Okay, that's definitely a bit of a dramatic title, but I am definitely not happy with this turn of events. This actually happened two weeks ago, but I've been busy vacationing in LA (staying in a hotel, with a real room!) and haven't been posting.

Anyway, as you can see, someone has hit and damaged my front-left blinker, dislodging it from its socket and ruining a perfectly pleasant afternoon. They didn't leave a note, not that I should be expecting decency from a reckless stranger anyway. After a (very little) bit of sleuthing, I think I understand what happened though.

The Hunch

Looking at the damage, it's immediately clear that a taller, larger vehicle is the source of my woes. The scratches are higher up than a car or truck's front bumper would be. Additionally, the area I'm parked in is near where the corporate buses queue up before going about their routes. In all likelihood, a bus took the turn too tight, and the tail swung out into my poor house-truck. The driver may not have even noticed.

The Lesson

Like I've said before, I'm constantly learning new things and encountering situations that nothing in my past could have prepared me for. I can say with a fair bit of confidence that if I lived in an apartment, I'd be significantly less likely to experience someone busting their car through my wall like a Kool-Aid Man/Transformer-hybrid. But I live in a parking lot, and I guess car/house-accidents just come with the territory. The upshot is that since my house is mobile, I can move it to a spot out of the path of bus-destruction, which is exactly what I did. The damage isn't bad enough that I need to get it fixed immediately, and I'll try my hand at fixing it up before I bother a mechanic about it, especially since if the bodywork took them a few days, I'd have to relocate temporarily. Stay tuned for a future home improvement post.

Back again with another riveting installment of Questions and Answers.

Mountain View has a car show during its Thursday Night Live series of events. Are you in that?

Erm, no. Though if I ever go fully insane and paint the outside of the box with flames and other crazy shenanigans, I'll definitely start attending some car shows. I could go the full nine yards, get an amp and put a sound system in the back, maybe a disco ball or two. Open up the back gate and have a good old-fashioned truck rager. I could even make a business out of it, call it "Block Party in a Box". Or I could not do any of those things, that's also an option.

Can people be in the back of the truck while you drive it? If no, could you attach seatbelts to your bed or something to make it kosher?

I'm not going to look up the driving laws surrounding this, because common sense dictates that it's illegal, much in the same way that riding in the back of a pickup truck is illegal, at least outside of the Deep South. Theoretically though, since I've secured everything down in the back, someone would be totally fine laying in the bed with someone driving, as long as they weren't going full-NASCAR. It'd actually probably be pretty cool, like a discount, white trash version of Space Mountain. Continuing the trend of monetizing my housing, I could just paint a huge "White Trash Space Mountain" sign on the side (next to the flames), and charge $5 for a ride up and down the 101. Again, I could also just not do that instead.

Do you have an emergency plan for when your truck gets stolen/explodes? Because then you will be extra homeless

For all the planning I did to get where I am, I've never really thought of any particularly good contingency plans. I've always known that if things don't work out, I can just fall back to an overpriced apartment for normal people, but I've never concerned myself with worrying about various truck-related disasters. Regarding the "stolen" scenario: Virtually no carjackings occur on the company campus, and it's surrounded by video cameras. If anyone was dumb/crazy enough to steal my gross, dumpy vehicle while it's surrounded by Teslas and Porches, they're going to get caught fairly quickly. The whole explosion scenario is far more likely, because it has about 160,000 miles on it, and while there's no outright mechanical issues with it, I wouldn't want to be my car insurance company. If it were to die on me (preferably not in a blaze of glory), I'd pack my gym bag with a few outfits, have it towed to a repair shop, and stay at an AirBnB or a hotel for a few nights. Hardly the worst thing that's ever happened to someone.

A few of the questions were comments on site features, and I've implemented a few of them, and some more are on the way. The Question/Comment box and the About/Search box should show up on more pages now, and I'll be adding in "Previous/Next" buttons from individual posts soon, so stay tuned!

In Charting the Waters, I mentioned two books that I picked up to get myself in the travel mindset. Last week, I set aside an hour and read through the lighter of the two: How to Drop Everything And Travel Around The World.

Thoughts

Overall, I thought the book was a worthwhile read. As far as actual, concrete information about travel and destinations, it was pretty light (the whole thing is only 56 pages), but it was certainly helpful in orienting my mind with respect to my future world tour.

Getting Excited

The book did quite a nice job of selling the concept of travel. Not that I needed any convincing whatsoever, but I was definitely getting excited just reading through the first few chapters, thinking about the planning process and choosing my destinations. In particular, the book included a quote from travel writer Pico Iyer, as follows:

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more.

-Pico Iyer

The beginning of this quote is a little too Confucian for my tastes, but nonetheless I agree with its sentiments. There are plenty of things that can only be properly experienced in-person; a newspaper or computer screen simply won't do it justice. It goes almost without saying that travel falls into this category. And while I'm not quite done being a "young fool" in the first place (I do live in a truck, after all), travel will likely kindle a child-like awe contrary to what I've experienced in my (short) adult life.

Tips and Tricks

While the book didn't have much concrete information on travel destinations, it certainly provided me with new, useful travel information.

Traveling Light

I've managed to pack my life into a 2' by 2' area in the back of a truck, and thus like to consider myself well-versed in living minimally and "packing light". That said, the book had valuable advice on what kinds of clothes to bring with you to maximize utility and minimize the raw weight and volume of your baggage. I wouldn't have even thought of bringing quick-drying shirts with me on my voyage, so that was a good tidbit to discover.

Regional Snapshots

One of the useful things the book provided was single-paragraph snapshots of different areas of the world, broken down into 8 regions (South/Southeast Asia, South/Central America, East Asia, Europe, Africa, North America/New Zealand/Australia, Central Asia, and the Middle East). What was particularly nice is that it took the perspective of an English-speaking American, and outlined how cultures in each region are going to vary and what sort of differences Americans can expect.

Random Tidbits

Did you know that just the act of planning a trip makes people happier? Me neither, but it's apparently a studied phenomenon. This, along with tips for spotting a good food cart, where to find not-sketchy housing, how to do travel research effectively, and how to travel alone versus with a partner, are all useful pieces of information provided by the book in various forms.

All in all, the book helped me get my head in the travel game and get excited for planning my future trips. For $3, totally a sound investment.

I'm not talking about securing in the sense of safety and making something inaccessible, but rather in making sure something stays static relative to its container.

When you're setting up your room or a new piece of furniture, generally the last thing on your mind is making sure it stays in place. It's basically just a given that your various belongings aren't going to wander around when you aren't in the room. I knew from the start that I'd have to be careful about driving with everything in the back, and one of the first things I did was secure the bed with some rope. Even with proper securement at the forefront of my mind , estimating the stability and safety of various restraints is apparently not my strong suit, and I'd still occasionally find things fallen over after a trip to the post office. So without further ado, here are some things to remember when securing your very own truck-house.

The Little Things

When you're building furniture for the truck, you've probably already thought of what it's going to be screwed into, and so it generally isn't the big stuff that gets you, it's the little things that you leave around. An e-book reader, a battery-powered light, the broom, it's usually the most mundane things you'll forget to secure or put away. And nothing is worse than taking that first turn and hearing all your various belongings crash to the floor, and then proceed to roll around for the remainder of your trip. Not pleasant, and easily avoidable.

Check it or Wreck it

Sometimes I won't have driven the truck for 3 or 4 days, and I'll forget that I've left a bunch of things sitting on top of my dresser. Oops. Luckily, this is a super easily-remedied problem: Even if you're very on top of putting the little things away, take a quick look in the back before you leave. If there's anything loose back there, put it in a drawer, hang it up, or put it under the covers.

Velcro is not your friend

I built a dresser for my clothes and tools early on, and very quickly found out that low-friction rollers do not stay put on their own in the back of a moving truck. I've since developed an acute fear of left turns, which caused all the drawers to fly out and careen across the truck, uniformly showering the ground in my belongings. My brilliant solution to the problem was to secure the drawers with Velcro, which as it turns out doesn't have nearly the holding strength necessary for my purposes. The takeaway here is that you should be using rope or screws to hold everything in place, don't trust Velcro or most adhesives, which weaken with time and temperature.

I was talking to someone, who we'll call Michael (because that's his name), about the truck life and this blog, and he said, "You know, it'd be cool if you had a place on the site where you could see how much money you've saved." Well Michael, I agree with you wholeheartedly, so starting today, there'll be a live-updating clock on the right left side (or bottom on mobile) of the page that shows the amount of money I've saved by living in a truck. I've mentioned on numerous occasions that it's not entirely about the money, but regardless, it's an interesting metric to have. However, without an explanation as to how I arrived at that value, this whole thing would be pretty pointless. So here is my magic money formula.

The Recipe

The formula itself is pretty simple. I alluded to it in this post, but stated more explicitly, the formula is:

Savings = Time In Truck*(Cost of Rent - Truck Insurance) - Cost of Truck

So I'm glossing over the units here, but "Time in Truck", "Cost of Rent", and "Truck Insurance" are all measured by the month, and the cost of the truck was the initial investment. Now let's plug some numbers in.

Time In Truck

The "Time in Truck" is the total amount of time I've been living in a truck instead of paying rent somewhere. My first night in the truck was my first day of work, and would have been roughly when I moved into an apartment if that's the route I had gone. So "Time in Truck" is the number of months (as a decimal value) since May 26^th, 2015. As of this writing, it's about 1.863 months, assuming 30-day months for simplicity.*

Cost of Rent

Since I didn't end up getting an actual apartment, it's impossible to know the actual amount I'd have paid in rent per month. However, I do know that I was looking for a studio apartment in the Mountain View area, and luckily there are more than enough services that can tell me, on average, how much that would cost me. Zillow is the premier service for buying, selling, and renting online. They have a pretty extensive database of housing prices, especially with respect to time. According to their site, as of May 2015, a studio apartment in Mountain View averages $2,180 a month. So that's what we'll use for our "Cost of Rent" value.

Truck Insurance

It turns out I'm not entirely off the hook for all monthly expenses. My sole monthly, truck-related expense is insurance, which costs me about $121 a month. In all likelihood, I'd still get a car and pay for insurance if I wasn't living in the truck, but to make my estimates conservative, we're not going to consider that.

Cost of Truck

I've mentioned before, but after haggling, fees, repairs, and taxes, the truck cost me almost exactly $10,000.

The Final Formula

Savings = Time*(2180 - 121) - Cost of Truck = Time*2,059 - 10,000

But wait, why is it negative?

At the time of this writing, my net "savings" are a little over −$6,100. It's negative right now because I spent more money buying the truck than I've saved on rent. But if you've been paying attention, you may have noticed that we can calculate the "break-even point", where Savings = $0. Using a tiny bit of math and a tiny bit of Wolfram Alpha, we can see that my break-even point will occur on Wednesday, October 21^st, 2015 at 4:50 PM. I'll have to throw a party or something. I'll certainly make a post noting the clock is in the black.