As some of you already know, I am currently traveling around the country while living in a converted camper van. This diary is part of a series on why and how to live fulltime in a van.
Part One: Why I Live in a Van:
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Part Two: Selecting a Van
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Part Three: Bureaucracy
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Part Four: The Logistics of Living in a Walmart Parking Lot
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Part Five: Internet, Cellphone, and Staying in Touch
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Part Six: Electricity
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Part Seven: My Bathroom
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Part Eight: Laundry
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My laptop/TV/DVD/MP3/Kindle
Most of us can’t live without our TV or DVD. I don’t have a TV set or DVD player in the van, but that doesn’t mean I don’t get to watch TV shows or movies. I just use my laptop instead of a TV set. This actually isn’t much of a change for me, since years before I left my apartment and became a nomad, I had already cut the cable cord and gotten all my TV shows and movies online. So now, if I am parked in a place where I can get a good wifi Internet signal, I can download movies from iTunes or Amazon or Hulu or Netflix or whatever.
(There are small portable DVD players available, which can plug into the van’s solar electric system, but I prefer to just play online movies on the laptop—it’s one fewer thing to carry around and plug in.)
As for TV, I usually prefer to watch nature, science or history documentaries, and the best place to get those is on YouTube, where there are a large number of such shows uploaded from PBS or the BBC or the Discovery Channel. Many cable channels, like the Smithsonian Channel or the History Channel, also have websites that offer free downloads for selected recent episodes. If I have a good wifi signal, I can watch as I stream. If there’s no wifi where I am parked, I can go to a mall or library where there is a good signal, and use one of the various free YouTube downloaders to store the shows I want on my hard drive so I can watch them anytime later.
I can also watch over-the-air network TV on my laptop, using a digital TV antenna/receiver that plugs into my USB port and streams live TV to Windows Media Player. Usually no matter where I am, I can get at least one or two channels. I mostly use this to either watch the local PBS station if I can get it, or to watch local TV news and weather.
In addition to TV and movies, I have a Kindle reader on my laptop for ebooks, and a large variety of downloaded MP3 files for listening to music or podcasts.
And I can even get my popcorn in the Walmart. :)
I’ve also always been a fan of strategy board games, including that old standby “Dungeons and Dragons”. In the Internet Age there is a new category of board games known as “Print and Play”, in which the game board and all the game pieces can be downloaded (often for free) and printed out. Some games are specifically designed for solo play. So sometimes on rainy afternoons I’ll spend a few hours playing “Thermopylae” or “Dungeon in a Tin” or “Pocket Civ”.