Phase II: North Idaho

So, we embarked on Plan C: drive over Lookout Pass to Wallace, Idaho, where we kitted up, took down the bike, and rode the 12.5 km up to Mullan, 250 meters higher elevation. The ride back was very chilly, at speeds up to 30 kph. This 25-km ride completed our coverage of the entire east end of the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes, a 115-km (230 km round trip) paved rail trail from Mullan to Plummer. The only part left we hadn’t ridden was in the middle, from milepost 29 to milepost 39. As we stopped for lunch in Wallace, I discovered I had lost part of my keychain in the last few days in all the excitement: It had my Army dogtag and our bicycle lock keys on it: fortunately we hadn’t locked up the bike, but it’s still a loss. We have duplicates of the keys at home, but I had lost the other dog tag many decades ago.

We planned to camp near milepost 29, but the camp spot listed in iOverlander as a lakeside space for a few campers and a pit toilet turned out to be not as advertised, up a narrow track to the top of a hill, where we were saluted with a beer held high by one of the two guys who were already there. The pit toilet was at a boat launch farther up the road, which was posted no overnight parking. So, we backtracked to the CDA River RV Park in Cataldo, where we had camped in 2019 and had cut our bike ride short at milepost 39 when a thunderstorm rolled in, barely making it back to camp before it hit.

In the morning, we decided not to ride from the nearby Cataldo Trailhead, as it would have been a long ride upriver on the return, so we drove to the Bull Lake Trailhead (MP 33.5), rode to MP 29, then back up to MP 39.5. We met another couple on a tandem who had been riding the whole trail in several days, camping along the way.

This completed the entire trail for us, which began with a 61-mile ride from Harrison to Plummer and Medimount back in October of 2004, with five to 20-mile segments over the years, as we had time when we passed through and the weather cooperated (which it often didn’t). Most bicyclists ride the entire trail both directions in two or three days: we were passed coming and going by a woman on a time trial bike, full aero, who passed us going up-river at at least 45 kph, while we lumbered along at 17-18 kph. This final segment turned out to be 33 km.

A bit tired after two days back-to-back rides longer and harder than we had done all year, we drove down to St. Maries, hoping for a decent camp at the fairgrounds, but it was a dump, so we phoned the Heyburn State Park office just before closing and were assured there were four sites left to choose from: 13 miles of winding cliffside road later, we backed into a level site next to the showers and had a great evening and good sleep.

We checked in/out in the morning and found our way to the bike trail for photos of the Chatcolet Bridge we had crossed on our 2004 segment, and views of the lake and Plummer Creek Marsh. Then, down ID 3, a new route for us, enroute to Judy’s brother’s in Caldwell, Idaho. We stopped for lunch at a riverside forest service camp, then made our way to US 12 and US 95 to Winchester, for another state park, checking in in mid-afternoon, after a day of driving through the mountains and eastern end of the Palouse, and down into the fire-ravaged canyon and the town of Juliette, then up US 95.

(to be continued)

Phase I: Montana

We loaded up as we completed fitting drawers and painting doors, setting off mid-morning, determined to make this an adventure instead of just a point-to-point run. We took the Chinook Pass route over the Cascades, a route we hadn’t taken in decades, probably since the late 1980s, and an alternate route through the Palouse, ending up for the night at a city park in a small town, parked on the street, our first venture into urban boondocking. We left early in the morning, stopping for breakfast at a riverside fishing spot on the Snake River in the Nez Perce Nation just before heading up the Clearwater River toward Montana. We arrived at our destination near Florence, Montana in late afternoon. In a typical example of Montana creative adaptation, we were invited to a neighbor’s office Christmas Party, held between the summer heat and smoke and winter cold, so it could be held outdoors, with live music and a catered food truck. We do miss Montana living!

We planned to spend a few days visiting and unwinding, as this was a real vacation from a furious seven months of van building for me and a hectic spring and summer for Judy. She had taken over coordination of resident scheduling and presentations for the women artist’s residency, Hypatia in the Woods, for which we serve on the board. That’s been a full-time job for her, with the learning curve and the workload.

Our new van worked well. Plugged in to friends’ house power, we had a chance to try out our small electric heater to see how it went with the better insulation. It did, to the extent we turned it off soon: we probably won’t need heat unless the temperature is below freezing, which will save us money camping this winter.

On the downside, our plan to lose a little weight during our trip by not snacking was scuttled by the hospitality of our friends with great meals. Nevertheless, it was good to be on the road again.

After nearly two weeks of visiting friends in the Bitterroot Valley, bouncing back and forth between them, it was time to leave. During our stay, we had taken a morning to ride our bicycle through the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge. I helped a neighbor assess his solar system, and helped a friend with her own van build. We helped modify her van doors to make space for storage inside the doors and cut the hole in the roof to install a vent fan.

We drove up through the Jocko Valley, stopping late in the day at the Garden of One Thousand Buddhas, as we usually do when we pass that way. We ended up in Polson, at the Super Walmart, with a view of Flathead Lake. Unfortunately, a young man who had pulled into the parking lot to make a phone call backed into us with an extremely loud thump and a jolt. Fortunately, he missed the bike, but we took it and the rack off to inspect it and the van doors. The doors opened normally and sealed, but the magnetic door stop on the left side had been pushed back into the door. This seems to be fixable without too much trouble, though we will have to remove the lower inside door panel and the insulation to inspect it.

After that, we moved back against the curb, just to make sure we weren’t in direct line of fire from traffic, and had an otherwise uneventful evening. After this, we’re not sure free parking at Walmart is affordable.

In the morning, we took a walk on the waterfront trail, which extends over the water under the bridge. Then, off again, through Ronan, Charlo, and Dixon. We found a great Lolo National Forest dispersed camping area on the Clark Fork River. Although we had an ideal campsite, and even cell service, a rarity at most remote camps, we got a weather alert of an approaching violent thunderstorm. Being a mile from the highway in dense forest on a dirt road seemed risky, so we buttoned down and headed out, seeking shelter in St. Regis. The storm hit as we approached the town, with wind gusts and flying needles and branches. Before it got dark, we could see the approaching wall of water at the edge of the storm, and it hit us just as we parked in an open parking lot.

The heavy rain carried no hail and the storm passed quickly. The lot was posted no overnight parking, so we drove on west on I-90, noting the power was out in DeBorgia and Saltese, as well as Haugan, our destination. The 50,000 Silver Dollar casino was dark, but we had stayed in their free campground before and found an open site in the pitch-black dark. The power was back on by morning. We left, thinking we were going to ride up the Northern Pacific Trail from Taft to Lookout Pass. But, there was heavy construction on I-90, as there always is before winter destroys most of the improvements. We couldn’t find the trail or a place to park, with the trail head a staging area for the road construction. I think the trail is a once and future undertaking, as there seemed to be a muddy, overgrown track where the trail should have been. We proceeded to the rest area 2 km up the road, where we could see the trail above, but no way to get to it.

(to be continued …)

Our 2024 van life began with a bang–literally. After ending 2023 with a quick tour of nearby state parks on our Senior Off-Season Pass, we pulled out onto a road in major sun glare, out of which a car appeared, very close and very fast. With a loud bang, we spun around 180 degrees and stopped cross-way in the road. Attempts to pull over were met with a rattle and no movement. The drive shaft lay in the street, with the rear axle pushed back against the spare tire, but little other damage. Inside was a mess, as the shelving and bed tore loose and items toppled from the top of our storage cabinet. But, we were unhurt, the driver who hit us was unhurt, and her car was still movable, so we directed her to the side of the road. While she called her husband and Judy called 911, I directed traffic until the sheriff’s deputies arrived. Hampered by poor phone service in this area, in rural northeast Olympia, eventually a tow truck was called and the insurance company was notified.

Our van was towed away to a body shop, and we rented a car and drove home. After a week of waiting, and a cryptic report from the insurance company, we finally realized that, despite what we thought was minor damage, our van, which we had christened “Bella” when we bought it three years ago in 2021, would be declared a total loss. We rented a small moving truck, emptied the van and removed all the add-on fixtures we could easily do so. We returned the rental car and the moving truck, borrowed a friend’s extra pickup truck, and began shopping for a new van, once the insurance settlement was reached.

Our new van, Bianca, a 2023 All-Wheel-Drive model, was not otherwise as well-equipped as Bella, with smaller mirrors, a smaller rear-view camera screen, and not a lot of extra features that Bella had: no eco-boost engine, parking assist, blind-spot warning lights, or armrests. But, it did have the stock Ford wall panels and a padded vinyl rug in the cargo area, which wasn’t a clean slate like Bella had been, and it changed our conversion plans somewhat. We wouldn’t have to purchase a liner or build a frame and walls inside, so we elected to have a roof fan and passenger seat swivel installed professionally, since it was winter and those needed to be installed first in the process.

We used the rug for a template to build up the solid floor and insulation underneath. We removed the wall panels and installed insulation on the walls, and in the ceiling and cargo doors. We made holes in the panels to line up with the threaded inserts in the walls, to which we bolted Unistrut beams to serve as anchors for the interior fixtures. I also set Rivnuts in the roof ribs to attach Unistrut rails to secure the fronts of the upper cabinets.

Before the wreck, we had already decided to make some major revisions to the van floor plan, mainly to move the tandem bicycle outside, move the bed to the driver’s side, and install floor-to-ceiling storage and a kitchen counter on the passenger side, so that’s the way the new van building went. I liked the idea of a cabinet bulkhead behind the driver’s seat, so we made a narrow electrical cabinet, with a box to house the toilet behind that. The toilet had been under the end of the bed in our last configuration.

So it went, juggling all of the contents of the old van aside to make space to build in the garage workshop. We cleared out an area in the weaving room to layout the floor and later the large plywood partitions, but doing all the cutting in the shop. We cut the wood subfloor with a jigsaw, but most of the rest of the construction was done with my set of Japanese hand saws, a pocket-hole fixture, my ancient Makita cordless drill, my Dad’s old Stanley hand plane, and a set of chisels. I made a few cuts with the old benchtop table saw.

By late June, there was enough done to call it a camper, including a new trailer hitch and hitch-mounted tandem rack. We headed to eastern Washington for a few nights camping and a bike ride on the recently-restored Beverley Bridge across the Columbia River. The bridge was the final link that connected the east and west halves of the cross-state Palouse to Cascades State Park Trail, along the former Milwaukee Road railroad route.

For the rest of the summer, we continued to work on the details and go camping overnight and take bike rides around the Olympic Peninsula, using our weekly hikes with the senior center group to select targets of opportunity. Finally, we planned to leave in early September for a month-long expedition to visit friends and relatives in Montana and Idaho.

(to be continued)

A decades-long tale of the hunt for leisure, and the price we paid, with apologies to Bob Dylan for the title.

About thirty years ago, I had been through graduate school, unemployment, and a succession of short-term jobs that didn’t yield any vacation time.  Finally, we had some stability, the promise of longer employment, with vacation benefits, and had gotten our finances somewhat under control.  But, we still didn’t plan *real* vacations.

When we stumbled upon the opportunity to buy into vacation property, in the form of a timeshare condominium resort, we decided this would be a good way to guarantee we used up our vacation for something other than visiting relatives.  We bought a 1/34th share in a two-bedroom condo at Wapato Point, on Lake Chelan in Manson, WA, which worked out to three weeks every two years, rotating around the seasons.

During the 1980s, we had taken a couple of trips to Lake Chelan, taking the Lady of the Lake passenger ferry up the lake to Stehekin, once for a backpacking trip, and once to stay at a tent-cabin resort up the river and ride our tandem up the valley on the Stehekin River Road.  We liked Lake Chelan, a landlocked fjord formed by glaciers, 90 km long, 2 km wide, and 500 meters deep, surrounded by the peaks of the Cascade Range, so it seemed a great “forever” vacation spot, just four hours drive away.  And, we had assigned weeks for vacation, that shifted year to year.  We had no excuse for not taking vacation for ourselves, and we still had a week every other year to visit relatives or go elsewhere, and maybe even have a vacation place to share with family in the future.  At least, that was the promise in the sales pitches, which came with a “free trial” weekend at the resort.

But, life being what happens when you are making other plans, I soon took a night teaching job to pay off my graduate school tuition, which required us to shift our assigned week some years to fit between quarters. My day jobs turned out to still be short-term, with year-to-year contracts and not always with usable vacation time.  And, it wasn’t always convenient to take time off from work on the assigned week, so I ended up working remotely some years, from the condo, with some difficulty in the age of dial-up.  Remote work continued even after WiFi became available, and we sometimes brought hobby projects to work on, which had nothing to do with the resort venue.  But, we did bring our tandem bicycle, and used up the hilly apple-growing countryside around Manson, when seasons permitted.

A few years into this timeshare venture, a new type of vacation company sprang up: Trendwest.  They built or bought into resorts all over the Pacific Northwest and sold shares, which converted to points that owners could use to book variable-length stays anytime during the year, with the points-per-night rates seasonally adjusted, and lower on weekdays.  This made more sense, but, since we were still paying the mortgage on the fixed timeshare, we negotiated a half-share, which would give us that missing week every other year, or the occasional off-season short stay.

So, there we were, up to our ears in expensive resort obligations, to the tune of over $20,000 “investment” and monthly HOA-type maintenance fees.  At least we had a steady income, though not enough time off for everything.  Fortunately, the fixed resort was tied in with RCI, Resort Condominiums International, a way to exchange time in one condo association with time in other resorts, or trade time for air travel.  So, we converted the Wapato Point property to RCI points, and used the exchange (which also required a separate fee) for lodging near relatives and sometimes for travel.  This was also convenient after we moved to Montana, and it was a seven-hour drive to Lake Chelan: we used our exchanges to go elsewhere.

Meanwhile, Trendwest had become WorldMark, a larger, more aggressive corporation that was expanding rapidly across the West through hard sell, and raising the points-per-night fees across the board.  But, by this time, we were semi-retired, with more time for travel, so we succumbed to the sales pressure and forked over another $15,000 to be able to use more than a few nights a year.  And, the upgraded ownership came with RCI exchange privileges, folded into the monthly fees, instead of the annual fee we paid with the other timeshare.

We did manage to milk a lot of practical leisure time out of our “investment,” in increments instead of full weeks, spending a few days mid-week instead of the expensive weekends.  We got more use after shifting into semi-retirement, with all my work remote. Over the years, we visited resorts throughout Washington, Oregon, British Columbia, California, and Idaho, sometimes by ourselves and sometimes with friends who were also in the timeshare life, with whom we traded off hosting.  We enjoyed urban vacations in Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria. We took a brother-in-law with us once, and a granddaughter another time. We went to Kauai, Wisconsin, Iowa, Michigan, British Columbia, and Ontario, on RCI exchanges.  We stayed at the resort in Santa Fe more than once, when one of our granddaughters lived there.  We gifted children with weeks on several occasions.  The monthly maintenance costs were just part of the budget, and the initial buy-in loan was just another monthly bill, so we didn’t think about how much a night this was really costing us.  After all, buying a share was supposed to lock in a lifetime of luxury vacations at reasonable prices, right?  Not really.

In semi-retirement, with a bit more freedom to travel on our schedule, we started going back to Wapato Point for our assigned weeks.  But, things were not well in the deeded timeshare industry.  Often, when we showed up in the off-season, ours was the only car in our association’s 24-unit parking lot.  The housing crisis was in full flower, and owners were abandoning their resort property in droves.  This, of course, drove up the maintenance fees, which were already high because the association had never built the third 12-unit building that would have distributed the cost of shared amenities among 36 units, with 1224 owners instead of 816, and now many fewer than that, as a substantial percentage of those 816 segments had reverted back to the association, and the rest of us were paying the fixed costs for those, too.  

Our income had also tanked in retirement, since I had quit working part time after my heart surgery, so we tried to sell our share.  No takers, and a big backlog, between private sellers and the association’s abandoned inventory.  High monthly fees made low buy-in less attractive, and the deeded timeshare ownership was just not popular with a more mobile generation that would have been the market: our own children refused to be “gifted” with this financial burden, preferring the “pay as you go, wherever you choose to go” vacation planning in an uncertain age.

Finally, we pulled the “age” card, saying we couldn’t negotiate the icy stairs to our second-floor unit anymore, and paid the association a substantial fee (to offset the maintenance costs while they tried to rent or sell it) to take possession of our share, plus the usual steep realty fee.  A sacrifice, to be sure, but the exorbitant maintenance fees also stopped.  Our plan to have a cheap getaway in our senior years had backfired: despite having stayed enough weeks over the years of ownership to reduce the per-night cost, the maintenance fees alone pushed the per-night cost to many times what we would have paid for a modest motel, approaching that of luxury hotel suites we would never think of staying at.

Meanwhile, WorldMark had become Wyndham, and ever more voracious in their up-selling campaign.  After escaping from the fixed timeshare, we were vulnerable, and forked over another $15,000 to upgrade our ownership level and maintain enough time to enjoy their resorts to the extent to which we had become accustomed.  This was, admittedly, not a good choice.  Within a few years, with the pandemic, and yet more and more pressure to buy, buy, buy, that left us bitter after what was supposed to be a casual vacation, we had had enough. We had evolved to van travel, opting for camping during the pandemic, and most of our “vacations” had always involved cross-country travel from lodging to lodging rather than multi-night stays that fit the timeshare model.  Many years, we had simply planned resort stays to burn off points, with no particular destination in mind, just the closest resort that had space, and we often just booked one or a few nights, which fit our original plan of having pre-paid vacations we couldn’t refuse to take, but which didn’t always satisfy “bucket list” destination desires.

In 2022, after spending a week in California in the winter, having to endure one last high-pressure sales pitch disguised as an “informational” presentation, and a week in Idaho in the spring that was more pleasant, with relatives, we stopped planning resort stays, putting our shares up for sale, while continuing to pay out $180 a month in maintenance fees.  Finally, with the promise of two full years of points on the table, we got an offer in late 2023.  We got a modest return, probably $0.10 on the dollar for what we had spent over the three decades to buy into the timeshare resort scam, and which barely covered the last two years’ maintenance fees. But, we look forward to the end of the drain on our budget for the monthly fees, which will buy us a couple tanks of gasoline to explore in our van, and the small stipend we recovered from the sale will pay off half of what we still owe on our last ill-advised share purchase.

We’re at least glad that we didn’t talk any of our children into taking over ownership of either of the timeshares, or saddling them with the inheritance of this drain on finances that they are, instead of the promise of a secure and affordable retirement getaway. Timeshares are not an investment, just an expensive $500 per night hotel suite that we can no longer afford (if ever!), and which doesn’t meet our lifestyle or travel needs.  We’re perfectly happy sliding out our home-built bed frame in the back of our van and crawling into our sleeping bag at a Walmart, Cabela’s, or Love’s parking lot when traveling across the country, winter camping around the state with our senior off-season pass, boondocking in state lands in the summer with our DNR pass, or camping half-price in National Forest and National Park campgrounds–places we want to visit, rather than where the resorts are located.

We’ve come full circle, going from backpacking to bikepacking with a tent in our early years and now back to camping, albeit in a “tin tent.” Besides, the times, they are a-changing, and our new mobile, stealthy, and modest van-lifestyle is good practice for WTSHTF.  It’s coming.  Be ready.