Episode 246 - Shari and Hutch from Freedom in a Can

[00:00:29] The bushwhacks were some of the worst days I've ever had in the mountains, or life really. Whereas Pantsy Mountain is totally opposite, it's a mountain on top of a crater. I think the weather challenges on this incident were particularly difficult. It is really the development of New York State. Catskills will respond to it.

[00:00:52] Passing into Inside The Line, the Catskill Mountains Podcast. Alright, so what are we doing this for, Tad? What are you cracking the can opening for? For you, buddy. I'm doing it for you and the listeners. So, you ready for me to go first? Yeah!

[00:01:22] Okay, here we go. Ready? Three, two, one. Ooh, nice. Yeah. Nice. I It smells good, too. And I am cracking one open for the informal trails, a.k.a. herd pets. There to be no more. We'll talk about that in a few. What do you got?

[00:01:52] Oh, shh! You got an awestruck? No way! Nice! How, what do you think? Tastes like, tastes like mountain lion piss. I'll make sure you put that back on auto, buddy. Or your microphone. Oh, I gotcha. Yeah. Boy. Mountain lion piss. God damn, that's a little harsh. Yeah, I got it up on Graham. Got it up on Graham mountain. Freshly Harvest.

[00:02:18] Well, so, ah, that kind of went off thing, but episode 246. Welcome everybody. Tonight, Sherry and Hutch from Freedom in a Can will be joining us. We're going outside the line. We are not in the Catskills. They are from North Carolina, but they have been living on the road in a 72 foot square trailer. Well, you know, uh, but RV, they, they said it's an RV. Yeah. That's, that's roughly 10 by seven.

[00:02:46] Yeah. 10 by seven RV for 14 years. Yeah. I don't even think that's as big as a garage bay. Right? Like, like I was thinking, can you fit a car in that thing? No. Yeah. Huh? But they, they, they chat with us tonight about that. And it's a very interesting, awesome episode.

[00:03:04] First time in a long time we've gone outside the line. So it's, uh, it's good. It's good to get out and they have a great story. They have a great kind of momentum and a great, just, uh, you know, a view on life really. Yeah. Living the dream. Yeah. I mean, uh, this ties a lot in with, uh, Sophronia to chat and it's pretty cool.

[00:03:26] Yeah. Well, there's all sorts of different types of life on the road and they're, they're doing it their way. My daughter does it her way. Other people do it whatever way there's in one respect, maybe no rules when you're out there. Right. You just do what you need to do to get by. True.

[00:03:43] So yeah, it's a, it's a great conversation. Um, we cover some interesting topics and it's kind of a must listen to, and hopefully it encourages some of our listeners to like, you know, pull up their anchor and get out there and, and Rome. Yeah. I like that. I like that. It was good. Speaking of roaming, I mean, it seems like this is a big topic right now. I mean, it's just came out this morning that I got information about this.

[00:04:13] And there are clearing the herd paths out in the slide wilderness area. So there was, I got a little information back from an amazing person who has wandered in the Catskills adventurously and all over the place who has, uh, one of those just minds of just all throughout the Catskills.

[00:04:34] Send me a picture, um, saying that there will be chainsaw activity in the slide mountain wilderness through from October 15th to November 15th. I believe, uh, is what I got once again. Sorry. Uh, that was like, I was very curious. I was like, interesting. And somebody said that they were clearing the herd paths going up to Friday mountain. I was just like, no way it has begun.

[00:05:01] It has begun. This has gotten way quicker than I thought it would. I thought something wouldn't be happening for years upon years. Okay. So, uh, yeah, uh, chainsaw window, blah, blah, blah. It says DC will be conducting management activities in the slide mountain wilderness during the wilderness chainsaw window until November 15th.

[00:05:22] So whenever this was posted, uh, the source I do, uh, my, my source is a very well-respected human being, um, two sources actually. So very, two real, well-respected human beings. And, uh, once again, they were going up Friday. Lowdown has been cleared almost all the way to the summit. Uh, and, uh, is, uh, very crazy once again to this happen this quick, uh, especially with something that I didn't think that they,

[00:05:53] they took so seriously. So it's, it's just, it's, it's happening. So the one question is, is I've reached out to my sources and stuff like that saying that this is a project of the DEC that they will, it will be ongoing. And they're looking to minimalize the web outburst of all the informal trails to make it once again, one informal trail going to the peaks and that eventually years upon years of coming.

[00:06:22] And that these will be connected to formal trails that we will have established trails somewhat on the informal peaks reaching to the other trails. So crazy activity, crazy to hear about, you know, what do you think, dad? Like here, you're, you're the, the off trail kind of dude. And this is probably just like, eh, there's still places to explore, right?

[00:06:46] Well, obviously there's still places to explore. Uh, what's, what's interesting is where is the final adoption of a area use management plan for this?

[00:07:01] Because last we knew they left off with the draft, uh, hit solicited and obtained comments. But, uh, to my knowledge, they have not, and I just Googled it now for whatever that's worth. To my knowledge, they haven't formally adopted a plan. Not all for this.

[00:07:49] It does make sense to have a consolidated way, a marked way to get up there. And for probably 90% and maybe even more of the, uh, hikers who go out there, they're going to stay on the beaten path. They do already. Uh, it's the only thing that's going to change is you're going to be, you know, uh, have some level of trail maintenance, uh, some, some level of trail marketing marking, and it'll be easier going.

[00:08:19] Probably end up having more people going to these mountains because they're more accessible. They're going to show up on trail maps. They'll have a higher comfort level going there. And then there'll be, you know, folks like you and I who go, whatever we want to get, to get up there. And that's fine. You know, we're not, yeah. You know, when it's, it's not going to be like, uh, uh, 250 people a month or roaming all over these mountain tops on and off hurt paths.

[00:08:47] There's, there's, there's, you know, probably 15, if that trips a month, people going up the less traveled way, if you will. So I'm down for it. It's gotta be done. Yeah. And, uh, you know, once again, there was a strong part of me a while back before I started the podcast, maybe during in the middle, like in the beginning of the podcast where I was against of doing.

[00:09:17] Anything like this. Like I was just like, keep it, you know, keep it like open. Don't do anything like that. And then I'm just like, you know, this might be actually for the better as if, you know, doing a little bit more exploring and stuff like that. You know, you're going up on, on Rocky or kind of like loan and you see 18 different herd paths. You're like, what the hell is this shit? Or going from Friday to balsam cap. Once again, the intertwining of, of trees and stuff like that.

[00:09:46] There's just so many herd paths. Like why not just limit to one little thing. If you are getting from point a to point B, you know, if you have a destination of that, just limit it. If you were like people like me and you was like, yeah, well, we don't want to come up from the moon. We'd rather come up from the never sink and just go straight up that there ain't going to be anything like that until we hit that herd path at the summit basically, or the, the inner, the connection of the call of those two.

[00:10:14] That'll be our trip. You know, once again, that's it's I, I, I, I'm for it. I'm, I look forward to this. It's it's, it'll be interesting. So this, will this be, will the devil's path be extended down? Like, are we going from St. Anne's peak all the way over to Hawkett and then Hawkett to, or what are we doing? Hasn't, hasn't the devil's path already been extended? I haven't heard. When have I heard of somebody saying, I mean, But it's informally it's been extended.

[00:10:44] True. I mean, that's, that's been probably one of the most well beaten into the ground herd paths for the longest time. You know, you, you can't say. True. And, you know, obviously I haven't been up between a balsam cap and, and Rocky in six months, but, you know, last time I went through there, which I think was in April.

[00:11:12] You know what? The, the herd path kind of fades out when you get into the call, but, you know, going up Rocky, going up balsam cap, it's, it's very well established. It's not like it was. I remember, you know, when, what I'll call the old days, 10 years ago, no, you know, it wasn't you, you, some, you would run into, especially coming off a balsam cap, having towards Rocky.

[00:11:36] You would hit some of those ledges going down and it would be a bitch to go down those ledges. If you hit it wrong and got into some of the taller ledges, it would take, you know, a little time to safely go over them, you know, jump down or whatnot. And now it's, it's so much easier, so much safer, so much faster to get off a balsam cap heading towards Rocky and then getting up Rocky.

[00:12:05] You know, there's a lot of different ways to get up to Rocky from that side that faces a balsam cap. Some of them are more challenging than others, but the unofficial way up is, you know, been fairly well established for three, four years now.

[00:12:22] Yeah. What is that? Donovan Brook going up from the Neverthink, right? Like, well, no, that's a little load. Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, you know, what are you going to say? Yeah. I mean, who, when, when's the, I mean, very few people, at least in my opinion, very few people who are on their third or fourth trip to Lone and Rocky go up or down the fisherman's path.

[00:12:51] Most of them now are doing it on the six. Yep. Doing it from the table. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, having, having that, you know, frankly, having a loop trail where you can start at slide, start at Denning, even start at Moon Hall, uh, makes sense. It'll be a nice hike. Yeah. People can enjoy it. They can swing. And afterwards they can swing by our estate at the end of Moon Hall, right?

[00:13:20] Are we not, are we not announcing the closing that we were closing on that, that we got the grant from the Graham family to keep us off, uh, uh, not Graham family, the. The Snyder family. Yeah. The Snyder family. Right. They put a surcharge on all beer to buy the place for us.

[00:13:37] Yeah. Right. Um, I mean, you know, it's, it's cool to see and, you know, we're, we're, we're, we're moving forward a little bit faster than I thought it would be, you know, I seriously didn't think this was, it was to take years upon years to think.

[00:13:50] But the, the one question I have, that's a big, are they going to keep these, the herd paths intact that they already have, or they're going to try to strategically kind of place, you know, the trees and stuff, you know, to, to make a better kind of more safer somewhat route that they're going to establish in the future. Like up Friday, we all know that last climb of Friday is just full of loose rock erosion and shit.

[00:14:18] Will they kind of like chainsaw something, push it in the way and then make it up a lesser road area where it can be a little bit more established. So where are you thinking that area is and why hasn't it been used already? I could like, oh, I mean, it has been, if you, if you go to that viewpoint and then you can just kind of go into the call of, of balsam cap and Friday and then shoot up. But not many people do that. They just go right from that viewpoint, the Ralph's ramp, and then just go right up to the summit.

[00:14:45] And that's that 200 last final feet that are pretty steep. Yeah. Yeah. There's definitely easier ways to get up there. Um, and it would make sense to do that because the steeper the slope is that you have people hiking up, the more erosive damage is done, not only by the weather, but by the foot traffic. Um, you know, it'll be easier. It'll be interesting to see what they plan.

[00:15:11] Like I said, months and months ago, you get somebody up there like Tom Martone, uh, who, you know, hikes these mountains almost like a, you know, constantly who knows them like the back of his hand and other, other folks out there like him. They, they certainly can do a lot to assist the DEC and, uh, orientating and, and deciding which ways to go, uh, for these trails.

[00:15:40] And that's where they ought to make guys like Tom, their friends and allies in doing this as opposed to going back to my bitch against their draft unit management plan. And, uh, alienating what they called the gridders is if what the, what gritters were doing was bad. I mean, we're just out there hiking. So, yeah, I think they ought to reach out and talk to the people that, that really know these mountains and know the ways to get around the mountains to help plan these trails.

[00:16:10] And maybe, you know, even, uh, what would you, what would you say about not even having a, an official route up from the moon hall? Just force people to get to Friday from the dink, make that the marked way. That's going to take some of the traffic off of it. That's true. I mean, but the room trail is pretty nice. I find that, I mean, it's steep as heck. The room trail has its own beer cooler. It does. It has that little, a little pour hole.

[00:16:38] I kind of, we found a Peroni on there at one time. It was, did you really, did you take a bite? Uh, we opened it up and it was very, my, my friend, Mark Sudik opened it up and he said it was very, very sour. I mean, we should have taken a bite at the time, but we brought it back down and we had it back at the, uh, the trailhead trailhead. And he said it was sour as fuck. So. Well, that would make sense. Yeah. I mean, that's, that's a, that's a risky challenge to do it.

[00:17:06] But I mean, the people that go up there, I mean, I'd leave a hard cider in there. It's, I mean, that's against the rules, but. Yeah. You should, you know, you take a hard cider, you leave a hard cider. That should be the rule. Every time you go through, drop one in the, in the slot and take one. Exactly. So I'm kind of looking forward to this. Let's, let's see what goes on. I mean, they started in kind of like the right place. So we'll, we'll see what the rim trail looks like. Once again, it is one of the lowest. What did I come up with today?

[00:17:35] One of the, the lowest 3,500 trailhead parking areas that you can climb up that has the most elevation gain. So you're going up from moon hall, which is 900 feet all the way up to Friday, which is 3,600 feet. I think Peek-a-Moos is higher. The Peek-a-Moos trailhead is higher. And so it's Fox hollow. And then there's, there's not much more than that. Pretty sure. So, well, you know, the, the thing is starting at the moon hall is you just start gaining elevation.

[00:18:05] The moment you slam your car door. Yeah. Right. You walk, walk across the road and pass the DEC sign and it's all up, you know, for the next like six, 700 vert. If you're taking the traditional way, it's all, you know, you're climbing some vert to get up there. Correct. So, well, we'll keep on in this. We'll keep on, on it. And, you know, once again, we'll get information and people, you know, I have good sources and good contacts. We have a great relationship in the Catskills.

[00:18:33] So if, if you have anything, let me know. We'll talk about it on the show as well. And speaking of, I mean, we, we have some good things happening. Ted, you just recently saw about this fucking, but once again, sorry for my word, sorry, Sherry and Hutch, but this painted rock on Wittenberg summit. So there was a rock, you know, it wasn't even strategically painted to be something of the forest. It was like a red shark. This I saw a week ago.

[00:19:03] I don't know why I didn't bring it up. And I apologize. It was on the trail conditions page on Facebook, but now it just came up on Instagram and stuff. Absolute WTF moment. And I am once again, I am. Look, I, the one thing I did not see that I saw last time that we saw on the lean to, you know, that, that, that. What is it called? Defication of lean to that. The outrage that we've had here on the trail conditions page.

[00:19:31] Like this person that did that stuff up on the lean to was basically like an old, like witch in Salem. That guy was put out on the stake and hung up, but I haven't seen anything about this person. I mean, they haven't come out with this person yet. I mean, we haven't heard about anything, but, um, you know, once again, if you go to the summit towards the summit of rock, there's a big, massive rock on near the summit of Wittenberg.

[00:19:58] And this has now been spray painted red, white, and blue. And looks like a weird shark. So when, you know, I mean, when does that happen? Does it happen on a weekend? Does it happen on a weekday? When, when you go up there, obviously you, you know, you have spray paint cans with you to do this. I don't know how many cans it takes to do that. What does it take? Four cans, six cans, a dozen cans, right? It's not something I would know, but it sounds, you know, it,

[00:20:28] really it's something that someone plans to do. Is it just one person? If it's one person, how long does it take one person to do it versus three people to do it? But as you're doing it, aren't you like worried about other people coming around the corner and seeing what you're doing? Right. Or, or are you of the impression that there's really nothing wrong with this? I mean, I'm going to go up there. And so, and what is the point of doing it?

[00:20:55] If you're not going to tag it, if you're not going to take credit for it, is it the reason you're not tagging it? Because you know, you shouldn't be doing it and you don't want it to trace back to you. It's just weird social behavior in the abstract thinking of those things. And then obviously, in my opinion, it's wrong, right? It's wrong to just, you know, to deface, if you will, a rock like that. Um, cause then, you know, now what does it do?

[00:21:25] It just invites other people to do it. Does this become the thing five years from now when you're hiking on Catskill trails, you see all this going on? I know, I know you see it down in Harriman. The few times I've been to Harriman, every time I go down there, I've seen stuff like this. Right. Yeah. But then, but then how do you distinguish that from Camp Steel? Why aren't we outraged that somebody spray painted on a rock on Blackhead? Camp Steel. And I think, oh, I gotta put that down.

[00:21:55] I'm keeping track, by the way. I know. Yeah. Yeah. And I gotta be honest. I think they have, uh, actually like kept up with Camp Steel. Like they, somebody has painted that up because I can't say that somebody from what was it in 1960 or 19. It was in the thirties. Okay. So 1930 something. That hasn't been like, once again, taken, like not taken down, but wear it off in the past hundred years almost.

[00:22:23] Like, so somebody has been kind of. Frushing, frushing it up. Frushing it up. Yes. Yes. Right. There's the old club members go up, you know, once every 10 years to, right. The reunion. Yes. And now they go up and they're, they're one of those rascal things that you get at the supermarket to go around the aisles and the electric scooters. Oh, God damn. Yeah. So they get a couple of old guys with white shoes. Um, yeah, I, I find that really disturbing.

[00:22:49] I find that more disturbing than the DEC cutting trails to the, what were the formerly trail lists or unmarked trailed summits. People going around with spray cans, spraying up the Catskills. And so what do you do when you see somebody doing that? Obviously you tell them to stop, but what if they give you the middle finger and they just say, we're going to go ahead and do it. Yeah. Um, I mean, what do you do get in a fight? Like you take a photo of them.

[00:23:18] What good is that? Yeah. They get caught. Um, I'm trying to find out where the last post was. Hold on. Um, on this most recent, sorry. Um, but like, I like, yeah, what do you, what do you do? Like, do you once again, take a photo of them, get in a fight? Like, do you defend your, your area? Like, it's just, it's one of those situations. Once again, that you're out in the wilderness, you don't know what's going to happen. Like, could this person be carrying a weapon?

[00:23:48] Like that's, that's the one, a big thing that I have uncertainty with confronting someone in the forest that is doing something wrong. Like, am I going to be like, Mike, am I going to get my ass kicked? Is this person stronger than me? Is this person have a weapon? Am I going to get attacked? Like you try to approach it with some form of respect and kind of like of the forest and stuff like that kind of educational purpose.

[00:24:17] But at the same time, they're spray painting a rock at the top of a 3,800 foot mountain that they just climbed four miles to get to. Like, that's a little ridiculous. Like, that I would be. And they're not taking credit for it. Like, to be honest, okay, let's, let's just. Jessica, when we were out on, in Yosemite, we were on this trail called Sentinel Dome.

[00:24:43] There was kids off of the trail doing stuff and she yelled at them. She was like, get on the goddamn trail and follow the rules. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, take it easy. Like, you don't know what these kids are going to do to you, man. They're young. They're going to freaking tackle you and beat the shit out of you. You were empowering her. Yeah. She felt safe. She felt safe in your presence. And it turned me on. I was actually turned on. Oh, boy. All right. I was like, hell yeah. Now we're not limiting it to F-bombs. Okay.

[00:25:12] But seriously, she, she was enraged with what they were doing. And I was just like, you know, that's correct. What you're doing is actually correct. But at the same time, I've been, I've been in this situation, not in these kind of where they spray painted in these situations before of when, like, what do you do if you come upon a situation like this, like, like a ranger, once again, has a weapon, you know, can defend himself.

[00:25:37] Me, I have a bunch of hiking poles that I can maybe do some ninja throws at them and they can dodge it easily. Like, like. All right. So, so thinking on the fly, here's the solution. I think we all need to start carrying bear spray. Oh. Yeah. But not for, but not for the bear. For people. Yeah. I mean, this is, if people are up there doing this and you've got to bring a stop to it, what do you do? I think you've got to spray them. They're spraying the rocks. Ah. Right?

[00:26:06] You should graffiti their face. Try this. Oh, yeah. Right. Like, like they spray you, your distance is nothing. Yeah. You know, I mean, we can, we can really, I mean, we can deep dive into this, but then also what does it take to remove all that paint from the rock? And is the DEC going to set out and do that? Right. And if they do that, just think of the time it takes for them to do that.

[00:26:32] The other things they could be doing with those resources, whether it's a one day thing or a two day thing, you know, could they, uh, do some remediation on these mud holes or bogs along the trail? You know, could they, uh, do some trail maintenance during that time? Could they take care of some signage during that time? Could they do some tree cutting, uh, along the unmarked trails? You know? Viewpoint cutting. Yeah.

[00:27:01] So somebody goes up there and does this. It's just really brings about a lot of, you know, uh, consumption of resources, including our emotional energy. So I want to move on cause I'm getting disturbed and I only have one alcoholic refreshment here. Well, you gotta, that, the lady come and bring you another one. Let's go on that. I don't have those, I don't have those kinds of resources. I don't have to knock up like you. All right. I have a personal assistant.

[00:27:29] What about, uh, this, uh, this new unit benefit plan for a little pond cramp gone? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, this is, so this is where the DEC is pumping its money into, uh, upgrading and modernizing, uh, camping area. Whereas, you know, people are going up there with their own agenda and painting rocks, which,

[00:27:50] uh, you know, appropriates resources from maybe fixing the, uh, observer's cabin on Balsam Lake mountain. So apparently the DEC is updating the use management plan for the little pound campground, which is in the Western cat, catskills. The proposed unit management plan discusses making trails more accessible, which is good.

[00:28:14] Uh, replacing bathroom facilities and modernizing them and then adding to little ponds, recreational amenities, which I found interesting, um, because they want to add a volleyball quarter to there. They want to add a disc golf facility there. And then moving the current basketball who out of the day use parking lot to help ensure the safety of basketball players and cars.

[00:28:43] Wow. So I thought, I thought it was interesting that you have what I would have thought was kind of a, uh, more primitive and unimproved rustic camping area in the Western cat skills. And you're creating these amenities, which are kind of like urbanizing your experience. Maybe the next thing you want to do is bring some spray paint with you. Jesus.

[00:29:12] In between volleyball and disc golf, go find some rocks to paint. I don't know. I didn't think of that until just now. Cause you got me going on the Wittenberg rock rock rant. Yeah. And you know, my life is better off trail. You don't see this stuff. You know, and, and you think about it in little pond campground is, is a popular site.

[00:29:37] I don't know why, because once again, it's the Western cat skills, like it's complete middle of nowhere, but it's very popular. And now they're making it even more popular. And it's like two and a half hours from, from New York city. And then I guarantee none of the people that I know very few people go down to there. Uh, if you don't know where this is, it's kind of like in between a middle, like Margaretville and Roscoe little pond is just sitting on the, the beaverkill Valley.

[00:30:07] Area. And it's just, that's, it's, it's, it's crazy. Like once you get a volleyball court, disc golf, like, I don't know. Where's this money coming from? Is that coming from Belair? Like, like, where is this? Yeah. I forget what they, what they budgeted for bathroom improvements, but it was a substantial sum of money. Hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yeah. I mean, how much do we, we did in that Wittenberg?

[00:30:36] We did the, when they did the, uh, the Woodland Valley area, that was, that was a substantial. Yeah. $500,000, I think for. Yeah. I think the caretaker's cabin alone was close to a half a million. Yeah. And there were, they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to pave the parking lot, which I thought was very interesting, giving what they could have done with that money on the trails. And now apparently they have to do an allocation to remove paint from rocks. Gas and the chainsaws. Yeah.

[00:31:07] These electric chainsaws. Like, are we going to be hearing this? What about my leaf blower? Like you'd be pissed off about my leaf blowers, Ted. And now there's going to be chainsaws over in the Western Catskill. Well, it's all changing. This is why, this is why we all need to buy RVs and hit the road. Jesus. Nice. Nice.

[00:31:27] I mean, we will see, uh, once again, like what, so then you add that this, uh, New York park and recreation of historic preservation is now accepting applications for park ranger positions through December 31st. Uh, New York, look at, uh, the positions. I'll post a link on New York state parks website. Hmm. So. So some of these positions are competitive and you need to take the civil service exam and others aren't.

[00:31:57] So, um, you know, provides, uh, an opportunity for folks to work in the outdoors. Good thing. I like it. Oh, we'll definitely post that in the show notes. I got it going on. So cool. Cool. Well, once again, uh, cheers, Ted, once again, shooting the shit. Thank you everybody who is, uh, participating in the, in this Catskill Mountain podcast 246. Uh, especially thank the monthly supporters.

[00:32:23] Chris Garabian, Eric Rosario, Skana Nichols, John Comiskey, Mikey S. Desert city radio, Henry Burmeister, Vicki Ferreira, Jeff Jotz, David Oliver, who probably doesn't listen to the show. John Dunn, Betsy A., Vanessa N. Jim C. Thank you guys so much for supporting the show. Love you guys. Really appreciate it. It means a lot. Actually, it means a lot because we just donated $500 to the Raven's beard last week. On the spot. It was fantastic.

[00:32:54] Yeah. Great episode. Uh, also, I mean, big shout out to the monthly sponsors like Outdoor Chronicles Photography. Molly specializes in adventure couple photography and she'll immortalize your moments amidst the stunning landscapes of the Catskills, Adirondacks, and White Mountains. She'll craft timeless images that reflect unique bond in nature's grandeur. Embark on an unforgettable photographic journey with Outdoor Chronicles Photography.

[00:33:21] Don't hesitate to get a hold of Molly on all platforms. Speaking of having Molly on all platforms, she is going to be in a future episode. So. Awesome. Yes. It is scheduled. It is done. So. Oh, yeah. Cool. And so, also, discover the Wilderness and Trailbound Project. Our expert-led hiking and backpacking education programs offer unparalleled outdoor experiences.

[00:33:47] Whether you're a beginner or seasoned adventurer, join us to learn essential skills, explore stunning trails, and connect with nature. Start your journey today with Trailbound Project and unlock the wonders of the great outdoors. All right, Ted. What are you having tonight? Oh, so. Yeah, I don't know. I was at the beer store two weeks ago now and picking up four packs of beer.

[00:34:16] And for whatever reason, I decided to pick up a four pack of this awestruck premium hard cider, dry apple and oak. And I'll say, yeah, it's really good. I'm surprised. Doesn't, you know, they say they don't add any sugar to it. It's just apples and some sulfites. Is that what it is? Sulfites? Yeah. Is that what it is? Yeah. Is that good? Well, to stabilize it.

[00:34:45] So, yeah. It's, what is it? 6.8% alcohol by volume. It's good. I can see myself drinking, you know, a few more of these over the coming days, if you will. Yeah. Awestruck dry apple and oak. All right. I will send them a message and be like, send him a, like, welcoming pack of everything you've got. Oh yeah. You know these guys? Yeah. They're 20 minutes away from me. Okay. Yeah.

[00:35:14] They have some really good, whoever, whoever cooks there has some really good flatbread pizzas. They're really good. Oh really? Yeah. Maybe, maybe we should get together there and do show two 50 at awestruck. That's a little bit too far out of the way for everybody. We're going to be only people there. We can, before the, before, uh, hanging out at awestruck, we can play volleyball at the, uh, campground. At the campgrounds and basketball.

[00:35:37] And maybe, maybe it'd be funner to like hit awestruck first and then go play volleyball at the campground. Nice. Nice. I am having a good old Hudson North caramel apple. It's that time of year. And then I had, uh, when we were talking with Sharon Hutch, I had an awestruck homicider, hometown homicider. Good stuff. Yeah. You've been drinking a lot of those. So it's interesting.

[00:36:00] I'm having the upstate awestruck from Sydney and you're having the downstate more or less, if you will, from just outside of Newburgh. Hudson cider or Hudson North cider. What are you like? 20 minutes from you. Just like they're 20 minutes for me. Yeah. Nice. That's crazy. That's, that's crazy. Uh, so we're drinking, we're having a good time. Uh, so the question is, are you really outdoors? So you mentioned one of the podcasts on your hike through social media.

[00:36:28] We will chat about it on the show. Uh, you tag us by typing at ITL Catskill MTM podcast on your post. And I apologize if I missed your, your post. And apparently I did miss Oskana's Catskill ever asked her. She was on bear pen and halket and also the following waters preserving Glasgow. Uh, and I'm, I'm very, very sorry. I missed your, your post. Oskana, she called me out of it, uh, like at least eight or nine times.

[00:36:55] I got like several voicemails and emails saying, you know, like, uh, nothing actually. I'm just, I'm just going over. Yeah. We did, we did fire your purse. We fired your personal assistant and we're now looking to, you know, we're now looking for a replacement. Um, maybe we've got this one application from this fellow named Claude who we might hire. I like him. Claude. Yeah. Claude. Yeah. I like him.

[00:37:25] Apparently he's from the island of Anthropic. Oh, so that's good. That's good. So once again, sorry, Oskana. If, uh, once again, if I called you, if I, if I called you out, if I missed your tag, please call me out because I really do apologize. Because I love, we love hearing about your tags. We love hearing the people who explored whether it's just not the Catskills anywhere.

[00:37:47] So especially Serena Murray 46, or was officially stamped for her fastest known time in the winter for her female time on the Catskill fire tower. Tron. So both winter and female fastest known time for the fire tower challenge. It's crazy. Fantastic. Yeah. Very cool. Unbelievable. Serena was in on our episode. I don't recall what number, but she was in talking about that and how crazy it was. She said the worst part was driving.

[00:38:17] And I think she spent more time driving than hiking. So I can only imagine. Michael Finn 59 did a bunch of hikes in two days, Alder Lake to Millbrook Ridge, and then Orchard Point and North Lake or North South Lake Escarpment Trail. So it looks like a fantastic time. Had a good time out there. Run strong with Atiana was out in the big Indian fur trail doing some reconnaissance, I believe.

[00:38:45] She might be attempting a through hike of the 35. So I was very excited about that. That'd be cool to hear about. And speaking of a through hike with a 35, our next guest is a through hike of the 35 actually kind of set some records about that. Oh, yeah. Who's that? Who's that? His name is Mike. No, really? Mike Schutte. Awesome. It'll be good. It'll be good. Yep. Yep. My daughter knows Mike.

[00:39:14] She says he's a really cool dude. So that kind of validates him. Down to earth. Down to earth. Yep. Let's see. Vicki, Hiker Goddess Adventures, went out on twin with Michelle, who's chipping away at the 3500 list. Congratulations, Michelle. You're a great guide. I also saw Vicki at the WFA this weekend. We'll talk about that later. Scott, Catskill Mountains Brew is back in the Whites hiking Mount Tecumseh. And also did Musilaki with Katie.

[00:39:43] And then Katie Henderson Hikes was in the Whites. She did Zeeland Falls Hut overnight. And then did Zeeland, Geode, South Twin, and also Musilaki. That's great because we all know what she's been through. Yeah. I've been on those mountains at least 40 to 50 times each. Every weekend I hit those mountains. I know what she's been through. No, she did a hut. Those hut experiences are like nothing else.

[00:40:12] Tab, we're going to do that this year. I am forcing you to do that. All right. As long as I can play disc, golf, and volleyball. Jesus. When I'm doing it. Well, I mean, at some of the places they probably do have that. So we'll have to see. We'll have to throw the disc and then it'll be caught in the wind and brought to the next peak. And we'll pick it up on Washington. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Once again, they're out there chipping away at their whites. So that's fantastic. 48s.

[00:40:41] Tracy Pink Pony 18 did a little recon for Dr. Kudish and went up big indie and looking for a 1700 landmarks and more with Dylan and Mo. So it's pretty cool to see. Do you know what they're talking about? Yeah, she had pinged me and asked me. I'm familiar with the ridge that they hiked, but not the rock that they were looking for. And they weren't looking for it to spray paint it and tag it, obviously.

[00:41:11] But yeah, it's great to see that she's out there supporting Dr. Kudish and getting off trail and roaming around in that area. So we're talking about like a rock face, like nothing like a stone structure and stuff like that? Yeah. I forget exactly what it was they were up there looking for, but with Kudish, I'm assuming that it was not only a rock, but a tree.

[00:41:37] But this was that area that way back when there was a search out for a fellow who had gone missing for a few days. So you're talking about the ridge line or the shoulder that goes up to Big India, not a Sager, Hollow, whatever. Nice. Okay. Interesting. I was, you know, and I looked, Ted, so where do you find like Dr. Kudish's stuff on the bogs? Oh, so.

[00:42:06] Do I have to go online about that? Yeah. So you need to Google, it's all put online by the University of Vermont and just Google, you know, Dr. Kudish Catskill historian maps, maybe throw in Vermont. And then you'll see they have a list. You can search the list using your browser search feature and it'll pull up his hand drawn maps.

[00:42:35] So the most beautiful thing, I'm going to get that tattooed on me, by the way. Yeah. Right. And so they're, they're generally not to scale. But, and they, they mainly go by elevation. He's very much an elevation guy as opposed to compass direction and understand that all of his, what I find fascinating is he computes all of his elevations through the present time.

[00:43:00] Based upon an old barometric altimeter. So he's not doing it based upon GPS or what your map elevation is. What he's doing is before he goes off on one of his excursions, he goes to a known place and takes a reading on his barometer for the barometric pressure. And then he goes out and does his hike. Um, and along the way he takes pressure readings.

[00:43:29] And then at the end of the day, he goes back to where he took his reading because your barometric pressure can change throughout the day. And then from those barometric readings, he computes the elevation. Wow. That's very cool. It's a lot of work. Yeah. Is, uh, so his, uh, barometer is literally, it's about the size of a small frisbee.

[00:43:54] You know, it's not like eight inches across, maybe it's six, but it's, it's not small. It wasn't made, you know, in the last 40 years, it's probably something from the seventies. Right. You know, it's old school about as old school as you can get. It's not as old as him, but it's, it's all very interesting. Fascinating thing to go out hiking with him. Yeah. He's such a, yeah, he's such a treasure, such a resource and just a swell person.

[00:44:23] But yeah, down to earth, uh, straight up guy. So that's fantastic. So cool. Looking forward to hearing more research from you, Tracy and, and Mo and Dylan. Uh, uh, also Todd T-Bowled outdoors without exploring Harriman with Jeff Johnson. Orla without a plan. They just did whatever. Uh, Rob, AKA the sloth tramps without the Harriman on a bowling dock with some cooked pierogies and sausage and onions. Wow.

[00:44:51] These guys seem like to do the six with right. Yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, if they have that kind of stuff. Yeah. Or, but they're obviously, if you're going to hike out in the dark, you know, if they're taking time to cook food like that. I mean, that's true actually. So are they going to be, we're going to put position that at the end of the trail to have the pierogies and onions and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. I think that should be down in the parking lot. Um, with some Bluetooth enabled device.

[00:45:19] So when you're like a mile away, you can turn on the burner and, and get things going. Oh, nice. Nice. Nice.

[00:45:52] Yeah. Chrissy G was up on Balsam Lake and the Esopus fire tower to complete another round of the fire tower challenge. Congratulations. Yeah. Killing it. Danielle, which in the wilderness was out enjoying some sunshine in the Mindy Waska state park. Uh, Delta triangle did his first 3,500 hike up Balsam. Awesome choice for your first 3,500 trike hike. That was mine. So good for him. Good for him. Let's see.

[00:46:21] He's going to be engulfed with this, this stuff for the rest of his life. So good luck. Delta triangle of getting out of the good old Catskill mountain loop of, of craziness because he, you will leave. So good to hear, uh, Matt, AKA PD cat 766 had fun fishing and camping at dig pond. Hopefully there wasn't any, uh, volleyball camps over there.

[00:46:46] Uh, Samantha, the broke trail hiker was throwing the F bomb down at a fire or excuse me, fire tower. So she was, uh, a little bit unhappy that people were at a fire tower, but she was said there was no rules and regulation with the F bomb. So don't blame her. So we've only had like two today. So we're, we're at a smooth pace. It's sharing hutch. We got to keep it low. They're awesome. All right. Yep. All right.

[00:47:15] So Josh at Ursus compass was up on wind of high peak when, uh, during one of his favorite times, which, which I enjoy, but I don't enjoy cold, dark and rainy. So some of those days I like it other days. I want that to you. So, uh, Josh enjoys everything. So check them out at Ursus compass. Uh, Rob rock photo was up on Panther with maho. And now has three hikes to complete for his 3,500. Tad, he was up on Panther.

[00:47:44] Take a guess of what he needs to complete. Oh, he probably needs to complete slide. Right. So he's got, so he's got, so he's winter ones. Uh, I don't think you're not in winter season for right around that area. You were right in the general vicinity slide. And Panther. Uh, Wittenberg and Cornell. Oh, okay. He saved the best for last. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Good. Cool thing. Uh, and now he'll get to see the rock.

[00:48:14] Yeah. Yeah. Hey, Rob, you know, let's, let's, let's, uh, let's get you some supplies. Maybe that's what the rock is for in his, his handle. Oh, no, no. He's going to D rock. He's going to make it, make it good news. So, uh, Kendrick Pfeiffer was up on balsam Lake mountain for her 10th peak. Good to hear from you. Kendrick again, keep completing those peaks. It's awesome. She said there was a little bit sketchy on the, uh, the balsam like fire tower.

[00:48:43] She said the fire towers are sketchy. And, uh, bossam Lake is a little bit more stable than the other places. All depends how hard the wind is blowing. True. And bossam Lake is one of those fierce wind blowing places. I love that place. God, Graham. I should like do some, something about Graham. Some. Yeah. I was just checking out Rob rock photos. Good stuff. Yeah. He's got some good stuff.

[00:49:10] There are some city photos, some Catskill photos. Yeah. Those are all over. Uh, and then last but not least, Joe from the N R R I national rescue and response into do was found doing the WFA for the 3500 club in Arkville. Check them out. I saw. I was there on Sunday. Uh, Joe was on one of our episodes with stay rag climbing. Phenomenal instructor does stuff for the government for.

[00:49:39] Uh, Marines for Navy SEALs, stuff like that. Unbelievable background. So if you want training and wilderness first aid, swift water rescue, whatever. Joe has that background to train you. And it is 100% worth it. I was only there for like two hours and I was blown away by his knowledge and his wife. And they had another trainer there. Her name was like Jamie.

[00:50:06] I think I'm horrible with names, but, but awesome. Awesome. So total tags. Tad, what do you got? Well, I see you added to, so you're up to 21. That's pretty cool. Yeah. So if we, well, so if we have 21 tags, that's mean that according to the statistical average, we were probably tagged by 29.8 listeners. And we forgot seven plus or minus tags. Most likely. So we're sorry.

[00:50:36] We're sorry. We're just a bunch of fuck ups and we'll get to you next week. Oh, and I said that. So now I gotta, I gotta put on the tally. Oh my God. You're making this editing process a little bit more. Another F bomb. Yeah. I'm keeping score here. Are you going old school style? Like one, two, three, and then cross. Yeah. Or fourth cross. Okay. Nice. I like that. I got so. I don't call it old school for me. It's the only. Yeah. Traditional. Yeah.

[00:51:06] When, when I went to school, we, we walked up hill two miles to get there two miles up. And snow. Yeah. And we didn't have calculators. So. I'll allow it. So if you, if you think we're doing a good job, but it's a hard cider to support the show. You can do that on buymeacoffee.com. That would be fantastic. Also rate the show. We recently got a one-star rating for the amount of swearing we do. So we need people.

[00:51:36] Uh, if you haven't read the show to counter react that one star rating, because I really don't think we do too much swearing on the show. And I think it's all natural. It's not like we're, we're pushing out there. Like forcing it. So once again, rate the show where you can Apple, Spotify, stuff like that. Five stars is the greatest. I would say, thank you so much. Please do that as soon as possible. And to get that one star rating out there.

[00:52:04] You know, basically if we're doing a great job, obviously give us five stars. And if you think we're doing a lousy job, give us five stars for doing a lousy job. Do it. Nice. Yeah. We did a shitty job. You got five stars for doing the shit. Yeah. We're really good at being lousy at what we do. So either way. It's the Catskills. What else? Yeah. Either way, we deserve five stars. At least we're not out spray painting rocks. Okay. 100%. 100%. How about previous hikes? What do you got to add?

[00:52:35] Well, I knew because tonight was going to be such a long show. I knew over the weekend that if I went out hiking, it would just make the show even longer. So I decided in the interest of our listeners, I would sacrifice the weekend and not hike. It had nothing to do with my daughter coming down for my wife's birthday and all the festivities and spending all the time with her and not wanting to drag her outside and go hiking someplace without her mother, yada, yada, yada.

[00:53:04] So yeah, I don't have any hiking stories. How about you, Stash? You know, I can't ask more questions. How's Soprania doing? She's doing fantastic. She's like I said, well, I guess I said it later on in the show. She's down in the red now. She spent the latter part of her summer, early fall in Western Colorado. And she's down for what is the hiking season in the Red River Gorge in Kentucky.

[00:53:33] She's been there several times before. And she says it's the best climbing, rock climbing in the country. She says there's more difficult routes elsewhere, particularly around the Vegas area. But in terms of where she is in her climbing, doing 512s and 513s, the Reds for her is the place to be. So it's fun to see her. She's happy. She's living a great life, doing what she wants.

[00:54:00] And, you know, it's just, you know, with both of my daughters, it's great to see that they're well-adjusted and content. Nice. Where they are in life. How old is she now? She just turned 27 in October. Awesome. She still, she literally lives in the car I bought her when she turned 17.

[00:54:23] Like I will allude to later on, she is interested in acquiring a different vehicle or setup because of the nomadic lifestyle she lives as a feral person. So, you know, obviously her father will help her with all those things because I believe that a child should not wait until their parent dies to get their inheritance.

[00:54:53] The parent should be able to see the child in joy living off of some of that inheritance when they're young. And so that's with both my kids. That's what I'm proud to be able to say that I can see them doing is, you know, out there enjoying life, having a good time and not becoming slaves to the chains of society. Hell yeah. Hell yeah. Good father right there. That's my mantra and I'm sticking to it. No, she's doing great.

[00:55:22] I will say if you ever see her walk into a room, it's such a stark appearance because all she does is climb vertical rock walls. I'm not going to take the escalator. I'm going to take this wall. Yeah. So she, yeah, she climbs all day long. I mean, they do take days off from here and there and she's a sport climber.

[00:55:49] So, um, there's a lot more get up and go than traditional climbing where you have to place your anchors as you go up and come down. So she, you know, sport climbing is more, uh, has more of an anaerobic component to it than traditional climbing. But, you know, again, she's out there doing what she likes. It makes me happy. Nice. Happy for her. Yeah. Okay. So, but if you want, you know, if you want to make a contribution towards by, by Sophronia

[00:56:18] vehicle fund, you know, knock yourself out. Yeah. Fantastic. Nice. So this, this weekend, uh, I had Sunday off and I was just, I don't know why, but I was intrigued to go up Fox hollow to Panther. I don't know why I was like, I mean, once again, it's an, it's a project to see the viewpoints. There's only like two, I think going up Fox hollow and it's a long hike. It's, uh, what is it?

[00:56:46] Like 4.6 to the summit. That's a long hike and it's 2,200 something feet again. So it's a long hike. So I, I, I get there. I started off at a good time. I get up early. I'm not, this is not my usual 11 o'clock time. I might get there like nine and I pull up and I see, I'm like, Ooh, this parking lot is, it's kind of full for Fox hollow.

[00:57:12] Like there's two cars over there, but I pull up, you, you know, you got to rise up. And then I see two other cars. One's a Corvette ZRX one. Another one is a nine or a 2016 Mustang V8. I'm like, these guys made the wrong decision and they're parking at the wrong trailhead.

[00:57:39] So I, I, I'm getting my stuff ready there. They're starting. So I am like hurrying to get these, to get to these guys to tell them they're at the wrong trailhead. And, uh, get my stuff on. I fly through and I catch up to them and I'm like, Hey, what are you, what are you guys up to today? You know, once again, educational, I like to be educational and they're like, Oh, we're going to giant ledge. I'm like, you know, that's, it's like 6.8 miles away. Right? Like, yeah.

[00:58:09] I'm like, that means you have to hike six point miles over and then 6.8 miles back. So it's 13.6 miles. Back with over probably like, you know, maybe 3000 feet elevation. Yeah. Okay. Like, you know, there's another trailhead that offers like a three mile hike with 1200 feet of gain. Right. And they're like, Oh, we didn't know that. We're just going to stick to this. I'm like, okay. All right. All right. Cool.

[00:58:39] As long as you guys, one of them had a backpack, one of them didn't. So my goal was on the way back down to convince them to go back to turn around. Uh, but that was on the way down. But, uh, do they started out kind of, uh, like misty with all the peaks being obscured with, with the clouds. So, but it was beautiful. If you've, you know, once again, I mean, you've, I've known if you've hiked Fox hollow

[00:59:05] before awesome, like old, like road, old, kind of like a, a log road that leads up to the pods. You know what pods is, right? Come on. Tell me what pods is. Uh, pods means pointless ups and downs. Correct. Several, probably one of the only Catskill peaks that has pods, uh, three of them, which, which sucks, but they're beautiful.

[00:59:34] They offer their own unique experience within that. But, uh, this, this kind of like old road goes up through that. You go through awesome blow down through an old kind of like a, I don't know what happened that somebody said back in the 2000s, some crazy wind storm happened and through massive amounts of blow downs. Like it took them two weeks to clear this area of Fox hollow. It was closed for two weeks. And I, I, I remember his name is Clint.

[01:00:04] He told, he told me about this, that it took two weeks to clear this blow down of just that little tiny stretch of where they had a massive wind storm. Um, you get up to the first bump, uh, beautiful. The view obstructed. You have a very minimal viewpoint of, of plateau and sugar loaf. That's it. Uh, it's, it's on the map, but it's not really much, but you get up to that area and it kind

[01:00:29] of offers kind of like that Panther planes kind of thing of where it's just like, it looks like, uh, you know, you are more of the geological thing. It's like a glacier scowl. It just ripped apart the forest and you have that kind of like flat, flat plane. Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. Um, that's, that's one of the, once again, kind of more of the inspirational things.

[01:00:57] And as I was getting up in elevation, you know, it, it kind of sucks because, you know, you have two other bumps to go over. So I'm like, if there's no view, I'm not going to keep going, but I kept going. I was stupid and I kept going, but as I kept going, it got clear. It got, I wouldn't say nicer. There was a, once you got the wind was howling, the wind was out of control.

[01:01:22] Like when I was going through the, in the beginning, you could, you could hear it up top, but nothing was happening. I was sweating like crazy, sweating profusely. But when I got to the first pud, it started getting so windy and just getting so cold and such. So I'm just like, all right, you know, once again, be bold, start cold, let it dry off and stuff. Uh, got to the second pud. Once again, that, that kind of the second pud hits more of a boreal forest and you hit

[01:01:51] more of kind of like a East Rusk kind of setting. I found that to be beautiful. Like you get more of the boreal forest, you get more of the conifers and stuff like that, a little bit tighter, but it's very limited. So what you're calling the second pud is you're actually on now the ridge going up to Panther. Okay. Whereas before, before you're, you're really down from the ridge going over kind of the shoulder that leads up to the ridge, not, not on the ridge proper. Correct.

[01:02:21] Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So, and you, and you got the wind blowing in from the West. Uh, I would say more of the North. Really? Yeah. It was, it was, uh, once again, it was odd. I was just like, this is a little weird because. Yeah. So you had it at your back coming in. My side to the right. So is that, is that Northwest, right? Yeah. I'm going to call it more to me, the orientation is more of the West. Okay. So, yeah. So it was, I'm not looking at a map, but yeah. So, yeah.

[01:02:51] So like, like once again, like you could hear roaring, but once you got to the top of the, the ridge, it was like blowing and you could feel a bit colder. My whole right side was starting to get cold. I kind of like, once again, contemplated of putting my Heli Hansen on and, but. Putting your one on? Your blue Heli Hansen? My blue Heli Hansen references. Um, I saw Vicki Fair.

[01:03:18] Um, and then, and then, but I did eventually put it on when I was in a call of the third, second or third pod that leads up to Panther. And it was cold. It was fricking whipping. It was gust. The trees were bouncing back and forth. I loved it. Um, but then at the same time, I put it on period, periodically just to get in between that call. And then I saw the up and I'm just like, you know what? I really don't want to do this shit. Like, I don't want to go up there.

[01:03:47] I'm like, but I know a good viewpoint is happening and the clouds are clearing. So I'm like, what the fuck? Whatever. There's another one. Um, and I, that's like, let me, let me mark that down. Hold, hold on. Hold that thought. It's only two first time. Wait. Okay. Yeah. So got up to, uh, I met, uh, two ladies at coming down from the viewpoint. You know, there's two viewpoints on, on Panther, by the way.

[01:04:17] Uh, if you don't know, I never, I never knew that. No. And you, you did probably. So there's one at more of the summit where you have to traverse across and you hit that viewpoint. But if you go a little bit below that, there's another viewpoint that has a rock that has an outcrop. It's, I think it's better than the summit view. On the trail. On the trail. Yep. Yeah. This is the second one in the direction you're going that you're talking about. Yeah. So we're facing, we're going East along Fox hollow. Well, I'm coming up.

[01:04:46] I'm coming up West. Frank, frankly, one of the best views in the Catskills is off trail. Always. Yeah. Looking, looking at slide mountain. Yeah. And this was, this is once again, you have this, the, the, the circ of a Panther. And then you have the rim over there facing. You can't, the, the rim is blocking slide. So this is a, once again, a little bit below the summit. I didn't go to the summit. I didn't summit the peak.

[01:05:14] I just went over to that viewpoint and I went back down and I met these ladies back again. And they said they were doing five miles and then returning. So they knew what they were doing. They had their Harman, uh, shirts on. And they had, uh, gloves and stuff. So they were ready for the cold weather. Um, I was sitting there in a t-shirt that was pulled up because I was just coming up the mountain and they were chatting with me.

[01:05:39] But, uh, sat up there, put my summit sweater on, had something to eat, started my way back down. And I was dreaded that I had to do another 4.6 miles. And I'm just like, fuck, this is going to suck. And it wasn't that bad, to be honest. Um, yeah, it was long.

[01:05:58] Um, there's a lot of spots where you can, once again, make some good time if you want to like jog because the, the rocks are not, there's not a lot of rock presence. There's not a lot of slippery leaves and stuff like that. Um, but once again, it's beautiful and you know, going through these pods, you, you, when you go up, you're kind of like, man, this sucks. But the, the way back down is not bad.

[01:06:26] You know, I didn't find it that crazy, but the last probably like two, three miles when you're going along the rim and you're going down that old logging road sucked really bad. Um, I ran into those, what I won't, I won't disagree. I mean, the return when the return trip, which I've only done that as an out and back maybe twice. In snow though. I remember you saying you did that in the, well, in snow.

[01:06:55] I don't know as if I've, I've, I've hiked through there in snow, but not all the way out to Fox hollow. Okay. Many of the, many of the times I've come up from that direction. Um, I'm on the lower part of what is that? 42 that runs through there or 43. Uh, they were talking about the other side and all of Ray. Well, we're yeah. So I'm coming off of one of the, one of the lower, uh, ridge lines or from 28 proper.

[01:07:25] I've hiked up to the trail, up to that last, you know, over that last put, if you will. And then picking up the trail. Yeah. I've come in that way more times. Cause you, you park your bike up at like slide or up at the hair per pin, or you park your car up there. You ride your bike down hill to 28 and then bushwhack up and then hike all the way to the car. Yeah.

[01:07:51] I mean, once again, it was, it sucked, you know, but you know, I had a good time. You're up there. It was great weather. You know, was it dude? I, I, I, I, once again, I did three different apps and they all came pretty close. The, the Gaia, the G, the YKai Loke that I use, I've been using for a long time. And my Garmin, uh, watch like 9.2 miles with 2,300 feet of game within the last area.

[01:08:19] And once again, I was like looking for these guys that I would find. And I was once again, I'm going to convince them to turn around. They'd already turned around and they were basically back at the tail end of the, and I chatted with them and they were like, yeah, we fucked up. And I was just like, I was laughing. I was like, I tried to convince you guys at the beginning, but you know, you wouldn't, you wouldn't listen to me. I'm like, but who listens to anyone driving a Tesla? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. They actually did see me pulling in with that.

[01:08:47] And I'm just like, you know, like number one, you guys, I like, they, they chatted me about the giant ledge area. And I was like, that ZR one is not going to make it into that area. And he's like, what do you mean? I'm like, you think parking in this, going up that little bump was bad. There is a massive dip in giant ledge and you are not going to back it out without scraping that thing to shit. And he was laughing so hard. Maybe it was a rental. They didn't care. Oh no. He had spoilers on that.

[01:09:16] They were his manual. He had a V8 in that. He had done work on that. What year was it? On 2008. Is that on your own information or did Alex tell you what year? I mean, if I took a picture of it, I'd say 2008. Did you, did you notice I'm getting the awestruck here? Did you confirm the story with Alex? I should have. Okay. Outrageous.

[01:09:43] So it's not reliable information that you're conveying to us. It could have been a 2007, 2009. Not that it's relevant to the story. I'm just kind of like small talking here, but oh, well. Oh, well. That's a great hike. You know, like I said, I haven't done it that many times from an out and back, but I think you, if you're a Catskill hiker, that's, you know, that's a trail. You've, you need to hike at least once and hiking up that side of Panther is so worthwhile.

[01:10:14] If not for nothing else other than the lack of foot traffic. Seclusion. Yeah. You go up the other side. It's heavily eroded. The trail is wide. Um, you know, just a lot of the moss is gone from people putting their hands down on rocks and things. And so it's, it's all polished off. Whereas you go up from the Fox hollow side, going up Panther.

[01:10:41] That's a true way to climb one of the 3500s on trail, but really stepping back 10, 15 years because it doesn't get that much traffic. And so it makes it worthwhile if you're out gritting or for doing the four seasons. Obviously in my view, you got to go up from Fox hollow at least once, if not twice or multiple times. Like I said, I've come in from many hit Panther for many directions.

[01:11:08] And, you know, I'm not one of these guys that needs to bushwhack it right to the summit. I'm happy to bushwhack it to a trail and take, you know, the trail in for the last half mile or mile to, to make the summit. I think that's a cool thing. Just as cool as, you know, bushwhacking right to the summit. And I agree. Um, once again, I don't know why I was intrigued to do it. It just, once again, the seclusion, the, the amazing, I mean, it's amazing, but horrible pods.

[01:11:36] Um, I also met two people on the way down once again, that had made the wrong decision of hiking giant ledge from Fox hollow. And then as I'm getting done with the hike, I I'm ending the hike. I have stopped all my apps and all of a sudden this guy's flying down from the top of Fox hollow and, uh, juiced up for Bronco newer for Bronco. And I'm like, Oh God, here we go. Another question about giant ledge.

[01:12:07] I was correct. He's just like, Hey, how do we get the giant ledge from here? I'm like, Oh God. I'm just like, listen, man, like you got to go on 28 to 42. She's still got another half an hour drive. And they're like, and it was like one 30. So I'm like, you got another, probably like an hour and 30 minutes until the sun starts hitting the mountain and then you get darkness. And they're like, Oh, are you sure?

[01:12:33] I'm like, I mean, the stickers all over the fricking car say, I'm kind of sure. Yes. And it's like, they're like, Oh man, what else can we do? I'm like, I told them about Rochester hollow, um, overlook stuff like that. I'm like, and they're like, ah, we'd like to join your lunch. I'm like, you do what you want, man. I'm like, do you got ad lamps? And they're like, uh, we have our cell phones. I'm like, that's not going to work, but you're not going to listen to what I say.

[01:13:00] And they were just like, they looked at me and they were just like, Oh yeah, we're probably going to try to do giant ledge before sundown. I'm like, try to influence you, but I guess not. So they just left off. Yeah. Rock, rock hollow is a good suggestion. Maybe I would, from the way you described it, I would have gone so as so far as to suggested hitting the fire tower at the Catskill center. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

[01:13:27] There's a fire tower at the, the Asopas fire tower at the Catskill center. There's a fire tower. Yeah. Great views. And your, your car won't get cold while you're doing the hike. Right. Yeah. So that was a fun experience. I mean, once again, and then after that, I was just like, you know what? I'm going to go to the wilderness first aid class down in Arkville. My buddy run by my buddy, David Oliver and by Joe from the NRI. Fantastic experience.

[01:13:55] Once again, they did an amazing job. Joe has the knowledge of 10,000 people of outdoor experiences. So, you know, stay rag climbing, the NRI, the national rescue resources information. It's just, just endless amounts of knowledge. And it was great to see people. I saw Jack Walker. I saw Jim C supported the show. Thank you for support of the show. Nicholas.

[01:14:22] If you remember golden money cat, he tagged us several times. Uh, uh, what's his name from lynching bike tours. Uh, he was there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And he did post some photos of that. I remember seeing that. Yeah. So how many, how many people were there? Was it like 10 people, 20, 50, 51. Wow. Okay. Yeah. And they're thinking about doing another one in, uh, I think it's, uh, may, uh, but at a bigger location.

[01:14:51] So I'm, I'm going to look forward to going to that. Uh, I might have to skip out on some other activities and go to that. So in May. Yeah. Yeah. I might be down for it. I was interested in doing this time around, but you know, my, uh, present physical condition would not permit me to, to do that type of training to heart palpitations and stuff like that. Yeah. So although my, what, my other daughter, the one I don't talk about that much on the show, Sydney, she's a registered nurse.

[01:15:20] And she, you know, she does do that. She hammers you on like you're doing it wrong, dad. Yeah. Every few days she has a story about how she has to, you know, they call, call it coding and rapid where they, it's kind of like what you see on TV. Pretty impressive. Nice. She's out there doing that. So shout out to my daughter, Sydney, who happened to have been in town today, but all right. Could tell her I said, hi, awesome. Great to hear. Uh, all right. So yeah, that was my previous hike.

[01:15:50] I don't know what's on the agenda for the future. Probably don't have anything. So yeah. You're not hiking this Sunday. I got a, I got a crazy busy weekend. Uh, Friday we're going to a show, uh, band up in Syracuse. And then Saturday we're going to a hockey game and then Sunday we're going to hockey game with the men's social group. So. Busy. Yeah. I'm trying to, I'll, I'll, it all depends on the weather. Uh, what I plan for this weekend.

[01:16:18] I, I am the safest thing for me to do right now is, is some cycling. So I'm going to try to get out and do maybe 40 miles on the bike this weekend. Wow. Uh, non, non road riding, try to get some type of rail trail or trail and, and then see what the weather is like and pick the safer of the two days for, uh, me to go out and bike something on the list. Yeah. So. Cool.

[01:16:48] So, I mean, talking about the weather, let's break into the weather forecast. Awesome. Let's do it. Here is your weekend weather forecast. Winter is knocking on the door here in the Catskills and we're looking at a pretty crazy weekend with flurry snow, rain, and whatever the hell you can throw in there that New York loves to do. So it's definitely a weekend to bundle up and bring your spikes. Do it.

[01:17:17] On Friday, November 13th is looked to be cold and snowy with a wintry mix throughout the day. Valley should start around 30 to 32 degrees and reach the mid thirties in the afternoon. Up on the summit, expect chilly temperatures to be in the twenties to low thirties. There will be a couple inches of snow accumulation on the summits due to the storm we got on Thursday. Expecting one to three inches possible with more even at the higher summits. Slippery conditions are going to be there.

[01:17:46] So bring your spikes and also dress accordingly because wind chill will be there. So more layers. On Saturday, November 14th, expect it to be cold, cloudy, and breezy with scattered snow showers and occasional rain mixing throughout the afternoon. Horrible conditions. Valley temperatures will hover around 28 to 35 degrees while the summits will remain in the low twenties to low thirties. Winds will make the peaks feel even colder.

[01:18:15] So definitely not ideal hiking weather. So once again, bring your spikes and bring your layers. On Sunday, November 15th, it will improve a little, although it's still going to feel like winter. Expect mostly cloudy skies with a chance of few morning flurries and the valleys will start in the upper twenties to low thirties and reach the upper thirties in the afternoon. The summit should stay in the low twenties to low thirties and winds won't be that high as the other days, but it will still be cold. So bring your layers once again.

[01:18:44] Overall, it's a cold, messy weekend in the Catskills. If you're heading there, prepare for winter, especially above 2,500 feet. Traction, traction, traction, and extra layers are going to be your friends. Winter season is making its grand entrance for the Catskills. So once again, when you're out, be safe, be prepared, and don't become tomorrow's rescue story. Back to you guys. Crazy weather forecast.

[01:19:14] We don't know what the hell's going on. So I'm time to get your snowblower ready. That's what I'm hearing. Right. I mean, people have that. No, no, no. So Catskill news volunteer, New York, New Jersey trail conference, 3,500 club, Catskills, trail crew, Catskill mountains club, visitor center, Jolly rovers, trail crew, Bermicount mountain fire tower, anywhere you can volunteer makes a huge difference in the Catskills. Do it. And let me know if you need stickers. I will send them to you for free, free of charge.

[01:19:44] I just need your address and name, or you can go to camp Catskill and get some free stickers. All right. So let's get to the last set of sponsors and then we'll get on to sharing Hutch. Cool. All right. So discover camp Catskill in Tannersville, your ultimate hiking store. Find top quality gear, apparel and accessories for all your outdoor adventures. Our expert staff is here to help every hiker from beginners to seasoned pros.

[01:20:11] We also carry a variety of unique Catskills, souvenirs and gifts. Visit us online at campcatskill.co or in the store to gear up for your next journey. Adventure starts at camp Catskill. Also embark on a transformative journey with another summit. Another summit is dedicated to serving veterans and first responders with free outdoor activities. Activities like walks in nature, paddling, hiking and even backpacking.

[01:20:40] Join our supportive community to rejuvenate in nature's embrace. Experience commodity, adventure and healing at no cost. Take your next step with another summit and ascend to new heights of resilience and joy. Apply today on another summit.org. All right. So let's get on to the guest of the night. Let's go. So tonight we're going outside the line. We're going way outside the line. There is no line here with Sherry and Hutch.

[01:21:09] They are two people, two couple that have drifted off into the outer space of living to where they live in Hamlet, who is 75 square feet, correct? 72. Yep. Close enough. Close enough. 72 square feet for the past 14 years. Yeah. 14 years. So welcome to the show, guys. Thanks. Great to be here. Great to be here. Are you in Hamlet right now? We sure are. Wow.

[01:21:40] 72 square feet. We have, I have so many questions. I know Tad does. Tad actually had the most intriguing question towards the end. And I'm looking forward to that question. Oh yeah. I'm going to have to scroll down and see what that was. No, I didn't put that in there. So it's good to meet you guys. Once again, a little backtrack. We met, Jessica and I went to the RV show down in Hershey is the world's largest RV show. And they had a presentation about national parks and boondocking and off the grid living and stuff.

[01:22:07] They've been living in Hamlet for over 14 years now. And it was just very, very great. To be honest, Sherry and Hutch, I don't know if you noticed, but Jessica and I were probably one of the youngest couples in that. Yes. We love it when we see younger couples in the room. Yeah. It's great. We don't know why that most of them are our age and older, but it's just. The people who come to presentations tend to be over 55. Yeah.

[01:22:36] The younger, we occasionally get some young millennials at our presentations. Occasionally there's families with young kids. That's really cool to see. But I think it's mostly, you know, I don't know whether it's millennials thinking that, you know, they can get everything online or they're just like, what does this person have to say? Maybe they're not used to talking to real people. It could be. Maybe they're not used to just going and listening to a presentation.

[01:23:02] I don't know what it is, but there's certainly plenty of that age group, all demographics around the RV shows. So they're there, they're shopping, they're maybe buying. Yeah. But whether they, you know, our seminar crowd tends to be, you know, folks who remember shows like Welcome Back Cotter. Yeah. Yeah. So they were there doing this presentation and we met them. We talked about them on off-grid living and such. And it was just great to run into you guys.

[01:23:30] And now we have you on the show talking about living your life in Hamlet, 72 square feet. And we're going to get the lowdown about that tonight. And once again, it's great to have you guys on the show. And the first question we'll get a little bit into depth about different things is a little background about yourselves. You know, Sherry and Hutch, you know, maybe like your childhood and then how you met and stuff.

[01:23:56] And then we'll break it into how you get into Hamlet and got the hell out of corporate America. Sure. I'll start. So I was born and raised in Southern California in suburbia, south of Los Angeles. And mostly was raised by a single mom, but went to school out there. And he was raised in Central Michigan, a traditional family.

[01:24:22] And we've lived, you know, in our young adult life, kind of all over the place. And we met in grad school in Ohio, Miami University of Ohio. And we were preparing for a program that prepares you to work in higher education. So it's working with students in a co-curricular format outside of the classroom, but tied in with academics. And we loved it. Absolutely loved it.

[01:24:46] And our first job or jobs that we had right out of grad school was in the mountains of North Carolina in the Blue Ridge Mountains, a place where people absolutely dream to live. And it is gorgeous. A beautiful, beautiful place. Obviously part of the Appalachians. So as we say it down there. And we kind of thought we had sort of landed in like camp forever, you know? Yeah, sort of. It was a great place to be an outdoor educator as I was.

[01:25:16] And it was a great place to be, to, you know, have a good work-life balance. And the cost of living at that time was not, you know, wasn't ridiculous. So. No, it was, it was great. We had great careers. We enjoyed the university where we worked. And we had a lovely home in a rural part of the county. And overall, it was just quite good. But we came to realize at one point is that we weren't going to have kids.

[01:25:45] And we were living the life of two people that had, that had children. That like, that stable life, if you know what I mean. You know, the, the two, or we had a three bedroom house, two cars, you know, two careers, you know, a couple weeks of vacation a year type of thing. And we loved being outside. Matter of fact, we had the opportunity to take students on trips all over the world. And that is actually something that we take for granted.

[01:26:15] Like we've traveled both personally, individually, and a couple, and also with students. Right. And, but things got, things were different. Things changed at the university. There was a new administration and it just got harder and harder to do our jobs. And not as fun. And yeah.

[01:26:40] And we realized that we were both, you know, we were both two very driven professionals who really got into the education field because we wanted to change students' lives. We wanted to be invested. And we worked a lot. We worked a lot. We were victims of our own, of our own success. You know, there wasn't, there wasn't like pay increases.

[01:27:03] We were just working because for the incentive of having a really good, well-run program and getting to do some of these trips that, that led us to, you know, other continents and other parts of the country. We did some amazing trips and had some amazing experiences, but we were not living in our home. We weren't there very much. We weren't there very often. In fact, we came back in 2008 from a trip abroad.

[01:27:30] We were like six weeks with students, two weeks on our own. And we had just been living with a backpack. What was in our backpack for like two months. And we came back to this, what seemed like this massive house. And it was only, you know, it's a modest house, three bedrooms. And I realized I had all this stuff and I'm like, what do I, what do I need this stuff for? And it was nice stuff. You know, it wasn't like junk. It was just, we had a lot of stuff.

[01:27:57] And that summer we really did some intentional downsizing. We went through every room, every closet, every drawer, and just started getting rid of things. It just felt good to kind of unload that. And at about that time too, we just started saving for something. We knew we wanted something. Someday. So we had to sort of prepare for it. And we said, let's, we don't know what it is. We don't know what the dream is. But let's be intentional.

[01:28:24] And let's save and let's have some, a kitty for whatever that was. And we truly didn't know what that was at all. Right. So basically like all this experience of traveling and stuff like that kind of grew on your influence of living life independently and separately from, you know, being a normal household. Stay at home person. Yeah. Yeah. We were just enjoying that aspect of life more.

[01:28:50] And, and those travels with students were, you know, once a year kind of thing, maybe a couple of times a year, sometimes domestically, sometimes internationally. But that was not the majority. Majority of our life was behind a computer in meetings and presentations, you know, that sort of thing. I don't know. I'm pretty racist. Anyway. So, yeah. Well, what I was going to say was. Sorry. No, it's fine. We were sort of thinking about what was that next thing going to be.

[01:29:21] Meanwhile, you know, still busy, still staying up with all the career nonsense. And again, we had good jobs. Don't. I'm not. I'm very grateful. It made me who I am. But you've got to know when there's a time to leave. And that time was approaching. And Sherry hit me with this idea about, it was the summer of like 2010. So, two years after that trip where we really were happy living out of our backpacks. She hit me with this idea.

[01:29:49] She's like, why don't we buy a small camper and travel the country? Because we realized we knew more about other countries. I knew more about the South Island and New Zealand than I did about my own country. I knew more about Wales in the UK than I did about my own country. And so, we kind of said, you know, we should dive deep into our own country. We get to know it, see the national parks. So, she hits me with this idea. We're out on a bike ride. And she goes, hey, Hutch, I got an idea. I'm like, lay it on me.

[01:30:19] She's like, let's get a camper. Let's travel the world or the country for two years. We'll rent out our house. And we'll just figure it out from there. And I said, I love it. Let's do it. But I was thinking in the back of my head, we'll get to this someday, right? I'm thinking, yeah, let's do this. This sounds great. Let's do it someday. Yeah, because we're in the middle of these two careers. We've got this home. You know, all of that. Like, the things that everybody has or most people have. Well, fast forward a couple of months later.

[01:30:49] So, does this lead to what was the final stamp of saying, screw this? Yeah. We just wanted to give you the back story. Okay. We weren't leading terrible lives. Yeah. That we were trying to get out of. But again, it just got overwhelming. So, anyway, a couple months later, my colleagues and I had prepared a proposal for the upper level administration of the university. And we'd been encouraged to do this.

[01:31:19] And that was the day of the meeting. And we went in and they listened. And we'd spent weeks, maybe months preparing this. And this was to expand our program, make it better. Give us their vision for the next five to seven years. You know, that sort of thing. And they listened politely. They asked a couple questions. And then pretty much when we were finished, they just said, I'm sorry. No.

[01:31:47] And it wasn't like, not at this time, not someday, no crack in the door whatsoever. Just flat out, no. And so my colleagues and I, we wrapped up, thanked them for their time, went back to our offices. I closed my door. I cried ugly for 20 minutes. And then about 20 minutes later, I felt this sense of, I'm free.

[01:32:14] I'm completely free of this, what kind of was starting to feel like a burden. I no longer have to worry about this career anymore. It's time for something different. I literally opened my door and just felt like a completely different person. And I went home from work that day. We often commuted in together because we were at the same university. But that day we were, we had driven separately. He had a late meeting and I went home. I poured myself a glass of wine.

[01:32:42] I opened the laptop and I started poking around on eBay. Oh, wine and eBay. That's, that's an interesting duo right there. It was only one glass of wine. But nonetheless. Big of a glass of wine. I had never purchased a single thing on eBay before. This was before a lot of online shopping too. I mean, some, but not a tremendous amount. It was 22. Yeah, it was 22. So there was some of it.

[01:33:10] But I found Hamlet. I found this beat up old hunting trailer. And we had already decided that maybe something of 1950s, 1960s would be a great little escape vehicle. And I found it. And the bid was closing that night before he was going to get home. And I just said, I have to put in a bid. And I just felt this compulsion to do it. And so I did.

[01:33:37] And about an hour later, I, you know, come through the door and I'm tired and I'm hungry and I just want to relax. And as soon as I opened the door before I'm actually through, she says, promise me you won't be mad. There you go. That's always something you want to hear. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm taking, and I said to myself, what did you do? And she says, promise. Yeah. I made him promise before. Yeah.

[01:34:08] And so I say, okay. And she tells me we're about to be the proud parents of this camper. And I'm like, you know, right. I wanted to see the pictures. I wanted to see what it was. And I was not encouraged when I saw the pictures. I thought, oh my God, this is a real project. And, but we were, we were, you know, we, the, the bid closed. We won the camper and we just had to go get it from Michigan.

[01:34:37] Which is another story. When we had it brought down, we saw it in the driveway and I just was shaking my head. I was like, this is going to be a project. But she saw a very different path. But together, uh, the next year and a half over nights and weekends here and there, we, um, we renovated it and it came together.

[01:35:04] And I really started falling in love with this camper. And by the way, we had never been RVers. Cause again, I was an outdoor educator. I spent 30 to, you know, 50 nights in a tent throughout, throughout the year. So I was, you know, I kind of had that sort of like look down on people who had a camper, but she, when she pitched me the idea of, of going on a road trip, I imagined like trying to set up and every day, a new tent kind of thing.

[01:35:34] And I'm like, no, that's not going to work. So we tried to get as small a camper as we could. That is really like a hard sided tent. But I want something I want to say is that I realized that night when she going back to the night, she purchased the camper. I realized that that was a fork in the road for me.

[01:35:53] That was a, I could either stay on the track that I was going to be, that I was on, or I could watch her drive off in this cool camper to go have adventures. And I maybe thought about it for 30 seconds. And I imagined her driving off in a camper that maybe I even helped renovate, you know, leaving me behind. And I just said, Oh no, hell no. I have got to be in that driver's seat. I've got to be in that cab with her.

[01:36:21] I'm not going to miss out on what she's going to go. And that choice got me through the doubts and the questions and the fears and all that stuff of like, Oh, I'm leaving this career behind. Yeah. Well, so was that, was that the plan from the outset to just cut all ties and all tethers to your normal economic lifeline, if you will, and just become boondockers from the outset?

[01:36:49] Or it was like the, the thought, you know, if you're an academic, you typically get long breaks, you get summer off. Were you thinking we're going to, you were just, just from day one, it was going to be, we're cutting all of the economic supply lines and we're venturing out in our 72 foot square foot eBay buy that we slapped together ourselves. Right. Um, okay.

[01:37:14] So that's relatively adventuresome and probably not something that most of our listeners would dive into without some encouragement. Sure. We were, we were well-traveled. So that was not, not a concern. B we had a lot of home repair skills and a lot of tools cause we've done a lot of work on our own house. So that's why I thought it was perfect because it was an inexpensive camper with good bones.

[01:37:41] At that point we bought it, it was 53 years old and it had stood the test of time. And I thought if this thing is still standing and rolled from Michigan to North Carolina, it's got good bones. Right. What you're not telling us, and this is what I find is that one of the either biggest inhibitions or the biggest excuses to people doing what you are doing is debt.

[01:38:09] You had college degrees, graduate degrees. I'm thinking student loans, right? Yeah. Was there any, was there any debt there? How was it? How, I know selling the house, you know, gets you free of the mortgage, getting rid of your daily drivers, gets you rid of car payments. What, what about like student loan debt, other debt, like the typical chains of our existence that most people had. You have no debt. We had no debt. We worked ourselves completely out of debt.

[01:38:37] We had the, out of student loan debt and we had low student loan debt to begin with due to the nature of the program that we had graduated from. We had cars that were paid off. We sold vehicles before we left and that added to the travel fund. I was raised from a very financially conservative mother who like, you know, you just, you don't live a life of debt, you know, and you as well. Right. And we had, we had this sort of, again, we had the house debt.

[01:39:06] That was a lot. Yeah. It was, you know, when we, you know, how we live, we paid off our credit cards. We, we worked really hard to get the student loan, those student loan payments down. Um, and we were fortunate with that. We put more money toward the mortgage every year than we had to, um, in order to pay that off. And we actually rented out before we sold it. So we rented it when we left. Um, and so our renters were paying the mortgage.

[01:39:35] And the main reason for that was it was shortly after the crash in the 2007, eight area or timeframe. And, um, in the mountains of North Carolina, because it's a second home market, it came later. It hit harder later. And so it took longer for that market to pick back up again. And so we wanted to wait for the market to pick back up again before we sold it. So we were like, let's go ahead and just, you know, try this.

[01:40:04] And, and in all honesty, we were going to do this for maybe a year and a half for two years. And that was the thing. It was maybe two years at the most. Yeah. And, um, and then possibly settle back down. But I think we realized that that house was too big for us. And we were just wanted, we, we were desperate to do something different, just craving to do something completely. And we realized that if we, you know, because we didn't have to do it, we didn't have to take kids who had no say. Right. In the, in the, in the choices.

[01:40:33] We didn't have to take them along. Now we've met tons of families doing this and homeschooling their kids. And like the kids are out there, like learning in the national parks, using that as their classrooms. I mean, I want to be that kid, you know, who, that sounds amazing. Yeah. When we meet them, we're like, kids are amazing. Right. But we felt comfortable, um, that we could do this for a short time and, uh, and, and figure it out.

[01:40:59] And we, um, we saved a bunch and that sort of gets into our, how we've made this, I guess, work. Yeah. And I don't know that we said that we bought Hamlet for $900. Oh, wow. And so, yeah, for $900 and put maybe 4,500 ish into it. Um, initially. And so most of it was labor. Most of it was our own labor, but very little money.

[01:41:25] So if you want to think about a camper for a home for less than $6,000 and we, we didn't have a truck. So we had to sell a vehicle to buy a truck. Um, and then we sold our second vehicle right before we left to a neighbor. So yeah. So let me ask you about some of the pragmatic choices here. Uh, you thought initially maybe we'll do this for a year and a half or two. Uh, you start off with a 72 square foot tow behind trailer.

[01:41:56] You've been doing this for about 14 years now. Why haven't you gotten a bigger unit? Uh, why haven't you switched to a van, an RV? Why is it you're sticking to this, the 72 square foot, uh, closet on wheels? I mean, a trailer on wheels. I'm sorry, but why is it? Why does, why does that work for you? Cause like Stash, Stash has a vision towards getting an RV.

[01:42:24] Uh, my daughter who lives on the road is talking about getting a van. You guys are making it work in a trailer. So what is it? 1950s trailer. Yeah. So what makes it work and what are the pros and cons from what you see with other people? Sure. Absolutely. And we get asked this question a lot when we do our seminars and the writing work that we do as well. So for us, when you find perfect, um, it's hard to stop perfect, right? It just works for us.

[01:42:53] It has literally everything we need in here and it is so small that it's easy to park. It can be put just about anywhere. Um, it's easy to fix when things rattle apart, you know, I mean, cause all RVs need to be fixed at some point. Uh, and by the way, when we say RV, we talk about recreational vehicles. So, um, other people refer to, I know, especially in the Northeast, they refer to RVs as motor homes or, you know, that's the class A, class B type of thing.

[01:43:23] But to us, RVs are RVs, recreational vehicles. So we have something you sleep in that either drive or pull behind. Class A, class B, class C, all, you know, all the lingo there in the RV industry, but travel trailers are great. Um, you can leave them behind and go explore in your four wheel drive truck. We have three kayaks on the top, two bikes on the back. We can also take the bikes and put them on the truck and go places.

[01:43:48] And yeah, it's just simply made, simply built, but built well. And we have bumbled down so many dirt roads, so many gravel roads all the way to Alaska, all the way to Labrador, down to Florida. I mean, just all over the United States and Canada, uh, for 14 years. And when it, I mean, it, it still works, you know, and like, like, like 72 square feet.

[01:44:18] That doesn't have a built-in bathroom. Does it? It doesn't. We have a toilet. That's a little, that's a little, I can't, that's, that's crazy. Like, I mean, I, I mean, of course we've had an iPad backpack before and stuff, you know, when we talk about pooping all the time, because, you know, like I love my favorite outhouses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Outdoors people talk about pooping. So like, like, how do you do that?

[01:44:42] Like, you know, when you're like, I don't know, it's just, I, I, I, I have to eventually do this because once again, Jessica and I are figuring, trying to figure it out and, you know, boondocking requires. Everybody has a different way of doing it. Um, a lot, I mean, you can't find an RV, very many RVs that are on the market that don't have a toilet. Some, some teeny, some teeny tiny ones do smaller than ours. Um, I think it's a waste of space.

[01:45:11] How much time do you spend in the bathroom? You know, in a daily basis, you might spend, you know, 20 minutes total, right? Half an hour. If you've got a shower, you know, um, and in the, the, the, the space that you have, especially in what we have, it would be a large waste of space. I think now some people, I absolutely, that's a, that's a, that's a deal breaker. They have to have that. And I get it. So get right. But we have a portable means.

[01:45:40] We have a portable method to take care of that. We, we, you know, give each other the privacy that we need, um, or don't need because we're very comfortable, um, with that and it, it works. Wow. And what works for you may not work for everybody else, but, but we have a pretty, you know, comfort threshold with all that. And, and the upside in terms of space that we get and where we can go with this small camper,

[01:46:07] we can show up to any campground. And if they have an open space for the night, we can fit. We will fit in. Because it's small. Um, we can fit into, because our camper is, is, is 15 feet or less, we can fit into 100% of every national park site campsite that allows an RV. So that increases our flexibility. So that is such a great asset to have with that small size that for us, the downside of

[01:46:37] not having a bathroom. And by the way, we have a portable shower and a portable shower tent that we can set up. Um, and we can have a very luxurious shower and private time, um, that we might need, you know, uh, with a five gallon, with a five gallon bucket of warm water and our shower temperature water. And, um, and it works really great. Let me tell you, when you haven't had a shower in a couple of days, the shower that you get

[01:47:04] from a bucket toilet, sorry, sorry, a bucket shower, not the bucket. That was a, that was a, that was a Freudian slip. Two buckets. You got to do what you got to do. One bucket. Other purposes. All nasty stuff. Right, right, right, right. So, um, so I think it's for everyone, but the question that you asked about getting back to why the trailer versus a van.

[01:47:33] One thing that's really important is that for us, at least is the trailer is a living space. It's not a driving space. When you have a van, you have your driving space and your living space and there, and the two are very connected. When we park for the night after a long day of driving, we're in our home and we've got real dishes and we're cooking real meals on a two burner stove.

[01:47:59] And the driving space or whatever happened while we were driving is, is now separate. And that has been something that I didn't think about originally. Um, but has become a very key figure in our, in our life is that there's a, there's a driving space, there's a living and working space. And, and those two are separate. Yeah. Also that truck is not just the truck that gets us around. It's our garage.

[01:48:27] So the back of the truck is organized with bins that have, um, off season clothes, all of our camping gear. Cause we actually still tent camp. Um, all of our kayaking gear shoes, um, our 12 volt fridge is back there, extra water, extra gas tools, things like that. So our garage there and the living space is here and that's how we separate it. Um, but what's really nice is when you have a van or a self-driven RV.

[01:48:56] So a class A, B or C, um, you have to put everything away every single day that you're going to drive. You can't just leave stuff out. So if we're parked somewhere and we want to set up our home for a period of time, we can just leave stuff out, unhitch and, you know, drive away and come back to it. So now if you're traveling, you're, you're, you're continuing to go, you're putting things away every day. Uh, we're doing that actually right now.

[01:49:25] We're on route 66 in Missouri right now. We're making our way to California. Um, it's an amazing, amazing route to take. And it's the hundredth birthday of route 66, um, tomorrow. Tomorrow. So, which is kind of cool. Yeah. Cool. So, um, and we've never done the entire route, but nonetheless, you get the idea. Like you have to put everything away. If you have a, if you have a class A, B or C vehicle, um, that you're going to be driving at.

[01:49:49] And you have less space, uh, because the tow vehicle really is a storage facility as well. So, and it's amazing what we can store in Hamlet and in the truck. We've got pictures of both that show just all the stuff that we're able to organize and, and have in there. So, and then lastly, and lastly, I just have to give one thing. We are just big lovers of the mid-century modern aesthetic of campers and trailers.

[01:50:18] So this era of the canned ham with the all wood interior and the simple lighting and all of that, it's just something we love. So I've always said, if something happens to Hamlet, he was simply built. We could, we could rebuild this and, and make it function the same way and have it look the same way. So that's, that's something that we're just entirely wedded to because we, we love that aesthetic.

[01:50:45] Um, and modern as in like a newly built camper does not appeal to us because it doesn't have the same feeling that we love. And warmness and stuff. And people who have vans, we have plenty of friends with vans. They've come in here before and they're like, oh my gosh, you have so much more room in here than we have in our van. It's amazing. Like you could dance in here compared to the van that they have. So now motorhomes, that's a different story. You know, obviously they're huge.

[01:51:14] They're gas guzzlers. Um, and we can live more sustainably. Um, I could rattle off a few of those figures if you're interested, but we haven't paid a mortgage in 14 years. We haven't paid an electrical bill in 14 years. We can live on about a third of what we used to make, um, over the last 14 years. We drive about half of what most American couples drive, but we travel all over the continent instead of back and forth to school and the store and church and friends and all that.

[01:51:44] We're, we're on the move all the time, but we only drive about 16,000 miles a year. And most American couples drive about 30 on two vehicles. So, um, our propane, our propane bill is about $150 a year. Um, so that's about 10% of what we used to pay to heat our home in the mountains of North Carolina. And that was back then. Those are the prices back in 2010. So yeah, there's a lot.

[01:52:09] I mean, we can live so sustainably, so inexpensively and have a blast. So, I mean, that kind of, that kind of goes in with the, you're all having a blast. You're all speaking all these, these great things and stuff. What about the not so great things? Like, uh, you know, we, we all have once again, in our lives, you know, like breakdowns, you know, something breaks, furnace breaks, stuff like that. What about on the road, life on the road, 14 years of just traveling all over.

[01:52:38] What are some like the not so dreamy things that you're talking about being on the road? Could you, do you guys mind sharing that with us? Or is that just like, eh? Sure, sure, sure. So I think we both have different answers to this, um, because we're different people and we have different, you know, comfort zones and things like that. First off. Like, I had to learn how to become a boondocker.

[01:53:01] Um, I used to, you know, I used to take students on these trips and I couldn't just show up with 20 students in tow and say, hey, do you have a campsite for us? You know, so I made reservations. And so not having reservations and not having a plan at first was really hard for me. Um, and I felt, you know, like nervous and like I was maybe breaking rules or something like that, the unwritten rules. And then I just learned, you know, I'm not that big a deal. It's, I'm just not that big a deal.

[01:53:31] No one's paying that much attention. And we learned how to find great free or inexpensive places to camp and to park, um, that were safe and comfortable. Um, but I had to learn how to do that. And that was a real growth experience for me. She was a lot better at that. I have to say something. So people ask us all the time if we stealth camp, because that's a kind of a terminology. And we laugh hysterically.

[01:53:58] We're like in a shiny silver 1957 camper. No, there's a purple door. There's nothing stealthy about us. Um, we just park in an obvious location and people don't really bother us. Right. I mean, it might be for a night. Yeah. In the boondocking world, there's called the knock. Yeah. Right. Like you're in a place, someone knocks on the door saying, hey, you can't, you can't be here. Or in 5,000 nights. Yeah. Potential nights of camping. We've, we've gotten the knock like twice. Yeah.

[01:54:28] Um, so we're pretty good at finding those places. Um, and once is just because the office was closed and we didn't get a chance to register. Oh, that's right. He was coming by. He was right. Coming by. And we're like, well, we can, it just said to show up in the morning. So, but if you're here, we can take care of this now. So kind of like, like how she's saying, kind of like being in the corporate world and stuff like that with your planning, your, your organization and stuff like that, that had, that we weren't

[01:54:57] really ready for something that was just like, like, we're going to go out there and do this. Yeah. We're hard to just be like, let, let go of that and, and let it come and realize that I was going to find a place to be. And also like the question of the question of, well, where am I going to sleep? Well, I'm going to sleep in the bed. That's right over there. You know, like I don't have to worry about a hotel or a motel, you know, that it has maybe something that's not comfortable.

[01:55:26] I mean, we're traveling with all everything that we need. It's just, can we be in a place that is again, you know, quiet enough and safe enough and out of the way enough that nobody, that nobody matters. And that's been easier than I expected off the bat. And it took, it took a while. It took a while. But the other thing is when we, and this is, you know, we can talk about technology later

[01:55:54] on, but it's become so much easier with the different apps that are available. When we hit the road on our first night in an RV, our first night in an RV, by the way, was our very first night on the road in 2012. We slept in it a couple of times in our driveway. Right. But that was in the driveway. It wasn't really like using the systems. Right. So we hit the road with a, with a, with a flip phone and a road Atlas.

[01:56:20] There was no, there were no, there was no GPS. There was our Atlas. We had the Rand McNally adventure Atlas and we would find a little camping symbol on the map, on the map. And we would go down the road and find it. Right. We had a rule at one point that we would not do that. What he just described at night. And we broke the rule all the time. Every day, all the time. We would try to say, okay, we're not going to drive to an unknown place in the middle of the night or after.

[01:56:50] And we just, we ended up being, you know, constantly doing that because we, we had to, but now it's with there, with apps, you can actually check on location. There's, you can, there's all kinds of, you can read what people say about them. You can find what's, what's safe and what's loud. And what's here. You can navigate right to it. So you know how long it's going to take you to get there. You want to, you like, you'll know what the road is like. And like, there's so many reviews out there. It's, it's silly.

[01:57:15] So if that, like, you know, that speaking of that, it kind of like takes away the adventurous feeling. Do you find that of more of a positive than a negative? Like, like once again, you're not as adventurous as you were 14 years ago, but do you feel the same? Like, you know, it's a real good question. I mean, I think I miss some of those freewheeling, I call them freewheeling days, the early, the first six months of learning how to live like this.

[01:57:43] I am so glad that we did that without the pressure of social media or writing. We were just in it. You know, we weren't working. We were living off of the savings we had, we had, we had made in those first year, year and a half. We took up, we took up some odd jobs here and there, but like, it wasn't really a focus. And we were able to like really hone down. How do we do this? And how do we find safe places?

[01:58:11] And how do we talk to other people and learn from them and create, get involved in a community of travelers? And that was great. It is easier now, but it has allowed for a certain level of other kinds of adventure. Like we can say, oh, we can go there. Great. Let's see what's here. And let's push ourselves in this realm, knowing that we have this thing to get to at the end

[01:58:40] of the night, or we have an options. We have options for the night. So it's opened. We're not as focused on where are we going to be tonight? Like for instance, we wanted to get to the most Northern point we could get to on the coast of Labrador in the summer of 2025. And just because we just wanted to go to the end of the road, that was the goal. And prior to that, we wouldn't have known that the road that we had to drive down was 50 miles, almost 50 miles of dirt road to get there.

[01:59:08] But we knew that going in and we just said, you know what, let's try it. If it's a terrible dirt road, we'll just abort the plan. But it was a very well graded dirt road and actually in some ways better than some pavement in those parts of the world. And so we got out there and we just loved it. We boondocked out there on the coast with the ocean as our back door for several days out there. So anyway, so that it's opened up options. It's given us a little bit more confidence, I guess.

[01:59:38] I guess it's confidence to like... Of just going to super remote places and not worrying about it. Where other people have maybe reviewed it. You're like, oh, I can get there. I can get there too. So while we may have pushed the boundary early with some of... It's also allowed... The community of, say, boondockers has allowed us the opportunity for us to push our boundaries a little bit more. And to see what other kind of adventures we do want to have.

[02:00:05] So while the day-to-day is not as much of a wild kind of feeling of, oh my God, where are we going to be tonight? And you know what? If we want that, we can turn it off. We can always go back. We can still do that. Yeah. How about Sherry? Sherry, how about you? What about the not so dreamy experience? Sherry, how about the not so dreamy experience? Um, it's really hard for me, but I mean, we have to go look for laundry. You know, we can't just go to the washing machine and stuff like that.

[02:00:34] And if we need to wash clothes, but you know, there's laundromats pretty much everywhere. Um, except for Newfoundland. Um, there's not a lot of laundromats out there. We learned that. They're just not a thing up there. Yeah. As much. And, um, and when you do find them, there's very few of them and they may not be working. Um, but Hey, you do laundry by hand. You know, we've, we've both lived and traveled in developing countries and we've done hand washing and put it up on a line. We know how to do that. So that works. There's that clean bucket again. Yeah. The clean bucket.

[02:01:04] Is that, is that before or after the shower? There's no shovel. Oh, shower. You know, when you're not showering, it's just clean water coming from the bucket. So you could, you would do the laundry after the shower. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and, yeah. And just, and we have a, we have a spray bottle of bleach. So if we need to bleach something, we, we spray things out as needed. Um, what else? Gosh. I mean.

[02:01:34] Just, you know, like sometimes weather, you need to worry about the weather because you're so close to it. Um, instead of being in a house and, you know, and, um, insulated from it. Um, if it gets cold, it's colder in here. We got a plan for that. Um, if it's windy, we got to strategically park so that we're not getting blown, you know, back and forth. You get, you get rocked to sleep. If you know what I mean. Sometimes if you don't park properly, um, thunderstorms will wake you up in the middle of the night. But they woke me up in our house too.

[02:02:05] Um, and of course treacherous weather, we're constantly paying attention to the weather. Um, we're constantly looking ahead at what's coming. Um, there's been a couple of times we've had to hunker down and get out of it. Um, other times and, you know, that's why we don't make reservations very much, pretty much at all. Um, because you never know when you're going to have to move on, change your plans, you know? So yeah. And yeah. So people in homes get affected by weather too.

[02:02:34] Obviously there's tragedies everywhere. Matter of fact, our home community, um, in the Appalachian mountains, not so much our friends and family that are there, but, um, thank goodness though we did have some friends, but, uh, got hit with hurricane Helene of course in 2024. So pretty bad, pretty bad. How often do you stay at a developed RV site versus just, you know, it really depends, uh, throughout the season and not RV parks.

[02:03:02] So we pretty much never go to RV. We're almost always when we, when we camp, we love to be in the off grid. Simple, like national forest campsites, national park camps, national park campsites, sometimes state parks, um, depending on the, on the state. And, you know, if we can not pay for electrical, we don't have to, because we run off of solar, a solar powered system.

[02:03:28] Um, so that saves us a lot of money, but it also means that we don't have to, we don't have to camp like that. We can be, we can be in those remote areas. So I would say, you know, and they're less crowded and there's less people. And it's, and you're surrounded by a natural setting. Typically, you know, trees are beautiful desert. Yeah. I mean, I would say half the time we're in less than half the time we're in a developed campground.

[02:03:53] The rest of the time we will be in either visiting with friends. We're doing harvest host stays or we're boondocking in a, in an, in an area. Those are 60, 40, maybe camping. No, 60, boondocking. 60, 60. Okay. So yeah. And it depends on the trip too. It just depends on the trip of where we are. Like we're on route 66. We're going through towns and villages right now. So we're doing a lot of boondocking. We actually have to leave the highway to go to a state park or, or something like that.

[02:04:23] But, um, you know, if we're in a place where we're going from national park to state park, cause that's, what's there like in Alaska, but we did a lot of boondocking along the Alcan tremendous amount of boondocking along the Alcan and Alaska. That's the Alaska highway. Yeah. British Columbia to Alaska. So we boondocked our kind of way up there and from Washington and then stayed in some national and state parks cause we wanted to be there. You know, we wanted to leave the camper behind and go explore on foot bike or with her truck.

[02:04:51] So, yeah. Yeah. So not, yeah, we estimate that we have, so if we had paid $50 a night for, uh, to stay in an RV park and that's on the low end, just so you know, 50 is very minimal at this, at this point in time, um, depends on where you are, of course, but about that, we would have spent about $255,000 on camping fees in 14 years.

[02:05:17] Um, but instead we know that we've spent what about $25,000, $28,000. We've kept track of that over a 15 year. So again, some of that includes, you know, there were times we were with family. There were times we volunteered abroad. There were times we were, um, you know, like in the winter season, we speak at a lot of RV

[02:05:42] shows were actually not in our camper during those months because they're winter months. And, you know, when you're speaking at a show, you, you, you can't, it's hard to be, it's hard to be living in a camper like ours in the winter in one place. We can sort of travel through winter, but we can't, it's hard to like hunker down. And also our RV show speaking gigs are often back-to-back weekends. So one will be in Michigan. The other one will be in North Carolina. And we can't count on not having really bad winter weather and getting to and from.

[02:06:11] So we often apply to those shows. Yeah. So we, we park Hamlet and then we fly to those shows. So, so some of those nights, you know, um, obviously. So with this, like, like off boondocking and stuff like that, and you don't, Hamlet doesn't get hooked up to any, like, like 30, 50 amps, stuff like that. Right. Not usually. No, we can't actually, we don't have 30 or 50 circuits. So 15 amp is the, or 20 is the highest we can do.

[02:06:39] Um, we don't even have a 30 amp plug. So now like, how do you, you usually get all the power for Hamlet and how long does it really last? So that's a, that's a tricky question. So we, we do a lot with solar. We've been rolling solar for 14 years. We had solar when we left our driveway. You had solar before people had solar panels really on their houses and stuff. Jesus. Exactly. It was very funny. We had a 80 watt panel that we would put out on his guitar stand on an angle and, and

[02:07:08] bungee, um, bungee cord to make it. So it wouldn't fall over. And people would walk by all the time and say, is that a solar panel? What are you powering with that? How does that work? And so we would explain, and our system has grown tremendously since then. Obviously we now have 400 watts of high efficiency panels on the roof and a 400 watt panel for it. That's a portable panel that we can put out in the sun when we're parked in the shade.

[02:07:33] Um, we've got, instead of one rinky dink lead acid battery, we've got two lithium iron phosphate batteries. We've got four times the power storage. So it just, and we can also use DC to DC charger. So if we're driving, if we're, if it's a low solar day or it's been raining for three days and we're like, we're just not going to get charged up today. And we need to get some work done tonight or whatever the case might be. Um, we have a DC to DC charger.

[02:07:58] So while we're running the truck and driving down the road, it is charging our batteries in Hamlet. Um, and so it just depends on how much driving and depends on, you know, there's no time timeframe. It's just, there's calculations, there's worksheets, we can solve that for folks, but you basically, the bottom line is you want a two to one ratio between the, uh, power, your, uh, able to generate to your storage capacity.

[02:08:25] So we have 400 Watts on the roof to a 200 amp hour battery bank. And, um, and then you want flexibility and that's the key to solar. So if you're parked in the shade, you want to be able to put a portable panel out so you can stay in the shade and that can be, uh, pumping up your battery or use that DC to DC charger. And then every so often we have something called an AC to DC charger. And this is if like, it's a week of terrible weather and we haven't seen anything and we really haven't moved very much.

[02:08:54] So we can't really rely on the truck power, um, to pump up our lithium iron phosphate battery. We can plug in what's called an AC to DC, uh, charger. And so what that means is we can plug into a campground or a friend's house or whatever the case might be and charge our DC powered batteries from an AC source. So it works like a converter does on a normal RV, but it's just a portable little thing that is about the size of a notebook.

[02:09:20] So because what our camper came with was one circuit with an extension cord to, uh, to plug in and, um, it had no off-grid had no off-grid battery at all. Um, so we created that system in this camper. Um, and then we've expanded it over the, over the years, but most people's RVs of any kind van motor home or trailer are going to have a system that where that has a converter.

[02:09:50] That charges off-grid batteries while you're plugged in. We don't have that, which is why Sherry mentioned the AC to DC charger does that serves that function. And that's nerding out of solar. Uh, uh, you know, we can do that for as long as you want. Um, we're solar consultants. We do these seminars at RV shows. We educate people about this because it's, yeah. What's the company again called? Uh, freedom in a can is our company. Um, Renogy who we work with. Renogy. Okay.

[02:10:19] I remember talking about that. It's, it's pretty cool. Once again, the upgrades that has happened with the batteries with lithium batteries in the past 14 years have been astronomical. Tremendous. It's, it's unbelievable. When we hit, when we hit the road, everybody was talking, uh, golf cart batteries that weigh, you know, 75 pounds for 50 amps. Mm-hmm.

[02:10:43] And you would, and you would, you would have to have, you know, 150, 200 pounds of batteries in order to do what we can do. We can, we can throw that much power, more than that much power in, in 45 pounds, 50 pounds of battery bank. Um, so it's just tremendous what has happened in terms of, of battery capacity and battery technology in the last 10 years. Also, they have Bluetooth. Um, they have self-heating batteries.

[02:11:11] So when your battery gets too cold, um, it will still give you power, but it won't actually charge back up because it, there's a computer chip in it called a BMS or battery management system that, uh, makes it. So the battery says, I'm too cold. I can't charge anymore. And so there are now self-heating batteries. So that if there's just even a little bit of trickle of solar or AC to DC or DC to DC power, and it'll warm those batteries back up internally and make them so that they can start charging again.

[02:11:39] So what used to be back in the day when we had the very first lithium batteries and we were in a cold spot and our batteries would freeze overnight, we used to have to blow heat into the battery compartment to get the batteries to warm up so that we could start charging again. And now it just does it all by itself. And we don't even think about it anymore. Like literally haven't given it a second thought in several years. So, so flat out with these lithium batteries, you said you got two of them, correct? Two 100 amp hours. Yep.

[02:12:06] So if you were to go 100 to zero, how long with your, the way you guys live, because I know you live substantially minimal as possible. How long do you think you could go with those two batteries? With no solar? Uh, yeah. Yeah. So just straight up to 100 to 0%. Like as if we were living in the dark. Yep. Correct. Yeah. Okay. Um, the way we live, uh, depends on what work we're doing.

[02:12:33] If, if we weren't doing a lot of work a week. Yeah. I was going to, if we were, if we were doing, depending on how much work, uh, we were doing, um, maybe half that, um, when I'm doing video processing with my, uh, with my laptop, that does. Or running our Starlink. Yeah. Or running, running the, uh, Starlink. Yeah. We have Starlink.

[02:12:57] Um, uh, but right now we're, we're not using it at all because we have such a good, um, cell signal in this part of the world. Uh, we will, we'll turn off the Starlink and not use it. Um, because it's... Pause it. So you're not... I remember looking into that a lot. Right. A lot. We use it a lot in Canada, um, and, and very, very remote locations. But other than that, we have pretty much relied on, um, hotspot or, you know, just...

[02:13:27] So a week? Go ahead. Yeah. A week. A week. About a week. The places we have run out of power actually have been at my... Ironically, when we're at my, my, either my parents or her parents. Because where we, where we parked, it was in tree cover. And we were sort of in and out of the trailer.

[02:13:53] Even though we're still sleeping there, we may not be, you know, doing stuff inside the house when we're visiting with them or, or working on house projects for them. Um, and, um, we've actually let the battery go down just because we weren't paying attention as much to, um, but that could have been a 10 days. Oh, wow. You know, you know, uh, of before we actually really needed it, um, to come back up. Yeah. People think it's funny that we go visit our parents and sleep on our camper, but it's our bed. We love our bed.

[02:14:20] So when people ask that, when people ask that question, I would say, imagine if you could travel with your bed, you have your bed. It's your sleeping setup. It's comfort. Right. If you could go travel the country and take your bed with you, wouldn't you want that? You know, that's the, that's the way we even have a bed heater at night. Um, or winter. So instead of getting into a frozen bed, we just turn on the mattress heater and warm it up in there.

[02:14:49] That's one thing I did not expect from you guys that, that the sustainability with, with that is, uh, that's pretty, that's pretty impressive. Yeah. I mean, it doesn't take very much of our battery for that bed heater and it actually makes it so we don't have to run the heater heater at night. Um, so we can just turn that on, warm up the bed, turn it down to whatever temperature we think we need it at for the night and for how long, depending on how cold it is.

[02:15:16] And then of course we've got a big down comforter and you know, all of that, but for winter time. So like when you've traveled all over these places, what are some of the places that you keep finding yourselves to go back to? Like, you're just like, God damn, we can't, like, we cannot skip this place. That's let's right here. You know, I, I always think of, you know, I just went to Yosemite and Sequoia national forest. Like I just, Sequoia is just someplace I'm going to return to thousands upon thousands of times.

[02:15:46] Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah. It's, it's, it's tremendous there. Um, let's see. I think we have always tried to leave something for next time when we are visiting a cool spot. So we never try to say, how can we visit this place and get it all in? That's just not a, that just doesn't, it just doesn't exist because you'd be constantly running from place to place to place to try to do it all.

[02:16:14] So we have millions of places or thousands of places that were probably with, with, with a bunch of bucket list items, you know, that we may not get to because we try to leave that as an incentive to come back. So like, you know, we've not done the Zion traverse. I want to do the Zion traverse sometime. I want to do rim to rim, you know, a rim to rim hike in the Grand Canyon. He has flown at the Grand Canyon. Right. I have done that.

[02:16:41] I, I, so there's these places, I think the way we want to answer that question is there are, there are environments and ecosystems that we're, we're feeling drawn back to. So we love the Northeast. We love the Southeast. Southeast was home for many years, but a place that resonates with us is the American Southwest. But I can't in the wintertime. Yeah. I can't be there in the summertime. Yeah. We don't have air conditioning. You know, there are some places that are just too hot.

[02:17:11] Uh, to be comfortable. Although I did do the Grand Canyon in the middle of July, which was the hottest I've ever been in my life. Jesus. Um, but again, but you can, the great thing about that, you're getting, you're getting into like 70 degree water, you know? Um, and it, you cool down immediately. So, uh, that is, that is the only way that you can actually be in that environment is to be right next to the river.

[02:17:37] Um, but, but I, in terms of places I'm called back to, like we, we want to be back in the Southwest and that's why we're heading there. We're just doing it slowly along route 66. Just to take it all in. There's so much. Cause there's so much to take in this road. It's just amazing. Um, yeah, I, I, I agree with you about environments, you know, and wanting to be in certain places. And every place has its, has its best season too.

[02:18:03] Like, you know, Maine in the summertime is amazing. Yeah. We've been to Maine on the coast numerous times. Um, we used to work seasonally there. Um, we don't do that anymore, but we have done that for several years and yeah, what the, the desert in the winter is definitely a return trip. The mountains, um, summer, sometimes winter, depending on where we are and the coast in the summertime.

[02:18:30] And we often go to parts of Canada in the summertime as well, mainly to get out of the heat and away from the crowds. And, um, we're able to just travel without reservations up there pretty, pretty freely. Yeah. All right. So I'm, I'm, I'm going to bring it up cause I think Stosh has been avoiding it. Oh, I'm going to bring up the four letter word work. What do you guys do for economics?

[02:18:58] You, you've been out there 14, 16 years. We all want to live this lifestyle, right? One of the, one of the big things that keeps us from getting there is we don't have that rich uncle who gave us. Yeah. So, so tell us, tell us how do you pull it off financially? What is the economic scene? Absolutely. Let me give you a backstory of what we've done for work, um, over the last 14 years.

[02:19:25] So we told you that we saved a chunk of change, uh, before we left, sold some stuff, all that. Um, and for the first two years, we pretty much lived off of savings with a couple of like odd jobs we did here and there, but truly just a couple of those. We did a lot of volunteer work to keep our costs down, things like that as we traveled around. And then we met people who were working seasonally. They would work a season, travel a season. We're like, well, that sounds really fun. So let's try that.

[02:19:52] And we have a background in outdoor education, environmental education, things like that. We said, well, that just transfers beautifully to working at a campground or environmental education center, uh, things of that sort. So for about six years, we did that type of work and we mostly worked in the summertime. Um, we worked on the coast of Maine. We worked in the mountains of Washington. We worked in Northern Michigan and, and several other types of places like that. And, um, we'd have a travel season. We'd have a period of time. We did a lot of volunteer work throughout the year.

[02:20:22] So we kind of just kind of made it work that way. And because we live so sustainably, not only from an environmental perspective, but a financial perspective, we didn't need to make the type of money what most people have to make. Right. So there's that.

[02:20:39] Um, and then sometime in about 2019, we, we had started being asked to speak at this RV show or that RV show, um, write these articles for these various publications, um, do video review work. Of solar components and things like that. And we started, there was a kind of a collection of things that were kind of side gigs for us. If you want to think of it that way.

[02:21:04] And we said, what if just, what if we took all these side gigs and put them under one umbrella as an LLC and just see if we could manage to live off of that and travel. And so it was a bit of a gamble, but we decided that in the fall of 2020, we would set up a tremendous number. Sorry. Oh, sorry. Fall of 2019. Correct. Thank you for that correction. Cause that's an important date.

[02:21:31] We set up a whole bunch of events for the, um, late winter, um, spring and early summer of 2020. And we got through about four of them before the whole world shut down. So that was kind of fun that year. Uh, our parents kind of saved us actually. And what I mean by that is both sets of parents, one in North Carolina, one in Michigan, um, needed a lot of work done on their homes.

[02:21:59] And they said, you guys have skills. You guys now have time. You don't have to say yes to this, but we need help. And we don't want people that we don't know in our homes right now. Um, would you be willing to do the work and we'll pay you? And we said, sure. It was a nice, yeah, it was a nice little like opportunity for both of us. Yeah.

[02:22:22] So we kind of potted up with them and then we moved to Michigan and potted up with my parents, um, during that time. And, uh, and we, that, and again, what Sherry was saying is like that opportunity or lack of our in-person events. Forks focused, uh, forced us to sort of start to work on a more online presence and it, it opened up some new opportunities.

[02:22:48] We got into a little bit more video production stuff and, um, and then it's kind of led us to where we are now, uh, where we are, we are running our own business that was really diving deeply into RV lifestyle education. And we, we do that in in-person seminars at RV shows like the Hershey show where we met Stosh.

[02:23:10] And, um, uh, we do, we write for several RV publications and we do our own newsletter and we do, we have a YouTube channel where we do a lot of, uh, solar installations and product reviews, but also lifestyle stuff. And now we do solar consultation for people in the RV lifestyle who want to get into it, but need someone to sort of help walk them through that. And we do affiliate work. So we'll get commissions here and there for things as well.

[02:23:40] Um, for the various products that we use every day and love and want other people to, you know, try and get them a discount. And then we get a commission on them if we sell something with our link. Um, so all of that somehow pays the bills. It just does. I don't, it just does. And it varies from year to year. Um, but do you ever find your guys like, like on the edge, like though, like.

[02:24:10] No, no, that's good. That's good. There was a, I will say there, there was an edge, um, 2015. Let's go back to this. So we were still doing seasonal work. Uh, the spring of 2015, we still had a house in North Carolina. We still had renters. We started an unpaid internship with Acadia National Park. We were so excited. Super excited about this. So excited. We were going to see if the park service is going to be in a career or job opportunity for us to work.

[02:24:39] We're doing a volunteer gig and, and they had us a place for us to park our camper. And we worked, uh, four days a week with them, uh, in the education department. The day we, the day we showed up to that. I think it was the next day, but nonetheless, we get a message from our renters. We can't, and they say, we can't pay rent this month or next month. And we're moving out. And they had signed a two-year lease with us.

[02:25:07] And this was 10 months into their two-year lease. And we were like, we're done being landlords. This is not for us. So where it got on the edge is that we then had to be paying our mortgage and working this unpaid internship.

[02:25:28] And on the weekends, we were picking up, uh, Craigslist, like odd jobs, um, just so that we could, uh, so that we could. Which we found is that there's a huge market for that. If you've got any sort of skills and you can, and you can put together a cohesive ad with, with good punctuation, with proper punctuation and correct spelling.

[02:25:52] And you actually can't, when people contact you, you actually write them back or call them back. And then you actually show up and do the job. You will have more work than you could possibly imagine. Seriously. There are so many people out there that need work on their homes, their yards, this and that. They don't have the skills or they don't have the time and contractors won't touch it. They don't want the small jobs. They don't want the small jobs. Yeah.

[02:26:20] So we were fine with, so there is a niche for the handy person and to be able to do that, you know, with a, with a, you know, the tools you have in your, in your, uh, your off-grid rig. Right. Um, which we have done. So, I mean, when it got edgy in that regard, that was, that was the, the time that it, it got the most. Uh, but we really, you know, we just knuckled down and, um, and found an opportunity. Um, and we're able to, to just keep on rolling. So let me, let me just say too.

[02:26:49] So if that happens again in the future, we have the ability to change how we're living. So what I mean by that is like right now we're on the move. We're doing route 66 from Illinois to California. We're enjoying ourselves. We're going to diner breakfasts and we're checking out all the history and we're going to the museums. Many of them are free, but nonetheless, we're, we're on the move. Right. If for some reason money got tight, we could just hole up and boondock for a while. Right.

[02:27:17] Not spend money on gas, not spend money on travel, um, or campsites or anything of that nature and run on solar by groceries, you know, and keep our costs down. We could go volunteer on farms. We've done that. Um, we loved it, uh, family, organic farms, um, really great volunteer opportunity, meet some very cool people and, um, you get a lot of your food. And learn how to grow things. We've done that in five states across the country as well.

[02:27:46] And in those volunteer gigs, you're, you're bringing your home and you're not paying a nightly, you know, fee. And often maybe you're using their wifi or your showers and laundry. So like all of those things. And you have a community of people. Right. Can be a way to really cut down, you know, the cost. And you can go ultra, ultra, ultra cheap. So those edgy things have been tested.

[02:28:15] Um, so Ted, like Sophronia has been doing that for, for a while now. Right. Yeah. She, my, so my daughter who has a four-year degree in neuropsychology. Love it. Yeah. And, uh, she's a really smart person. She was home for the weekend. I picked her up at, uh, Newark airport. She's, uh, held up down in the red. Do you know of the red, red river gorge down in Kentucky? Oh yeah. Red river gorge. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[02:28:43] So you guys refer to boondockers. My daughter is what is known as a dirt bag rock climber. I was going to say she's a climber, right? Yeah. Yeah. She's a climber. Okay. She, she lives out of her, uh, 2017 Subaru cross track that I built a sleep platform in it for her. She's got like a cargo carrier on the top.

[02:29:10] She's got like a, uh, uh, I'm going to, I hate to say this with Stosh, but she's got a Walmart pop-up tent. Um, yeah. So that, yeah, but she, you know, and she's the master of, of living on the cheap with her friends. So, and she has, she has some really funny stories, um, and from her days and her times doing it, but it's also, you know, she doesn't have like, and I'm trying, she wants a new vehicle or newer vehicle.

[02:29:39] And so we're, we're having these discussions. Um, and she wanted to get a van. Right. And so I'm trying to dissuade her from the van because I think having, uh, a truck or a, a hardy SUV with a tow behind is the best way to go for exactly the reasons that you described, because she can park at some place and then hop in her vehicle

[02:30:04] and, and head out without towing behind her, you know, the, um, the trailer and one of her favorite places to go and go all over in is in death Valley national park and in the Southwest. Yeah. And I'm amazing climbing there too. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I don't think a van is really high on the suitability list for that. I mean, I think it's, I think that's the culture that she's in though. You know what I mean?

[02:30:34] Like, I think the climbing culture is very much, very much vain, um, for the stealth aspect, for the, for the, but it's also the zeitgeist a little bit of that, of that group. And, and I think you can get the same amount of going somewhere really cool with a, with a two vehicle situation, um, and get the best of both worlds.

[02:30:59] Um, you know, that's just our, that's our party little, you know, that are designed for off grid, there are some really amazing solar already, already go, man, they're expensive, but they're out there. Yeah. You also find used ones relatively cheap because my daughter's father is, yeah, I'm bargain hunting for her.

[02:31:27] Um, the one thing that's unique to what she does, and maybe you guys get into this or not, but she's almost like in a caravan atmosphere where, but yeah, before she went down to the red, she was out in rifle Colorado with 20, 20 to 30 people. And up those 20 to 30 people, at least 10 of them were going down to the red. And then they were meeting up with other people down in the red.

[02:31:53] So she's down there with a group of a couple dozen people that she knows. So they, they community cook, they community, this, they community that they like on a rainy day off, they go hit the local laundromat and, and do other things together. So it's a very interesting lifestyle and she's having a good time. I just kind of wonder, is there going to come a time for her where she burns out, maybe burns out more from the rock climbing aspect of it.

[02:32:21] But my question for you guys is you've been doing the 16 years. You seem to have a handle on all the essentials from the planning or not planning, just freestyling it, the, the economics of it, the, the having fun and leaving another thing on the bucket list for the next time you come there. But is it really all that great?

[02:32:51] I mean, you guys are with each other 24, seven, three 65. If one of you wants to step out of the trailer now and the other one can talk, like have a confessional, what, I mean, how do you make that part of it work? Yeah. All right. So Hutch is stepping out, right? How is it that you, right. You, how is it that you make that work?

[02:33:15] You guys are, are together seemingly, whether it's, it's driving together in the, in your living quarters together. How does that work? Are you like, are you the like 0.001% of couples that are totally compatible or what's the unwritten rules there? Okay. Let's see. Do you want to start? Let me start with this. Okay.

[02:33:41] I think we go through the same ups and downs, ebbs and flows. There is definitely times where she has turned her back from me and I've gone, I'm reaching forward, you know, like I'm going to strangle. Um, and then I go, no, no, no, cannot do that. I cannot do that. She has definitely looked at me in the face and said, are you going to be like this all day? I just want to know what I'm dealing with. Right.

[02:34:12] And there's been times she's looked at me and she said, you need to go for a run. Cause I know endorphins are really good for him and get him out of his cranky. Right. Right. And I know it too. Um, but one of the things about like, when you get, when you say earlier that we had sort of figured out how to sort of boil things down to the essentials, I think relationship stuff and being together stuff has also boiled down.

[02:34:39] So what it means is when there is a conflict, we go through the same cycle of conflict and anger, resentment, uh, frustration, resolution, reconciliation. We go through that same process. It's just, instead of that taking three days or maybe three weeks, you know, as I've observed another camp camp couples that happens in a very short window.

[02:35:08] So we go through that same ride and we may go through that same ride multiple times, but it happens. It just happens quicker. And because we can't get away from it, there's not a door that can be slammed. Um, there is, you know, I've been locked out of the trailer before. Somebody's going to be left outside in the elements and that's not going to be good. That's right. That's right. Um, but I mean, one thing is it has, we knew, we knew that we were doubling down on

[02:35:38] our relationship with this, with this, this camper and this lifestyle. And we said, this is either going to make us or break us. And there have been times when it looked dicey. Uh, but we've met, we've always come back to, cause I think our bottom line is that we have a mutual respect for one another. Um, and that's the basis of our relationship is mutual respect.

[02:36:04] And I think that's the, the rock on which we build this thing. And we try to, we try to find spots where we can vent the frustration or get alone time or absolutely. So there are different activities, you know, if he wants to go do something and I don't, I'm like, go for it, go do it. Or if I want to go do something, he doesn't. So forth. We enjoy a lot of the same things too. So we've also leaned into those things that we enjoy, enjoy it together.

[02:36:32] So I do less of the stuff I used to do by myself. Sure. We do more of the stuff that we like to do together. Right. But we still get the, right. We get the enjoyment out of it. So hiking and biking and, and kayaking, we do a lot of, but he's a whitewater kayaker and I'm not. So when he wants to go do that, he's on his own and you used to rock climb, but he broke his wrist and it just hasn't been. Not while rock climbing. Not while rock climbing. I wish I'd broken it. Oh yeah. That would have been a cool story. I was carrying a cooler.

[02:37:01] No, I wouldn't even carry it. I was dragging it and the candle broke. And he fell back and landed on his wrist. Whoa. But nonetheless, so yeah, you're really silly. Kind of. Yeah. Impressive. Yeah. Impressive. Yeah. It was one of those like cartoon, like, you know, legs in the air, you know, and he's, I mean, he was pulling it and nevermind. It doesn't matter. It, it, the handle broke. I went backwards.

[02:37:25] He had a lot of flying backwards and landed fully on my wrist, you know, feet up in the air, kind of flying. But landed on the wrist. Yeah. So anyway, I completely forgot what I was saying, but we have our, yeah, we have our own things. And even like, we have completely different work styles completely, but we somehow managed to run a business together.

[02:37:50] And part of that is we have our, we have some tasks that like I handle some things, he handles other things and others we do together. So it just, it depends or, you know, I'll write a portion of something and then he'll take it and proofread or vice versa. You know, like we'll, we'll do that sort of thing. Um, and keep in mind, we also, we met in grad school. We became very good friends in grad school. We both worked at the same university, even though we were in different programs and running

[02:38:19] completely different, different things at the university. We led trips together. We did lead trips, trips together. Um, so we've been doing this close contact kind of thing now for 29 years. Yeah. I think we've been married for 26 of those years. Congratulations. Really part of the doubling down, we didn't mention this, but we rolled out of our driveway

[02:38:45] in Hamlet, um, on our 12th wedding anniversary, kind of as a gift to our marriage. So it was a make or break kind of thing. But we at the university, like we worked very different schedules. And so we didn't see a lot of each other. He had a lot of weekends and a lot of nights and I had more, you know, during the day kind of stuff. And, um, anyway, so we've kind of felt at one point like we were roommates living in the same house.

[02:39:13] It felt like our, you know, our relationship was sort of starting to come apart a little bit, um, before we came back with this kind of focus. You know, I think, you know, couples when they, they choose to have kids, that's a, that's like a major focus. That's a major project. That's, that's a, that's a lifestyle choice that is so important. And because we weren't making that choice, it felt like we were making two career choices and, um, and our, and our relationship was almost secondary.

[02:39:41] And then when we got into this, into this project, we knew like, Hey, this is going to bring us together. And so the seasonal jobs have been in the same place, but different, different responsibilities or maybe different days. Um, we wouldn't even see each other most of those days, but now that we're running our own business together. Yeah. We do see each other all the time. We do work together. Um, we try to go in with the different rhythms of each other's work and there have

[02:40:08] been a lot of compromise and there has been a lot of, there's been a lot of staff meetings, you know what I mean? And, and, and she's the CEO. I have to say, like, I have to, I have to give her props. She's the CEO. We couldn't be doing this without her leadership in that role, because there are things that I do very well, but if, if she wasn't the captain driving, making the decisions, uh,

[02:40:35] and, and driving the agenda, I, I would be, uh, floundering a little bit. So I have her to thank for that. And, and, um, I appreciate that. And he has a level of focus, even for somebody who's a little ADD, he has a level of focus on things that I just flat out couldn't do. So, um, and his, he's got, he's a fantastic writer. Um, and he is really does a fantastic job with video production work. And that's, I'm a photographer. I'm a technical writer. He's more of a creative writer.

[02:41:04] So the two kind of blend together nicely. Um, I'll write the technical part of an article and be like, this needs some stories, throw some stories in here, you know, get some, get some life into this. And, you know, I handle most of the business stuff and the payroll and the finances. So I'm the CEO, CFO type of thing. Um, I mean, it's a full, it's an LLC, it's an S corp, you know? So it's, it's, we have, we have a retirement plan.

[02:41:33] We put money away. We put money away to retirement. Yeah. So, but I mean, let me get back to your question. Just, I'm sorry, go ahead, go ahead and ask you what I, what I wanted to think you, you really, we, we got back onto the business things, but I think, uh, you know, the relational part of our, of our working together has been about compromise and negotiation and figuring

[02:41:58] lists, figuring it out and also understanding that like whatever big dream that we need to accomplish for that season or that year, you know, needs to be worked into the schedule. And if there's anything we've learned from this lifestyle is that your dreams or your big trip or your goal or your project, whatever it is that you're working on, isn't going to happen unless you make, you put it on the schedule and you make that a priority.

[02:42:27] Um, and so we've made Sunday forever and it never comes. So we made our relationship a priority and we've had, you know, intentional conversations and we continue to do that because there are times that I drive her crazy and there's times that she drives me crazy, but we can have those conversations and still revolving around that basic respect for each other.

[02:42:52] Um, and admiration of the skills that she brings, even though I don't have the, some of the skills that she has and vice versa. Um, so that's fine. That was what makes a good team. Right. Right. And I'm also really good at saying yes, ma'am. No, he's not. He says he is, but not always. Yeah. We all know who owns the trailer Hutch. Okay. She bought it and I'm just along for the ride. I'm just the guy with the screw gun. You know, true.

[02:43:22] I'm going to say this in the Arnold Schwarzenegger. Come on. Don't bullshit me. Like we all know who, who's, who's got the upper hand here. So, I mean, I mean, that that's, that's great. You know, once again, a balanced relationship is great. And then once again, it keeps all the energy flowing in a good place instead of just bouncing all over the walls and bouncing off things and just everything hitting each other and then a catastrophic failure. So that's, that's incredible. So. I just want to add this one more thing.

[02:43:52] You know, we keep emphasizing the whole, we live in 72 square feet. So yeah. So this space is 72 square feet. It has a bed, a kitchen, a dining area, which is also a guest bed, which is also a workspace and has tons of storage. But we live so close to the outside that we spend so much time outside. Like we spend most of our days outside. And I always say we have the biggest front and backyard of anyone we know, and we don't have to mow it. We don't have to weed it. We don't have to, you know, maintain it. You know, it's just there.

[02:44:23] And we get to enjoy those different spaces. And we, and we love the variety that this, you know, I'm easily bored and I love the variety that travel provides. Every day is different. There's no standard schedule. We'll negotiate every day. Do we want to get work done in the morning? Go play in the afternoon or what's the weather doing? You know, so if it's raining or if it's going to rain all day, we'll get work done. If it's going to be sunny, we'll go play, you know, so we have that ability to move. And so that helps our relationship.

[02:44:52] You know, that helps keep it interesting, keep it fresh. And, and again, we love the variety of it. So, so when you're talking about, once again, Hamlet, 72 square feet and, and not like basically having a child, but when was the last time you were separated from Hamlet and how long? Sure. Sure. Um, the very last time was at the Hershey RV show, actually.

[02:45:17] Um, Hamlet was parked at his father's house in Michigan. And we flew to Hershey, um, cause it often is that the show happens at a time of year where we're not usually in Pennsylvania. So we fly in for that. But prior to that, we went to Isle Royal National Park, um, which is a three and a half hour ferry ride. And we spent nine days and it's an Island, no vehicle. So we did nine days of sea kayak camping.

[02:45:47] And then prior to, and that was, we need a big, at least I need a big. Oh, we both need a thing. Wilderness. It's not yet right. You, I know. Um, I have to have a big wilderness adventure once or once or twice a year. And I, if I don't have that or if I can't, I, I get really cranky. Yeah. And actually last, I mean, sorry, last, um, December.

[02:46:12] So almost a year ago, uh, we cooked up a plan to go to the Virgin islands because we're trying to get to all of the U S national parks. And now we've got a list of Canadian parks. We're also getting to, but, uh, the Virgin islands was one of them that we had never been to. We thought, well, wouldn't it be cool if we went, but what if we invite your dad and your sister to join us for the holidays and let's just see if they're interested. And so we ended up spending three weeks on two different islands and the Virgin islands and got to go to the national park, um, several times.

[02:46:42] We camped there for a while. We camped there in a tent as well. Yeah, camped there in a tent platform. And then we also enjoyed time with them at some Airbnbs and stuff. So, but we spent three weeks there last December. So, um. So we do take breaks from Hamlet. Yeah. Right. And then the Airbnbs goes. Sometimes it's work related. Sometimes it's adventure related. Um, but it's always, it's always nice to come back to home and whether this camper is

[02:47:08] parked in California or in, uh, Cooper Harbor, Cooper Harbor, Michigan. Um, yeah, it feels like home when you're coming back. Wow. Amazing. You know, once again, Jessica and I have been following you for a very long time and it was great to meet you at the, the RV show and to get that amazing information as well. So like Jessica and I are looking into this, this sort of lifestyle, not 72 square feet. Let's just say that. That is no way. That's impossible for us.

[02:47:38] It's whatever. But, uh, but like where else can, uh, you mentioned, do you have of course, like a newsletter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube. Is there anything else that we can follow on that could tag you on the show? Most of our resources that we share for like how to go solar or how to, uh, find work, um, and, and other resources for living life on the road, how to find campgrounds.

[02:48:04] All of that is going to be found at our website, which is sort of the umbrella for all everything that is freedom in a can.com. And you can scroll through our resources and see all the pages we have dedicated to the different aspects of RV lifestyle and how we manage it. And from there you can get on our social media. So right on the front page, you can get to Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube.

[02:48:30] But if you searched freedom in a can freedom in a can, you'll find all of our, all of our stuff as well. And then the, our almost monthly newsletter. So we mostly send it out once a month, but we guarantee you're not going to send it out more than once a month. So once a month to get to hear from us. And that's via our website as well. So there's a little pop-up that comes up and ask you to subscribe to that. Interesting. Awesome. Awesome. I will post any of that on the show notes and stuff like that.

[02:48:57] And, uh, it was great, uh, having you on once again, we usually ask this question. It's kind of our last question. I know you're not like you, you've been to the Catskills and stuff. I remember you telling me that you have been to the Catskills and stuff, uh, but we have a post hike bruising bites. Like, you know, after a hike, like if they're long drive, you've guys been all over the United States. Is there any place that you would like to recommend to somebody to stop and to, that needs to be this one single place to stop at and have something to eat or drink?

[02:49:27] Stop out and have something to eat or drink. Um, goodness gracious. I know you guys have probably been everywhere. All right. So let me change it up. Cause I, I have this conversation with my daughter. Okay. Okay. Best truck stop in the country. Oh, truck stop. I can't answer that. Really? We don't stop at a lot of trucks. Um, we were in, we were, we were in a truck stop the other night and that actually worked out pretty well.

[02:49:56] That was like the, the loves, but, uh, that's so rare. It's because that was what was there and we were moving on the next step. Um, actually there is this, there, uh, there is a, um, Oh God, I, I kind of, I'm trying to think. So best, best, best post hike cruise. Okay. Um, I was going to say, yeah, if you're going to go, gotta be a Mexican restaurant. Probably.

[02:50:26] So Santa Fe, New Mexico, uh, there's a, there's a restaurant, uh, bar called Maria's and it is like old school tequila and mezcal drinks. There ain't nothing fancy about it. It's down home. It's a local like institution. The food is amazing. And the tequila selection is amazing. You can just, yeah, you can just get everything. Yeah. And everything's Southwest there.

[02:50:56] And it is, it is, it is an amazing place. It's across from the Trader Joe's. You know, I mean like. Right. Yeah. So you can, you can park your rig in the Trader Joe's parking lot, walk across the street. Yeah. Um, and, and the hiking in, in Santa Fe is amazing. Uh, there's, there's lots of, there's lots of places to just get lost in, um, oh, and this, and the state park in just right outside of Santa Fe is up in elevation. It's up in elevation. It's about 2000 feet above.

[02:51:26] It's on the way to the ski there, their winter ski hill that they have there. Um, and it's like $10 a night. It's ridiculous. And you're six miles from downtown. Six miles from downtown Santa Fe. It's 10 bucks. It's amazing. Awesome. All year long. Open all year long. So if you, it's a little cooler up there because of the elevation, cause you go up, up, up, up, up, you know, six miles. Um, I was going to add one more breakfast spot. Melanie's.

[02:51:56] Well, three really favorite breakfast spots. Um, one of them is called two cats and that is in bar Harbor. These are all B towns. Um, because of our favorite B towns, bar Harbor, um, outside of Acadia national park. Two cats is phenomenal for brunch. Um, Melanie's is in Boone, North Carolina. That is our kind of hometown, if you will.

[02:52:23] And, um, then there's one in Bend, Oregon called the Victorian cafe, I believe. So if you like a good breakfast, it's not diner breakfast. It's like, it's like fancy, fancy breakfast with like amazing, uh, bloodies, bloody Mary's. Interesting. Yeah. We both love breakfast. A post hike from the night before.

[02:52:51] Or a prep for a big hike. Have a nice big breakfast. All great places to go hiking. I mean, North Carolina, Blue Ridge mountains, Acadia and Bend, Oregon, all phenomenal outdoor, um, places to enjoy the area. Wow. Yeah. That's a long. Yeah. Right. Right. That's good. That's good though. That's good though. So, um, to wrap it up, uh, definitely. Thank you. Uh, Sherry and Hutch for joining us, uh, tonight.

[02:53:20] Um, just want to give a big shout out to the monthly supporters, the monthly sponsor of the show. Uh, really appreciate it. Uh, also as the people who've donated and to everyone who is still listening with Sherry and Hutch joining us and talking about Hamlet, about being 14 years on the road, self-sustaining, just having life, living life at large and loving and living life. Check out their stuff. Freedom in the can anywhere on social media, YouTube. I'll have all the links in the show notes. So Sherry and Hutch, thank you so much for joining us.

[02:53:50] We really appreciate it. Thank you. This has been fun. Thank you. Lots of fun. Great conversation and great questions. Yeah. Have a good night. We'll talk to you in the future. Thank you. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye everyone. I just want to thank you for listening to the show. If you enjoyed the show, subscribe and throw down a smooth review on Spotify, Apple Podcasts,

[02:54:17] or any podcast platform that you use. You can also check daily updates of the podcast, hikes, hiking news, and local news on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the official website of the show. Remember this, you gotta just keep on living in the Catskills, man. L-I-V-I-N Wicked, wicked, wicked, wicked.