Newfoundland is the setting for a lively discussion of van camping, planning and building systems on the road from blogger and podcaster Craig Constantine.
Moving Along talks with podcaster/blogger Craig Constantine during the final week of his and wife Tracy’s five-week Ford Transit van (“Panda”) trip across Newfoundland. Craig shares how childhood camping and Caribbean sailing—with heavy navigation and planning—shaped his approach to travel, watching his mom plan trips with paper and pencil, and why Newfoundland appealed as a place to “depressurize,” despite being more developed than expected. He explains balancing “non-negotiables” (especially prebooked ferry dates) with flexibility, using Crown land, campgrounds and the iOverlander app for overnight spots, and coping with variable terrain and weather.
Craig describes year-long preparation after buying the van, outfitting it with fold-down bed/table systems, organized crates, Starlink and a cellular booster for remote work, and on-trip improvements built from a local hardware store run. To avoid constant status updates, he built a microblog with AI that became travelog.place, and reflects on tight-space communication, driving too much and planning next year’s journey to Tuolumne Meadows near Yosemite.
00:00 Introduction to Craig Constantine
02:21 No Lighthouse
03:59 Growing Up in the Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania
09:59 Boondocking in Newfoundland
11:39 It's a Big Van But...
12:55 Finding the Nuts
13:25 Finding Places to Sleep
15:57 Not Much Grows Here
17:09 Planning the Trip
19:50 This Is Like a Sabbatical
20:54 The Van Named Panda
21:49 Jerry-rigging the Van
25:14 Clever Solutions: Crafting a Wall of Storage
28:20 Make It Better, Have Fun, That's the Whole Point
29:59 Pecking Order at the Campground
32:09 What You Do Defines Who You Are
34:14 You Have to Make the Ferry
35:58 Type A List Maker
39:03 From the Paper Tablet to the Travel Microblog
41:58 Builder
43:05 You Can Do This
44:38 Newfoundland Is an Hour and a Half...
45:07 Where to Next?
47:14 Any Oops?
48:31 Planning All the Problems Out of the Trip
49:06 It's Birds
50:57 Shorthand: A Different Kind of Mindfulness
53:02 Books I Didn't Touch
53:52 That's Not How the Id Works
Links
[00:00:00]
Christi: Welcome to Moving Along. I'm Christi Cassidy. Today, my guest is Craig Constantine, the prolific podcaster and blogger known for Open and Curious, Movers Mindset, and PodTalk, the Podcasting Community, which is a forum and to which I belong, a daily thought provoker called The Daily Eating Prompt [00:01:00] found at 365changes.com, and the newsletters Open and Curious and my favorite, 7 for Sunday.
Plus, there's Craig's personal blog at constantine.name. Craig is by nature a self-described builder and mover. It's true his degree is in engineering, and when we first met several years ago in Seth Godin's Akimbo podcasting workshop, Craig was coaching. I've never met anyone quite like him. If something bugged him, he fixed it so it didn't happen again.
If there was a knotty technical issue, Craig usually found a path to the solution, not next week, but now. So when I heard he and his wife, Tracy, were van camping in Newfoundland, Canada, in a Ford Transit van [00:02:00] called Panda for five weeks no less, and that he'd fashioned a microblog for friends and family to follow along, I invited Craig to come talk about the planning and doing of this overland trip to Newfoundland.
We recorded during their last week in the province.
Christi: This sounds like a good story. I can't wait to hear...
Craig: obviously Newfoundland is a giant island, but there are so many little bays and peninsulas, and every bay and every peninsula has a lighthouse on it. So I wanted to come down here to, this is Cape G- Cape George's, St. George's, I believe it's called. I wanted to come down here because it-- I thought it had a lighthouse.
There's no lighthouse. Carolyn and I'm like, "Oh, it's just a nice view, but there's no..." I was expecting, like, a really photogenic... No, it's not that kind of point. So, so we got the point, but we didn't get the,
Christi: No lighthouse
Craig: But we just drove down [00:03:00] here just because it's fun to go places and see things, and creates a little bit of friction.
I'm like, "Let's drive another hour." And she's like, "No, I really don't wanna go that far."
But that kind of plays into you were asking, how do you make this work? Like, how do you get a truck
Christi: Yeah, that's really what I was hoping to talk with you about. It's like I've got... lots of questions and about this trip in particular and traveling in general and about how much planning this all took and, and yet following along in the blog, the micro blog, which
Craig: looks so highlight
Christi: Yes, but it's also, it's like, oh, wow, it doesn't feel rigid. It doesn't feel like, totally without flexibility, let's put it that way. Even just like what you were just saying about, "Oh, let's drive.
Let's drive another hour." "No, no, no, we can't, Mr. Bill." But there you are, and here you are, right?
Craig: Yeah
Christi: [00:04:00] but, I would love to start with the way I usually start, and just to remind, you grew up in Pennsylvania, right?
Craig: Born and bred
Christi: And what town?
Craig: Well, I was born in Allentown. I was
in Allentown. I don't have an
accent. man. I was born in Allentown which is also where both my parents were born. And then we moved to a little town called Orefield. It's, like, just outside of the city in the rolling hills 'cause that's what my mom and dad wanted, was to get out of the, the city that Allentown is. and then I grew up in the same house basically until I w- like, moved out after college. So I was always in one place. I went to college in Bethlehem, which is, like, the other end of the valley, 40 minutes away. just because I really liked the school, but actually that's where I met my wife, so it's probably a good thing I went there. Us together, we decided to stay in the-- how the, why do-- I'm thinking, "Why did we stay in the Lehigh Valley?" We just kinda did. I think originally Tracy stayed with one of my grandparents for a while before we found our own place, and it was just... That's where my [00:05:00] business partners and I started our businesses, was in the Lehigh Valley.
So I just never really left. I've always
lived there
Christi: So what did travel and moving mean to you as a kid?
Craig: We used to in the beginning, it meant a lot of camping. My mom and dad used to do, like, tent camping. So my dad would have like a Mazda pickup truck, and as a little kid, I sat in the middle of the bench seat and, you know, my dad worked the gearshift between my legs as we were driving. And then we had a tent, and it would rain, and a raccoon would steal your pans and all that stuff. And I don't know that I really loved it or hated it, but I was just a kid, so how could you hate, you know, sleeping on the ground? And we would go with other friends of theirs. So you're playing in the woods, and we had a little sailboat, and it was just like playtime. And we kinda got away from that when I got older, went to high school and to college. But my parents always wanted to sail. So multiple times, starting when I was 12, we went to the Caribbean, and they would charter increasingly larger sailboats and take more and [00:06:00] more of our friends along. And it got to the point where we'd have, like, six people, my mom, my dad, me, Tracy, another couple. And my dad and I are quite accomplished at sailing, so we would sail the whole boat. that was sort of a bigger, We'd try not to make it be an adventure. We'd try to make it be a vacation. But those would be a bigger trip. And that was really, like, the transition was seeing my mom plan it. You know, this is like in the '70s and the '80s when you're working with a pencil and a paper and a phone.
Like, "Hey, can you..." You know, you had to call and fax. Which is, I think, kinda seeing how she planned it that might have planted the seeds of, like, maybe not the planning, but the understanding of how much planning it was going to take. Our friends would go on the trip with us, and they didn't really see the six months my mom spent in advance with tablets.
So, so maybe there was just I, I lucked into seeing my mom do it, so I knew what I'd be in for. 'Cause I've, I've thought of a couple of different trips, like different things, and the planning never scares me off of the crazy adventure.
Christi: Wow. [00:07:00] So was this was this like AAA, the little maps that you flip through and that's
Craig: Well, my mom and dad were my, my father passed away and my mom is still alive, but my dad was a little more of a spendthrift, so he didn't wanna spend money on AAA. But yes, we had maps. So like the rules I'm an only child, so there's three of us. The rules in my dad's truck, you know, like a Bronco, were if you wanted to ride in the front seat, you had to be the co-pilot, which means you had to exactly know where you were at all times, you know, with a paper map. When you're, when you had to use the little dots that had the numbers next to the roads beside the miles between the interchanges. And he would, he would do things like, Well, I need a coffee or something," and there's no Google. You had to like figure out what town was likely to have a McDonald's or whatever. And that he would plan in advance. "Okay, we're going up..." I mean, I was a little too young to understand all the highway systems, but he would know we're going here to here, and he'd write it down so that he could just navigate by, "Oh, this is this interchange, this is this interchange." And then when we would go on sailing vacations, [00:08:00] when I was a little kid, I wasn't involved, but later, in later years, every night you would have to go over, it would usually be my dad and I, we would go over, "What are we doing tomorrow?
Are we moving the boat?" You know, 'cause it w- this is just a sailboat anchored in a bay, and there's, there's nothing there. It's, you're just in the wilderness. We had to decide, are we moving? Where are we going? Oop, we need water. We have to go to a marina where we can get fresh water. Like, so I, I got a little bit more of him.
He would be like, "Well, we could go here, but that's like six hours of sailing, and that's going to make everybody unhappy." So I, I think I got a little bit more of it about trip planning from my dad, like really planning it out. 'Cause then you're like, you know, you're with a protractor and you're like drawing lines and figuring out, can the sailboat go that way?
How deep wa- how deep is the water?
Christi: I know. I was going to say it's a different kind of navigation, on the water than going by road. Do you remember before all the interstates, or is that like, did you go on those two-lane, Route 20 style roads?
Craig: We used to do that. My my dad once wanted to go to Canada to [00:09:00] go sailing, and we had a, a 16-foot-long Hobie Cat. It's a catamaran. It looks like two canoes and a big mast. It's basically way too much sail for a tiny little boat. It's a racing catamaran. And he wanted to go sail in the Great Lakes. I don't know where he got that idea from, but him and some other friends of ours, we went up there, and we were like way... At one point we stopped at some little gas station and the guy said, "Oh, you can't get there from here. You have to go back to..." You know? My dad's like, "Well, you can get anywhere from anywhere. What do you mean you can't get in?"
Christi: Oh, man
Craig: So, so yeah, I remember the little roads and on this trip, you can't see where we are, but I'm like on the top of a hill. We are like in the middle of... We had other people around, but this was like at the bottom I had to consider, do I wanna try driving up this hill? Is there room to turn around at the top or am I going to have to back down? So I think I got a little bit of that, of that adventure spirit from seeing him, with a, like a little Mazda truck and a giant over wide sailboat, you know, trying to get in these little roads, and then trying to like turn around in a little diner or something.
Christi: [00:10:00] And so where did this trip begin?
Craig: Everybody asks, "Why did you go to Newfoundland?" I, I, I don't know. I think I saw... It wasn't for the icebergs. it- the iconic thing is to see icebergs, and after the fact, when it was all planned, I'm like, "Oh yeah, we should try and see some icebergs." I, like, forgot about that. I just like the idea of call this boondocking.
We're not going to spend the night in this spot. But there's literally, the, it's not, there's no pavement here. There's no bathroom. There's no water. It's just, it's like camping, but I'm not on the ground. I'm like in a super tent. And I just like the idea of the sun comes up, and you're just out by yourself, just... I don't think I'm going to, I don't want to be in the wilderness, but I wanted to just, be able to depressurize a little bit. somehow I got Newfoundland in my head as, this iconic place out in the wilds. It's not really that wild. Roads and cars and gas stations and cell service almost everywhere we went.
I mean, not everywhere, but [00:11:00] most places have cell service, so I, I k- I kinda gather it's changed a lot, like, in the last 10 years. Just I see a lot of things, I'm like, "Oh, that, that looks new. That looks new." I can... "Oh, that cell tower looks really new." You know? So I think it's been getting a lot more tourists.
But, but still, there's maybe four other couples here at this spot pretty remote
Christi: you're looking for the remote or you're looking for just a little piece of Canada or
Craig: I think I was looking for, like, the depressurization. Like, I just wanted to, you know, I just wanted to relax, wanted some time off. Which oddly, this trip hasn't been the most relaxing 'cause we're always, we're always moving. There's always something to do.
Craig: The van that we're in is very small.
I mean, it's a big van, but when you put two people in it for five weeks, it gets small, and all of our stuff is in here.
Christi: And, and how do you you just decide like, "Okay, today we're taking separate walks"?
Craig: We probably-- That's a good idea. Why didn't we do that? No, we [00:12:00] we have a piece of masking tape down the middle of the van, and there's a... No. sometimes we do that, but usually we've been together for over thirty years now, so it's like okay if we don't have an argument. We can just kinda be like, "I don't need...
I can read your microexpressions. I'm going to give you some space." But, but big part of it is not pushing, intentionally pushing each other's buttons. Like coming up here tonight, I'm kinda pushing her buttons a little bit. Like she's kinda like, "All right, now, oh, and now you're doing this podcast thing. Oh, and I wanna go by like that."
So... But then there are days where she does that to me. I'm like, "I don't wanna do that, but okay, fine. We'll go do that." So mostly it's about not-- It's actually about not trying to over-plan everything if you-- if we try to say we're going to leave at seven twenty-five and we're going to go thirty miles an hour, like we spend too much time planning, and then in ten minutes the plan goes out the window.
Craig: So you have to find the sweet spot of like, I call them the nuts, the non-negotiable [00:13:00]items. You gotta find the nuts, which are like, well, we have to be on the ferry at ten PM, or we're stuck here for six months 'cause you can't get a ferry ticket. Like it's pre-booked. So like we have to be at some places, gotta be there on time. But a lot of things we just sort of say we still haven't seen whales. All right, Saturday, we're going on another boat ride." And then we'll spend an hour like finding a boat ride and figuring out if we can get there and get enough planning, and then we do the thing.
Craig: So it, it's really there's a balance about you have to plan enough so that you're not constantly stressed out about like, "Where are we going to sleep?"
That happened once. didn't plan enough,
Christi: Oops.
Craig: and like the sun's going down, and we're like at a little, I wouldn't even call it a marina. It's a little boat launch. Sun's going down. There's nobody around, and we're like, "We should figure out where we're sleeping tonight."
Christi: Whoopsie. And are you allowed to just... There's no like Walmart where, push comes to shove, you can...
Craig: actually there are Walmarts. There's like five Walmarts
Christi: Oh my
Craig: are Walmarts all over. Yeah, so I'm like a Walmart here. This is not a Third World [00:14:00] nation. The, so the, this is the Dominion of Newfoundland. Newfoundland is how they say it, I think. And the, the way the dominion here works is they have a lot of Crown land.
Crown lands are open to any, for anyone to use. So we're, we're on public property right now, so you can stay here. There's limits.
You can't stay here like three weeks. And of course, everything is leave no trace and there's no services. But can stop anywhere on public property. And it turns out all of the gas stations, truck stops, restaurant, they're all very much like, "Yeah, you can park here overnight if you want. Have a blast.
I mean, if you wanna sleep next to the road, have a blast." So it's actually very easy to find spots. And then the other thing that you can do to cheat is there's an app, called iOverlander. People who spend a lot of time doing this, they drop pins like, "Oh, I found this place, and you can get fresh water there," or, "I found this place and it looks like it's private property, but it's not.
I talked to the guy who lives next to it and that's actually public." it's really, it, it is not like the United [00:15:00] States in that sense. Like if you try to find a place to park and spend the night on the side of the road in Pennsylvania,
Christi: No.
Craig: that's not going to work out well. But here, the more that we've been doing this we've mostly been staying in campgrounds, but even the campgrounds, some of them, we called them up and they're like, "Yeah, we got sites.
Just come on by." And they're like, "Just drive through and tell us what number you want, and then come back to the office and we'll..." I'm like, "Oh, okay."
Christi: Wow
Craig: It's, of them don't even have websites.
Christi: N- not exactly Yosemite. Yeah, exactly.
Craig: Y- yeah, where there's a lottery system a year in advance. But some of them, there are big KOAs here that are exactly what you'd expect in
the States. They have really big trucks on the highways. I mean, it's, it's not like America, but it's not, not like we can't find groceries or we can't get eggs. There's like, it's, it just I think we're missing vegetables. But like there aren't a lot of vegetables
Christi: a lot of farm stands, huh?
Craig: N- no, there are-- in fact, I don't think I've seen a [00:16:00] single farm stand because nothing would grow here.
It just, it barely gets sunny enough 'cause this is 50... I think this is 52 degrees. The, the island's pretty far, but like it's like 57 at the top and like 47 at the bottom or something. We're basically about where like London is and I think Zurich, Switzerland lines up with where we are right now. And they don't really have great growing season and the soil, the soil isn't very good. very few sand beaches, although I think where we are here there's a lot of sand, but it's a lot of rocks, so there really isn't a lot of stuff being grown. So tomatoes are really expensive. There just aren't a lot of veggies. But when you go into market, the market has veggies. They're not the greatest, but people don't buy them.
So like the reason the veggies aren't here is because people aren't eating them. If everybody wanted vegetables, boop, there'd be a Wegmans. You know, like the, the, the-- people-- somebody would fill the demand.
Christi: Wow. And so, well, we could talk a lot about food. And I have questions about what's in that van that you have [00:17:00] jerry-rigged to make it thus. But, I... Go back a little bit and talk, how long did it take you to plan this trip?
Craig: I started-- I, I think I really started planning pretty much the day we bought this actual van. We have another smaller thing called a Transit Connect. It's like a, like a caravan, like a minivan-sized thing. And we had been using it to go car camping, sleeping in the van instead of in a tent. we're-- every time we did it, we're like, "Yeah, this is great."
But by day three, we're like, wanna kill each other 'cause it's like the size of a tent. So we were talking and talking, and finally we decided we were going to buy a bigger van. And when we picked this actual model of van for various reasons, then it kinda became real. Like, oh, well, if I had that van, then it's comfortable and it sits higher and it gets better gas mileage, and we can go longer distances. And that's kinda when I said, "Oh, we're going to get that van," and then not as the first trip, but then we're going to take that van and I'm going to go to Newfoundland. And I said, "Would you like to come along?" You know, like, [00:18:00] that's how I, that's how I put it. I can be a little pig-headed. So that was like a, that would've been... That's over a year ago. We bought this van in July of '25 we bought the van. It's now the end of July in '26. So basically I was planning it for a
Christi: Wow
Craig: and that was mostly me fiddling around with-- I did a lot of it with AI. But fiddling around with, well, how, how much time do you need to get from one end to the... How big is this island? Like, you know, you see it on a map and you're like, when you start driving, it's bigger than it looks, Craig. And I completely misjudged the terrain. I, in my head, I had this as like a, yeah, it's got cliffs and then it's mostly level, and then there's like some mountains in the middle.
Mm-mm. It's mountains and hills. It's beautiful. and well, you drive over one, one, I mean, I would call 'em the hills, but you drive over one hill, in the next valley and the weather is completely different. And it's really beautiful. A lot of the, a lot of the trees are like, you know, they're all like blown sideways, all of them.
You're like, "Ooh, the [00:19:00] winters must be rather harsh here," you know?
Christi: Yeah.
Craig: it, it took me a while to get a, an idea of like, s- like you see something on the internet, it's like, oh, look at that, it's gorgeous. You go find it. You're like, "Oh, that's over here." And then you see something else. Oh, that's gorgeous. And you're like, oh wait, that's... Oh, that's on the other end, you know? And you, you starting to realize there, you can't say, "I'm going to visit Germany." Like, well, what part of it? You can't visit the whole thing. And I quickly realized Newfoundland is like that size. So we just said screw that, and spent four weeks and visited the entire thing. have been all over it, we keep going in new places. But it really, it's been like a year of discovery leading up to the actual, The day we left was a little like, "Okay, we're closing the doors on the van." I drove away, looked in the rear view mirror. I'm like, "I hope we see the house again," you know? I've never been away this long.
Christi: Oh, I wondered. So this is the longest trip you've ever taken?
Craig: Yeah. How many people take five-week trips? This is like a sabbatical.
Christi: Yeah, well, but Tracy's working. So [00:20:00] she's doing the digital nomad thing there, right?
Craig: technically we're both working. Yeah, I work a little bit now and then. But yeah, today, today is actually a work day, and they-- her-- we, like, we ran up the flagpole that they know that she's remote. Her direct boss is in Wales.
The people that she works with are in Massachusetts and North Carolina. So they're like, "Yeah," well, they're kinda like "As long as you get all your work done and make all your meetings, you've been here seventeen years. You can pretty much, you know, you know what to do." That is another challenge that I think most people wouldn't be expecting because our planning for the next day is like, okay, what, what's work for you the next day?
Or like, if I have to do something, we're like, "Oh, well, we need eight hours of working time, and it has to be with solid, like rock solid internet service." I mean, I'm in the-- I'm literally-- probably twenty miles from a cell tower out here. So the van's name is Panda.
Christi: Yes.
Craig: reminds us to slow down, and that's how pandas roll. It also looks like a panda from the front. [00:21:00] The van's name is Panda. So Panda has a couple of superpowers. One is mobility, just close the doors, move. The other one is internet. So there's satellite Starlink mounted on the roof and a cellular booster. So this morning, we actually had a bit of a problem.
We went for groceries, and our plan was to-- we had to actually go to the Ford dealership. We had an engine problem which turned out to be bad
gas, but we got that worked out. But we had to go to the-- so it's like, we go to the Ford dealership, and then we're going to go to the grocery store, and then we're going to sit in the parking lot and just park out of the way. We were there for like five hours, and we went to the grocery store, and then she did a lot of work, and then I did my stuff too. but that's all, like you gotta plan for that. We're like, "All right, I'm working." You know, she's saying, "I'm working this week." And it's like, well, we're not going to spend the entire week playing. We're going to spend forty hours in the van working.
Craig: So before we left, we had to make sure that the van had a work surface table, and we actually have a nice set of chairs and don't always have to use them. But she actually has [00:22:00] an extra full-size monitor and like a whole
setup.
Christi: Oh, wow
Craig: So depending on what we're doing, we set up what we need or we don't. Don't really work while we're driving much, but we can do that too. But you can't really concentrate in Newfoundland. so you come around a corner and she's like, you know, stops typing and stare out the window. Like, sorry, a little distracting. It's just gorgeous most places.
Christi: So, You have jerry-rigged the inside of this van, right? So there's a desk that folds down and a table, or the table is the desk, a bed
Craig: Yes, exactly. The table is a desk and there's a bed. What, what I did was-- my friend, my rock climbing friend, had a small van, and he had just put like a platform in it.
So he just made like a lower deck and an upper deck, and below was all storage. They're just like crates and climbing gear and then things underneath. And then on the top was a place that two people could sleep. And I, I went out climbing with him. I spent like two weeks in this tiny little van with him. I just started seeing like, oh, you know, you could-- why didn't you cut a [00:23:00] little space here in the corner so that you could have put your feet down? Like in his van, you can't. You c-- It was like
either Indian style
or you had to lay down. There was no places you could
Christi: Right
Craig: So I just co- I am that person where I always see these little changes that can be made to try and make it better.
Now that, that's a slippery slope. I can spend huge amounts of time rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. But I started to imagine, well, why couldn't I make a bench that was mounted on the wall, that you fold it down, and then there'd be two of them. Each one is three feet long, so you fold them down, I have a six-foot-long bench, and I'll make it two feet wide.
That's enough for one person to sleep. Well, once you folded it down, the top of the bench could be another set of folding leaves that flip out again. Well, now it's a queen-sized bed.
Christi: Perfect
Craig: I'm like, it took a lot of work to build that. It has to have folding legs and magnetic catches and little fiddly details, but that's the, the bed.
Like at the moment, it's one's a bench and the other is a thing, and you can sit on two sides of the table, [00:24:00] which we have seating for four if you wanna get real cozy. then I did the same thing. Well, what if I had a table and it folded down from the wall and then had another piece folded open and then just very carefully built everything so it all lines up right, so everything swings past each other and everything works. And then from our previous camping in the other van, I had this crate. It's called the cooking crate. It has a stove and a fuel bottle and the pots and pans and the lighter and the hot pad, and it all fits. And then that's under the bench. And then there's a crate called the kitchen crate. It has all the utensils and the dishes and seasonings and things you need to wash dishes, and that goes under the bench. And then there's a bigger crate, we pull it out, called the pantry, or actually the provisions. You pull it out and it's all the canned goods and, oatmeal and bulk foods and things and, and little stacking crates with like the, the potatoes are on the bottom and then there's onions and then tomatoes are in a crate on top so things don't get crushed. It's just all systems and organized.
it takes a lot of work. A lot, a lot, a lot of work. A lot of times the van is on the patio and I'm [00:25:00] fiddling.
Christi: at a certain point, I think in your micro blog, and I do wanna know when and how you decided, "I'm going to, share this trip with my friends and family."
Craig: On the trip is actually the answer, but keep
Christi: Oh, okay. I think you s- you decided or you realized that you hadn't been using those side doors that slide open,
Craig: Yes.
Christi: and so you went to the local hardware store and
Craig: Yep. Yep. And, and basically built it. So the, this is a cargo van, so it has a slide side door, a full-size cargo sliding door. And we used it all the time. It was like in and out and, and we, we loved it. But when we packed for this trip, we had a pile of stuff, on the floor, and then you'd open the door and you'd have to, like, climb over the pile, and then you wanna go to sleep, you gotta move the pile.
And like, the third night in, we're like, "It takes us 45 minutes to," we call it flip the van, to flip from, like, we're cooking or working or [00:26:00] driving, to flip to sleep mode. And I said, "Well, the problem is all this stuff on the floor." So I, I think it was a workday. Tracy was working, and I'm sitting on the other side of the table with my notebook, and my little brain is like, "Well, you know, you could do the thing, and And then I'm on the website like, "Well, what's a Canadian hardware store?" Oh, it's called, you know, Home I can't remember. And I like the thing, and then I called them and, and I basically went over there and I went in and I said, "Hey, could I have..." And they were super nice. I, had designed enough of it.
I need this board cut to this length, that board this length, three boards like this, two boards like that, five boards like this, and a box of screws. I need-- I had a screwdriver. I need a saw. I have a tape measure. And we went in, in like 45 minutes, I bought all the materials, and then we stood in the parking lot for two hours.
They actually closed. The place closed, everybody went home, and we put it together in the parking lot. It's a little rough. You know, it's not st- it's not really stained, but it works, and it has a place in the bottom so that the-- There's, like, a step-down in the wheel well. You can reach in there from inside the van.
It's full of shoes and [00:27:00] tools and things we never use. And there's a big space for our luggage, and then there's a little shelf with his and hers, like, a day bag of, like, all your random stuff. Laundry in the middle, hooks on the front for all of our, like, backpacks and stuff, and then some storage on top. It took, you know-- We wasted, air quoting, we wasted half a day on it, that was like three weeks ago, and now we're like, "We couldn't live without this thing over here." And I have plans when I get home, here's how I'm going to change it.
Christi: How are you going to change it? Yeah. Are you going to take it all apart?
Craig: Well, no, what I'm going to do is I'm going to measure it up and I'm going to build a whole new one, because it, it's kind of a little rough.
It isn't built to the same level. Like, it didn't get... You have to polyurethane things, otherwise they get stains on them and stuff. You were just, like, smacking mosquitoes.
Christi: yeah
Craig: But it, it could have more shelves, and it should have a better layout. And if I open the slide door, everything falls out.
Christi: Okay
Craig: And what it needs is the shelves need to be bigger with what's called a fiddle, so that when you open-- I wanna be able to open the slide door and get to everything from
Christi: Ah.
Craig: And then there's some other things I wanna put [00:28:00] in from the outside of, like, some big folding, like a pop-up screen room for over your
Christi: Oh, okay
Craig: I have one of those, but I had nowhere to put it. I'm like, "Oh, I could put it between the door and the outside of this thing. It's only two inches thick." So I'm always, I'm always thinking that way.
It-- Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking that way, but it makes for really clever solutions.
Christi: How many years have you been camping like this? I mean, and forget the sailboat for a second, although I did notice the big, bigger, biggest, you know, kind of that's what's happening with the van too,
Craig: Well,
Christi: with the sailboat. Yeah
Craig: more people on the sailboat too, and we wanted to go longer distances, and we wanted to not kill each other, so we need more bigger boat. The we bought our other van in maybe 20 like 2023 maybe. It's probably only been like three or four years that we've really been regularly going
Christi: Oh, interesting
Craig: it really just, yeah, it just kinda comes down to... And it's funny 'cause when we, when I s- like, "Oh, let's do this." And I, I think the trigger was a really good [00:29:00] college friend, Tracy and myself and this guy, we all went to college together. Really good college friend, and he's like, "Hey, let's go to the Delaware Shore for Labor Day, and it's like the end of the season, and we'll be on the beach, and it kinda rhymes with Craig's birthday and all that stuff." so we went, and we took our little van, and it was like this first camping trip. And then we came back with like bug bites and went, "Oh, we need screen doors. Oh, we need, you know, we need solar power, and we need a refrigerator. How can you go camping without a refrigerator?" And it just, it just every time we go camping, I come back with a list, and I make it better. And it kinda works out. If I make it good enough, then Tracy also has fun, and if the two of us have fun, that's kinda the whole point. But as we were talking about this more and more, she used to do the camping thing. Her parents took her camping, tent camping when she
Christi: Ah.
Craig: there's like a generational, like our generation, my generation, her generation. Our generation's parents used to stuff everybody in the back seat of the car facing backwards, you know, and take you out and go tent camping. So there was that. It's like an American thing, only now the way you do it is you do it in your car, do it in your van.
Christi: Is [00:30:00] that it? It's just evolved? Is that it?
Craig: I, I, I mean, maybe you're right. Maybe evolved isn't the way to think about it because I do... I see people like there's like a pecking order, you know? I, I open the door of the van with my fresh pour-over coffee, and I look at the people in the rain, you know, 'cause I'm standing under a cover. I look at the people in the rain in a tent, and I think, "Ugh, I would never do that.
That's crazy," you know? And then people park next to me in a cr- in like a professionally built van, 'cause like you've seen them, the big fancy vans. They
Christi: In like a Kombi, in one of those VW bus
Craig: right. Like the wall, if I, if I look out my window, there's like two of them, three of them parked, four of them parked right next to me, and they're like the big kids.
You know, I assume they're looking out the tinted windows from their Corian countertops with their drip perky, you know, and, and like chuckling at me. You know, "Look at the guy in the homemade van." So there's, there's definitely a... so much a pecking order, but it's like, what, do you do that gets you...
Like for example, [00:31:00] Tracy, who now probably can't hear me, I'm hoping, is, is putting on her jacket and her hat and just walked away from the back of the van because she wanted to go hike and see the there's a cliff. Wants to go see the cliff, and she probably wants to see the, those birds up on the hill. So for her, this like, oh, this bit of driving up here this evening is kinda eh, and then we gotta drive back, but the hike for her is worth it.
I would, I mean, I would enjoy the hike too, but I'd rather do the podcast. So everybody finds their thing. So the tent campers, they really wanna go mountain biking, or the people who are sleeping, like literally sleeping in their car, they wanna go kayaking 'cause they have kayaks on the roof. So all they have is the car and the kayaks, and that's what, they're there for. So that to me is the thing. With this van, we don't wanna sleep on the ground. So I think everybody is into the camping for their own thing. I see people who just sit in the campground. We use campgrounds, like we get up early and leave, and I like not having to take, like we don't have to take the tent down. We just [00:32:00] drive
Christi: Right
Craig: know, close three doors and drive away. Everything's in the van. Unplug first, drive away. Then come back. If we wanted to, we can come back after dark, plug in, go to sleep.
Craig: So other people sit around there like we used to do is, when I was a kid, we'd sit around the campfire, and we'd make s'mores, and you'd tell ghost stories. Now we come back, it's like, we're old. It's dark. We're going to sleep. You know
Christi: Uh-huh. So, thinking about the last three, four years, is this like one of these things where when we were all younger that it was nothing to sleep on a friend's, couch or whatever, but then you get a little older and you want at least a motel, and then before you know it, you're in the boutique hotels just because they're so nice?
Craig: It, it's not that-- for me, it's not that those specific items, but yeah, there's a progression to what you get used to. And I know Christi, you know that I do
parkour. The French people call it art du déplacement. in that [00:33:00] vein, they talk a lot about like what you do, that defines who you are. You know, like the physical shape you're in is the result of your genes and what you-- the choices you've made. the same thing happens here. It's like, yeah, do I get the best night's sleep in the van when the mosquitoes are in here? Oh,
Christi: No.
Craig: No, it wasn't pleasant. It wasn't pleasant. But, do I enjoy starting the van and driving away from the campground and going a few miles and being like, "Wow, look at this."
Or, oh, and then pull over, this is what we're doing, we're going for a hike. Just the freedom of being able to move around like that. So I think it's, it's just a matter of not getting... And this can happen to me. Don't get overly fixated in making everything perfect. Like, so I gotta have the boutique hotel 'cause I want the bubble bath would be one, one slippery slope of making it perfect. That doesn't attract me, the boutique hotel. I can't sleep there. The bed's too soft. I don't like bubble baths. But there's other things for me, like I'm like, "Oh, I'm going to change the way the heating works [00:34:00] in here so that we can get in and out of the campground quicker, and I'm going to redo this entire shelf.
It'll take me four days." Creature comfort for me is different than a comfy bed and a bubble bath. But yeah, there's a slippery slope about, "Oh, I can make this better. Oh, I can do this better."
Craig: And it's like that may be part of why I went to Newfoundland, because to get here, you have to take a ferry, if you wanna bring your car.
If you wanna fly, you can rent a car. Met a lot of people
doing that. Um, but if you wanna bring your own vehicle, you gotta get on the ferry. And if you wanna get on the ferry, you gotta pick your dates like in January or February, you better pick them in like-- 'cause it's complicated. There are only so many ferries and there's only so much space. It's a big ferry, takes big trucks, but there's only so much room. So we had to really commit, and then we had a hard date. It wasn't like, "Eh, we're not going." It's like, "Well, if you don't go on these dates, you're not going this year." So that might've been part of what Newfoundland was like this, oh, there's a, there's a goal, there's a date, there's a thing, you gotta go at this time.
Um[00:35:00]
Christi: Right. It's a, a forced vacation. You must go.
Craig: Yeah, you must go or
Christi: Right
Craig: It got a little hairy as we got down to the departure day. We're like, especially because you know that feeling of the rush to the airport?
Christi: Oh, yeah.
Craig: like, "Ah, it's, it's flight day." Well, okay, we had that for five days 'cause we left our house on a Saturday morning, and it was like, we need to leave this house at 6:30, we're not kidding, or we can't drive the six and a half hours to the thing we were doing in Massachusetts with my family to then drive four more to get to the... You had to, like, keep moving because the ferry was leaving at 4:00 PM on whatever day it was with or without, you know, Craig and Tracy. So it, it required a, a little bit of organizing. It was I actually think well, I call that load out when you're, like, loading everything out into the departure. We actually aced the load out. We were entirely loaded out the night before we went to bed. We got up in the morning and we're like, "Did we forget anything?" "No." Shut the doors and drove away, you know?
Craig: But that was because I'm a list maker. I
make [00:36:00] a lot of lists, but
Christi: Yeah, and talk about the planning, but what surprised me most was seeing the analog side of it, not just the maps, the paper maps, but also your, your travelogue books all neatly bound and detailed.
Craig: I'm like a type A, I'm a type A person, so I have a thing called a comb binder. You know, it like punches 30 holes and then puts the plastic things in them. I bought one of those a decade ago. So, when I mentioned before I was using AI, one of the things that I did, the AI didn't do it, I did this.
I made a book up that just has a date. It's just a piece of paper. I could've done with blank sheets of paper in a, in a ring binder. There's a piece of paper, the, the thing is right behind me, has a paper for every
calendar date. And there are a couple things that are like really firm, like written on there was that I wanted to do this podcast on this day.
And like, it's Monday, Wednesday is the ferry day, so on Wednesday, our ferry reservation numbers are written there. We open the book and we have a rule, no, we call it a family meeting. No family [00:37:00] meetings without the book, because invariably we try and talk about like, "Well, is it what?" And then we need the book. So the book gives you a place to write stuff down, and don't try and do it on the computer. It doesn't work on your phone. You need an eight and a half by 11 sheet of paper, and we scribble. Some days we've scribbled all over the paper for the day, and the back of the other sheet is covered in notes.
And it'd be like an hour into the day, we've crossed the whole day off because the place is closed or something's wrong. And it just gives you the opportunity to like write down, okay, 6:00 p.m. and this, and we need eggs, and you know, don't forget to get gas, and we're leaving at 8:00. Okay, and then we have a little plan for the next day. it, it really worked well. We were, I don't know, my brain is messed up with kilometers and miles. We were like 700 kilometers, which if that was miles, that'd be bad. We were like 700 kilometers on the other end of the island, and it's like, okay it's T-minus seven days to the ferry. We need to start making tracks heading west. And, we sat down and we went, "Okay, let's work from the other end." We know we have to be on the ferry at 11:00. We gotta be there two hours [00:38:00] early. There's this place called Wreck House, which happens to be the highest recorded winds in Canada, and we have to drive through it to get to where the ferry port is. Normally it's fine, but every once in a while the winds pick up and you just can't go through there. So there's a website and a flashing road signal system you can check in advance. So we're like, all right, well, to get through Wreck House, we wanna go through there on the day of the ferry. Let's find the closest place we can camp so we can get up in the morning and we have the whole day. Takes five minutes to drive through Wreck House. So the people line up like, and then they all scoot through. So we just like work backwards, and we're writing in the book. So you just like flip backwards through the days. And then eventually we got to today and we're like, "Oh, we got two more days to screw around here, and then we'll go here, and we'll..." We used to joke and call my mother the electric-- she had an electric pencil, but she had like regular physical pencils, but an electric pencil sharpener. And she would just be in there writing and sharpening, and writing and sharpening. We called her the electric pencil. and just her writing on tablets, it's just I think that's where I got that from.
Just write it down and then re- rewrite it, recopy it. We don't recopy our, [00:39:00] the trip book. We just turn the page. Tomorrow, clean sheet.
Christi: And how does that dovetail with your decision to do the micro blog? And how did that come about?
Craig: well, okay. The microblog I'm a, a super technical, you know, tech is my bread and butter. Actually, I always say I hate tech because tech is really the, the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing us the internet was simple. Tech is really complicated, and it is actually confusing.
It's, it's not, you know, people listening, it's hard. It's not you. It's just hard. the problem is we're like it was 1,100 miles to the town where the ferry then took us seven hours by sea. We are way out here. And of course, everybody wants to know that we're okay. So it's like my mom and her mom and all these family members.
So we're like, "Oh, for crying out loud, what are we going to..." I'm going to be like sending thousands of messages over my cell phone. And I'm like, "Ugh, right, fine. I'm just going to make a place to do this." I already have my own personal website. I have like 12 [00:40:00] of them. And I'm like, I'm just going to make this space underneath my normal blog, I'm not going to tell people where it is, like the public. I'm just going to tell my friends. So I'm like, "Christi, just go to this URL and you can, you know..." But I built it using AI. So I started we were like days into the trip. Like I, I think I was working on it before I got on the ferry. I was still in mainland Canada. And every time I would come to a stop, I would pop open my computer, I'd spin up Claude, and I'd be like, "Where were we?"
And it'd be like, "Oh, we were working on this feature." I'm like, "Well, let's keep working on that." And it would write software, and then I'm reviewing the software, and behind the scenes, there's ways to manage the code and upload stuff. And I was just doing that da, da, da, da, over and over and over. And then I would find something.
I'd be like, "Oh, I wanna drag-- Oh, it doesn't handle those kinds of images. Hey, Claude, could you please make it..." And my rule of thumb is I just take the edges off of everything. If I'm doing something and it bothers me, I either delete it entirely or fix it
immediately,
Christi: Ah
Craig: especially if it's like a two-minute thing. So I've just been tinkering on the microblog [00:41:00] now the entire time. It has graduated now. It is a completely public thing. I don't have it o- it's not open for registrations yet, but I have, I have made it its own thing. Anybody in the world can have their own travel log using the software, Christi, that you've been following us
Christi: I wondered all of a sudden,
Craig: just
Christi: I started getting emails I'm like, "Wait a second." And you were, "Hello, welcome to our new home." I'm like, "That was fast."
Craig: Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's travelog.place But yeah, so it was just, You know, my, my mom wanted to-- I mean, we, we're calling people. We were just talking to her mom before. We're calling people. We have phone service, and we can do FaceTime calls. We're recording a podcast.
Christi: Yes, we are.
Craig: the, the things are here. But but oddly, I was going to say I didn't wanna spend my whole trip providing status updates to, you know, 40 people. But oddly, what I didn't say was I spent all my free time writing the software that automatically provides status updates to 40 people.
Craig: So I-I'm [00:42:00] just-- I'm, I'm a, I'm, I'm what I call a builder.
I build things. I, I like to make systems. I'm the guy that builds stuff out of Legos. I stack the cans in the kitchen. I tinkered on cars. Like, I just, I can't stop. So I'm just like, I'm leaning in. I use Claude, I write software, I write thousands of lines of code a day, and we deploy features, and it handles videos.
And have you seen the whale videos?
Christi: Oh yeah, they're great. I did
Craig: Whoo. I mean, the, the, the whales are awesome. I think I did a pretty good job shooting the videos too. However, the fact that you can just go there and click on it and it works on your phone or your, whatever kind of computer you have, you can just see these videos that I shot from the day before. And of course, you know, her mom and my mom are like, "Whoa! Oh God, you know, we used to see that stuff on Jacques Cousteau." I'm like, "Oh, this is way better than Jacques Cousteau. I shot this in HD," you know, with my little iPhone. Anyway,
Christi: they, they were wonderful and I, I appreciated the, the the captions. This is the, the, the right whales and the, and [00:43:00] the sperm whales and the whatever . Anyway, it was, it was fun.
Craig: the-
Christi: it's like a place I'll probably never get to, and that's part of it is the voyeurism. I mean, you kind of enable that for some of us, which is nice
Craig: Yeah, but I, I mean, I also think maybe people will I would like to hope that so the travel log itself is not public. If people are like, "I wanna see it." It's like, "No, can't see my trip." But a lot of my friends, like my personal friends, not podcasting friends, my personal friends are like, "Oh, oh, well maybe..."
And you can, you can just kinda hear the wheels turning like, "Well, crazy, Crazy Craig went to Newfoundland, but maybe we could go to Yosemite or, you know, the Grand Canyon." Or like, some-- I kinda sometimes maybe hope that maybe I'm just a little bit of a trailblazer. Like, you can do this. I, we went away for four weeks, and we figured out how to arrange for someone to check in on our house now and then, and we have an, an alarm system that has a fire monitoring, you know, and I have insurance.
Christi: Uh-huh.
Craig: just sort of, you know, life is [00:44:00] short. You gotta... You don't have to. Some people are completely happy staying where they are, but I really like to say I travel because I like who I am when I get home.
Like, I, I get a better, I get a better perspective on things when I go home. helps me get my stuff in order
Christi: I think that's I think that's one of the great things about travel is that it does, it gives you just, it takes you out so that you can see back more clearly
Craig: Yeah. There, there's a famous quote. I didn't make that up. Somebody-- That's a quote that I can't quite put my finger on. Somebody said... Yeah, but it might've been like Hemingway or somebody. Would be-- It's a very Hemingway thing.
Christi: Let me just, we're getting close to to tea time here. I was going to ask...
Craig: yeah. Newfoundland is an hour and a half
Christi: I, yeah.
Craig: a
Christi: Where'd that half hour...
Craig: hard that is? my brain, I still can't do
Christi: Where did that...
Craig: I'm like hour and a
Christi: I know. It's like living in Arizona. What time is it? What day? Wait, are we [00:45:00] on LA or Santa Fe time? I can't tell. Mm, where are you going next?
Craig: There's a little bit of discussion. I said, "You know, we could just not drive away and stay here tonight." But we're on a-- We're kind of on a slope, so this wouldn't be great sleeping because you slide
Christi: Oh, no
Craig: We are very likely going back to the campground, which is, like, an hour from here. and then... What did you mean, like,
Christi: Yeah, no, this is good. And then you can keep going.
Craig: I, I think meant next trip.
Christi: Like this though.
Craig: one more day here. We have one more day here as we hop a little closer to Port aux Basques, where the ferry is. A lot of things here are French names. And then Wednesday is a ferry. We'll leave push off at 11:00 PM, sleep through the night in a cabin, then we have to drive across Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, down Massachusetts, and then we'll be home next week. But the question I think you actually were asking is where are we going next? I was so excited. Tracy has always wanted to go to Tuolumne, the flowers and prairies, the high [00:46:00] prairies above Yosemite. We've And we've actually been to Yosemite. Year... Many years ago, we went there, flew out, rented a car, drove around, had a blast, but didn't go to the Tuolumne Meadows.
While we were on this trip, like four days ago, I said as a joke, "Hey, let's start planning Tuolumne." And she went, "Okay." And I got all excited because we spent like an hour and a half with me. I spun up a new AI and said, "Let's plan the Tuolumne trip," 'cause it can look up all the campground stuff and everything. And we started planning that, and I, think she didn't have discusser's remorse the next morning because it's actually like, "Oh, maybe we'll go in the..." 'Cause you have to go at the right time of year to catch all the flowers
Christi: Is it like a springtime thing or
Craig: And, and it's 2,800 miles one way to drive out there.
Christi: Ooh. Yeah, so then you can think about flying and renting or, but you have this perfect vehicle.
Craig: call it perfect. We could rent a nicer one. Yes, but yeah. That's another part of it. It's like you could, you can rent these but I think the problem with renting them [00:47:00] is it would drive me bonkers. Like, "Where's the can opener?"
You know, I know where my can opener is, you
Christi: Right. And why don't I have hooks all on the doors where they belong?
Craig: Or there'd be hooks there when I leave. Oh, all these hooks appeared. Yeah.
Christi: And then you said I think I was going to ask you what, if there was regrets or maybe that's too harsh a word or something like next time, and I think you might have... Go ahead. You, you talk
Craig: yeah, there, there-- Oddly, there aren't any like, "Oh, that was a mistake." Like, you know, you know the difference between oops and aw shit? Oops, you can fix, right? Aw shit's permanent. There were no aw shits. We've had a whole bunch of oopses, you know, got lost, went the wrong way. We haven't gotten stuck anywhere, like physically stuck, like in a rut. We haven't gotten stuck. We haven't been pulled over, arrested, shot at, chased off. You know, like it's, it's really been really buttery smooth the whole way. you know, like, all right, it's time for a shower. We need to [00:48:00] find a place that has a hot shower. Like this campground sucks. Okay, we've had, you know, a couple of those. But really it's just been a ton of fun. The, the biggest challenge is just two people in a space that's five feet, zero inches high, five eleven wide and ten feet long. Like that's, you know, go get masking tape and make that cube and then live with your wife for five weeks. And like all of your clothing, you know, like, "Ah, where are my shoes?"
They're either in that cube or they're back home, you know? So really we haven't had any big problems.
Craig: We haven't had any major, knock on wood, any major breakages or anything. But a lot of that is because I, planned. Like I actually have the big battery system that we need to run the refrigerator.
I actually have a spare, much smaller one, but I have a spare with me so that I could run the fridge and the lights and the computers if I had to. I wouldn't, wouldn't be able to use the solar panels that are on the roof 'cause they don't connect to that unit. But some of the really key things we have backups for.
I have an extra second emergency cook stove [00:49:00] in case my first one were to break. But mostly it's just we kind of planned all the problems out of it
Craig: The biggest mistake I'd say we, we have made, and made it again today I think I did, was just dri- just driving too much. Like always wanting to go over the hill to the next thing.
Christi: Right
Craig: it's just like, just so much to see. You're like, "Oh, we gotta see the puffins." Wow, those were awesome. Well, let's go on this boat tour 'cause we only saw 3,000 puffins. We wanna go on the boat tour which has literally a million puffins, the largest puffin colony. Yes, let's go see that. You know, then we're like, it's a lot.
It's birds. It's a lot more birds. Like, was it really worth it?" You know? Like were reasons that trip was actually cool for other reasons, but you start to get like this, if you're not careful, you can get this chasing the next thing sort of feeling. And sometimes I think, "Oh, we should've just sat." But the flip side of that, because Tracy is working, we do spend entire weekdays parked in one spot. And in [00:50:00] the night before I'm thinking, "Oh, tomorrow's going to suck. I'm not going to get to do anything." And then I spend the whole day doing laundry, fix- fixing things, writing software, writing emails, doing actual work. Like I suddenly realize, yeah, Craig, you can't literally be on vacation for four weeks. Like you, there's stuff that has to get done. Gotta brush your teeth, you know? That takes five minutes. Like, I mean, like brushing your teeth is a silly example, but there's so much in life that you go, that I go through at home that I don't pay attention to. I don't pay attention to taking out the trash. I don't pay attention to paying the electric bill, all that stuff. So when you're away for five weeks, well, I do still pay the electric bill, but you gotta take the trash out. You're like, "Oh, where's the trash can?" So suddenly all these things that were automatic and that were kinda like annoyances now are just this is life.
It, it takes... It-- When you, when you wake up in the morning, we can't do anything else until we not just make the bed, but you have to fold all the bedding up and put it all away where it lives so you can fold the bed so that you can move around.
Christi: It's a different kind of mindfulness it [00:51:00] sounds like
Craig: Oh, that's a whole other thing. You have to slow down.
If you move fast, you, you will hit your head. You'll bang, you'll like bump, like 'cause it's small quarters. So you get in the habit of when you don't reach unless you're looking, you know, like don't just stick your arm out, you'll poke someone in the eye or knock their food over. You know, you gotta like look where you're going. And, we, we have little phrases, like we literally say gangway, you know, like the Navy thing. And, and gangway, gangway has no negative connotation. It's just like, "I need to go through where you are. Just move." Like, don't-- I don't, don't need your help, just gangway, and like I go through or,
Christi: Yeah. Like people in restaurants who work in restaurants, I think they have, yeah, shorthand
Craig: Yeah, shorthand, and they say things, and they, everything is, there's a please before it all and a thank you after it all, but they don't say it anymore. Yeah. There are little... I'm curious to see how our interpersonal habits are changed after this. There's a lot of, I'm not quite sure what the grammarians would call it, but there's a lot of things people say [00:52:00] to each other like, "Hey, can you hand me blah, blah, blah?" or, "Can you do this for me?" And in this little space, it might take me significant time to climb out of wherever I am to get over to do the thing that's in the other end of the van. So if I say, "Hey, can you..." It's, can be a legitimate ask, but there's also just stuff of like, I don't just randomly say, "Hey, can you like roll the windows up?"
Or, "Can you put the shades in?" Or whatever. I don't just assign work and assume that the other person is just sitting around twiddling their thumbs waiting to be of service. You know, instead, I tend to be more like, well, if I want that that way, I have to go do that, and maybe it can wait, or maybe I can figure out how to do that and something else while I'm over there. so it just, you become more mindful about... Because it happens the other way. "Hey, can you do this? Hey, can you hand me that?" It's like, "No, I'm over here. I know it looks like I'm doing nothing, but I'm in, you know, I'm working." so it makes you more mindful about the communications, the interpersonal stuff too.
Christi: So it'll be a, it'll be a [00:53:00] re-entry regardless, right? A different
Craig: I, I kinda feel like I had these ideas of, like, I have books that I was going to read. I didn't touch them.
Christi: I was going to ask you. D-
Craig: my
Christi: you didn't, you brought books and you didn't read them? No.
Craig: have books that I didn't
Christi: Ah.
Craig: I, I almost feel bad, but
Yeah, it is
Christi: yeah
Craig: I I spent a lot of time working on the travel log software. It's, it's not quite done. It's really, really wet. It's like a lot of it is done. There's one feature that's missing yet that nobody would know what it is.
It's just Craig knows. but, you know, it's like, does the world need another travel log online thing? I don't think
Christi: I, it's pretty elegant, I will say
Craig: Yeah. So it, it's cool. It-- Now I, I set it up so people who are following mine, there's a link at the bottom. You can make your own for free forever and just, you know, set up your own, upload your photos, and pretty cool.
Craig: But yeah, I feel like, I feel like I was the same. Maybe part of what I was originally hoping when I said, "I'm going to go to Newfoundland 'cause it's so far out there, it will [00:54:00] force me to be a different person." And my-- I have a really good friend who's a practicing Buddhist. His name is Vincent. Vincent would probably chuckle at me for saying that, like, "Craig, Craig, Craig, Craig, that's, that's not how the id works." The ego goes with you. So I was basically the same person I always was. I think I'm a little calmer. I think I was a little more polite. a lot of-- People can tell you're American as soon as you say a word and are, they know the accent. And I think they expect the Americans to be a little more pushy and in a hurry. So a lot of times when I walked into a gas station and was nice or polite or, chewed the fat for a minute, they seemed to appreciate that I wasn't an asshole. So that part of me, I was a little, it was a little nice to be slowed down and, and depressurized. am not looking forward to the Northeast corridor, you know, the whole, you know, the whole-- I'm not looking forward to the energy of all that, but that's where I live. Is Is the sun setting.
I'm being summoned from the back of the van. I believe the sun is setting
Thanks for making the time. It would've been easy to do it when we got home, but I think it was more fun to do it from here. It makes this spot more [00:55:00] memorable.