Sprinter, "The Dollhouse"

I have wanted a Sprinter van for a long time. They are cargo vans, but just happen to make great road trip, camping, bike transport mobiles. They aren't too pricey, used or new, but with the added customizations they can be very expensive in both time, and money. Finding used, upfitted ones that are nicely finished is hard, as they are expensive, and rare, and finding one that meets your needs is even harder. Most people build their own. I have been trying to convince my wife for years that we should get / build one. She was somewhat amenable to the idea, but she wanted a Eurovan Camper with the pop top. Those are nice, but for four people (two adults, two teenagers) and two dogs, and four bikes, plus gear, the Eurovan is just too small. Also, with the newest year available in the USA being 2003, and with their known mechanical flaws and very high resale value, I did not want to spend money on one. Next we moved onto the idea of a pop-top camper sprinter. I looked at several. A friend of a friend named KC gave me a tour of his:

KC's pop-top Sportsmobile Sprinter

But I didn't like not being able to stand up in a low-roof Sprinter, which is the only version for which you can get a pop top (Sportsmobile calls it a "Penthouse".)  and I didn't like some of the other downsides to the pop-top; cost, water leakage, wind noise, gotchas with the mechanism, exposure to the elements whether you like it or not, etc. We really reached an impasse here, with Lauren conceding that the Eurovan Camper wasn't right for us, but holding firm on a short-wheelbase, low-roof Sprinter with the pop-top. I just didn't think it would be right for us.

Recently an ad came up on our local craigslist for a short-wheelbase (144") 2007 high-roof Dodge Sprinter upfitted by Outside Van (really by Van Specialties, when the work was done in 2010 that was how it worked) at a price we could afford. It was white, with 59,000 miles on it. We went to look at it and Lauren was smitten. I thought that the conversion was nice, but a bit too minimal for the price being asked, not quite what we'd want - we'd probably end up undoing quite a bit of it to re-do it in the way we'd want - and maybe not long enough. I also had been considering getting the new Ford Transit commercial van (not Transit Connect) because I thought it might provide better / less expensive long-term service, and wasn't sure I wanted the headaches, cost and occasional immobility of a Mercedes Sprinter van in the great expanses of the western USA.

The funny thing is we went from me trying to convince Lauren that we needed a Sprinter, to her trying to convince me that we should get this van, specifically. We did.  The purchase experience was somewhat maddening. The seller and I worked out a price we could both live with, that wasn't so bad. I was approved for an auto loan amount by my credit union that was greater than the cost of this vehicle. I knew that the bluebook value for the van would be far below its asking price, because of the upfitting job. I called the credit union, and also the branch office where I planned to do the transaction, making sure that the transaction would go smoothly. I was assured on the phone that there was no problem, and made sure I had all the paperwork in hand, including an inspection report done at the local DMV office the morning of the transaction, because this van was registered in Oregon and not California. When we arrived at the branch office, we withstood a three-hour odyssey where we were told "Bad news", "problem", "no" and "it isn't going to happen" by someone who was obviously not capable of processing this transaction. The basic problem was that the bluebook value wasn't near the price I negotiated with the seller, and somehow all the previous communications I'd had were immaterial. We spent hours going back and forth on it, until I was able to produce an email reply from someone at Outside Van that mentioned the cost of doing upfitting work. The amount quoted was actually for work we were interested in doing, not for the amount that was done. (Seller did not have the receipt for the work done.) But producing that email saved the day, as they then had a number from a vendor that they could use to bump the value up to meet the price. The seller had run out of time and left by the time we had checks, but we returned to his home later that evening, handed him a check and drove the van home.

Lauren driving the new Sprinter

It was originally a crew van, but the second-row two-person bench and associated hardware were removed. The previous owner bought it from the original owner, an architect that worked at Nike in Oregon, then had Van Specialties / OV convert it. His wife called it "The Dollhouse", because it's a little house that you can fill with little house-like furnishings. It was a fairly minimal conversion that I could afford. My wife and I plan to make it more suitable for us, as budget allows. We are four people, four bikes, two golden retrievers. We go to bike rides and bike races and go camping and on road trips in the western US. There's a chance a paddle board or two would go in/on the van.

Sprinter in our driveway, oil stain from the old tripmobile

Pictures are here

What it has:

• Interweave interior panels, and I believe insulation underneath, rubber floor.
• Mercedes Benz re-badging (was Dodge)
• Outside Van soft goods; rear door pouches, fancy windshield sun protection (not pictured). Also the owner created a cool, hanging storage thing out of fabric, with lots of pockets, which mounts on the mac track. Also included are some simple window sun shades made of Reflectix which velcro into place.
• LED lights in ceiling. They are on the same circuit as the dome lights.
• A single cabinet on the inside left behind driver, above rollover sofa
• mac track on the floors (parallel to centerline, two) and on the walls (two each, vertical on the rear insides
• D-rings in the roof, walls and floor
• rollover sofa on the driver side behind driver seat, not sure dimensions
• CR Laurence (?) tip-out windows middle side left and right
• two hanging bunks made of tubular steel (?) and plywood, which attach to wall mac track and suspend from D-rings in the roof
• blacked aluminum wheels, taller BFG AT tires
• nudge bar (no receiver hitch) with Hella lamps
• fancy Kenwood stereo / nav / backup camera, camera itself in rear plastic above license plate
• two fork-mounts for bicycles on aluminum plate with mac track connectors
• heated, leather, Mercedes front seats
• 12V outlets in the rear of the van
• factory towing package

Here is what we want to change, in rough order:

• Remove sofa.
• Install factory three-person bench seat.
• Add three-panel bed that clears bikes and rear factory bench, without headrests. (Roughly 40" of inside height is needed to clear bikes and bench, with raised floor.)
• Reconfigure floor mac track, add bike mounts for four bikes parallel to centerline, under panel bed in rear, with bike seats dropped if needed.
• roof-top fan, maybe also roof-top vent, maybe cold-air vent on floor
• awning
• solar
• house batteries
• fridge
• microwave
• inverter
• front 2" receiver added to nudge bar
• minimal galley
• rear heater

Week four; good news but no changes

I went to see my orthopedist today for my four-week appointment. It's been four weeks and two days since I broke my hip. This is the second time I've seen him. (First was Friday 6/11 & Monday 6/14.) They shot x-rays, and the ortho told me the films look good. I've got some compaction, where the bone is kind of smashed into each other at the break site, shortening the neck by about .5cm, which is good I think he said. ("Imagine an ice cream cone where the ice cream fell off. You pick it up and smash it back onto the cone, so that it won't fall off again. That's compaction.") The upper screw has not backed out, nor has the dynamic hip screw (DHS) below it. However the compaction has the upper screw hanging out a little bit, with its washer loose. He showed me the two week and four week x-rays side by side, and pointed out that some gaps are filling in. He told me there's no sign of avascular necrosis (AVN) yet, which is very good news. I am still in some danger of experiencing AVN in the future. He recommended two more weeks with no weight bearing, and also to continue working from home. The concern is that BART and its steps, escalators and urine-soaked elevators are not safe for a person with a healing broken hip, on crutches. I'd agree. At six weeks I'll see him again, and he'll probably allow me to go into the office, and also to begin putting a little weight on my left leg, and progressively more each week thereafter. He also said that he'd recommend taking the hardware out of my leg at some point in the future. I was happy to hear that! I'm not sure when it would happen, and it would also mean another six weeks off the bike, but I know I'll prefer it. He said he didn't think I'd need a bone graft for the removal, that it would probably fill in fine by itself. We talked about some of the 'funny feelings' I've had, and he said that all of them sound benign. (A click in my left hip, once, removing my wallet while driving, a feeling of movement once, while sleeping, and some new pains that I didn't have before.) We also talked about how I stopped taking the calcium supplements, as well as vitamin D and magnesium, because the calcium supplements did seem to trigger afib, and he agreed to stay off them and eat healthily, with lots of dark greens in my diet. I'm doing that as much as I can. I talked about how, although I try to not place any weight on my left foot, sometimes getting up, carrying things while on crutches, getting in and out of cars, et cetera I do place some weight on my left leg, but that I try really hard not to. He said that's OK, to continue to try to keep my weight off of it for now.

I feel better, emotionally. Whew! I can see a happier future.

Week three, I'm still blue

I am three weeks and two days into my recovery from a broken left hip. My recovery is supervised by an orthopedist, (see update at week one and week two) and he's recommended no weight bearing for the hurt leg, just "toe touch" walking with crutches, and maybe some time walking in a pool. I haven't been in a pool yet, but I've been hobbling around. I can and have driven, although the twenty one steps from our angled driveway to our front door make me avoid it as much as I can, and climbing into my tall Toyota Land Cruiser isn't easy. I am probably putting more weight on the left leg than I should, but I don't have anyone waiting on me, either. My family is already pretty tired of me asking for help.

I've been really depressed, stuck in the house, working from home. I've had lots of visitors, and they have greatly cheered me up. Sunday Lauren brought me to Wente Vineyards, where her friend Katy works, for some wine tasting. Joining us were Austin and Celeste, and we also sat with Katy's fiancee Tim, and his friends Sue and Chip.

Tasting wine with Austin and Celeste

Week two, I'm blue

I went to see an orthopedist last Friday, 7/11, and again for x-rays last Monday 7/14. He's a cyclist, local, referred by another friend who's a rider. Nice guy. I gave him the CD with x-ray and fluoroscope images from before and after my femur surgery, and contact info for the surgeon who did the work in UT.

One week later

It's been a week and a day since I had my left femur screwed, bolted and plated back together. I've been home for five days. I'm more alert, more mobile, and in a little less pain each day. Still just doing "toe-touch" on the bad leg, no weight bearing yet, using crutches to get around. One thing I've discovered with crutches; you cannot carry anything. Haven't yet come up with a good strategy for this, except to ask my family for help. I can use one hand to carry stuff, pinch the crutch with my armpit on that hand's side, and swing it with my armpit, but that's dangerous - using only one hand to control the crutches - and I think it's not good for your armpit to put so much weight on it.

A shower stool makes taking showers safe and possible. It's important to keep clean, with all the sitting and lying down that follows a broken hip. BTW this has confused people; I broke my femur, which is my upper leg bone. I broke it near the ball that fits into the pelvis' socket. That joint is called the hip joint. So I broke my femur, and I broke my hip. If I had broken my femur down towards my knee, I might have gotten a cast. But because of where I broke it, they had to operate to put it in the right place. I'm lucky, too, in that way. The surgeon talked about possibly having to make two incisions to align the bones, but he found the bones in alignment I guess using the fluoroscope, so only one incision was needed.

One of the odd coincidences for me was that I had Kaiser Permanente health insurance on the day of my accident, through my employer, but that changed on the Tuesday after my accident, as did my employer. Now I have BlueCross / BlueShield of Texas coverage, as my previous employer (from Texas) terminated Kaiser Permanente coverage on 7/1, replacing it with BCBS. This is a continuation of my previous employer's healthcare. On 8/1 I get BlueCross / BlueShield of Illinois coverage from my new employer.

I don't have a new job, but in a way my company has a new job. We were bought by a competitor, the Department of Justice cried foul, sued on anti-trust grounds and won. The competitor had to divest itself of our company's assets, and restore us to a pre-acquisition state of competitiveness. A group from Chicago that was already doing some similar work raised some capital and bought us. I've basically worked at the same company for 2.5 years, but its just changed ownership for the second time, and the new entity still has the same name as it did when I joined. Anyway, that's the employer changing bit.

So I have to select a new GP and an orthopedist who will accept both BCBSTX and BCBSIL coverage. Hope to have that sorted, and see someone soon. I don't yet have a recovery plan. I'll give the new orthopedist contact info for the surgeon in UT who worked on me, and a CD-ROM with x-ray and fluoroscope images from before and after the accident. They'll help me recover and rehabilitate.

I want to walk and ride my bike and be able to leave the house! My family has been very helpful, and my work has been very understanding. I'm looking forward to getting better.

Milk Money

I bought a new/used project bike frame, placed the winning bid for an XL Lenz Milk Money on ebay before I got hurt, and paid for it the morning after my surgery, in my hospital bed. I've always wanted one of these. It's a single-speed, full-suspension mountain bike frame. I'll use it for night rides, especially in winter when it's wet and muddy. It'll also make me strong again. A single speed needs a chain that's constantly in perfect tension. The front and rear sprocket are ideally always in the same relationship to each other, so that the chain can never slip. And of course they must be in the same plane. This is basically impossible on any normal full-suspension frame, where the rear wheel moves in a variable path through its travel, at variable distances from the bottom bracket. Hardtail single speeds are fun, but a FS single speed would make a lot of the riding I do even funner. The Milk Money frame uses a unique suspension where the front pivot is concentric on the bottom bracket shell. It is not the most optimal suspension design, but it is the most optimal suspension design for a single speed. This version doesn't offer a lot of travel, just 3", and it ramps up pretty hard at the end of that travel, which is fine. Even a little rear suspension, paired with a similar amount up front (100mm fork, or almost 4") would work pretty well. 

I certainly don't need another bike! But this will give me something to do, and to look forward to, and help get me strong again, while I recover from a broken hip. My friend Chris Bondus just built one of these, and his build will inspire mine. I can't wait!

Broken femur, or how I went from rebooting a company, to 8200' in the aspens, to the hospital bed in two days

The week of June 23-27, 2014 was a crazy one for me. We were preparing to reboot our software company, doing a lot of work to re-route networks, update vendor relationships, extract code and documentation from another company, and be ready to go live and make our customers happy on "zero-day". I was working hard, not sleeping much. Riding bikes was out the window. Coincidentally, on the Friday of that week I was to fly out to the NICA 2014 Conference. Vanessa Hauswald had asked me to come to Utah, take skills training from Lee McCormack of Lee Likes Bikes, using his NICA curriculum, so that I could come back to my home League, NorCal, and train other coaches and kids. I was excited about this, because it meant a trip to Park City, UT, a chance to learn some cool skills, a chance to meet and hang out with a lot of coaches from around the USA, and also League Directors from all the state leagues.