HMS Beangle

Welcome aboard! We're sailing across North America in our Bean Stalker teardrop trailer. Come share our journey.

Category: United States

  • Hotels are odd things. Strangers packed into too small a space each morning, huddling over a meagre spread in a kitchenette. Pardon me and Excuse me and May I and Oh, I’m sorry around a warming dish with watery powdered eggs and mass produced sausage patties, a platter of single serve bowls of artificially colored,…

  • Tallulah Gorge

    Well look at that. The first thing we noticed driving into our campsite at Tallulah Gorge State Park was a teardrop trailer in the site next to ours. (The second was that the previous campers at our site hadn’t left on time.) It made my heart happy to see another proponent of the tiny travel…

  • Life has thrown us a curveball

    Around 11:30 am, a driver ran a red light and crashed into the side of the truck. There is extensive damage to at least four panels, the front wheel, maybe the tie rod, and possibly the electrical system. At this point, we don’t have any idea of when it’ll be repaired or if it’s going…

  • Chattanooga, Chickamauga, and Chance

    Grab a cup of something, this is a long one. We fairly raced south from Kentucky. The weather projections were looking quite bad across KY, with heavy rain and extreme cold in the forecast, even the possibility of tornadoes in northern Tennessee. Waking early, we slid well south to Chattanooga and set up camp for…

  • Triple Boone

    (Jeff said that my last post, a ‘Why can’t I sleep?’ special, sounds like everything was all done in a single day. It was not. It covered four days.) After leaving Indiana, we crossed into Kentucky and headed west for Bourbon Country, a little American Revolution history, and unknowingly a lot of Daniel Boone. While…

  • Either cold or wet, but not both please

    Although our plan is to chase the good weather, the reality is that poor weather is going to find us sometimes — especially since we headed south about two weeks later than we probably should have for those warmer temps. Luckily we’re sturdy folk and can tolerate some cold temps. We left Michigan in cold…

  • 19 Turkeys

    When I return to a region so full of family and friends, not a lot of pictures get taken. Sorry, but it’s always been this way. For nearly three weeks, we barely saw the inside of the HMS Beangle, as we curled up in the homes of others. Running water? Right there. Heat? Turned on.…

  • Up North

    Mack-a-naw or Mack-in-awe, I’ve heard both, but it’s definitely not Mack-in-ack. Go ahead and take a sec to practice, if needed. The Mighty Mac can be five miles of swaying suspension terror on high wind days, makes a truly horrendous sound when driving on the inner metal grates, and the edge rails feel far farrrrr…

  • It’s pronounced Past-ee

    When we heard that some of our favorite people were going to be camping near Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, we decided to head to Munising, MI. We didn’t know what to expect with the governmental shutdown, but even if we couldn’t get into the park, we knew we wanted to see Rob and Kate. If…

  • Pig Iron

    There’s no getting around the fact that Fayette — a company town on the shores of Big Bay de Noc, a peninsula on the southern shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula — was a major contributor to America’s Industrial Revolution and the northern states’ wealth after the Civil War. Now the Fayette State Historic Park, it’s…