Adventure, Part I

A quick biographical break here

Jun 13, 2025

What happened?

After two years in San Diego/Escondido, CA, I’m home. Back, on the Delmarva peninsula in the home my parents bought for us in 1996. It’s just me and my dad now. Mom and Nathan died years ago, and I’ll be damned if I find out another relative of mine has died via a phone call. Mostly I moved home because I figured that the highest regret I could imagine would be if something happened to my one living member of my immediate family while I was 3,000 miles away. Besides, dad is spry for nearly-80 even if he won’t admit it and he doesn’t feel it, but I hadn’t seen him in 2 years and I wanted very much to see if I could have a good relationship with him before he dies.

That seems like the really important part of the story. Nobody triggers me like dad. It’s been that way for a long time.

For one of my two years away I lived with old man Vern, a 15-year extreme invalid and the worst person I’ve ever known. Granted that’s doing pretty good. Vern could have been a lot worse. I lived with his two cats and acted as part-time live-in caregiver for the lot of them. As “Chef Sam” I was responsible for cooking and feeding and bed-baths and listening to him screaming vile things on the phone when he didn’t get his way with customer service people. I miss the cats; Vern was the reason I started wondering where to move to next, which led me to realizing I wanted to see dad again.

In order to do that I needed to drive my now-elderly pit bull mix and me across the country.

I had to sell my tiny car and get a van.

The tiny car needed a little work. I learned how on YouTube how to do some of it.

The rest of it I learned from the first of many saviors on this trip. Alan the mobile mechanic agreed to teach me things with absolutely zero friction on his end. I watched him work on other people’s cars and then he carefully guided me on my own repairs, withstanding tantrums and always keeping my intention to learn in the forefront. He grew up around a junk yard and (I learned later) could diagnose via phone call no matter how far away I was.

It’s amazing how rewarding home car repair was. Because it was so frustrating and brought me to the verge of tears often, the finished product was exhilarating. Empowering. A reversal of the dark mental tunnel a check engine light used to bear on me. I still don’t know much, but I know it is possible if I try and my first thought is of fixing instead of falling prey to a mechanic.

Alan accompanied me to look at a 2005 Chevy Astro van. More or less intact mechanically, completely gutted on the inside save the beat up driver’s and passenger’s seats, she was a work van some adult grandkid was selling for his grandfather. I got her for $1500 down from a list price of $2200. Astros are a beautiful middle between the spaciousness of a full-sized van and a minivan. They’re everywhere in California.

No matter what car you own I recommend joining a Facebook group or two focused on that car. Astro Vans Only was a place I frequently posted photos and frustrations and got responses almost immediately from from a fix-it-up community, many of whom owned multiple of the vans.

See those ribbed plastic tubes? They’re called *looming*. Harbor Freight is my favorite store. Looming protects electrical wiring from getting rubbed or damaged. I learned a lot about that 800 miles into the trip.

With Alan’s help, I learned how to remove the doghouse to get to the engine from the inside. I replaced vacuum lines on my own. He helped me take the doors apart and what I was looking at on the inside. Brought me somewhere to rebuild the starter and many other terrifying adventures for a woman who had very little money to do anything.

My best Escondido friend, Hannah (with her two girls), helped me when it came to cleaning and packing and getting things on the roof of the Astro. And keeping my spirit up. They believed in the process and really understood me and what I was trying to do. God, to have friends of such faith in you! Keeping things frugal, I planned to leave enough space for me and Maggie to use the van to sleep in while continually selecting and repacking all my belongings that I wanted to take back home.

My final delays involved making sure the Astro would start when I tried to start it, giving Vern extra time to find a replacement live-in caregiver, and selling the Toyota Yaris.

I did so many stupid things along the way. I had an adventure where the hood blew up on the Astro and smashed the windshield. My friend incredibly graciously gave me money to replace it. Before that, a stranger named Mustafa saw me on the ground in the strip mall parking lot using a hammer and a block of wood to bang out dents in the hood that were stopping it from closing all the way. This was the first of two times on this trip that a man was waiting for a haircut and saw fit to help me do car repair in the meantime. He helped me hold and maneuver the hood and the dents, and he also left me with the idea that every day when I go to bed I should say,