Lighting and Windows: Installing a skylight, window, bubble dome or double decker is a major project, but the light and/or space will be your reward. Materials suitable for a skylight or window are likely to be found in a junkyard, a stained-glass window from a house being torn down, a porthole from a boat, a glass camper window with a screen found at the flea market.

The top half of a VW bus or bug, sliced off and welded onto the roof of your rig is another popular possibility for added space and light to your living quarters.

Often, privacy rather than light will be your goal. Curtains are your answer here. Heavy material or black crepe will give you day or night privacy.

Stoves: There are different types of stoves for heating and cooking that you will want to investigate. For heat, many will prefer wood-burning stoves or kerosene, or perhaps you will want more sophisticated propane or butane gas stoves. A word of caution: don't try to use gasoline. It explodes.

For simple cooking, you can always count on a Coleman stove and for simple heating, a catalytic heater works fine: they both run on Coleman fuel, which costs about $1.85 a gallon. (not these days!, try $5.99)

Small wood-burning stoves used for heating can be quite efficient and charming at the same time. Wood stoves will heat just as quickly as any other stove. The stove should be in as central a location as possible for the best distribution of the heat.

(Is that a melted plastic wastebasket being used as a wood storage container next to the hot stove? -Sharkey)

"The only thing anybody's hassled us for pretty much is 'Where you going to park all those buses?' So that's what we're out doing. Also, we're learning a whole lot. One thing we learned is that you can drive for five hundred miles at a time in parts of the United Stated and not see anybody else. We've been up in places where there just ain't any people for as far as you can see in any direction, for miles and miles and miles. They talk about it being crowded right around New York and Los Angeles, it's really crowded and not much fun. But you get out in the rest of the country and there's a lot of country left, and it ain't so bad. It's pretty good-looking country."

-Stephen

(Stephen Gaskin led a caravan of 75 buses across the country from San Francisco to The Farm, in Summertown, Tennessee, a journey described in his book, The Caravan)

Jodi Pallidini, an exhibited painter, craftswoman, and book illustrator, has traveled in the Southwest and Mexico in her family truck, "The Brown Rose of Tibet."

Beverly Dubin, a published writer, artist, and photographer, has traveled extensively throughout the United States.