Terlingua Bay co.

This is an experiment to see how big I can get the software to render the pictures in their current resolution…thanks, Wanda!

We moved into the bus on Christmas Eve Day- me, Dave and Henry the cat. Brent and Brendan (who was visiting, kittycat courier extraordinaire) helped out tremendously in a myriad of ways. After 3 nights on the floor, David built us a beautiful bed which is SO comfortable and huge that I really have a hard time leaving it in the morning.

Dave built a square frame on top of the rail that was revealed close to the bus floor, once the seats were removed. He added two 2×4’s for bracing, and then laid the bed slats on top. After being screwed into place, the bed was ready to sleep on. It took him about two days (no fans or a/c- it was sweaty work!) Thank you, Dave, for making us a swell place to rest our bones!

Yep, we’re home!

Here are some pictures of various bits of the land being made into manageable surfaces. It was so muddy these days that getting stuck and losing one’s boot was a very real problem!

I wisely stayed at home for a few days, while Mikali, Dave and Brent and the gravel trucks pitched in to render an actual driveway and shelter. But now…it’s a place we can get onto and use! And check out the recycled, re-purposed housing! It’s the 37-foot, non-running yellow thing that the bus company is real glad to have off their junk lot. It was towed off the lot and the hauled up into place onto the lower cleared pad, leaving the upper pad free for building at a later date. From what I hear, it took some doing and more gravel than expected to accomplish this, but we’ve now got a very solid driveway that will stand up to the heavy rains that we get on the east side of Hawai’i island.

Long-time followers of Terlingua Bay will remember that we used to live in a very similar converted schoolbus when we lived in Texas’ Big Bend along the Rio Grande. We were most astonished to find this one languishing in the buslot near our office. It doesn’t work in every conceivable way except one- it gets you up off the jungle floor instantly, away from bugs and wild pigs. You do have to get the seats out before you can do anything else…but that’s why we have a sawzall. This familiar yellow hulk cost less than a nice EZ-up picnic awning at the big box store, and it counts as recycling too. Brent (www.brent.fm) pronounced it one seriously green tech box for living!

And we do have a rather large living room- acres of it…

We’ve been asked by family and friends to document the next step of our journey,
which involves making our home- a permanent basecamp, if you will. Although our
version of home may be vastly different than yours, we hope to shine some light on some
sensible, low-cost and in some cases recycled ways of living that are available to
anyone interested in living closer to the land.
In order to have a home, you must first acquire some land. In order to have the land be
rendered useful for making a home, you must find someone with the right tools to help you
out. You must also decide how much of the land you want to leave alone. Since we are
land conservation types, we have decided on selective clearing (versus bulldozing the
heck out of the ‘aina, which is the Hawai’ian word for “land”).
Fortunately, we have acquired three acres of land; and we have also located the
people with the right tools. We live on the island of Hawai’i, but the techniques we’ve learned

will work anywhere.

this is the driveway

Dave walks up toward the house pad

round about amidships in the clearing layout

http://www.ontrackequipment.net/

Mikali from On Track selective landscaping (pictured @ the top of this post) is a real artist, and doing an amazingly sensitive job of clearing selectively. It’s kind of mildly shocking to be causing a swath to be cut into the land- but it is being done by someone with similar land conservation opinions as our own, and it just has to be done in order to utilize our land! Also, it is very exciting. More pictures as the job progresses!

Greetings, planet earth!



our property is to the right of the frame; the Pacific Ocean is the blue stuff


this is where we decided to bring in the driveway


Dave (visible) and Miles (only his hat visible) hike in to
check out the lay of the land


the view from the top of the lot; entrance will be down the road on the right