Beachgiving- Vanlife Thanksgiving on the Beach

December 20, 2019December 20, 2019

Beachgiving- Vanlife Thanksgiving on the Beach

2019 has been a year of new experiences, being in new places and having new stories to tell. So to keep with the idea of new, we celebrated Thanksgiving on a beach in Florida. This is a first for both of us, but hey, 2019 has been all about firsts!

However, I can only handle so much newness, so the meal will be traditional.

The Menu

Turkey
Mashed Potatoes and Gravy
Bacon Wrapped Green Beans
Sweet Potato Casserole
Pumpkin Pie

Shopping List

Turkey for two
Butter
Onion
Celery
Carrots
Potatoes
Sour cream
Milk
Gluten free gravy mix
Bacon
Green Beans
Brown Sugar
Sweet Potatoes
Pecans
Gluten free pie crust
Canned Pumpkin
Pumpkin Pie Spice
Eggs
Heavy Whipping Cream

To be proactive and not cook everything on Thursday, I made the Pumpkin Pie Wednesday evening. I love our new Camp Chef oven! Not wanting to try pie dough in the bus, I did something very out of the ordinary. I bought a pie crust, shh, don’t tell my mom! Wal-Mart had a ready made gluten free crust and it tasted just fine. Not homemade, but still good.

Thursday morning was beautiful, the sun was shining and we watched dolphins swim next to a ship while we drank our morning coffee. Turkey prep began. Turkey is in the oven, cooking and smelling wonderful. Next step, sweet potatoes. While the water is heating up I step outside. When I come back in there is an odd smell and I look and look. Then I notice the water isn’t boiling and it should be by now. Then I notice there is no blue flame. Discussion begins and we realize the last time the propane was changed was in Nova Scotia, in August. Good news, the Camp Chef is way more efficient than the traditional Coleman. Bad news, it’s Thanksgiving, I have ingredients everywhere and neither of us want to move the bus to search for propane, on Thanksgiving. So, the trusty Coleman is pulled out of the back and put back into commission. It came in clutch, everything in our Thanksgiving feast, except the Pumpkin Pie, was made on the Coleman camp stove!

The turkey was cooked in the cast iron. Mashed potatoes and gravy were always a stove top item. Instead of baking the bacon wrapped green beans, they were cooked with the lid on. It ended up caramelizing the butter/brown sugar mixture much better than the oven ever has. Then the sweet potatoes were mixed and cooked on the stove top. We still wanted the marshmallows to be browned, so out came the MSR Pocket Rocket. We used it like a creme brûlée torch and it worked!

The picnic table was set and we feasted!

Pumpkin pie with homemade whipped cream for desert was the best way to round out this Turkey Day.

After stuffing ourselves we took a leisurely stroll down the beach. We spotted several types of birds, saw a few fish jump and then watched as two dolphins played. Sharing Thanksgiving together was a special day and one that we won’t forget!

December 11, 2019December 11, 2019

Okienomad’s Holiday Gift Guide for the Vanner in Your Life

This is a guide for those that have a van-lifer in their family or friends that are building or hope to build a van, skoolie, or overland vehicle. We own most of these products and can attest to their usefulness in a mobile lifestyle.

This is not a guide of things that we want for Christmas! We already have a ton of stuff and we have whittled down what we own to fit into our little bus and everything works really well.

Sea to Summit X-Pot

This thing is so useful that we have replaced our standard kitchen pot with the 2L size. The silicon sides make handling the X-pot a dream and the vented lid lets moisture escape the pot and also works as a handy strainer for pasta dishes. The best feature in our opinion is that the X-pot collapses to about 2 inches thick which makes it a storage dream. We have been using the X-pot for two years almost daily and it is still crushing it!

Read our Gear Review of the Sea to Summit X-Pot

Viair 88P Air Compressor

Every vehicle needs a portable air compressor to keep in the trunk for low tires. We have used our portable air compressor more times than we can count. From airing down in Baja to topping off our bus tires after sitting for a while, the 88p does everything we ask it to. With the purchase of an adaptor we have even been able to air up our stand up paddle boards with the 88P. If you run bigger tires, VIAIR makes many different models and we wouldn’t hesitate to throw money at anything with the VIAIR name on it.

Read our Gear Review of the Viair 88P

Blue Sea Systems 12V USB Outlet

One of our favorite additions that we made to our skoolie was a couple of 12V charger ports on each end of the bus to charge our phones, camera batteries, GPS, and anything else that uses USB to charge. We originally cheeped out and bought Chinese knock-offs and that was a bad idea because one has already died after being in use for a very short time and it was replaced with the Blue Sea unit. Blue Sea Systems sells a fast charge version of their USB outlet that will crank out enough juice to charge your iPad or cell phone in no time.

Buy a Blue Sea Systems 12V USB Outlet

Helinox Chair One XL

Had you told us two years ago that we would be using $100 lawn chairs, we both would have laughed in your face. What we have learned is the saying “Buy once, cry once” is a real thing and definitely applies to camp chairs. Our hand-me-down fold out camp chairs from Wal-Mart were beginning to succumb to the hundreds of uses in creeks and sandy beaches as well as bouncing around in the rear of the bus and truck for some 50,000 miles of travel. Once one chair became too derelict to use, we chucked it and put the other in deep storage as there was a new chair in town: the Helinox. The stored size is perfect for any number of cubby holes and the chairs are truly top notch quality. We expect to use these chairs for a long time!
Rand McNally Road Atlas

Read our Gear Review of the Helinox Chair One XL

Rand McNally Paper Map

There are times that we feel like old-folks…when we go to bed at 6PM and read until we fall asleep with a book on our faces and when we use paper maps to navigate. Our jobs take us around some of the most hi-tech navigation setups in the overlanding world and we still rely on a cell-phone with offline maps and a paper atlas. There is something soothing and adventurous about following your navigator’s finger on a map instead of a dot on a screen.

Read our Case for Traveling with a Paper Map

Just a head’s up: this page contains affiliate links. If you use one of the links scattered throughout this page, a portion of your purchase price will help fund our adventures (at no cost to you). Thanks for reading and shopping with our links!

December 8, 2019December 8, 2019

A Case for Traveling with a Paper Map

If you were as fortunate as we were growing up you had the opportunity to go on a few road trips before the cell phone was invented. I remember riding in the trunk of our 90’s Chevy Astro Van on a trip to South Dakota and the navigator was armed with three tools at their disposal: a bag phone that was astronomically expensive to make voice calls on, an AM/FM radio that played cassette tapes, and a paper road atlas. Consumer GPS and Google Maps were still at least a decade away and the only way to get from point A to point B was to follow the map.

To this day, we still travel with a paper map for a few reasons. First, technology is fickle. Although phones, tablets and computers have come a long way since they became commonplace in most every American home, there are still times where batteries die, maps don’t load, and phone GPS beacons simply don’t work. Once while exploring the four corners region of the Southwest US, our phone started giving us wonky directions. More than wonky, it was telling us to go South when our destination was clearly North. We opened the Apple Compass app and sure enough, the compass was pointing the opposite magnetic direction that we were traveling.

We use paper maps when we are backpacking, bike touring, or exploring in our kayaks too! Follow the link below to find out how we download and print National Geographic Topographic Maps:

Download FREE Nat Geo Topo Maps

A second reason that we prefer traveling with a paper map is the value that we place on the big picture. By looking at an entire state you have options- when you work remotely and you don’t always plan where you will be at the end of the day, it’s nice to have a big picture view of where you are off to next.

The third and most important reason that we keep paper maps in our bus is the tangible feel associated with a paper map. Similar to a good soft cover book or journalling on high-quality paper, holding a map in your hands is warm, simple, and relaxing. Technology is cold and brings along all of the other distractions of email and application notifications that are normally the reason why we are navigating out to the wild in the first place. A paper map is honest and true (if it’s current) and it doesn’t present you with the fastest route or a way to avoid traffic, it takes you where you want to go with as much true adventure as a piece of paper can generate, and that’s very valuable to us.

One of the best gifts we received from our wedding was a Rand McNally print atlas that we still travel with today. We plan with it, we real-time navigate with it, and we will only give it up when it is too torn up to use.

December 3, 2019December 3, 2019

Gear Review: Helinox Chair One XL

This piece of equipment was an investment, there is no doubt about that. Spending over $100 on a camp chair seems like a lot, which is why we didn’t buy a set when we left in 2018 on our round-the-country skoolie adventure. In hindsight, I wish we had because the Helinox Chair One XL camp chairs are worth every penny. We picked up a pair of chairs at Overland Expo 2019 EAST and put them to the test in the months following.

Our comparison for the Helinox is coming from our use of the most basic standard camp chairs that everyone’s grandparents have tucked away in their garages-they come in a bag and they are clumsy to say the least. Obviously a $100+ chair will work better than a $12 Wal-Mart chair, but will the improvement be enough to justify the cost difference? We think so. If you are a fan of the tried and true fold out camp chair and you don’t see any reason to upgrade, more power to you. If like us, you have always looked at the fold up camp chairs in your rig as a monstrosity that need to be replaced with something small, lightweight, and comfortable that is built to last a really long time, keep reading.

The biggest improvement from our old chairs to the Helinox chairs is the size; these chairs pack up small without compromising on comfort, but more on that later! The Chair One XL is the biggest of the square Helinox chairs and packed it measures 4.5” x 5” x 18.5”, a huge improvement over the nearly 5” x 5” x 36” dimensions of our old school camp chair. The Helinox is also a winner in the weight department, coming in at a slim 3.3 lbs. whereas our old chair weighed nearly 9 lbs. if you count all of the small grains of sand still stuck in the legs from our last beach trip. The new chairs are light enough that we would consider taking them on an extended paddle trip or an ultra luxurious bike tour. We are now much more confident in being able to pack our chairs for a walk to the park or up the trail for a picnic a few miles away.

Another alluring factor that drew us toward the Helinox is the manufacturer’s 5-year warranty! You read that right-FIVE YEARS! Do you know how long your camp chair warranty lasts? I do, until the moment you sit down in it the first time. The peace of mind associated with a 5-year warranty on a product that we use weekly is invaluable!

The only area where the Helinox is not a clear winner for both of us over a standard camp chair is comfort. For me (Zach) that’s not to say that the Helinox is not comfortable, it is, just not any more comfortable than a normal camp chair. Rachael finds the Helinox much more comfortable than the camp chair which I can attribute only to the fact that I am an ogre and she is much smaller. There are also no cup holders on the helinox chairs which is not a huge miss for us, but some might not enjoy sitting their beverage on the ground.

The Helinox is a worthwhile upgrade for you if:

You use your camp chairs as a piece of furniture for full-time travel
You are tired of trying to find a good place to store huge camp chairs
You use your gear enough to value a 5-year warranty

The Helinox might not be worth it for you if:

You don’t like gear that is expensive
You don’t use your gear enough to warrant the price

For us, the Helinox is a no brainer and we are disappointed that we didn’t upgrade sooner. We will decommission our old chair that is still functioning to storage and maybe put it in storage for when the niece and nephew come to visit some day. Until then we are going to keep enjoying our Helinox chairs!

Month: December 2019