> 2) A friend who works for google who is going on a 6 month road trip in a camper van
I tried it for 6 months. It was easy because I had a sister who lived in NYC for a time and essentially I could wash up there and not have to pay outrageous campground prices for temporary stays to seek a shower when needed. I stayed on the street there for 6 weeks mostly around Flatbush area and in Brooklyn elsewhere but also on the street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This was the most fun part of the trip. It was really a trip (I wasnt on drugs by the way). I saw a rocker getting into a cab with a woman hanging on him and he had to like push her away "no baby - it's over" right in front of me as he got into the cab. She was hot. It was a deeply personal thing that I shouldn't be reporting on but synchronicity somehow drew me to that event. I was there seeing it go down and I wished I could haved helped her. I couldn't buy her food because I lived in a van, and that story would have to come out in the first 5 minutes or I'd be a sleezebag who didn't explain to women what his deal was yet the deal wasn't completely unworkable. She could have had her own place and have been interested in me intellectually for long enough for it to be fun, and maybe a relationship could have blossumed out of that. Instead I got back in my van and lived a normal life as a vandweller who was afraid to hit on her. She deserved something.
These kinds of antedotes came up throughout the van ride out west (to San Francisco) too and basically I had fun but was stuck too often in situations where I needed to fess up to being a van dweller around attractive women in a way that I couldn't cover myself for doing well back then due to societal norms not having van dwelling being real back then. In today's world it might be OK. I'd talk about tiny houses first and how Twitter helped make them become popular and how a van is almost the same thing underneigth. It's just better looking to be honest (once you have the inside paneled). You need a rising platform (in the back) up on stilts like made of wood with storage space underneath giving you just the right about of headroom with a futon installed above it. A real carpender helped me and it was easy relative to fancy stuff that people do with RVS. You need to really have a second battery with an alternator cut-off solenoid in it so that the second battery charges off of the first and automatically ensures it cannot drain the first if you forget about it. This enables you to run 4 or 5 fans in the back that are mounted above if you can and basically that's it. Enjoy your rig.
Civic places I hung out:
- Portland Oregon
- Downtown Oakland
- SF proper (Haight parking is possible)
- Colorado (hotel stay needed - it was too cold sometimes)
- Las Vegas (hotel stay needed - the other temperature extreme)
- Chicago
- and many other places along the way