Welcome to In the Wilderness! I first opened the inthewilderness.org domain over 10 years ago when we first left ‘Babylon’ and spent time wandering ‘in the wilderness’. That was a time before social networking on every phone, so it’s purpose was meant to be a way to keep in touch with friends and family. It was basically a message board. We recently made the decision to ‘go gypsy’ again, so I thought I would re-open the site with a blog of our tales from the road.

Saying we recently made the decision to go back on the road is not completely accurate, because we were never supposed to come off the road in the first place. In 2005 we bought land outside Taos, NM with the intention of creating a ‘base camp’ then getting back on the road. Well that wasn’t exactly how life worked out. Maybe some of you are familiar with the legend of Taos Mountain, but the story is that if the Mountain wants you, it keeps you and if it doesn’t it, spits you out. We convoyed to New Mexico in two vans, and within a week after arriving neither was running. We would go through about half a dozen vehicles that first year, none lasting more than a couple weeks. We gave up and just hitchhiked…

A year later an opportunity arose and we bought a beautiful, very remote yurt in Tres Piedras, NM. Since we had a beautiful view of ‘the Mountain’, she approved and allowed us to keep a ‘mesa vehicle’ running for our transportation needs. It would still be years before we actually had a street legal vehicle though.

Last year Taos Mountain released us from our contractual obligations and we packed up and left New Mexico. I don’t think the mountain really spit us out, it was just time…

We moved to Portland, OR and into a McMansion in the ‘burbs with roommates. We affectionately christened our place ‘the Looney Bin’ and had an amazing year with our Looney Bin family, successfully creating our own little autonomous zone in the suburbs of Portlandia. Life happens and all good things must come to an end. Multiple circumstances told us it was time to let the Looney Bin go. The first thought to come to mind was to get an apartment and continue this Babylonian thing. We started the tasks of preparing to move, looking at apartments and stuff. After a night of drinking, smoking and story telling with the roomies, we came to a very important realization: we set all of these goals, but weren’t going to be happy if we achieved them. We didn’t want to live in Babylon and play that game anymore.

The end of the month we will be on the road again in our new (1978) Dodge van that we have named Cloud Nine 2.0 in honor of one of our old conversion vans. ‘Cloud’ is really more of a class B motor home than just a van, but IMO it sounds way cooler to say you’re living in a van. We looked at a couple of newer vans, but you just can’t develop the same kind of relationship with these newer vehicles. Old vans have their own personality and become part of the family…generally adding and creating adventure of their own.

So this will be a journal of our travels. The cast will consist of: the wife (aka Abby, Abbey [the spelling has always been in dispute], Abigail, Kelly, the little woman, sweetheart, my better half, etc.), the dog (aka Aurora, the girl, ‘you know who’, the bitch) and me (aka Christian, Daniel, the bearded guy, the Mad Minstrel*, CJ, the curmudgeon).

So this concludes my first blog post. Tune in next week for another exciting Tale from the Road. Next weeks episode will be “Preparing for the Road” and will have some exciting guest stars, so you won’t want to miss it!!!

**Disclaimer** I am not so arrogant as to think many people will read this blog, so it is being written mostly for my own amusement. The word ‘tale’ implies some embellishment, and the amount of embellishment will vary from story to story, as required to keep things interesting or to fill gaps in my memory. Any mention, hint or allusion to any activity that may or may not be legal in your area is clearly fiction, and thrown in purely for entertainment purposes. In fact now that I think about it, the true stories are also fiction and meant solely for entertainment purposes too. Any similarity to any persons or events, past or present is purely coincidental. There will probably be opinion thrown in every once-in-awhile too, and opinion should be considered even less true than the fiction. Please enjoy responsibly.

* Mad Minstrel and the Mad Minstrel likeness are trademarks of Mad Minstrel International and it’s subsidiary Mad Minstrel Music LLC. Est. 2014