Adventures in Hilo
Zach and I spent about 8 days in Hilo staying mostly in the Walmart parking lot until the 5th day when a security guard told us that this Walmart isn’t like the mainland ones. We moved to the Safeway lot the remaining nights. Honestly, staying in Hilo wasn’t good for either of us. Hilo is a very rainy and rather gloomy place. We were both moody being in a city, but we got a lot accomplished while we were there. We finished the 3/4” plywood floor, treated a lot of rust and got a lot of materials, supplies and plans ready for future projects. Zach also got a lot of his work done since he works part-time online. I’d love to show a final picture of the plywood floor but I haven’t had a chance yet.
We started the week by getting rid of all but the first set of back seats. I thought I might want to keep one set to hold stuff and be seating area, but halfway through the week I realized how much more space there would be without them so I got rid of that set too. It was extremely difficult to get the bolts out of the floor. It took us three days with lots of penetrating oil and teamwork ratcheting. We finally ended up buying a 1.5’ pipe to give more leverage on the ratchet which helped enormously. The space is about 11’ x 5.5’ from the back of the front seats.
For the floor, we got two 3/4” fir plywood and used newspaper to make an outline of the floor. We built the floor with 4 cut pieces total. It probably took a full day of work total but because of logistics it was spread over 3 or so days.
We then traced the newspaper on to the plywood. We were working in the Home Depot parking lot for most of this. We also sanded and treated the big spots of rust.
You can see the newspaper laid out on the plywood here. I’m also charging my solar battery; the panel is on Zach’s bike box. We rented a jigsaw from Home Depot and they actually let us cut in back until a manager showed up and told us that their insurance didn’t cover this. Luckily, she showed up just as we finished the 2nd piece. We then bought a 750watt inverter and cut the rest of the plywood at a park using my battery.
We had to sand down the last piece to fit it in with the others. It fits very snuggly and the wood floor has made things much easier living in the van. I’ll get the final picture of that the next time we unload everything from the back.
During all of this I was actually fighting off a flu-like cold that I think was mostly stress induced. I’m feeling much better now, but I went to a naturopath just to make sure and she put me on some natural, but heavy immune boosting supplement to help me recover faster, which I’m thankful for.
On the 2nd to last night we decided to try parking out in a neighborhood rather than stay at Safeway again. This didn’t work out so well though. It took a long time to find a spot and once we did someone tried to pick the lock on the backdoor (right next to our heads! At another spot we were egged! So we went back to Safeway. lol.
The last day was also it’s own adventure. I took the van to a mom-and-pop place to get the brakes looked at. There were a lot of parts that needed replacing because of heavy use. There were actually cracks in the back discs that looked like the whole thing might break in half! They called us with an estimate of $640 and we verified that labor was included several times. At 5pm when everything was complete we got a call saying the total would be nearly $1150! The lady apologized that she had not added labor and that it was her fault. I had only budgeted $800 for this project, so I was feeling pretty darn worried by the time we arrived at the shop. I told them the situation and that I wouldn’t have agreed to the work if I had known the actual price. After some talking we agreed on $900. Overall, I’d say I probably got a great deal for my new brakes! I really really hope nothing like that ever happens again though, because both parties came away from that feeling bad.
After a great pizza and dessert at Cafe Pesto, we left Hilo on Wednesday night to stay at Laupahoehoe Beach Park. It was so wonderful to get out of the city and back into the more scenic, free-flowing areas of the island.
