About Gram Weenie

Gram Weenie is a leader and an entrepreneur who's constantly taking on new ultralight challenges. She's been known to limit her international vacation suitcase weight to 25 lbs. She is sure she can shave a few more grams off that total.

Today I Took a Tiny Shower

It’s been 24 days and…finally…today…we have on-site water!  We’ve been so busy these first few weeks that we hadn’t had the time to try out the water and sewer system.  Well today, Kayak Chris hooked it all up.  It’s wonderful to be able to wash your hands without walking to the bath house!  No more rationing water consumption for fear of the late night, flashlight led, trek to the bathroom.  Now we’re living! Continue reading

First Trip: 22 Hours and $1900

Our first trip in the travel trailer was from Northern Virginia to Gatlinburg/Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.  On a normal weekend, that’s a 498 mile, 8 h 48 min journey.  This was no normal weekend however.

We packed up and hooked up our tow vehicle on Friday night so we could get an easy start the next morning.  Early the next day we set off towards our half way stopover point, Smith Mountain Lake, where we’d also visit Gram Weenie’s grandmother.

About an hour into the trip, we stopped for breakfast.  After eating, we followed a road we assumed would take us back out to the highway only to discover a dead end.  We were stuck.  We tried to turn around but the anti-sway bars between our truck hitch and trailer don’t handle sharp angles well.  We ended up breaking off a small piece the hitch and throwing one of the anti-sway bars into the grass.  If an observer hadn’t alerted us to it, we might not have noticed the sway bar was off!  We reconnected it and instead, had to back up, all the way down the road, until we could make a less restrictive turn. Continue reading

Are you guys retired or something?

Ever since we started planning this adventure, we’ve been asked plenty of questions.  Here’s a running list of FAQs and answers.

1. Are you guys retired or something?
This was asked by a travel trailer salesman on one of our fact finding trips.  We’re not retired, but see no reason to wait until we’re retired to live the lifestyle we want!

2. Where are you going?
Everywhere the roads will take us! We plan to head south, do a clockwise loop around the US, and avoid winter weather at all costs.  We’re particularly excited to see or revisit Florida, Texas, Arizona and Utah.
Continue reading

The Sounds of Sterling

While I’ll certainly miss family, friends, and food, there are a number of things I won’t miss about suburban condo living.  Most of them can be classified under what I call “The Sounds of Sterling.”

Even with the windows completely closed, each day brought the following menagerie of predictable sounds. Continue reading

Our Ultralight.Life

Welcome to our Ultralight Life! We are two mid-30s professionals on a life adventure. We’re too young to retire but refuse to wait until retirement to start living the lives we really want.

We’ve thrown ourselves off the “meeting the expectations of others” train and are instead forming a new and experimental path of our own choosing.

We dislike tradition, restriction, regulation, and HOAs. We avoid physical and virtual things that are heavy and tie us down.  We’re not interested in acquiring “things” for the sake of having more.

This quote from Ellen Goodman says it best:

“Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.”

We don’t want to be normal.  Instead, we want: Continue reading