Lexi Goforth

Lexi Goforth

Lexi lives in a truck camper down by the river.

Packing

Packing the truck cab is still a work in progress. We are packed and ready to go, but how things are packed will be subject to change over the trip. After a year of frustration whenever we took a tight corner and a loose plastic set of drawers would fall over and spew its contents across the van floor, we have a better, though imperfect solution.

DIY Truck Bed Camper

Rolling back the months to when we first moved out of our San Francisco apartment and into Dodgy, we had ambitions, very custom ambitions. We intended to strip Dodgy and turn it into a travel home tailored to our needs. While Dodgy was amazing, with more space than we could have hoped for, we quickly discovered that finding replacement parts and people who would work on Dodgy was an onerous task. So we shifted gears: instead of making Dodgy the end-all-be-all road chalet, Dodgy would be our prototype.

Dodgy II: The Truckening

As has been alluded to earlier, dear Dodgy has not been at top form. Aside from her preexisting maladies—broken air conditioning, speedometer, temperamental gas gauge, and such—the passenger side window had stopped working. Of course, there is little that duck tape can't "fix," but we didn't want the window fixed in place. Rolling down the window was the only was we could manage the heat. With summer around the corner, we needed a more permanent solution.

I Watch The Watchmen

It's another Saturday night, and I'm parked in a hotel. I'm actually sleeping in something other than my van. But it seems like others are sticking with their cars. Looking out on the hotel parking lot, there is quite the selection of boats parked behind pickup trucks. Quite a few people went fishing this weekend. What they are doing now, though, is watching their boats. While they clearly do have hotels rooms, several are sitting in and around their boats. Granted, this certainly isn't the nicest part of town. (We aren't willing to shell out the amount of money it would take to stay there.) Yet, it just seems pointless to rent a hotel room, cheap as it may be, only to spend the night watching your boat.

The Mistake

Some mistakes lack any humor. Like yesterday: a photographer walks into a restaurant and leaves their camera. See, not funny. Maybe if I had walked into a bar, there would be some value in being able to say "a photographer walks into a bar..." but there isn't even that.

Surfside Beach, Texas

Sunset over Surfside Beach, Texas

Ours can be quite the tough lot in life. We get woken up by sex workers, compete with drug dealers for hotel rooms, and occasionally find ourselves at restaurants with rancid bacon.* But once and a while, it all pays off. Sometimes we find a culinary gem or a hidden oddity. In this case, we got an upgrade. To celebrate Valentines (on our own time) we reserved a room with a king bed at the Ocean Village Hotel, right on Surfside Beach, Texas. The morning we were to travel there, I got a phone call: "Unfortunately, the room [we] had reserved is under construction. Is it ok to climb stairs? Really? That's great! We'll put you in the Honeymoon suite."