Camper Life

 "How do you do it?". "We'd kill each other". "I could never do it". Those are just a few of the statements we hear when people find out we will be traveling together for 3+ months in a pickup camper with just over 100 square feet with a spouse and two dogs. To be honest, I don't know how I do it either. For those of you who know Barb, you know the anguish and burden I have to put up with. But I get by, day by day.

To take on an adventure such as this one has to be extremely organized. You have to think about everything you need for the trip and find a place for it. Good thing my middle name is "Mr. Organization". If it was not for me, this trip would be utter chaos for sure.

It starts out with the motto of "A Place for Everything and Everything in it Place". Who am I kidding, the only thing I bring to the table is the chaos. Barb puts everything in its place. Including me! She has this place so organized that we even have cupboards and cabinets with room to spare!

So I thought I would give you a little tour of how we do it and if you have any suggestions on what we could do it better, we would love to hear them. Besides me, there are two main things that take up most of the room in the camper; food and clothing. Having never been to the Maritimes area before we do not know what to expect for weather so we are packing for both. Our hunch is that is going to be on the cooler side so we brought lots of sweatshirts and warmer clothes. For our clothes, we have a closet and three cubbies up in the bedroom area. We plan to do laundry once a week so we kept clothes to a minimum. So. if you see pictures of us in the same clothes all summer, that is my excuse. Jeans, shirts, sweatshirts. Actually all our outerwear goes in the closet. 

All of Barb's clothes are neatly hung up while mine are in a 3-drawer storage units with the jeans on top. And the area above the closet is DVD's hats and gloves.

The cubbie on my sides contains my socks and what not, while the cubbie on Barb's side contains the same. The upper small cabinets have a couple pair of rolled up jeans, and books.

The area above the bed  is where we keep the extra blankets for those colder nights.

Moving on to the kitchen/dining room, we of course have a place for Dakota who loves her spot under the kitchen table. She will join us up in bed once in a while but usually only for a few minutes just to say hi. 

The main areas in the kitchen are the pantry and fridge. The fridge is packed! Barb was mortified when I took a picture of it.

The freezer is just as  tight! At least it was when we left. Since then we have had a few meals out of it. Barb starts a menu well before we leave on our adventures. When she decides on a meal, she will make it while we are still at home then freeze half of it in a 1 gallon ziplock laying flat so it stores perfectly in the camper freezer. When we hit the road we will have 6-8 of these frozen and ready at a moments notice. Most of the other meals are what she calls One Pot Meals so it does not take a lot of dishes for the preparation, 

The pantry is also stuffed to the gills. There are two cabinets in the back of the camper; one very shallow on for spices and a deeper one that contains paper towels, towel and our toaster. It is amazing how much storage is in these little campers. A place for everything and everything in its place. 

Bread, English muffins and bagels are all stored in the microwave, The oven stores her skillets and baking sheet. And the area above the sink contains all our dishware. There are long, deep drawers under each of the benches of the table. One side is pots and pans, the other side is for all things dog - toys, treats, clothing for Zoey, medicines and brushes. 

I know a lot of people put things on their beds while traveling. That causes too much anxiety for Barb, if something is not it's home....well, lets just say life is much better when things are in their home. The shower is the one place that we have to move things around if we want to use it. That is where we store the dog food, soda, shoes and laundry basket. This works out pretty well as a lot of places we stay have a shower we can use so we only use ours when camping remotely for days at a time.  

In the truck we keep the big bag of dog food, some more beverages and our all important "Snack Bag" which is always within arms reach while traveling!

One of the hardest things to fit in are our recreational equipment; fishing gear, hiking boots and items like that. We installed a cargo carrier on top of the camper a couple of years ago and it is now stuffed full of those specialty items that we do not use every day. The perfect place for items like this that keeps them out of the way. 

Our flyrods fit in the carrier but our longer rods are in that black tube you see to the right of the carrier. 

We finally got out into the field to start planting and have been going non-stop for the past 4 days. Too much to cover in this post so that will have to wait a few days. But while I have been doing that Barb has been busy in the camper. She replaced the faucets in the bathroom and kitchen! 

The original faucets they put in were so stupid. The kitchen sink as a divider and the faucet barely reached the left section. The new one reaches it quite nicely!

In the bathroom they had this super small faucet with a nozzle that only went over the lip by about 1". This first picture was taken after Barb replaced it but you did not even have room to get your hands under it when it was mounted. The new one gives us plenty of room!

Last but not least, she installed a couple of "3500" protective stickers on the inside of the truck doors. Our hope is that they will protect the paint from the dogs paws. 

So, there you go. That is how we do it. We are ready for our 8,000+ mile adventure! You now know where we keep everything should you wander into our camper and need to find something. Stuffed but not too stuffed. We would love to hear your ideas on how we could improve or do things differently.