Sometime during the Summer before my wife and I were to get married, we made the decision to take a road trip across the country and build our mobile domicile ourselves in the form of a teardrop camper. The build began in September of 2008, but the real progress occurred during the three months before our wedding date. This was due to the fortuitous circumstance of me getting fired from my consulting job. Alright, two things: laid off is the more appropriate term, and it was fortuitous because there was zilcho chance that I'd be able to finish the Teardrop in time for the June 2nd takeoff without the ability to focus 60 hours per week on the Teardrop construction during the months leading up to the launch date.
The photo below captures the state of how things started in September of 2008. This is an assortment of steel frame pieces for a DIY utility trailer.
I'd started another blog, Fear Not the Teardrop, to track progress which, obviously, devolved into sparse updates and a complete lack of an end game. This is the Internet, this is how this stuff works. What you get is a semi-consistent splash of progress updates until the final countdown within the month before we embarked on the trip. During that month of May, 2009, the level of haste and abundance of wedding duties began to erode the time in the shop, and photos became hard to take with a fevered mind and hands crusted with glue, sawdust, polyurethane and crusty scars. In the end, we embarked with the chunk of love you see below.
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| Tara with teardrop at test run one (and only) night before departure |
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| This thing has seen miles - it's been dragged to the lowlands of Colorado |
Everything leading up to the departure was steeped in a bit of haze, until it hit a crescendo of nuptials, photographs, wine, beer and champagne, dancing and opening of strange bank accounts while the bank rep looked at us with suspicious eyebrows and our thousands of dollars of checks to deposit... with the hopes of withdrawing on maybe somewhere between here and California and back.
You can see the dropoff from the Teardrop blog. You can see the moment when there just wasn't any time left for extras. It was all build, and meet wedding planner, and plan more teardrop work and wedding iotas, and run and try to figure out when I could get more loads of lumber back to the workshed. Again, this would have been impossible without making it a full-time job. And then there were cats.
A cat had babies. Bandit had babies, and that, of course, was the first thing I learned to use the Handycam on. This was a handycam that our friends threw their chips in together to purchase, and has afforded us many hours of undisclosed footage. This is footage that I will disclose here, eventually, after I remove those parts that will get us deported.
In the days prior to the trip, the footage begins with technical camera feasibility tests involving the kittens, kitchen planning sessions and a one-night shakedown camping trip at a campground ten minutes away.
Here, the kittens become unwitting test subjects only nights before departure:
Below is an example of what the typical planning process involved for a trans-continent expedition. It's basically mumbling and daydreaming.
And then we have the single test camping trip that took place only a few nights before the real trip, and we further hashed out map routes and contingency plans. Just kidding, we just spaced out for 24 hours after the wedding hangover was over.
Finally, the waiting was over, and we could get the rubber to the road. We departed on June 6th, 2009, customarily late in the day and short on nerves. Unceremoniously, we pulled the Teardrop out of the driveway in Delaware Water Gap, with the only farewell being the gouging of the asphalt with the trailer hitch on Route 611. We'd point our eyes to the Western horizon, and not see Eastward again for a few weeks.
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