-latches on them, were rock-solid, absolutely unshakable.

The finished product—ain’t she a beaut?

Remember those lines from the letter written to the Hebrews I mentioned earlier—the ones about casting aside unnecessary weight so we can run the race set before us with endurance? Here’s another little snippet from that same chapter:

When God spoke from Mount Sinai his voice shook the earth, but now he makes another promise: “Once again I will shake not only the earth but the heavens also.”  This means that all of creation will be shaken and removed, so that only unshakable things will remain.

Since we are receiving a Kingdom that is unshakable, let us be thankful and please God by worshiping him with holy fear and awe.⁷

Stripped of encumbrances to run with endurance.

Shaken down until only the unshakable remains.

Secure, grateful, and eager to please.

It’s crazy how much a big yellow truck has in common with solid life lessons from ancient Scriptures. We are just starting out on this nomadic lifestyle, but we are already learning so much. What will be next? I do hope you’ll continue to follow along. There’s something in the journey for all of us.

Until next week,

Sherry

1. An 8% grade for four miles is not an exaggeration in Colorado, or even terribly unusual. We experienced it. And it’s not even their steepest highway pass. I’m convinced Coloradoans just like to show off when it comes to roadbuilding. And town-building. They put small towns anywhere around here. Ten thousand feet? No problem. Let’s put in a Dollar General. Bruh, that’s so ‘Rado.

2. Since nearly all the nations on this globe (99.5% to be exact) use metric, Andy and I are trying to make ourselves bilingual between the two systems. We even set the map programs on our phones to metric. Hint: 400 meters is one lap around the track. And yes, I know how tall I am in meters: 1.75. I also know how much I weigh in kilos, but that’s nunyabizness.

3. Kayleen’s home is neither enormous nor extravagant, but it felt like both after living for the past six weeks in an 8’x16’ box.

4. Hebrews 12:1 (NLT)

5. Here’s the whole text of that Sam McGee poem, in case you are dying to know what he found when he opened the door. Also, here’s my post from a few weeks back that features this very poem.

6. Remember Weebles?

7. Hebrews 12:26-28 (NLT) In fact, read the whole chapter. It’s surprisingly relevant. Hebrews 12 (NLT)