Getting out of “Dodge”

Committing to Go and Starting our Trip

A key enabler for this trip was renting our home in San Francisco, so we spent a good portion of our energy packing up all of our personal effects into a POD, remodeled an old pantry, cleaned out my art studio, and painted.  We’d done quite a bit of research about the trip but not much in the way of actual planning, when  we got a call from our agent. We had renters!  Starting Tuesday. It was Sunday.

Needless to say we had a wild last 48 hours of scrambling, but things worked out and we made it out of Dodge on our way to my Mom’s house with a pickup truck filled high and riding low. 

A key differentiator between this blog and others you may read about similar trips is that we had 5 weeks between decision to take the trip and trip start and 80% of that 5 weeks was spent getting the house ready to rent.  The remaining 20% got us and our truck just barely ready enough!  You’ll see that we were still finishing up administrative tasks all the way through Mexico.  Being more prepared would have been ideal, but hey, when opportunity presents itself, TAKE IT!

At my Mom’s outside of Sacramento we dropped our cat as well as a bunch of gear we decided we could live without for the next 6+ months.  Riding slightly less low, we made our way towards Jen’s parent’s house in Phoenix.

We stopped for the night in beautiful Mojave National Preserve where we got to do a trial run of our camping setup before we left the land of REIs.  We also got in a short and beautiful canyon hike before blasting out to Phoenix.  Not too long afterwards, in the middle of the Mojave, we ran out of gas.  Just dumb lack of communication during a driver change, and the new driver not realizing there was a long stretch of gas-stationlessness ahead.  The stop to await gas from AAA was “only” an hour and a half and then we were on our way again with a good lesson learned.  Nina found the idea of someone delivering us gas simply thrilling and has mentioned it several times since. 

Once safely in Phoenix we did another round of sorting-and-ditching of gear, procured a light-but-sturdy bin to ride on top of the Tonneau cover, and Jen’s dad helped Dmitri install a deep-cycle battery in the truck.

The last US stop was Jen’s sister’s place in Tucson where Nina and her cousin, also 3-years-old, had a blast together.  Meanwhile, we got the electronic tailgate lock installed at a car stereo place, secured the safe inside the truck’s trunk (fits 15″ MacBook Pro), and received Amazon shipments of locking cable-threaded straps to secure the rooftop items and the bin as well as a Hi-Lift bumper accessory we hadn’t realized we needed with the Hi-Lift jack.  We felt reasonably good about the security of our truck setup when we blasted out to cross the border, exactly a week after leaving San Francisco.

By the way, traveling by vehicle all over the place often living out of your vehicle (or tent) is called “Overlanding”.  We were now officially Overlanders.