Tales of a 21st Century Gypsy

December 23, 2004. Camping in the Cold.

When I made my travel plans, I figured I’d visit the northern parts of the continent in the summer, and stay south in the winter. My van doesn’t have heat when I’m not driving, and the air conditioning doesn’t work even when I am driving, so this way I figured I’d be okay on temperatures all the time.

Little did I know! I’d never been at elevation before, I’d never been in the high desert before, I had no idea what the southwest is like in the winter. Snow at the Grand Canyon should have been a warning, but I figured it didn’t snow further south so I’d be fine.

Okay, we’re not talking Boston winters here, and in the desert it does generally warm up when that blazing sun comes out. But living in a van that’s the same temperature as the outside world takes getting used to. I’m not sure I have.

When I stayed with Karl in Phoenix it was in the thirties at night. Cold, but my sleeping bag and the wonderful fleece blanket a friend gave me are great. Under the covers it’s always toasty warm. And when morning came I could zip into the house instead of staying in the cold. By nine in the morning the chill was gone, and by midday I’d be out in shorts and a t-shirt. Afternoons were positively hot.

When I went down to Tucson it was raining. When it rains the sun doesn’t come out, and when the sun doesn’t come out the overnight chill never goes away. For a few days it was wet and nasty and cold. Fortunately there was a nice Y in Tucson – two of them – with good gyms and nice hot showers, and Catalina State Park, where I stayed, also had showers.

At the hot springs, the solution was to just stay in the water. After a quarter of an hour it was too warm to submerge, so I rested half in and half out, raising an arm or leg into the chilly air to cool off, or lowering it into the water to warm up, as needed. I spent evenings that way, reading by the light of my headlamp or enjoying the moon and stars. At Faywood Hot Springs in New Mexico, I woke to an unexpected phone call at 5:00 in the morning. Once I’d crawled out of my van to listen to a garbled message, I figured I might as well get in the pool instead of going back to sleep. For two hours I enjoyed the warmth of the water, listening to coyotes yapping in the desert and watching the sky slowly change from black to charcoal to deep royal blue to hyacinth to a clear brilliant light as the sun came up and shone through the slats of the fence around the pool. Once I got back to my van and packed to leave, though, my hands were numb with cold, the air temperature still below freezing.

I watch the temperature in my van carefully. I’m curious to see how cold it really is, or what I’ve come to consider warm. Fifty is like being in a nice heated house by now. Thirty five isn’t really bad, though it will make my hands pretty cold if I’m not careful. One morning my thermometer said thirty when I headed out for a walk. As I walked I got colder and colder, my lips were numb, my legs were freezing. When the sun finally rose I warmed up, but as soon as I stepped back in the shade it was icy again. When I got back to my van, parked in the shade of a canyon, the thermometer read twenty four. I must have been warming it up to thirty degrees!

During Chanukah I felt briefly Jew-identified, and decided to light a menorah. That warmed up the van quite nicely, and I eagerly waited for the holiday to progress so I could light more candles each night once the sun went down. But I had to crack a window all the time, lest the limited oxygen supply burn up. And I had to watch those candles with an eagle eye; I really don’t need to start a fire in my little van. So Jewish holidays weren’t quite a solution to the cold.

Right now southern Texas is having a cold snap, along with most of the US. Thank goodness we’re not having the blizzards or freezing rain or near-zero temperatures hitting the mid-west, but it’s still cold enough. And it's windy,

wild swirls of leaves rattling in corners and banners tearing off of buildings to flap wildly in the gusts. I’ve been camping at the rest stops on I-10, which is legal in Texas. It’s quite a scene, actually. The night before last I pulled into a stop just west of Sonora at 7:30 in the evening. There were a couple of RVs there, and a truck or two passing through. I pulled up behind the RVs and closed all the curtains in my van so I was in a cozy bright cocoon – albeit a cold one. Much later I headed to the bathroom to brush my teeth. To my astonishment, the whole rest stop was filled with trucks, there was hardly room for any more. Who knew? I never realized how many people spend the night at rest stops. In the east it’s not allowed. I’m not sure where the truckers sleep out east, but in Texas the rest stops even have RV dumps and signs that the trash bins may only be used by campers, not for household waste.

Alas, whoever designed rest stops in Texas doesn’t seem to have noticed that winter happens here. The bathrooms are fine and clean, and the hand driers pretty good for thawing frozen fingers, but the walls don’t reach the ceiling, and cold winds sweep through the place. Maybe they don’t want us folks in unheated vanagons to decide to camp inside instead? A lot of the trucks ran their engines all night. Wimps, those macho truckers can’t even handle the cold! Under my blankets, with the hood of my fleece jacket pulled over my head, I was lovely and warm. In the morning I lay in bed for an hour, ruefully aware that soon the need to go to the toilet would overcome my fear of the cold, and force me out from under my covers. Who ever knew that going on the road would include such improbable experiences?

Last night I stayed in a rest stop on I-10, en route to San Antonio. I pulled in past eleven, and almost couldn’t find a space to park. Up at the front I saw an old Westy with California plates, so I pulled ahead of him and hoped I’d find out later who was inside. Sure enough, this morning as I was packing up, I saw a young man shivering in a hooded sweatshirt as he took a photo of his van and mine. His bus was a 1971 that he had restored the previous fall, and from the outside it looked quite lovely. But he didn’t have funds to replace the poptop canvas, so as he drove the wind whistled through the whole van. Poor kid, he was even more shocked by the cold in Texas than I was!

Maybe if I’m still living in Matilda next winter I’ll spring for one of those interior heaters that they keep arguing about on the Vanagon list. On the other hand, there’s something rather nice about adapting to the cold, maybe I won’t.

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