First Week as Nomads

Our first week has been a little hectic. We moved into the camper August 31st, but we didn’t actually leave Denver for a week as we finished up some repairs, figured out some logistics, and tied up loose ends. We finally got new tires on our truck, but it took two tries, after the shop mounted the wrong size tires the first time. It was difficult for us to think about leaving our entire truck and camper at a shop, since our whole home and life are all in one place, but we had to accept that in certain situations, this is what we’ll have to do. We said multiple goodbyes to our families as we kept thinking we were leaving, and then had one more thing to do in town. We also had a couple major rainstorms in Denver that are testing the waterproofing of our camper- we had a couple drips inside the camper that we will need to get sealed up.

We finally left Denver September 5th to head to our first stop, Steamboat Springs, Colorado! We are spending a few days in Steamboat to attend a wedding, as well as to finally get off grid and enjoy some time in nature. We had to test out our ability to get cleaned up and fancy in the camper- right now we had to find room for each of us to have one nice outfit for this reason. 

Now that we’ve actually been living in the camper for a week, we’ve tested out the potential of our solar system. We got pretty much every piece of camera gear we own charging in the camper at once, and only got our Battle Born Batteries down to 40% as we used our appliances throughout the night. Our batteries also recharged to 100% within the first 3 hours of the morning while we were still sleeping. We are loving our setup and are super excited to be able to live off grid with our solar system.

For Night 9 in the camper, we are finally leaving civilization and driving up to the mountains. We headed towards Buff Pass outside of Steamboat, and really tested the driving capabilities of our rig. Buff Pass isn’t that rough of a road by any means, but definitely has some large potholes that if we didn’t see, we would end up smacking the top part of the camper on the roof of the truck, and making everything rattle.  It was our mistake for leaving Steamboat on a Saturday to find a camp spot, and since everything was taken, so we ended up driving for over an hour up the pass to find an ideal spot. The camper was creaking and crawling and we were going 10 miles an hour, 5 at times. We finally found a camp site surrounded by boulders and pines. 

On Sunday we drove back down to see if any of the lower campsites had opened up, because these sites were surrounded by yellow aspens. We spent a few nights on this pass. Blake got his video editing station set up at our kitchen table in the camper, and we worked for a few days while camped out.