Moochdocking in Kent

For the past few weeks, Trail and I have been living in our wonderful Airstream but have yet to travel farther than 10 miles from where we bought it. We are currently “Moochdocking” in beautiful Renton Washington at our good friends Jeff and Kate Grubb’s house, more affectionately known as GRUBB STREET. We will continue to be here until December 4th when we begin the traveling life in earnest.

The foremost reason we are here is that every year for some time now we have spent Thanksgiving dinner at the Grubb’s along with a goodly number of mutual friends. The table talk is decidedly Geeky while the food and comradeship are very much home for the holidays. As it will be a while since we next see these cherished loved ones we decided to stay until the annual feast. It also so happens that Jeff and Kate have a sizable driveway in which to park our Airstream, the Yamato.

Parking your trailer at someone else’s home is sometimes called moochdocking since by and large you don’t pay for the privilege. The experience is somewhere between being at a trailer park where you have city water, electricity, and sewer and Drydocking or Boondocking where you have none of that. Generally, you can get limited electricity from your host, borrow the WIFI bandwidth and fill up the fresh water tank from their outside faucets. On the flip side, you have to find somewhere else to dump your waste water tanks and the electricity has to be used gently lest you trip their circuit breakers. It saves a lot of money vs being at a park and can be a really nice way to visit people.

Family and Friends

Our second reason for sticking around is to work the kinks out of trailer life while still close to familiar resources. That has been a very good decision as there have been a good number of kinks to work out and it has been easy to manage them since we are close to friends and family. Of course, it’s also meant that we get to see some folks and they us before we head out.

A side effect of our moochdocking is spending more time in Kent, a municipality south of Seattle in the Green River valley. Most of our good friends of the last decade living here so it made good sense as a base of operations. It is largely suburban mixed with light industrial business parks and retail sprawl. There is still some farmland which used to be the mainstay so you can see cows and goats on occasion next to McMansions and low rise apartments. We have found the people of Kent to be especially warm friendly compared to Seattle proper and there are a number of good restaurants and many useful services here. All in all, it’s a nice place to live and has been very convenient. What it lacks in flash it more than makes up for in comfort.

The worst of the last month has been the weather. With only a few exceptions Seattle weather has finally been living up to its reputation as nothing but rain and gray skies. The weather was phenomenal early this summer so I suppose we were doing, but its made getting out of the trailer and onto some trails a non-starter. Flood watches and wind warnings have been the new normal. Trail has been suffering a bit from cabin fever as a result. Being part cave troll myself and can happily lurk under gloomy skies in a trailer so long as I can run my laptop. To escape the cold and wet we will probably make quick passage south once we do get underway.