Traveling with Beads

I'm back in New Hampshire after traveling 6,000 miles from Arizona and looking at a goodly portion of the countryside to be seen in the U.S.A. I'll post a selection of trip photos after I get through sorting through all of those that we took. Right now I'm going to answer Bad Liz's question about travelin'.

My companion for the winter hand-built the small teardrop trailer for me. No, it isn't the traditional vintage camper style, but made to house beads. Guess you could call it my bead buggy! He bought a Harbor Freight rolling chassis, steam bent a wood top frame to get the right shape and covered it with fiberglass sheeting. If there had been more time it would have gotten painted to match the Honda with California flames. It sure relieved the congestion inside of the Honda and spread the weight out a bit. One quick try-it-out trip and it went on the road.... Only problem was a burnt out tail light bulb.

How do the beads travel back & forth?


All of my beads are packed into flip-top plastic containers. The worst part of each trip is to get the beads that are spread out all over my studio back into their proper containers and boxes.




The individual containers go into Plano #3700 fishing tackle boxes. Those boxes then reside in specially constructed cabinets in each studio. I can see the color groups through the translucent boxes and pull what I need quickly.


When I'm ready to hit the road I put the Plano boxes into L.L. Bean canvas bags. Last time I weighed the bags, I had 250 lbs. of beads. This trip there was 11 of those bags with an average of 7 Plano boxes in each one. That's what got packed into the teardrop trailer along with some tools and a large tote of clothing. That's about 80% of all the beading stuff I own, not counting books and reference materials.

Somewhere, about mile 3,500 we decided to change the route.... and didn't have detailed maps for where we wanted to go... so I bought the HP mobile printer I had been lusting after for some time. We found a back parking lot, hooked everything up, connected to the Internet to see if it worked ..... and laughed at ourselves! We both like rural, unencumbered life styles and yet .... here we were, behind a Radio Shack, in the middle of nowhere with cell phones, a GPS, laptop, printer and a 4 cup coffee maker.