f**k the cold
Author’s note, 12.19.22:
Despite the self-aware intro paragraph, the original version published on Dec. 13 was rife with errors and frankly humiliating. My sincerest apologies to any readers who saw the original version in the <week it was published, and I ask that you regard me with generosity.
You know how they say you should never go grocery shopping when you’re hungry? Someone somewhere has probably also said you should never write a blog when you’re cranky, but I am the person who inhales half a bag of family-sized popcorn in the grocery store parking lot, sunglasses on so I can at least pretend to have some anonymity. So you’re getting a cranky blog today.
About a month and a half ago, our heater started acting finicky; it would start up as normal, run for an hour or two, and then suddenly shut off. One day it stopped working entirely and left us without heat for almost a month, save for ~five days when we thought one of the repairs was going to stick. Conveniently, this has coincided with the time of year when we really fucking need a heater. It is under warranty but service centers lose money on warranty repairs, so nobody was particularly keen on taking the time to correctly diagnose or fix our issues. The result? Six appointments with five different repairpeople, over 1000 unnecessary miles and $700 in gas driving to appointments/trying to find warm weather, and nearly two months in freezing nighttime temps without a reliable heater. I won’t bother going into all of the details of the repair people we talked to, back and forths with Four Wheel Campers, and troubleshooting we did on our own, but what I will say is: never buy a Dometic heater. They are garbage. Don’t believe me? Google “Dometic heater not working” and marvel at the thousands of forum posts from people like us.
Lest I sound like a wimp, please know that we are no strangers to cold weather camping. We’ve done it many times before, and are well-prepared for below-freezing temperatures. Remember, the first month of this trip happened to be one of the coldest and wettest Mays that the Pacific Northwest had seen in recent memory, and we did that in the 4Runner. Perhaps it was the newness of the adventure, or the promise of having a, ahem, heated camper on the horizon in June, or the longer days, or the sureness that summer and warm weather were just around the corner, but the cold wasn’t as bothersome to us then. This time around it’s brutal, and has dictated our schedule during a trip that has already felt too much at the whims of health, weather, and car/camper issues.
We spent weeks looking at forecasts across the southwest, adjusting our plans and driving hundreds of miles out of our way just to chase a small pocket of temperate weather in SoCal. We had Thanksgiving plans in Utah with friends, so every mile we drove in the opposite direction was one we had to retrace later. Not only was region a consideration, but elevation had to weigh into our equation too. We arrived in San Bernardino to mountain bike, only to realize that the bike park was at ~6000’ and 30 degrees colder than the nearby sea-level forecast we had checked (a stupid oversight on our part, really). Unable to find camping at low elevation, we spent a night in the parking lot of a Cracker Barrel (fun fact, if you’re ever in a bind, Cracker Barrels are generally amenable to RV/car camping for a night in their parking lots). Cars whizzed by on the 6-lane street next to us and lurid streetlights penetrated the blackout layer of the camper while I hunkered down miserably, warm but lacking both privacy and dignity as I peed into my emergency designated pee-Nalgene. The tableau truly reached its peak when Lee returned from a 7/11 pooping trip with a plastic tub of nut mix and a $9 bottle of Burgundy decorated with an outrageously fancy label. At this point I couldn’t help but laugh, which was easy because, for all my complaints, it was a balmy 60 degrees outside.
At worst, many people hate the cold or at best, tolerate it. I love it. Summer heat, especially living in the humid northeast, always left me sticky and lethargic. I learned to appreciate the warmth a bit more living in San Francisco, where it is temperate but damp and overcast nine months of the year, and a glorious, dry 70-80 degrees the other three, but I’d still revel in bundling up for trips up to Tahoe and packing a spread of wool sweaters for winter visits back east. I mentioned before that we’ve camped in the cold many times, and that was fun, too. My motto is that you can always put more clothes on, but there comes a point where you can’t take more off, so cold beats hot weather. I realize now what a privileged, indoor cat I am for thinking that. Cold is lovely when you have a warm home, restaurant, or bar to tuck into at the end of your outdoor stint. Cold camping is fun when you’re snuggled up with friends around a campfire and the promise of a hot shower and fresh pajamas wait for you at the end of the trip. But when there is no escape? When you come back from a hike, chilled by your own evaporating sweat, and hastily try to take a bath with nature wipes before putting on your thermal layers? When you’re searching around in the freezing wind and the dark for rocks to level the camper out for sleeping? When the sun sets before five, so you either need to eat dinner at four or be resigned to doing dishes with ice-cold water outside in said dark and wind? When you’re looking ahead at four months straight of this wretched routine, hopefully with a fixed heater, but according to the mixed responses of several repairmen, quite possibly not?
Yeah, fuck the cold.
We have plenty of bedding to stay warm at night - we won’t be freezing to death any time soon. But we have been cranky as hell, and our motivation to do the fun things we love to do has waned as so many of our destinations have become off-limits due to weather. I remind myself to appreciate these moments, to recognize the immense privilege of even being here, but that is hard to do when I’m so uncomfortable for half my waking hours. So we started to plan out what we could do this winter instead. We originally had planned on going to Mexico, but only for a week or two. Southern California is the one remaining refuge but there isn’t that much we want to do there to justify a four full months.
So what about South America? One of my dearest friends is in Ecuador, where there’s great biking. Colombia, Chile, and Peru also have great trails. We looked into shipping the truck (mega $$ and time) or even driving it (also mega $$ and time, and we’d still need to ship it from Panama to Colombia), and we considered storing it in the US and just shipping ourselves, renting a car once we’re there. That was the best option of the lot, but the trail systems in those countries are pretty spread out and maintenance is not certain. It’s the rainy season along the equator right now, so we’d run the risk of trails being unrideable due to mud. And while I usually scoff at safety alerts for countries, I’m not oblivious to the fact that petty crime does happen and traveling around with conspicuous bikes on the back of our rental car may not attract the type of attention we want. Scratch South America, much to my dismay - too many logistics and too much room for error.
What about New Zealand? There is great biking there. Safety would be a non-issue, and we’re heading into their summer. Shipping the truck would be ungodly expensive, but we could rent a truck and pack a tent, and just continue our camper bum life. This was a strong contender, but the cost ended up being prohibitive.
This ruled out most of the mountain bike destinations available in the winter. And while I have loved traveling full time, the past two months of cold and discomfort have left me longing for a home base and reliable access to a shower. I want to keep the adventure and activity without everyday logistics feeling like such an ordeal. I love international travel and I love itineraries that still leave room for surprises and the unknown, but the thought of arriving in a new country and exploring our way through the landscape didn’t excite me, it exhausted me. So when Lee suggested we rent a place somewhere and be ski bums for a month, my eyes lit up. We started running through options: Colorado was an obvious one, but we’ll be living there next year, so we figured we should take advantage of our temporary flexibility by venturing farther. California is an option, but lodging in Tahoe has become so astronomically expensive, and again, we kind of wanted to go somewhere new. Whistler could be a good choice; we were there in the summer, but have never skied there, and it has the advantage of proximity to friends in Seattle and the general ease of being in Canada.
Then Lee suggested the Alps; I skeptically responded, “ehhh,” assuming flights and lodging would be astronomical. I looked up flights, just to see, and round-trip to Geneva was $800… surprising. I texted my friend Margaret, who has skied all over Europe, and she gave some stellar recommendations. As we looked more into it, it wasn’t quite as expensive as we thought it would be to stay; not cheap, certainly, but accessible. And lift tickets are only ~$65/day, compared with American lift tickets that have swelled to $250 at many resorts. So we did some more research, and settled on France, with two weeks on the east coast for Christmas and New Years before we jump across the pond. Now instead of four months of unknown and cold, we only faced a few weeks before flying back to the east coast for the holidays and then on to France. We’ll have to figure out what we’re doing once we return in February and March, but by then our heater should (we hope!!) be fixed.
Skiing for a month gives me everything I feel like I need right now: plenty of activity and adventure balanced by a secure home base with heat and hot water. And going to France at least feels like a good use of this free time we have; the last thing I want is to throw in the towel when we still have a third of the trip left or feel like I’m just counting down the days until the trip ends. I’m still cranky, but I have something to look forward to, which makes it easier to pull myself out of this unmotivated fog.
