Archive for Travel / lifestyle musings
December 16, 2006 at 12:04 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
I’ve taken time off from the blog to concentrate on other things this week, including family and personal obligations. We’ve been doing the low-key things that comprised our life before we became wanderers: casual dinners with family and friends, attending a charity event, walking down the road with the dog, decorating the Christmas tree, seeing a movie.
Dinner with Christine
Since we aren’t having fabulous Airstreaming adventures, my attention has gone to the more subtle aspects of this full-timing lifestyle. Although taking off in a travel trailer is popularly viewed as the adult equivalent of running away with the circus, in reality we are as connected to our home base as we ever were. We haven’t fled our obligations, we’ve only relocated them.
This week, for example, we had our dentist appointments. A mundane thing, until you consider that for us dental and primary medical care are usually hundreds or thousands of miles away. I found that while I’d been away my regular dentist had retired and his practice had been taken over by a much younger guy, the very affable Dr Congelton. I also discovered I’d lost a small filling, but there’s no time to get it replaced before we fly back to Tampa. Fortunately, the doc and his staff were enthusiastic about our trip and happy to offer advice on the best way to deal with the situation.
This is the sort of cooperation that makes the trip work. Behind the scenes there is our support network: a Postmistress who handles our mail forwarding via email; a dentist and doctor who help us figure out how to maintain our health with no fixed address; a tax guy; friends who store our “spare” Airstreams, and other friends who provide logistical and emotional support; the storage unit; and the all-important family who give us a place to come back to. You can’t really run away with the circus and leave all your obligations behind without also losing important things, but you can pretend.
We’ve also been lucky. Sure, the hard drive/ GPS/ cell phone failed, a wheel came off, and Eleanor had a vicious five-day migraine, etc., but ““ at the risk of sounding like an old fart ““ we’ve still got our health. Emma’s doing great. We’re all still happy. I don’t worry about where my next meal is coming from (although it won’t be the Grand Degustation at Charlie Trotter’s), and considering that a large percentage of this world still does, that’s something to be thankful for. When things look gloomy, I try to remember that.
Coming back from Vermont we will mentally start another leg of our travels, this time traveling slowly across the south toward California. We have huge plans, including visiting many friends, looking for property in the southwest, attending several events, and working hard to grow the magazine. Most important will be a careful exploration of small towns that we might want to settle in next winter. Our list of places to check includes towns such as Fredericksburg, Marfa, and Ft Davis TX, Silver City NM, and Ojai CA.
We’ve already been doing this for a while, in the background. We’ve scoped out Eureka, Julian, Borrego Springs and Nevada City in CA. Also, Alamagordo NM, Patagonia, Sedona, and Bisbee AZ, St George UT, Boulder City NV, and dozens of others. Some we can quickly identify as not for us based on real estate prices or lack of local culture, and others (like Nevada City and Silver City) deserve a second look.
Eventually the trip will bring us to a culmination where we find a second home base for winters, and gradually we’ll settle into a “working snowbird” existence. But the extended trips in the Airstream will never end, I hope. This experience has brought too much value (friends, learning, personal growth) to our lives to put it behind us. The quiet weeks like this one remind me that we need to find a way to balance the opportunities of travel with the values of a fixed location.
August 22, 2006 at 9:00 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
We screwed up our courage and headed over to the two 10×13 storage units that we rented way back in June 2005, the month we sold our house.
For comfort and convenience, we took the Airstream with us. This allowed us to compare what we had in the trailer with stuff we found in storage, and of course it gave us a convenient place to take breaks and get cold drinks from the refrigerator.
I had thought the process would be straightforward, but it wasn’t. We were immediately overwhelmed by the sheer volume of “STUFF” we had stored. When we left on our trip last October, the idea was to come back in 6 or 7 months and build a house. Along the way, the plan changed, and so when we got back to see what we had left behind, it was more than a little shocking.
Houses allow you to accumulate stuff, and big houses like our previous one can accumulate a LOT of stuff. We have everything in storage that you can imagine: housewares, linens, clothes, toys, books, appliances, furniture, bicycles, office equipment, tools, pictures … and so much more, you just can’t believe it until you see it. Despite the fact that we spent months in spring 2005 giving stuff away, selling things, and throwing stuff out, there is still an amazing amount of just plain worthless STUFF in our two 10×13 storage units.
And it’s costing a pile of money to keep it there. In fact, I would be surprised if the used market value of everything in both units exceeds $10,000. Yet our cost to store it all for the past year has been over $3,000. This is obviously nonsensical from a financial standpoint.
A lot of the stuff seemed to have sentimental value when we stored it. Some pieces seemed like they were worth keeping because the cost of replacing them later would have been much higher. And many other things were just “too good” to give away or throw away.
But now our perspective is different. It has been a year and we haven’t needed 90% of it. We haven’t missed 98% of it. Our lifestyles are lighter now, my office is leaner now, our plans are different now. If we build a new place it probably won’t be close by, so it may be cheaper to buy new things than to transport all this across the country. The “stuff” needs to find a new home.
We started in on the piles but it was too much to tackle in one day. Tomorrow we’ll be calling auction houses, cleanout services, used furniture stores, Goodwill, and anyone else we can think of. It took years to accumulate all these things and it will clearly take at least weeks or months to get rid of most of it. Anyone need a nice three-piece set of black walnut living room furniture, a collection of old Polaroid cameras, or a unicycle?
August 20, 2006 at 10:18 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Home at last. We are parked, temporarily, in the driveway of one of our longest-term neighbors. Mary L happens to have a nice straight long driveway and she was happy to lend it to us tonight so we wouldn’t have to go searching for a campground. I grew up two houses away from here, and lived on this street from 1966 through 1981, so courtesy parking my Airstream at the neighbor’s house really is a new twist on “coming home.”
Mary L and my mother greeting the Tour of America
Emma is having a long-awaited sleepover with her grandmother tonight. Eleanor and I are preparing for a lot of tasks we need to complete while we are in Vermont: car inspections, maintenance, dumping unneeded stuff into storage, selling off furniture, cleaning the Airstream, checking on friends, etc. We will be very busy, I expect.
Along the way here we came up I-87, the NY State Thruway, which comes up from Albany into the Adirondacks. I had forgotten how hard it can be to find gas in the Adirondacks, and made the mistake of exiting the highway onto Route 8 near Horicon with only 1/4 tank left. Thus began our unintentional empirical test of the gas gauge’s accuracy …
I have not had the occasion to test the gauge below about 1/8 of a tank during our ownership of the Armada. However, I have been in this situation before with our prior tow vehicle, a Honda Pilot. The sinking realization that you are on perhaps the last gallon or two of fuel, and making headway at only 10 MPG is bad enough. But when you are in a place known primarily for trees, lakes, mountains, and remote villages — on a Sunday afternoon at 5 pm — in the rain — in a place where cell phones do not work — the sinking feeling turns into a stomach-churning nightmare.
Turning around on a twisting Adirondack road with a 30-foot trailer is not often an option. There wouldn’t be any gas behind us, anyway. Garminita’s database of gas stations has proved to be unreliable, so she wasn’t much help. I began to drive more carefully, touching the brake minimally, slowing down, coasting wherever possible. Mentally I began reviewing the procedure to follow if the engine suddenly sputtered and quit (power steering and power brakes would fail, but the trailer brakes would still work).
One option we have always reserved for emergencies is to park and unhitch the trailer roadside, then go get gas. Without the trailer, our fuel economy doubles, which could make all the difference. I was getting ready to do that after we passed through Horicon, Brant Lake, and Hague without spotting an operating gas station, and the fuel gauge passed below the “E” indicator.
The little orange “low fuel” light was on for over fifteen miles, and our level of despair was peaking, when we spotted an unexpected pair of gas pumps in a dirt lot next to a small campground. It was the sort of impossible gas station approach that I would normally bypass (uphill, two sharp turns), but in this case I was pleased to be gouged at a price about $0.40 per gallon more than what it would cost just 10 miles away. I bought three gallons, maneuvered very carefully to escape the pumps, and drove on to Ticonderoga to fill up at a more normal price. Between the two stations we bought 25 gallons.
So now we know: the gauge can go below the empty mark in this truck. The tank is rated for 28 gallons, but I would not dare to conclude that we had three gallons left. I think it more likely that the pumps shut off early. Now that we’ve “tested” the gauge, I hope never to cut it that fine again.
August 3, 2006 at 11:55 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
A few days ago when were browsing around Colorado Springs I spotted an interesting looking restaurant called “The Edelweiss” (shouldn’t it be “Der Edelweiss”?). Tonight, Arthur and Allison proposed taking us there. They spent a few years in Germany and gained an appreciation for German food. Plus I could not recall ever having been to a German restaurant so it was worth going just to try.
The food was indeed good, and it was a nice way to wrap a nice week of visiting. Of course, I didn’t do much this week other than work on the dining room table, but Eleanor and Emma got to see a fair bit of Colorado Springs. There’s still more to check out, but we plan to be through here again next spring and hopefully I’ll be less busy with work.
Emma, Allison, and Hannah at the zoo
I think part of what made this week so pleasant is having the Airstream as our home base. Visiting people can be so stressful when you are under their roof. Their household rules apply, not yours. It’s easy to feel like an imposition, taking up a bedroom or the couch in the den, eating your host’s food, taking up space. With the Airstream we were free to come and go as we pleased, sleep in if we felt like it, have breakfast in our home, and generally stay out of the way. So at the end of a week of visiting, nobody felt tense from “too much togetherness”. I doubt we would have stayed a week otherwise.
Tomorrow we are heading up into the mountains. “Up” is relative, since we are already between 6000 and 7000 feet, but for the next two weeks we will be even higher, in the cooler air. This will be our last move west for a while…
April 16, 2006 at 6:34 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
The Easter Bunny was here last night! We left him some celery and carrots, and he left us a nice basket of candies. (The basket strongly resembles one we were given by a couple we met in Mystic Springs. I wonder if they supply the Easter Bunny too.)
Emma & Eleanor’s eggs
Emma and Eleanor spent the morning boiling up eggs and coloring them, while I wrestled with our trip plans for the next few months. We’re leaving Tampa tomorrow. After several hours with a road atlas and browsing dozens of websites, we have a plan … sort of. It’s as much of a plan as we ever have.
Our intermediate goal is Myrtle Beach for the Region 3 Rally. But we don’t need to be there until the 25th, so our intention is to break it up into several short drives of about 150-200 miles each. So we are going to try to make a few scenic and fun stops along the way.
First stop will be Kissimmee. We promised Emma she’d see Sea World back in San Diego and we forgot to go. We used to spend winters nearby in Haines City, so we have a few other old haunts we plan to visit as well.
Next stop would have been St Augustine but unfortunately with the weekend we couldn’t get a reservation. Instead, we booked one weeknight at Little Talbot Island State Park near Jacksonville, and we’ll see if we can convince the rangers to let us stay longer even though the reservation system says the park will be full.
After that, we’ll wing it. I see a nice county park in South Carolina we might want to head to, and I’ve researched some other possibilities as well. There’s not much to do along I-95 in Georgia or South Carolina, so if we want to have some fun we’ll need to bail out to Rt 17. (Blog reader Brad Arrowood suggested that, and he’s right.)
Even still, I had to pull out all the stops to find a few ideas. There was nothing along our route in our “Watch It Made In the USA” book of factory tours. Nothing in “Howstuffworks.com”. No festivals along our route during that period. Nothing going on in the state parks, except for the interesting state parks (Hunting Island, Edisto Beach, etc.) along the coast, and of course they were booked solid.
Commercial campgrounds were unhelpful as well. They were either outrageously expensive or incredibly dull. I spent an hour today reading online reviews only to conclude there wasn’t any place I’d be happy to pay for, in a place we could use. I finally concluded I’m happier NOT planning sometimes … and instead just picking up what appears interesting along the way.
No, the kitchen isn’t in danger. That’s the rum burning off!
Tonight, Barry dropped by for dinner and dessert. Eleanor decided to make her famous Bananas Foster dessert, which is a favorite of mine. A nice sweet ending to our three weeks in Tampa!
March 31, 2006 at 9:50 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Over the past few months we have met many solo travelers in their RVs. Some roam with a distinct purpose such as work, to avoid the snow, or to visit family. For others the purpose is less clear: they roam for the joy of it, to escape something, to explore. But in common the solo travelers seem very fulfilled, and none have ever seemed lonely.
So for this reason I wanted to try a bit of solo Airstreaming myself. I am not moving around this week, due to being busy with work, but I am alone while Eleanor and Emma are visiting Vermont. I have been interested in finding out how the solo experience feels.
When we were at Manatee State Park a couple of weeks ago, I met a fellow who was in his 50s, retired, gregarious, and yet fairly lonely. He volunteered at the park to fill his time, and chatted up anyone who walked by. He was interested in our travels and said he’d like to travel the country in an RV as well. So I asked him what was stopping him.
“I think I’d be lonely,” he admitted. He was afraid that traveling alone would be an isolating experience. I think he pictured himself in remote spots, with no one nearby. But the reality of traveling this way is that you are usually surrounded by people who are sharing the experience. It is a conscious effort to slip away and find those moments of true privacy. Even in vast national parks, we meet new people every day and the opportunities to make friendships come regularly.
Quite often we’ve met solo travelers along the road who have linked up with others in the same lifestyle. The road is far from a lonely, isolating experience — it’s a broadening experience in which you cannot help but meet people.
That’s what I told him. And ever since that conversation, I’ve wondered what it would be like to travel without my family along, hoping to meet a special someone. Was I too optimistic in my advice?
I don’t think so. We’ve made dozens of great friends through our Airstream travels, and we correspond with them via email and phone regularly, and visit them all over the country. Tonight, here in Tampa, I invited over two such friends, Brett and Barry, to come over for bachelor night at the campground. I would never have met either of these guys if it weren’t for Airstreaming, and they are close friends now.
So what better way to celebrate the bonds of brotherhood than with a $4.99 disposable grill and a few cheeseburgers? Brett brought over the ice cream drumsticks, Barry brought his appetite, and then we sat around and talked about the things guys talk about: women, cars, Airstreams, and cheeseburgers. It was a great way to wrap up a busy work week.
While I miss Eleanor and Emma, and talk to them every day on the phone, I can also see the appeal of solo Airstreaming. I have everything to myself, I can keep whatever schedule is convenient, and the efficient space of the Airstream is ideal for one person. If I ever get lonely, there’s always someone nearby to talk to — and if I get bored with my location, I can pack up and move to some place more exciting. It’s much more liberating than sitting in an apartment or house somewhere.
If you are single and thinking about taking to the road, but afraid you’ll feel cut off, don’t be. The world can be your living room. Traveling solo may be the most invigorating thing you’ll ever do.
February 28, 2006 at 12:57 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
I’m working all day today and haven’t had time for any adventures. Eleanor and Emma are over at Janie Haddaway’s doing laundry, so they are working too.
Since we don’t have any exciting news, I thought I’d share a few photos of us having a typical day in the Airstream. These photos were taken by Andy, who visited us back in Tucson a few weeks ago. He caught us candidly doing the things we do every day.
Every morning the trailer is filled with hubbub. Usually one or both of are working on the computer, and I’m often pacing around talking on the phone. When you call Airstream Life magazine, and you hear noises in the background, just remember this picture of my “office”.
Andy was with us on our hike to Sabino Canyon and I’m really grateful that he took a few pictures of us together. We hardly have any good shots of us as a family. This hike in Sabino Canyon is a treasured memory.
And here I am at the end of a typical day, taking care of subscriber inquiries that came during the day, downloading my photos, and writing up a blog entry for you to read.
We are planning to stay here at NTAC for a couple more days, and then I think we will head over to Roger Williams Airstream in Weatherford for some minor repairs. After that, I am leaning toward visiting Hot Springs National Park on our way north to Indiana, rather than heading west to Mississippi. The more direct route will give us more time to stop along the way.
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