In Costco parking lot in Novato, Calif. last Friday. Makes me want to jump in and head for Baja…

On Lake Street in San Francisco last week

I went to the 65th (!) reunion of my class of 1952, Lowell High School, San Francisco, on Friday. About 80 people out of a class of 250 attended. Even though I’ve taken a different direction (wealth, politics) than most of them, I still love seeing these friends of 70+ years.

It was held at the Basque Cultural Center in South San Francisco, and this wagon was parked out in front. The curved roof, with bed at one end is, I believe, an excellent configuration for a tiny home, far better than the poster boy for tiny homes, the steep gable roof with ladder to loft for sleeping — a bad design, in my opinion, for many reasons. Here you can have drawers under the bed, and the curved roof gives you a feeling of spaciousness, as opposed to the claustrophobia of many tiny home designs.

This is also the basic design for the vardo of the Roma people in Europe.

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Foster Huntington quit his job, where he was working 70-hour weeks for Ralph Lauren in New York City, and took off living on the road, first in a (very) used VW Synchro van, later in a Toyota Tacoma truck with a spiffy fiberglas camper shell. He started The Restless Transplant, a blog that became enormously popular. I remember seeing it years ago and thinking this is my kinda guy.

These days he’s living in a treehouse in the Columbia River Gorge in Washington, just northeast of Portland and he has 1 million (!) Instagram followers.

His latest project is this book, and the publishers have printed 35,000 copies. Vans are tremendously popular right now, and this book shows them in all their glory.

https://www.amazon.com/Van-Life-Your-Home-Road/dp/0316556440/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502834221&sr=1-1&keywords=van+life

https://www.arestlesstransplant.com 

I drove pickup trucks for over 35 years. I finally got tired of hauling a relatively large vehicle over the winding roads that are necessary for us to reach the more civilized world and bought a Honda Fit 3 years ago. Which was a dandy little car. $17K complete (new). 1/3 more storage than similar size cars, 35 mpg, nimble on the curves.

All that ended when a rolling rock that I hit knocked the motor off its mounts a few months ago. It was so expensive to fix that AAA declared it a total and gave me $12K, a fair deal. Which helped a lot because Shelter Pubs was running on empty and it allowed us to pay a printing bill and avoid borrowing to stay afloat. I know, small peanuts in this day and world, but we’re a small peanut company.

I’m going to wait a while to get another car (meanwhile driving my 14-year-old Toyota 4-cylinder, stick shift 4×4, which gets about 20 mpg and is a magnificent vehicle and can go anywhere and pull other cars out of ditches).

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