Our Volksvegan Adventure

We made it to Portland, but barely. Apparently the coolant leak we had on the way to Boise wasn’t just the hose, the coolant reservoir was leaking as well! We got about 60 miles out of Boise towards Portland on Friday and the bus started overheating. So we pulled over in some dinky little town outside of Ontario, Oregon to work on it. The only thing we could really do was patch up the leak with some JB Weld stuff. Well, that stuff sucks for coolant reservoirs.

We stopped again in Baker City and got a different type of patching stuff. It held a little better, but we basically had to stop every hour or two to add coolant and check (and often re-do) the patch job. We finally arrived at my cousin’s house after 2 am. Thankfully the bus made it though!

Saturday was my cousin Joan’s wedding. Joan & Jake had a beautiful wedding (the happy couple is shown here). While I was on babysitting duty for her adorable two year old before the wedding, Seneca was tracking down a new coolant reservoir for the bus. Luckily the first place he found had one, although they don’t make the exact one we needed anymore (that seems to be common for the diesels, since they only made them for a few years). So he went to go get the part, and in the process missed the ceremony! The reception was a lot of fun and it was great to see all my family. Seneca hadn’t seen most of my family for a few years, so everyone was excited to see him and marveled at how long his hair had become (it is longer than mine now).

Sunday was spent running around town (thanks to my cousin’s awesome wife Bridgette – thanks!) finding hose fittings to get the different sized hoses attached to the new reservoir. Seneca then installed the new one and she ran great after that. It sure is nice having such a handyman around, and he has definitely gotten to know the bus very well after working on her so much. We got to test out his fixes on the way to Roots Brewery in Portland. They are Oregon’s first Certified Organic brewery and it was AWESOME! They even had plenty of vegan options and the beer we had was a heather ale from a 3,000 year old recipe!

Monday we got ready to head back to Boise and decided to camp around Mt. Hood. The bus did well on the trip as we headed out of Portland (after stopping at the wonderful Paradox Cafe in Portland for yummy vegan grub of course). Once we got to the Mt. Hood wilderness area, we started looking for a perfect place to camp (campgrounds, we don’t need to stinkin’ campgrounds!). We’d pull off onto every little dirt road we saw until we found one that led up a ridge to a secluded area. When we got out, we could see the top of Mt. Hood right from our campsite. It was an awesome spot, although it looked like some not-so-cool people had camped there before, because there were bullet shells and broken bottles everywhere. After a hike we cleaned up the campsite and camped for the night.

Today we drove from Mt. Hood back to Boise. The bus did get a little hot a few times (we found out that the engine runs hotter on grease, so we had to switch to diesel on big hills to keep it from overheating) but she ran great and we had no problem getting back. This week we hope to get some work done on the bus (install the new glow plugs we bought and track down the air leak that keeps her from starting up well every time) as well as give her a good bath – which we still haven’t done on the exterior! We’ll also plan our next stops and then hang out with old friends at my friend’s wedding reception on Saturday. Hopefully we’ll be heading out for Montana and then Canada by early next week. Unless of course we change our minds and decide to go somewhere else…

Well, the hardest part of our trip preparations is over. We rented a U-haul and trailer and hauled all our stuff worth keeping down to Boise. On the way, I was driving the bus, following Seneca in the U-haul, when the engine temperature started going up and the warning light came on, so I had to pull over. The back was steaming up and coolant was leaking everywhere. We found a small leak in one of our coolant hoses, which is thankfully a pretty minor problem. Well, not as minor as we had hoped. We’ve had one hell of a time finding the coolant hose we need because the diesel Vanagons were only made for 3 years and they apparently don’t make those custom coolant hoses anymore. So, we will probably end up making a hose ourselves that will fit.

We unpacked the U-haul yesterday after stopping in McCall overnight to see my sister. It took several hours in the heat, but it sure felt good when we were done and the U-haul was empty. Now, we need to go through the bus and re-pack it since everything got tossed around when we had to open the engine to find the leak. We’ll probably also need to condense our stuff for the trip quite a bit. Once we got it packed up we realized we had way too much stuff! So it’s time to do some weeding out and figure out what can actually fit in our new little home, and what we’ll need to leave here for storage. Then we will do a final cleaning up and get on the road to Portland tomorrow for my cousin’s wedding.

The adventure begins…

Well, we’re almost ready to hit the road. We decided to give ourselves an extra day to finish packing and tying up loose ends here in Moscow, so we’ll be leaving Tuesday. Then we’re headed to Boise to drop off a truckload of stuff (and the kitty) and see some friends and family before we head out on the journey. Our first stop is Portland, then we may be coming back to Boise (damn weddings!), then we’re thinking about visiting friends in Bozeman and Glacier National Park in Montana. After that, we’d like to drive up through Waterton Lakes National Park in Canada, up to Banff, then over through Nelson to Vancouver. From there we can go down the coast and hit up the places we had in mind to visit in Oregon and California. So that’s the rough plan, we’ll see where we end up!

We had a successful yard sale and going away party, everything is set up for our trip, and now we just need to finish packing and getting everything where it needs to be before we leave. The bus has been cleaned out and it’s all ready. We found a container for our grease filters and pump that fits perfectly on the top luggage rack, so no greasy mess will be left in our little home. The sound system and grease gauges are installed and working, the grease tank is full, and most of the upholstery is done (the rest I will finish in Boise). We even put the finishing touch on the bus: a sticker on the back window that says “Powered By Vegetable Oil” and the Greasecar.com logo. Now, I gotta go finish packing!

I finally got a domain name and moved “Our Volksvegan Adventure” to its rightful home: volksvegan.org. Update your bookmarks!

In other news, we have been working on the bus and getting ready to leave on our trip in exactly one week. We had a huge and very successful yard sale this weekend, and since we got rid of most of our big furniture, packing will be easier.

I am officially done with work, although I’ll be taking several projects with me on the road. It’s weird that I’m not waking up to an alarm and working on a Monday morning! Instead, we slept in a bit (on our floor, since we sold the bed!) and started working on the bus. We bled the brakes and the clutch, Seneca installed new CV joints, the auxillery battery is all hooked up, and our new grease pump arrived. The gauges are almost done being mounted on the dash, and I’ll be starting on the upholstery today (see the photo for one of the cabinets with new upholstery installed). Then it’ll be time for a deep cleaning and we can start packing the bus and a U-haul to bring stuff down to Boise for storage.

I started a new category and made a page on this blog for our “ultimate adventure 2007” so the trip will be easy to follow. I can’t believe we’re actually doing this! I don’t think reality will quite sink in until we’re on the road. So until then, we can only scramble to get ready! Which I’m off to do right now…

We plan to leave on our ultimate volksvegan adventure two weeks from now. It’s time to move fast! This week is my last week of work, and I’ve been getting ready for the big yard sale this Saturday.

Seneca has been working on the bus of course. Today he is installing the auxillery battery (it fits perfectly under the driver’s seat). It will run the stereo, super-bright headlights, and anything plugged into the cigarette lighter socket (like my laptop!) so we don’t have to take power away from the main battery. Just a little added reliability is nice. Eventually we could get a solar panel that charges the batteries as well. If we had the money for that sort of thing…

We are also figuring out a more portable option for filtering grease on the road, and decided to get a new pump that can be powered by the bus (instead of having to plug it in) and it’s much smaller and more powerful. We’ll use the filters in casings that we have now, but Sen ordered one for the end that goes down to 1 micron. The picture shows Sen pumping grease into the tank with our new system. Clean grease is very important, especially now that our baby got a new engine.

And in other news, I recently bought a domain name for this blog, volksvegan.org. It’ll take a bit to set it up, but I’ll let you know when to update your bookmarks! I’m off to get ready and plan this trip!