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Tag: adventure

  • From Junkyard to Full Time Residence- Giving a 1999 Prowler New Life

    Today, we pulled the solar panels off of the travel trailer that was our full-time home on the road for 6 months. The Homestead needs a more robust solar system, and the 1999 Prowler, which we nicknamed The Ungovernable, has become storage and a temporary feed room for all the various grains and feeds the animals require. I love that trailer and wish we could still live there! Unfortunately it just doesnt have the insulation to withstand Montana winters. The efforts my husband and I put in to customizing, repairing, upgrading, decorating, and outfitting it to be a fully off grid capable residence were truly labors of love that we haven’t been able to match in the camper we live in now. The Ungovernable holds so many memories from our time on the road, which was the happiest and most free of my life so far. As we make this transition, relegating it to a stationary life, it seems a fitting time to share the story and pictures of its transformation.

    Day 1 working on our new home

    We found the trailer through Craigslist at a time when camper prices were going absolutely through the roof due to covid. We had to make a choice. We could buy an expensive camper in good condition. But we wouldn’t have money to customize it for boondocking. The other option was to get a camper that needed serious work and have money in the budget. That’s what we ended up doing! The Ungovernable came to us from a backyard junk heap. A very nice man was living with his hoarder relatives and had parked it in the yard to live in until he and his wife got their own place. The yard was completely full to the brim with trash and every kind of junkie broken thing you can imagine. The whole place smelled of poop and piss. Perhaps surprisingly, when we saw the camper, the image of its potential clicked in our imaginations. Despite being on a salvage title from water damage, we had a feeling we could make it work! It was able to be driven home, and that’s all we needed!

    Of course, it wasn’t quite that simple. After we had negotiated a price and shook on the deal, the owner went to show us that the locks worked, and the key broke off in the door. Then we couldn’t get the running lights to work when we hooked it up. By this point it was fully dark and so the owner agreed to get the locks changed. We would come back to pick it up the next day. Fortunately, there were no more issues with the sale, and over the next six weeks, we worked as hard as we could to give new life to our junkyard travel trailer.

    I enjoyed the interior painting
    Main entrance (before)
    Main entrance (after)

    The first step was gutting and cleaning. Every surface was filthy! We immediately removed the microwave. Not only does it use too much electricity, but it’s also not in alignment with our lifestyle. I removed the cracked caulking and window coverings. Then, I scrubbed each drawer and cabinet inside and out and installed shelf paper. The walls, fridge, oven, and bathroom also needed a good scrubbing. Brandon pressure washed the exterior and repainted the back bumper and the entry stairs, replacing the worn stair carpet with traction tape. We also wanted to remove the previous decor and got rid of all the wooden “camper life” signs and cow print upholstery. We repainted the entire interior more to our liking. Contrary to the jokes about hardware store fighting, we were thrilled to find that we were in complete alignment on the issue of paint color. Picking it out was actually fun! Brandon, being a professional flooring installer, also put down beautiful WPC flooring and base boards. This brought the feeling of being in a modern home and is a massive improvement over the worn laminate.

    Kitchen and dining area (before)
    Kitchen and dining area (after)
    Stairs (before)
    Stairs (after)

    Next, it was time to get to work on real structural issues. The fun part was that we were able to install our solar system. But, it also meant tackling the previous water damage and repairing the leaky roof. Brandon was in charge of cutting open the roof and repairing that damage from the outside. I was in charge of repairing and covering up the places in the interior where the leaking had damaged the ceiling, walls, and inside of the cabinets. We also had smaller, although no less important, repair work to do such as deal with a leaky water pump. In that case, it just needed the filter cleaned. Phew!

    Water damaged and leaky roof

    For us aspiring off-grid travelers, having a robust and functional solar system was one of the most exciting and gratifying parts of the trailer renovation! After a ton of research, we went with a four panel system from Renogy. We chose to run it off of four refurbished deep cycle lead acid batteries. Brandon has some experience with electrical wiring, which was a good thing because he had to run some wires under the floor. But with the help of YouTube and a couple of calls to the Renogy technical team to program the inverter and solar charge controller, it was up and running! We were on the road from spring to fall and hardly ever had to charge our batteries with the generator.

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    Solar panels on the roof
    Battery compartment
    Inverter (under the bed). Later, he built a box around it to ensure the vent wouldn’t get blocked.

    One of our top priorities was making sure we wouldn’t need to empty a black water tank! We didn’t want to have to plan out going to dump stations, worry about it filling up, or haul around the weight. So we pulled out the existing toilet and installed a Nature’s Head composting toilet. I absolutely love our composting toilet! It was great on the road, and we have never had issues with smell. It works on the principle of separating the pee into a jug and composting solid waste with peat moss in a separate section of the toilet. Dumping the pee and burying the poo compost in the forest is a simple process and perfectly legal as long as you do it according to USFS guidelines.

    Bathroom (before)
    Bathroom (after) featung the composting toilet

    With the high priority items done, we were then able to focus on the smaller customizations. These details really made it feel like home. For example, the trailer had cabinet panels covered in fabric. Brandon is a painter and came up with the idea of covering them with painter’s canvas instead!To be honest, we didn’t get around to doing that many paintings. But I’m sure we would have if we had stayed on the road multiple years like we thought we would! We removed the bathroom door (it was a hassle in such a small space) and replaced it with a curtain. We hung up our cooking spices and herbs in mini mason jars under the kitchen cabinets. We added a beautiful charred wood backsplash to the kitchen and bathroom walls. For filtered water (another important off-grid consideration), we opted for a Zero Water filter that sat on the entryway counter and had to be emptied and secured for travel. I really desired to reupholster the couch and dining cushions. But I didn’t have the time! So I had to settle for giving them a deep cleaning. There were other things that didn’t get done as well. A few of the light fixtures remain cracked to this day. But they never really bothered us!

    In progress kitchen featuring the backsplash and no microwave
    Living room (before)
    Living room (after)
    Bedroom (before)
    Bedroom (after)

    Looking back, I’m really proud of the way The Ungovernable came together! We had everything we needed to live completely off-grid and enjoy incredible freedom. I loved the process, and it felt good being able to restore a run-down and neglected trailer.

    What do you think? Comment below!

  • Feasting on the Wild Amanita

    Feasting on the Wild Amanita

    Lately I’ve been reflecting on the joys of my earliest foraging days. Finding wild food is so fun and satisfying! It makes me feel like a self-sufficient badass and shows me that I’m provided for by Mother Earth. Not to mention the taste! In particular, my tastebuds tingle and my mouth salivates with the memory of the bountiful experience of eating wild Amanita coccora. It was early on in my time as a nomad and I was so excited to find out what the natural world had in store for me. I had already found that if I was willing to work for it, I could hydrate myself with clean, fresh water from creeks and streams. I had also found a few treasured herbs like mint and chamomile, and knew that finding food would be part of this path.

    On our nomadic journey

    One late spring day, I collected a few mushrooms who made themselves known to me on a casual walk through the national forest near the California/Oregon border. I brought them back to my campsite to identify.  One in particular caught my attention. It was a gilled mushroom with an umbrella shaped fruiting body (sort of like a portobello) that was a very inviting shade of pale yellow and had a large white skullcap. The mushroom had a pleasant springy feel, no slime, and was big and thick enough to be good eating! I hoped so hard for it to be edible!

    Amanita coccora growing on the forest floor

    Sidenote: I highly recommend a high-quality mushroom field guide and a detailed identification book for foraging edible mushrooms. I chose the works of David Aurora for this and rely heavily on his “Mushrooms Demystified” as well as the field guide, “All the Rain Promises and More” in my mushroom hunting. For me, internet research is a backup. But it can be fun to ask for confirmation and recipes in online mushroom enthusiast groups!

    At that time, I had only my mushroom field guide book to rely on, and no internet available. But I quickly discovered that the mushroom was Amanita. This is the genus of some of the deadliest poisonous mushrooms! Known as Death Angel, Destroying Angel and other harrowing nick names, there are Amanita whose toxins cause severe organ failure with no known antidote. Few who consume them survive. And yet… not every Amanita species is poisonous. There’s Amanita muscaria, a notorious red mushroom with white spots that is known for sacred healing and psychedelic properties. And there’s coccora, a culinary mushroom popular with Italian Americans.

    A delicious pile of wild coccora

    When I had read every word about Amanita in the field guide, I was about 98% sure that what I had was the totally edible Amanita calyptroderma, commonly known as Amanita coccora. The pictures in the reference looked exactly like what I had in front of me. This mushroom is beloved by many, but considered an acquired taste due to a “fishy” perception. I’m an experienced mushroom eater and lover of strong flavors so I wasn’t worried about taste. There’s only one way to find out if you like it or not! However, I was worried about mistaking the ID and dying a gruesome death in the forest just a month or so into my rewilding adventure! At that time, I just wasn’t confident enough to eat the mushroom.

    I continued to learn about Amanita. They were everywhere! I observed them closely on every walk and hike until I started to feel that I had developed an understanding of these mushrooms. Amanita share certain common traits such as having gills, a skirt, volva, white spores, and a skullcap. Slight variations in color, if the skullcap remained intact or separated into warts during mushroom growth, and the shape and contents of the stem were just some of the details that would distinguish them from each other. For example, one unique aspect of coccora is that the stems are hollow and filled with a cotton or gelatinous substance. The key to finding the Amanita is to notice how they lift the earth as they begin to come out of the ground. Sometimes, ones that are fully emerged are older and will have been snacked on by other critters or will be showing signs of decay. My advice is to leave those behind! They are often in groups, so if you find one or a cluster of them, keep looking in that area. I only harvested the above ground portion down to the volva and left the mycelium below to propagate future ‘shrooms.

    A beautiful example of coccora, displaying the skirt and volva

    A couple of weeks later, my husband and I needed to move camps and so we journeyed into southern Oregon. We found a meadow by a creek to camp in and soon discovered there was a trail through the woods just beyond. On one of my first walks up this trail with our dogs, I spied my familiar friend Amanita- a round mound emerging through and lifting up the leaf litter and branches of the coniferous forest. There was a mix of many trees including madrone and pine. I immediately recognized this mushroom as coccora. Wariness and excitement mingled within me as I made my way back to camp with my specimen. As luck would have it, I had just procured “Mushrooms Demystified” at the local bookstore. It seemed to confirm my identification. My confidence skyrocketed! My husband and I decided that we were going to eat them. Well, we almost decided. The whole process would take another 72 hours…

    Our camp

    “Do you think we can eat it?”

    “Well, yes… Do you?”

    “Yeah. But the worst-case scenario is horrible, painful death. We need to be sure.”

    “I am sure, I’m just scared to be wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong.”

    We carried on like that, talking in circles for at least 24 hours as we observed our mushroom and obsessively reviewed the Amanita chapter in the book. Finally, it was time to either eat the mushroom or just decide we didn’t have the will to take the risk. At that point I viewed it as a very small risk and was confident in my identification. The one nagging worry was if it was worth taking any risk of death when I wasn’t starving and didn’t need to eat it. But I wanted to! Some mushroom hunters refuse to eat any Amanita because of the deadly toxin. So, I looked up the average lethal dose and weighed out ½ that amount on my kitchen scale. I sauteed it up and we each took half, which amounted to one bite per person and a quarter of the presumed lethal dose. Symptoms caused by amatoxin can take 8-24 hours to develop. We waited a full day for any signs of illness. When none appeared, I started to worry that we hadn’t eaten enough and that we could still be in trouble if we ate a whole meal of it. So, we re-did the experiment and each ate ½ the average lethal dose and waited another 24 hours. Being in perfect health after both trials, I was ready to commit to eating a whole meal based on this amazing mushroom.

    My husband excited about our harvest l

    By that time, I had seen several more on my daily hike. I went out into the forest with gratitude in my heart and harvested a whole basket full. This time I sauteed up two big mushrooms and we enjoyed them as a hearty main course with sides of vegetables and rice. As I sat in front of a roaring early summer bonfire, mushroom juices oozed out of the silky, buttery flesh and ran across my plate, melting into the meal and infusing a subtle yet unique, savory and earthy flavor. At that point it was on! My husband and I ate Amanita coccora almost daily for weeks. Each time we foraged on the trail, we would find enough for multiple meals. There were so many I could spend all day cleaning and cooking coccora! Living on the road, I had to be pretty frugal and simple in my cooking. I added them to homemade marinara sauce and froze the jars to be used in pasta, but otherwise simply cooked them up with herbs and spices in a cast iron pan. Given the opportunity I would love to use them in tacos, creamy garlic sauce, chili, sandwiches, soups, and explore other Italian dishes.

    We also found this awesome skull!

    Cleaning tip: Do not let the gills get dirty! I made the mistake of putting mushrooms in my harvesting basket that had dirt on the cap as well as the lower portion of stem and vulva. They got each other’s gills dirty and it was almost impossible to get them clean without damaging the soft flesh. In the future I will check for a volva to reenforce my identification, and then cut the stem farther up out of the soil and wipe the cap off as well. If not too dirty, I like to avoid washing with water and simply brush the dirt off.

    So that’s the story of how I dared to feast on wild Amanita mushrooms! The process I went through to identify the Amanita coccora cultivated within me a greater sense of self-assurance. I became a more knowledgeable mushroom enthusiast, and forged a much deeper relationship with the natural world. Human beings are a part of nature; we are not separate from it! Along with physical sustenance, understanding this is one of the great gifts of foraging. I hope that someday soon coccora will once again find me in the forest. I’ll be keeping an eye out!  And perhaps one day I’ll even make it back to the beautiful meadow in the woods that I was fortunate enough to call home for a few glorious weeks.

    Meadow in the woods

    I’d love to hear about your experiences finding mushrooms. Drop me a comment below!