The Car Purge

It's been 105 days on the road thus far living out of Pennsatucky the Honda Fit.

Vehicle-dwellers of all persuasion are intimately familiar with the labor-intensive but highly cathartic "Car Purge." After a certain period of time, entropy takes hold of even the best-organized rig.

For me, it's about once per week. Frustration levels creep upward as I root through piles of belongings looking for a fresh propane cylinder, a pair of clean socks, or my favorite ceramic kitchen knife.

I am quite content to live with strata of dirt from four different states coating the inside and outside of my rig at all times, but there's only so much disorganization I can handle. The only solution? The Car Purge.

Once a week, I find a wind-sheltered patch of dirt upon which to disgorge my life's possessions. I pull absolutely everything out of the car and dump it onto piles: climbing gear, biking gear, clean/dirty clothes, bedding, kitchen, and trash.

Side note: Just sorting rock gear takes as long as a complete car purge itself. As a non-climber friend calls it, "playing with climbing dolls." Every cam (quintuples of fingers, doubles of hands) gets unracked from its color-coded carabiner and laid out. If necessary, I'll boil the cam heads, trigger wires and carabiner gates in a large pot of water, then spray them with T9 aerosol bike lube. Sometimes pieces need a fresh application of fingernail polish or paint pen to mark gear for easy differentiation with multiple partners (my colors are teal and orange).

The car purge is one of those things where the prospect of doing it seems daunting, and the process is arduous, but the end result is highly rewarding. When all my belongings are sorted and restacked in the car, I experience a palpable sense of relief.

My previous Honda Fit had a bed/kitchen platform built into the back, which made life incredibly easier.

This time around, I decided to forgo the build in order to keep the rear seats accessible for multiple passengers and more headroom. It's also easier to fit the phatbike without removing the rear wheel.

To engage sleeper mode, I incline the passenger front seat all the way forward and build out a pillow space in the negative space behind it using ropes, dirty clothes, blankets and eventually, a very clean pillow. As the mattress, I have several foam pads and two twin-size memory foam toppers. At 5'10a" I'm just the right size to sleep on my back fully extended. Were I an inch taller, it would be less comfortable. I enjoy my setup so much that whenever I crash a friend's place, I most likely will still sleep in the car. It takes me less than five minutes to convert the car to sleeper mode, but every now and then I'm envious of van rigs that are always set up and ready to go. My consolation for driving a "micro-van:"

46.4 mpg actual via manual calculations. That was driving 300 miles from City of Rocks, ID to Lander, WY. I routinely get 41 in the city and 44 on the highway.

I bought Pennsatucky (2010 Honda Fit EX, five-speed manual) for $8000 with 64k on the odometer. She's at 87k now with no work performed aside from standard maintenance. Having an older car makes me slightly more willing to rally on the dirt roads and drive high-clearance roads. The occasional ding only adds to her "street cred," as does the aftermarket "desert brown" paint job ;-)

When my trip concludes after four and a half months total, it'll be nice to reside in a brick-and-mortar domicile again. I've taken 19 showers in 105 days and done laundry twice. But for all the minor aggravations of living in a hatchback, it's been an amazing experience. I've met some amazing people and climbed outdoors 68 days thus far for a total of 26,490 vertical feet. A more thorough trip summary will follow when the climbing portion ends on June 10.