It was a long, cold winter. It was only seven days after we closed on a new house and moved our belongings into the new garage when we left snow-covered New England and embarked on our most ambitious road trip to date.

I have been keeping most music related videos to my other ‘Jeremy Blanchard’ YouTube channel but today I thought I’d make an exception.

We love our 2008 Ford E-350 extended wagon. It’s big, but just small enough and the way we’ve set up the inside allows for a lot of flexibility.

A few months ago I did a write up on the Goal Zero Yeti 400 “Solar” Generator and I am happy to say I am still very pleased with it.

I recently did a quick tour video of the Chasing the Twist AdventureVan.

I know, it’s everything you’ve wanted since you got your Teddy Ruxpin for Christmas, Chasing the Twist now has a YouTube channel.

I live just over the river on the south side of Boston. It’s a suburb sure, but a relatively urban one. It’s a wonderful place to live mostly because it’s under 15 minutes to downtown Boston yet it has bucolic features like tree lined streets which isolate it from the urbaness around it.

Don’t do what we did and underestimate how much two grownups and two kids go to the bathroom and overestimate the kids’ ability to manage a complicated potty. File this one into the “Lessons Learned” category of our #vanlife experiences.

I don’t know about you but our trips typically revolve around two things: our chosen activity and food. We love food. We love to eat and we like to cook. Cooking was a bit of a chore with all of our cooking hardware in a big bin. We needed a better solution.

After several single and double overnight camping trips we have now taken two triple overnight trips. The first triple overnighter was closer to home and was a great learning experience in how to best enjoy time on the road.

“Empty your mind. Be formless. Shapeless, like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle, it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”
- Bruce Lee

For years, I’ve been using what I consider to be the best EDC (Every Day Carry) pocket knife there is on the market. It is not “tacticool” nor is it perfect, therefore you may file this under the “boring but important” category. It is, however, the most useful, most used, and most practical part of my EDC aside from…

In the Personal Computing (PC) industry Apple pioneered, and still owns, the all-in-one push-button segment of the market. When other Window’s-based machines were pushing performance, modularity, and access to lower levels of control, Apple focussed on ease of use and design. In the Battery Powered Backup Generator…

There are so many knives in the world. There are so many types of steel and so many people, mostly men, who obsess over and collect all sort of knives. While I don’t have an extensive collection, I do have a couple Spyderco knives, a couple Victorinox Swiss Army knives, and some others but the one that I have used the…

Preparing for an overnight camping trip is a lot easier than you think and can provide many of the benefits of a more extensive trip.

After our initial ‘work-out-the-kinks’ trip in the Adventure Van, we were ready to stretch out a bit farther and decided to make the New England sojourn to The Flume in New Hampshire.

Adventure begins with the first step, and our first step was a local overnight trip to a commercial campsite in a typical New England wood. It was nothing exotic or remote, nothing extra-ordinary, but it was still a great experience which confirmed some assumptions and exposed some flaws in our initial set up.

I learned a few things building the platform for the Adventure Van. The biggest lesson is a confirmation that I am a hack when it comes to finish carpentry. My finish work is of the ‘good from far, but far from good’ variety.

I’ve been doing some more thinking and refining of the materials and plans for the back area of the adventure van. Today, I finally purchased the materials and have my plans set.

Now that the Adventure Van has been cleaned out, the mind turns to the interior layout. I’ve taken many measurements and gathered requirements and desires from the involved stakeholders and am deep in the conceptual exercise of designing the first iteration of the main bed frame.