Why Travel When You Can Live There? USA

By Rick Granger

Ever gotten a wild idea that was completely impractical and too far beyond your means to be even a remote possibility? “I wish we could afford to go see all the cool National Parks in America – all in one big trip. All of them.” The conversation started out something like that. The latest in the Why Travel? series, follow the G6 on their impossible journey around America!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 19, 2018
• ISBN: 9781387824083

Book preview

Why Travel When You Can Live There? USA

Why Travel When You Can Live There?  USA

Rick Granger

Copyright © 2018 Lulu Press

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-387-82408-3

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Other Books by Rick Granger:

Non-Fiction

Why Travel When You Can Live There?

Why Travel When You Can Live There?  Thailand

Why Travel When You Can Live There?  Hong Kong

Why Travel When You Can Live There?  Cayman Islands

Someday We Should Go Back

Theology is Not a Four-Letter Word

The Artwork of Rick Granger

Fiction

Given Up For Lost and Other Stories

Ca.1640

Cover design by the author.

For my wife and children who made travelling the country so much fun and so worthwhile.

Introduction

Ever gotten a wild idea that was completely impractical and too far beyond your means to be even a remote possibility?

I wish we could afford to go see all the cool National Parks in America – all in one big trip.  All of them.

The conversation started out something like that.

In my mind, however, conversations that are filled with wild ideas and impossible budgets are simply the outline of things I need to accomplish to make it all past tense.

How could we ever afford to travel with four kids?  Hotel bills would kill us!  So, no hotels.

Camping in National Parks is also expensive – no way we could afford those.  Some are eighty bucks a night!

State Parks?  Sure, but they’re twenty to forty bucks a night.  A trip like that would take thirty or forty nights.  That’s up to $1200 in campsites alone.

And gas!  Gas would be crazy.  Let’s say it’s $2.50 a gallon -  which it would not be – and we did 10,000 miles at 20 miles per gallon.  That would be 500 gallons of gas.  That’s about $1250 for gas.

We’re at $2450, best case scenario.

Food?  Could never afford to eat out all that while.  We’d have to bring food with us?  How could we store it?  How could we cool perishables?

Wait a minute!

The ideas were starting to roll like waves on the shore – violent ones – the really pretty ones!

This isn’t just possible, it’s practical. 

This can happen!

What if we free-camp on federal land every night?  That cuts out all accommodation costs.  $0.00 for accommodation.

What if we grocery shop every day like normal people do in every town on Earth? How could that not work?  No eating out.  We would eat everyday if we just stayed home anyway, so there would be no additional cost for food to what we would spend in our day to day lives.  $0.00 for food beyond what we would normally spend.

Gas?  It is what it is.  We plan the most direct routes and pull the lightest load possible.  So, gas would be our biggest expense at $1250.  We could probably count on this being a low figure so we could round it up to $1500.

From there, the rest is a matter of making it happen. 

The real question became, can we do $1500 for a summer trip that would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience?  Yes we can.

And so the wheels were set in motion.  We’d need to get some gear, plan sleeping accommodations that would work well for six people and could be set up and torn down easily and still work on any terrain, and start looking at a suitable route.  We’d need to plan for cooking, bathing, and washing clothes. 

In the span of a few seconds, the idea which was just a crazy whim suddenly had traction.  Lynsey and I are very task-oriented people. We simply looked at each other and said, Let’s do it.

For years I’ve written books about our experiences living overseas.  Our family has always joked that living in the US is not interesting enough to write a book about.  It didn’t take long, though, after floating the idea of the trip to the kids, to realize that from this trip would come the next book in the series, and that it must include the writing of all the Grangers.  And so was born Why Travel When You Can Live There?  USA.

1. Can We Survive Camping?

In the early two thousands, Lynsey and I studied at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts for a couple of years, each to get Master’s degrees.  It was a buy-one get-one deal, believe it or not.  How could we pass it up?

While there we met lots of people and made friendships that have lasted throughout the years with two very special couples.  Part of the character of our marriage is to seek out new friendships everywhere we go just as soon as we get there – it’s to do with living all over the world for so long.  You learn to make friends very quickly in that context, and so does everyone else.  It’s wonderful.

One of the couples we tried to befriend was an avid camping couple.  They had two little kids and they spent their every weekend cramming their car full of what appeared to be everything they owned.  They would set a frazzled gaze out the front window as their whining kids settled into their car seats in the rear passenger area, swaddled in pots and pans and mountain pie makers.  When they would return, their car would have the general appearance of a dust bunny with pine needles in it.  They looked exhausted and seemed as though they might be getting a divorce.

But they did this every weekend.

Lyns and I looked at each other on one occasion and shared a conversation that ended something like this, Why would anyone ever do that?

Years later, after having lived in Thailand, Hong Kong, the Cayman Islands and both Texas and Florida for around two years each, we found ourselves craving some outdoor adventure.  We laughed a bit about the couple in Massachusetts and decided we should try it – but, like, once.  Not every weekend.

We figured, what could it hurt?

We’d done a road trip up the east coast the summer before and we all loved it.  Road trippin’ suited our family perfectly. A little adventure.  A little unpredictability.  A good mix.  Plus, we stayed in peoples’ homes – we all love spending time with friends and family!  So we knew road trips were a GO.  How about this camping stuff?

The conversation actually sprung from an invitation to attend a graduation party in North Carolina for a nephew of ours.  Our sister-in-law offered to get us a pop-up camper from the Navy base for somewhere around $500 for the weekend or get us a reservation at a local hotel which would be around $700.

Zoiks!

So the wheels started turning.  How could we say yes, but still afford to go?

What if I made us a camper?  We could pull it behind our minivan and stay for free at my brother’s house.  Then hit a few mountain campgrounds along the Appalachian Mountains as we headed back down to Florida.  We could try out being a camping family for a week or so.  Cool.

The plan was hatched.  If I could build us a camper for cheaper than a thousand bucks, we’d be on the up when we came out the other end!  And we’d have a camper for years to come!

There were a few requirements I had to work with.  It needed a proper single mattress for Lynsey; she has bad hips.  It needed to sleep six; may as well all have proper mattresses.  It needed to fold up onto a 4x8 trailer, so it would be unobtrusive behind a Honda Odyssey; a personal preference to avoid looking too much like a soccer mom.  And lastly, it needed to be air conditioned.  The heat in the south is unbearable during the summer, especially in a small wooden box with six people and no windows.

I bought a brand new trailer and spent around $1000 on supplies and resources.  The design was brilliant, and we all loved it.  It was a two-story structure that lifted up like a hat box lid – straight up like a telescope – to be about 8 feet tall.  Then the side walls hinged up and became sloped roof panels, like a food truck counter.  Beds folded down out of each wall, outward, one on each side of the top, and one on each side of the bottom.  Lynsey slept right on the main floor of the trailer.  My bed folded forward out of the front wall over top of the trailer hitch with the air conditioner beneath me.  It was simply brilliant.

What’s more?  It worked really well.  The trip to North Carolina was a success and the Appalachians were calling.  We went first to Roan Mountain State Park in Tennessee.  The site we chose was to become the most beautiful backdrop for memories two summers in a row and is still slated to be our yearly camping spot.  It was idyllic. 

The following year we invited friends of ours to come with us - a single mom and her daughter.  The magic of that campsite lasted right on through a second year and made hosting friends a cinch!

We’d discovered a new family vacation spot.  But, more importantly, we’d learned a new way to afford family vacations!  Maybe most importantly, though, we discovered we could survive camping!

2. A New Design

The very first thing that became obvious to me with this massive road trip idea this time was that we’d need a new camper design.  The camper we’d been pulling for two years had been working swimmingly, but I was not prepared to pull it for 10,000 miles. 

It was framed entirely with 2x2 and 2x3 lumber with ¼ inch plywood sheeting for walls and floors on the upper and lower stories.  The upper story was also clad in a white plastic sheeting that is produced in the same manner as cardboard with ridges and layers – but extruded from a single sheet of white plastic.  To be specific – if you really wanted to know – they’re manufactured from high-impact polypropylene copolymer and are fully recyclable, and they come in a variety of colors.  You’ve seen the stuff before. It’s what they now make election signs out of; and signs for cheap divorce lawyers and We buy houses CASH written in magic marker.

I love the stuff.  I buy it in 4x8 sheets for around $16 a sheet.  It’s weather proof and is easily cut or melted into any shape.

All the hinges on the camper were made from waterproof military grade fabric, far cheaper than purchasing steel hinges for every moving part.  The fabric – if you really wanted to know – was 60" wide dark beige 1000 denier outdoor water repellent coated cordura nylon fabric.  Like the stuff good back backs are made out of.  This allowed me to cut costs on hinges, yes, but mainly, it allowed me to have an eight foot long hinge that was weather proof.  The roof panels that folded up from the sides needed to keep water our at the seam with the main roof.

Each bunk had three hinged walls made with the plastic outer coating, foam insulation, and an inner plastic wall coating – also hinged with fabric.

An air conditioner stuck through the front wall and kept us all comfortable in the summer heat.

We loved this camper.  We used it once a month in Florida when we’d visit my dad a couple hours north of where we live.  It was easy to set up – an electric winch lifted the whole thing into place – and it afforded us the luxury of our own air conditioned sleeping space for the weekend when we’d stay over at his place in the country.

There was a problem, though.  Empty, the camper weighed around a thousand pounds, I think.  When you loaded it with mattresses and pillows and a table and a couple BB guns and some thises and that’s, it weighed the better part of a ton.  It also stood about eight inches taller than our minivan.  The net effect was that it felt heavy to the driver and pulled like a parachute.  This wasn’t a problem for a thousand-mile round-trip camping week to Tennessee, once a year.  It certainly wasn’t a problem for a 200 mile round trip once a month to hang out with family either. But it certainly would be a problem for much more than that.

We needed a redesign.

My mind went straight to this before anything else.

I started making sketches on whatever sheets of paper I found lying round at any given time.  The new design would be totally different.  It needed to be light weight and low drag.  It needed to go up in a shorter amount of time and knock down more conveniently than the last one, which took some time.

I wanted it to carry all of our gear so that the minivan itself could remain mostly empty for the comfort of a month-long occupation by six people.  Of course it needed to be weather proof in its travel configuration as well as its sleeping configuration.  The roof of the travel configuration needed to be strong enough to carry bikes or whatever else we decided to strap on it.

That’s it.

The design was entirely open to new ideas.

About a year earlier, I had designed and built a roof tent for our minivan just for fun; sort of a just to see if I could do it kind of project.  It was welded from square steel tubing and folded out from a 3.5x3.5 foot square to a 7x7 foot square.  I’d used the same white plastic sheeting for the finished floor surface and then screwed a cheap three persons tent to it.  It was pretty cool, and actually still ranks as one of my favorite projects I’ve ever done.

It was this design that I’d gone straight to in my mind when I started thinking of a new format for a new camper.

What if I could put an eight-person tent on a flat surface that folded out of the top of the same 4x8 utility trailer.  I could use the same corrugated plastic sheeting for the flooring since it makes such a comfortable sleeping surface.  Underneath the fold-out tent floor I could build a rectangular box about two feet deep where we could store around eight or ten blue Rubbermaid bins of stuff for the trip.   In order to weather-proof the trailer part, the floors could fold down and form side walls to the trailer – like the roof had done on my previous design.  The design was set.

This time I’d make a major paradigm shift in construction materials and design, though.  This time I would use steel.

The entire design could be made lighter and far more sturdy if I welded the frame and all the trailer components out of steel tubing.  This would also be free.  One of the things I’d discovered in the intervening year or two was that a local big-box store threw away tons of scrap metal behind their store in an area where they allowed people to carry it away.  What a boon for my project resource inventory!  I started popping in once or twice a month to check their scrap metal corner and ended up walking away at one point with some massive steel shelving brackets – those huge shelves that extend up three stories into the ceiling where they stack pallets of merchandise for restocking shelves; serious, heavy-duty stuff.  Score!

It had laid around in my tiny garage for a year before this camper idea sprung to life and finally gave me something to do with these giant cumbersome but light-weight squares of steel tubing and reinforcing.

After coming up with this camper idea, over the next three months or so I sketched and resketched the design from all angles.  I designed the corner welds and the framing structure and tried and tested floor support structures on paper – and after months of sketching came up with a design that ended up being the same one I’d started with in my very first main-idea sketch the first time I’d sat down with a pen in hand.

The design would look like this:

A roof tent would fold off the top of the rectangle box and measure 8x16 feet.  No small ask from an engineering standpoint.

The trailer box itself would house a 2x4x8 foot drawer inside it which would contain all of our gear in a 2x2x8 foot box along the passenger side.

Along the driver’s side of the trailer would be a 2x2x8 space for a one-piece hinged fold-out kitchen which would be stowed for travel, but would open up as easily as a door and reveal cooking surfaces, countertops and cabinets all in one simple move.

The design would fit on the same 4x8 trailer we’d been using for our other camper for the last two years.  This is key.  It meant our other camper had to go.  We have a two-car garage and half of it is a workshop and kid-stuff storage area (bikes, scooters, sports stuff, etc.) and the other half had to fit our camper, whatever its design.  We could not keep the old one and make a new one.

This was a sad moment to fully realize.  This meant cutting, ripping, and pounding the old trailer into pieces and shuffling it out of our garage one trash can at a time over a period of weeks – like the Great Escape.  I would save all the white plastic sheeting and as much of the wood as I could, but this did little to assuage the bereavement that my sorry soul had to endure for the duration of this painful period of creative destruction.  It made sense.  It had to go.  But it was really sad work.

This is a tough part about being a grown-up, sometimes.  I’m a very task-oriented person.  When it comes time to make a decision, I simply do so, and then move on with the new course of action.  There is definitely time to mourn the loss of old things and even the loss of missed opportunities (in this case, more camping in that cool camper) but you just have to get going on the new course of action. 

Saddened by the destruction but quickened by the thought of accomplishing a new goal I set to work gingerly cutting the fabric hinges with a utility knife and popping all the plastic sheets off with a machete, sort of slicing the pieces off like an orange peel or skinning it like a giant game animal.  I used a hefty – and brand new – reciprocating saw for most of the framing and even had to pull out my chainsaw for some of the tougher corners.

The garage went from tidy to sort of frothing with white plastic sheet piles and wood piles and saw dust everywhere and heaps of steel tossed about.  The garage door never got jammed going down, but I’ll never know exactly how I accomplished this with every day’s added volume of scrap and eventually new materials I’d started purchasing for the next phase to add to the piles.

I’m not an experienced welder.  In fact, had only really completed the roof tent I mentioned already.  I’d done some odd small projects here and there – to include a huge roof rack for our minivan – but had only just started welding about a year earlier.  I’d always wanted to learn to weld.  True to form, I bought a welder and taught myself.  Like many other things, it’s just a matter of getting the supplies and trying it out.  Welding is like using a huge glue gun to stick steel together.  There’s a bit more to it, but it’s fun and easy.

One of the magic tricks the old camper revealed was that it was attached to my trailer with only four bolts.  It popped right off and you could store it on concrete blocks right in the garage, pull the trailer out from under it, and use the trailer on its own.  I wanted this same feature on the new trailer, but I wanted it to weigh a fraction of what the old one weighed.  It had been really heavy and was a major effort to remove.

Construction began on the new camper with a simple rectangular steel frame of two-inch square tubing reclaimed from the massive shelving brackets.  The whole frame went together in an evening and was honed and perfected over a second evening.  This bested the construction time of the old camper by a factor of something like one twentieth.  Welding was a new love in my life!  Most importantly - given my new design constraints – the entire frame weighed no more than 20 or 30 pounds.  What a victory!  I could toss it around all by myself and move it about for whatever needed to be done.  I sprayed it with gloss black spray paint to seal up any welding joints against the weather and began construction of the sturdy kitchen hinge, similar to a Jeep’s spare tire hinge.  The kitchen frame assembly ended up measuring roughly 18 inches by seven feet.  Onto this I would attach cabinets and countertops custom-made out of the lightest construction materials possible.

Originally this also included a spot for an air conditioner which we quickly discovered through testing would not be worth the weight or the space it took up.  We did a little research on weather.com and found that only Texas would have unpleasant sleeping weather and that, in fact, the remaining states we’d be crossing through would have temperatures in the thirties and forties.  Perfect sleeping weather!  So we axed the air conditioner.

There was also a phase in which the kitchen included a griddle, a grill, a microwave and a freezer.  These too were systematically scrapped for practicality.  As we did more research on free-camping, we realized that our entire trip could be 100% free if we removed our requirement for electricity.  So we scrapped all appliances in the design and went only with a propane grill and two independent propane burners.

Each time I cut out the welded supports for these appliances and removed them, the kitchen got lighter and lighter.  The final design included two three-foot wide cabinets that opened like two oven doors, both topped with corrugated white plastic to form countertops, and an additional three foot countertop that folded out of the top of the kitchen and extended off its end.  The whole set-up had been streamlined by practicality and the final design was fit for our purposes to the cubic inch.  We were quite happy with it.

The next thing to tackle was the sub-flooring for the tent.  An initial design included dozens of interlocking wooden slats that extended off either side of the trailer, blah blah blah… This design was scrapped after hours of work because it was just too heavy.  Simple 2x2 framed ¼ inch plywood-covered panels would suffice for the sleeping surfaces.  Almost all of these were produced from reclaimed lumber from the original camper.  This made me feel good.  In fact, any time I could re-use old stuff from the old camper I felt like it was a victory for us – for our budget, yes, but also for the planet.  Why chuck stuff if we don’t have to?

The final floor design was a 4x8 foot floor that had 2x8 foot wings that flopped down the side of the trailer like Labrador’s ears and covered the underlying rectangular storage compartment for weather-tightness all along its length.  When these were lifted up and locked in place with three plywood triangles on each side of the trailer, the kitchen door assembly was accessible.  You simply opened the kitchen out of the side of the trailer and, hey presto, the camper was set up.

Added to this, there was a similar sized additional layer of floor that hinged two feet off the front and six feet off the back making the total footprint 8x16.  These additional wings were held in place with steel tubes that you popped in underneath to support them as you set it up – like a pop-up camper uses, if you’re familiar with those.

The rear six foot section came to rest on the massive 4x8 drawer that pulled out of the main trailer box, which itself had a drop-down foot like an ambulance gurney. 

The net effect was a spidery wispy construction that defied the imagination and inspired – honestly – very little confidence in its reliability.  It just didn’t look like it was up to the job of holding almost a thousand pounds of people!  Yikes.  Is this thing gonna work?

Turns out, I love using steel.  What a difference!

An added project I’d accomplished along the way was to produce four legs for the camper that you could pop on, lift the camper off, and pull the trailer out from underneath.  These looked like the lunar module legs.  They were made to be detachable so that we could leave them at home.  We’d have no need for them out in the wilderness. 

The last thing to do was to screw the tent in place with eight simple screws where the tent stakes would normally go.  I’d bought an eight-person tent from Walmart and designed the trailer around it.  This was the crowning moment in the construction phase.  The lion’s share of the work was done.  There were little details to work out, and some finish sanding and painting to do.  There was the odd joint that needed some additional attention with the welder, and some weather proofing at the front wall to accomplish, but it was finished.

The very last task was to create the 2x2x8 box for the huge drawer inside the trailer, under the tent.  With this complete, it was time for testing.  We picked a weekend and headed for my dad’s.  We got it all set up and made note of some final adjustments we could make to improve the design.

In three month’s time I’d created our free-camping adventure trailer and it was a smashing hit.  All six of us loved it!

No small task.

The continent awaited.

3. Did You Say Continent?

Wait.  Did you say continent?

It was around this time that I started to have serious doubts about the wisdom of embarking on a trip like this with a home-made camper and four kids and not a lot of extra money and a tiny tiny minivan and no real idea of what we were in for and no real concept of what lay before us in any of these terrain and weather conditions and …

Meh.

We’ll be fine.

Again, true to form, I dismissed the doubts as just those, doubts.  What could possibly go wrong?  Nothing more than can go wrong here in our own home town.  It’s just that those things would be going wrong somewhere else. 

In all our travels over all these years, Lyns and I have always had one foundation for all of our practical travel decision making.  People live everywhere we’re going.  They live normal lives.  They do laundry.  They brush their teeth.  They grocery shop and take showers.  They get gas and throw stuff in the trash and go potty and sleep and wake up. 

Travel can be a lot easier than most people make it.

You really only need the clothes you’re wearing, the clothes you’ll change into when you’re washing those, and a toothbrush.  You’ll want a set of cold weather clothing (or hot weather, whatever is opposite of what you’re wearing) and you’ll want a hat and some sun glasses.

That’s it.

Maybe a vest and a jacket.

But other than these very basic items, the rest can stay home.  For international travel we leave shampoo and conditioner and body wash and mouthwash and toothpaste – all of it.  You can get it when you arrive.  For domestic travel we bring those things along, but we condense it all into one toiletry bag carried usually by me in a carry-on suitcase with all my own kit.  Our kids all pair up and share a carry-on suitcase with a buddy.  Lyns gets a whole carry-on suitcase to herself.  Because she deserves a little extra.

Our kids pair up in size pairs for now since we still have little ones.  Our oldest and our youngest pair up so large clothes fit in there with small ones.  The middles pair up since their middle-sized clothes will snug up just fine in there together.

I carry toiletries and any extra bits and bobs that make their way in: extra pocket knives, extra headphones, extra sun glasses or sunscreen, and extra first aid stuff.

In this manner, we travel the world, or in this case the continent, in four carryon suitcases.  Brilliant!  We’ve never gone wrong with this paradigm.  In fact, this time, since we were a little uncertain as to the laundry facilities we’d be able to find conveniently, we decided to double our clothing inventory.  This turned out to be totally unnecessary, but it gave us piece of mind knowing we had extra clothes if we needed them.

Because we could plan on being in the van 15 to 20 hours a day we let the kids bring anything they wanted to for bedding.  Each brought a pillow and a fleece blanket – Thomas the tank Engine, a kitty cat, a wolf, and a stripy pink and taupe decorative one – and a selection of stuffed animals, most of which belonged to our youngest.  He brought along five or six of these, which included three really big ones that ended up being great driver’s pillows for those uncomfortable rest-stop nights.

We also bought each of the kids a brand-new back pack and crammed them full of goodies for the trip.  We got them each a digital camera and a case to carry them as well as very large capacity micro-SD cards so that they could take as many pictures as they wanted to for the duration of the trip without any thought for storage or file transfer along the way.  They were free to be wasteful little kid photographers, extravagant!

In their goody bags were crossword books and rain ponchos, colored pencils and hard-covered sketchbooks for journaling and drawing the days away.  They had boonie hats and sun glasses and flashlights, headphones, and a bath towel and a pencil pouch filled with an assortment of writing implements and an eraser and sharpener for each kid.

We waited until the weekend just before the trip to give them these, that way they had time to play with their cameras and figure out how they wanted to arrange it all in their new backpacks with whatever else they’d cram in there beyond the goodies.

When we gave them their bags, it was better than Christmas!  Our kids have always been really appreciative of gifts and this was no exception.  There was lots of shouting and running around and Aw look at this! and Check it out!  This was one of the funnest parts of the entire trip for me.  I love giving gifts, and it was so rewarding to see them get so excited.  They ran about for a half hour excitedly fitting stuff in the bag, and drawing cover pages for their trip journals and deciding what else to bring.  It was fun.

As part of the preparations for the trip, one of the things I’d done is had bumper stickers made with the title of this book on them.  Each of us put a bumper sticker on the cover of our trip journal. This was rewarding too, as I felt like the trip was somehow more real now.  With this little gift bag, the packing had actually started.  It would be only a few days before we’d be on the road and the excitement was palpable!

We’ve watched lots of shows together as a family that have included major road trips as part of their format.  We all enjoy following along on these adventures as things go wrong and things go right and things come along that couldn’t have been planned better.  Some of these shows include the pre-departure segments where vehicles are packed and systems are tested.  The time for this was at hand for us, and we all started to feel like we were in one of those shows!  This popped up several times over the coming days, the feeling like we were just like one of those travel shows.  It wore off eventually, though, as real life started to be far cooler than its comparative value to television travel.  Our trip was far cooler than watching someone else’s trip, but we’d learned a lot watching them..

We did a preliminary van and trailer pack as a family and welcomed a sort of round-table input on ideas and opinions for locations to stow things.  We wanted everyone to share their perceptions so that we could come up with the best plans possible.  We worked out a basic packing format for the trailer first, and then the van.  These would shift a bit throughout the journey, but largely stayed static for the duration.  We’d hit on a good working relationship between the six of us.  Lyns and I didn’t want it to feel like we were taking our four kids on a trip, rather we wanted it to be like we were all going on a journey together.  Not two grown-ups ferrying four kids around, but six of us sharing the space and the responsibilities together.  The last couple days just before our departure, though, I had a couple surprises up my sleeve.

Our family does not have television.  I mean, we have a TV, but it’s not hooked up to anything but a game system.  We have a projector in our living room for playing DVDs and use it to connect a laptop for watching Netflix or Amazon Prime video.  That’s it.  It’s really nice.

Having lived overseas a bunch, and not ever really having gotten connected into American pop culture, none of us feels like we’re missing anything.  When we do see a TV somewhere, we usually watch whatever’s on with focused interest, laugh uproariously at all the commercials, and then forget it exists when we leave.

Our transient lifestyle has always fostered a pretty hefty DVD collection, though, which we still have – in a manner of speaking – available to us.  Those that aren’t scratched beyond use.  And since the internet can usually yield us whatever else