Our Volksvegan Adventure

We spent a wonderful week or so in the gorgeous Mendocino and Anderson Valley areas. It rained on our way in, but every day after that was mild and sunny. In addition to looking for rentals in the newspaper and at rental agencies, we got to watch sunsets on the Mendocino Headlands and drive along the winding coastal roads and through majestic redwood forests. We hung out with friends in Mendocino and Boonville and even got a little disc golf and beer sippin’ in at Anderson Valley Brewing in Boonville.

The Mendocino coast is an amazing place, and we are happy to report that we will be moving to the area in January! We found a place to rent outside of Fort Bragg, a town north of Mendocino Village. It is on over two acres of redwood forest (shared with the land owner) with two bedrooms and a big open living room/kitchen. It will definitely be a step up from our bus! We hope to start collecting grease and processing it there, since we’ve discovered that it’s much easier to use waste veg oil if you have a place to store it, settle it, and filter it.

The climate and ecology of the area will certainly be a change for us Idahoans. The California coast is moist and foggy, although the sunshine seems more prevalent than in the more Northern Pacific coastline. Since we’re only a few miles from the ocean, we’ll have a milder climate and probably no snow during the winter, which is rainy instead. We’ll miss the snow, but we can always head east to the Tahoe area to snowboard or hike in the Sierra Nevadas. Change is good, and we’re ready to be settled somewhere that’s a little more laid back, conscious, and organic. Mendocino county recently banned GMOs (genetically modified organisms), which means most food is local and organic. We hope to eventually buy land in a place we can live a bit closer to the earth: grow our organic food, set up sustainable energy, and work from home. So moving to NorCal will put us a step closer to that direction, especially because there are many intentional and sustainable communities in the area that we hope to check out.

We will be moving everything from Idaho to Fort Bragg in early January. So while this will be the end of the epic volksvegan adventure of 2007, there will be many more journeys ahead, and there’s still much work to be done to our veg-powered VW.