jesseslife.com

So, in grand engineer, I-have-no-job, style, I embarked on the idea of single handedly building my own clone of the EarthRoamer. Now, don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t going to copy everything. But I figured I could have an aluminum frame built, skin it with some of those groovy new structural fiberglass panels and mount it to a truck chassis. I’d start off with a simple bed, a few cabinets from Home Depot, a table built in a weekend from plywood. I found RV doors, windows and tanks I could buy. It may take me six months, working full time on it, but I figured I could take it for a few trips even before it was complete. I could sleep on the floor and didn’t need my own toilet. I could go for road trip, enjoy fall in the Sierras, and head back into civilization to a garage I had rented and knock the next thing off the list. That way, I would have tried everything before moving onto more complex projects. Kinda like unit testing an RV.

So, I ordered my truck in August – a brand new 2006 F-350 crew cab chassis. Diesel, four-wheel drive, upgraded payload, everything I needed. But two things stopped me from getting a good running start. First, I couldn’t find a place to work. I was looking for a garage that I could rent for three to four months and just dive in an build these things. Preferably in San Diego, where I still had a lot of friends and contacts from my previous job of constructing heavy-duty hybrid electric vehicles. But, alas, no luck on the short term lease department. Not in San Diego, at least.

The second thing that turned out to be a thorn in my side was a run-in with rheumatic fever I started while on a trip to Europe. Rheumatic Fever!? Yeah, I ‘m 30 years old, and yeah, it doesn’t make sense. But I was hobbling around like a little old man for the month of October. Hard to get motivated to get involved in a huge project while on vicodin, let me tell you. Also, if my readers noticed a lack of blog entries, that’d be the reason.