Its Friday!

Well, the time finally came. July 31st, about 4:00 PM. I left work to start a one year leave of absence from my engineering manager job. My plans are to travel western Canada, the US, and Mexico in a VW camper van for several months. I'll be visiting some people and taking plenty of time to wander the great outdoors.

Before I do that there's a few things I need to take care of. The van I'll be using is at my house but I'm making some modifications to it, mostly in the electrical power system. My friend Cliff came by today to do some final soldering work. I should have all the electrical connections complete tomorrow. I haven't burned down the van yet so I think the mods are going well.

The other thing the van needs is a license plate. It's a long story, but as a result of how I acquired the van I don't have the title yet. The lady at the Oregon DMV (Departmet of Motor Vehicles) said I needed a title to get plates or even just to get a temporary permit. However, Oregon's DMV web site said other things would work as well for the purpose of getting a temporary permit. I'm going to try again some time this week.

The last thing I need to do is get my house ready to rent and store my stuff. I've been cleaning up the place slowly over the past month or so. Next on my list is to finish cleaning the bathroom. After that I need to start packing stuff into my garage. While I do this I'm going to go through my stuff and get rid of some things. The plan is to wall off part of the garage and use it to store my things there. I've comitted to leaving the house no later than September 1st so I have all of August to get everything done.

I'll be taking some short trips in the American northwest during August as well. In this part of the world August is one of the nicest months of the year so I figure I should take advantage. Right now it looks like these short trips won't start for about another week. So, I think I'll be pretty focused on the house for the next few days.

Anyhow, that's it for now. By the next posting I should have the van completed and will add photos of it to this site.

Thanks for all the well wishes.

Vic