I've mentioned the website Boondockers Welcome on our site before - you can read more about it in my post here - but once again we had the pleasure of hosting some really awesome people in our driveway! A few weeks ago, we hosted Thijs and Rieneke who are full-time RVers from Virginia Beach, Virgina (originally from Amsterdam the Netherlands). Thijs and Rieneke travel and live in a converted/renovated Sprinter Chassis diesel. They've tricked the thing out to the max, and as our son said, "It's awesome!" Their RV is completely solar with a composting toilet, all LED lighting, a lithium battery pack, and a heat exchanger that supplies heat from the engine. Not only that, but it looks hardcore too!
Thijs and Rieneke have traveled all over the world - including to Africa on a 5 year honeymoon. Currently, they are gearing up to head down to South America in their RV. We sat and talked with them for quite a while, comparing stories of the US National Parks and our time "out west." They turned us on to a place called Antelope Canyon in northern Arizona, which we hadn't heard of. We looked it up and it looks so awesome that we've changed our trip plans for next summer to include a stop there. They also told us of a trip through Canada and the day they parked in Nova Scotia (or was is Labrador?) to eat lunch overlooking the ocean and saw a humpback whale breaching over and over again for about 30 minutes! Rieneke showed us the video on her phone and it was amazing!
They had had their doggie, Cacao with them, and our son loved playing with him and chatting about the RV. They had raised the RV a bit to be able to handle a little off-roading in South America, plus added a bank of badass-looking lights across the top, which he thought made the RV look like a monster truck, lol.
Rieneke is an artist who sells her work all over the world while they travel, and as a gift, she left us a thank you card made from one of her paintings. It's so beautiful. You can see more of her work at www.rieneke.com She is quite talented and has a marvelous appreciation and understanding of light. Her portraits look almost like photographs, but even better.
We're so fortunate and appreciative that we can share these experiences with our children. Not only does traveling show them the world that is out there, but opening up our "home" to travelers also allows them to meet people from far away places, other cultures, and experience different global perspectives.
