Archive for Travel / lifestyle musings
February 15, 2006 at 10:12 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
It’s a rare day that I post twice, but Bert & Janie showed up with my camera and so I had to rush down to the coffee shop to upload photos of Big Bend for you (which you can see by clicking the Pictures link to the left), and to mention a few other things.
I have posted my essay on the plight of the people of Boquillas Mexico. You can find that by clicking the “Gather” link to the left. I think their story is interesting and I hope you’ll enjoy the essay.
Victor Valdez, lifetime resident of Boquillas Mexico, singing by his handmade walking sticks
The other thing is simply that we keep meeting great people and I want to mention some of them. Besides, David, who I mentioned earlier today (below), we have met the McLravys of Lansing Michigan, who are traveling in their Airstream Land Yacht. Yvonne McLravy is quite a good self-published author, who gave me two of her books. I was up late last night reading her account of traveling Alaska’s Inner Passage, a trip we plan to do in the next couple of years. She may contribute some writing to the magazine in the future.
We also met Carol McNair, who is the general manager of the campground we are staying in. She dropped by today to say she is a big Airstream fan and owner of an Excella herself. She is one of those folks who stopped in Terlingua for a visit (four years ago) and just never left. Carol is also a subscriber to the magazine, which always warms my heart…
So between the new photos and the Gather essay, there is a lot of content for you to browse today. Enjoy! Let me know what you think. We’re off for a hike in the Chisos Basin now.
February 9, 2006 at 1:12 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
There are a lot of things I don’t get to talk about in this blog when we are traveling. The day-to-day experiences are enough to fill this blog, so I often skip little things. But today, since I’m parked in the bedroom working on the computer, I have no time to go play and I do have a bit of time to reflect.
One of the things I don’t get to talk about much is what I’m reading. Although you might not care, what I’m reading has a huge impact on how I see our surroundings, and hence what appears in this blog. A nice feature of the Airstream we have is that it has two bedside nooks, perfect for books. I like to read each night before bed, and so the nook is always full. Traveling also means learning about the places you visit, and one of the very best places to find books about local culture and history is the store at any national or state park.
My real problem is restraining myself from buying a half-dozen books at every stop. We just haven’t got room to store them all! So I usually only buy one every few stops. In Nevada I bought “Touring California & Nevada Hot Springs,” in Arizona I bought “Roadside History of Arizona” and “The Harvey Girls,” but these are more reference books than literature.
For this reason I was thrilled when Andy left me a copy of “Sailing Alone Around The World,” by Captain Joshua Slocum. Slocum was a a washed-up old mariner with familial, legal, and financial problems when in the 1890s he built a personal sloop and sailed off solo to adventure. His voyage, a sort of “Walden on the sea”, became famous, and Slocum eventually wrote this book about it. In the end, he emerged from the trip “ten years younger” than when he left Boston, and one pound heavier.
Slocum’s book is a remarkable bit of prose especially considering the author had no more than a third-grade formal education. The flow and pacing are beautiful, and the romance he brings to the mundane exercise of piloting a craft across featureless seas is inspiring. He manages to turn even a bout with food poisoning into a thrilling experience.
We, too, are sailing around the world in our own way. Like Slocum we are setting sail with only the vaguest of destinations, and letting the experiences happen as they will. This is part of our “post-modern traveling” philosophy, a deliberate lack of structure that encourages accidental discovery, unexpected turns, startling revelations, and the joy of true freedom.
With a rigid travel program in place, one can nearly eliminate the chance element. The risk of a bad hotel, a dull moment, uncomfortable surroundings, or becoming lost, disappears when one is bound by a pre-programmed schedule that has been carefully vetted by someone before you. But I think this is a false reassurance. Expecting that nothing unexpected will happen is paradoxically a self-fulfilling prophesy that you will be disappointed by something, however small. The world is not so cooperative and predictable, no matter what you pay the tour guide. Our philosphy is that it is best to accept that structure in travel is mostly an illusion, and embrace the challenge of constantly-changing circumstance instead.
Slocum had a tough life, in which he learned much about sailing and human nature, but seemed unable to apply it to his own circumstances until late. For that reason, his voyage around the world appeared to be escapism. But in fact he was finally running to his own true calling as a solo traveler and writer, most comfortable in his ship’s well-stocked library with Thoreau, Tennyson, Melville, Conrad, and Dickens. I am inspired by his ability to finally find himself after a lifetime of frustration and disappointment. It must have been hard to accept that his destiny could only be found by taking enormous risks into an unknown future. But his choice paid off, proving once again that following one’s heart is the best path.
So every night, I marvel at the similarity between the daily steps of his voyage of self-discovery, and ours. This is the stuff that great bedtime reading is made of. I’ll be sorry to finish the book, but glad to have met a fellow traveler such as Captain Slocum.
Sign of the week
What else is in my book nook today? “The World Is Flat,” by Thomas L Fleischman; “The Digital RV” by my good friend R.L. Charpentier (available through Lulu.com or Amazon.com); “His Excellency” by Joseph L Ellis (a biography of George Washington); and a pre-publication galley of “Mobile Mansions” by Douglas Keister (coming out in April from Gibbs Smith).
January 13, 2006 at 9:57 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
You may notice that I’m not updating the blog with our daily travels this week. We have elected to take a week of “vacation” and so I’m only posting non-travel bits until next Thursday.
Now, when I mention the word “vacation” I inevitably get the response, “What — a vacation from your vacation?” So I’ll explain …
Our trip is that of a working family. I still do my day job nearly every day (7 days a week) while we are traveling in our Airstream. As I’ve written before, an Airstream trailer with mobile Internet, cell phones, a laptop computer, a cooperative family, and a lot of personal flexibility make this possible. I work whenever I get a chance, and see the world with my family at other times.
But there’s no substitute for just unplugging. So when we started this trip, we agreed that at least once or twice we would truly disconnect from work and use the time to re-gain our perspective on everything. That’s what a vacation is really about, for me. I don’t want to remember my Airstream year only as a time when I was constantly scrambling to balance the obligations of family and work.
I think the obligations we have taken with us are the key difference between us and retirees. The goal of being retired, for many people, is to have most of the responsibilities of work and family behind you, so that you can roam the country without care. We still have those responsibilities but are unwilling to wait until we are retired to travel, so this is our compromise.
In that sense, we are travelers, not vacationers. It works for us. Life goes on, with all its minor dramas and trials, every day we are in our Airstream, but we enjoy our lives more and suffer the trials less because we are simultaneously doing what we love: seeing America on our terms.
Next week we will go back to our regular program of work and travel. But this week, through next Wednesday, we are just a family on vacation. I’ll let you know what other perspectives I have gained, when we get back. In the meantime, I will post at least every other day, with some answers to your questions and lifestyle tips we’ve accumulated over the past two months.
January 6, 2006 at 9:21 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Remember back in early December when we stopped at Tim Shepard’s house for a night of courtesy parking and an interview? Well, you can listen to the podcast now, on your computer. Just go to www.thevap.com and download Episode 9! You don’t need any special software.
In the podcast, Eleanor and I talk about living on the road, planning, budgeting, getting along, vintage vs. new, packing, laundry, and more.
December 2, 2005 at 11:44 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
One small risk of roaming around with no set plans is that occasionally you have to move on before you’d like to. Our plan was to stay in Capitola tonight and move the Airstream tomorrow morning to a place nearby for storage. But we were paying daily for this campsite and someone else had it reserved for tonight. The rest of the sites in this campground are booked too, so we need to pack up and move on by 12:30 pm. We’ve decided to go over to a parking lot near a laundromat, do some laundry, and then set up at the storage place tonight. We’ll boondock there and hit the road tomorrow, heading toward the Ontario (CA) airport.
It’s going to be a nasty shock traveling without the Airstream for a couple of days, to and from the airport. I just checked hotels in Paso Robles, CA, which was where planned to crash for the night on Saturday. But the Holiday Inn Express is $142/night … a bit more than the $0-25 we would have spent camping. I keep forgetting how expensive travel is if you always stay in hotels!
November 18, 2005 at 9:33 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
OK, I gave you fair warning: this would be a quiet week for the blog. The reason is that once in a while I have an overload of work and can’t maintain the even schedule I strive for. I just posted an essay on Gather about “work/life balance” which you can read by clicking the “Gather” link (to the left), but as it turns out, that essay is really an idealized account of what my life is like.
In reality work doesn’t go on an even keel when you are mobile. We’ve been constantly busy and moving around for two weeks, which meant that a major project due on Nov 20 was looming and nothing was getting done about it. This week it came to a head: I had to set everything aside and get the project done. I hate deadlines for big projects but I’ve never missed one yet and I wasn’t about to miss this one either.
So instead of exploring the central Oregon coast — Haceta Lighthouse, Seal Caves, Oregon Sand Dunes SRA, Florence’s old downtown and river port — I have been hunkered down in front of my laptop, working, working, working.
This is the dark side of traveling and working. Each morning at about 8 a.m., I ride my bike from campsite #140 through the tall pine trees and damp morning air of coastal Oregon. It’s about 3/4 mile down to the “Activity Center” where I can get a desk and free wifi to the Internet. I stay there all day, trying to concentrate on my work, while retirees come and go, playing the occasional game of pool, and working the jigsaw puzzles. Only full-timers roam Oregon this time of year, and we’re the only ones who aren’t retired.
Around lunchtime, Eleanor and Emma show up bearing lunch, and then I’m back at it. In the evening, we hang out in the Activity Center for a while before returning to the trailer for dinner and a movie (last night: Sahara — a bit too violent for small children but fun for adults). It’s a dull life compared to the last month, but a good chance to catch up on everything: phone calls to friends and family; trip planning; laundry.
Eleanor and Emma have had a chance to explore a bit, and they’ve taken some photos that I might get uploaded before we leave Florence. I have learned bits and pieces through them. For example, “sneaker” waves are a phenomenon of the Oregon and Northern California coastline, big surges that come between smaller waves. Here they warn you never to turn your back on the ocean, lest a sneaker wave knock you down. No swimming at most beaches.
The project will be done this afternooon and I’ll be able to resume a more normal schedule which mixes fun and work. Starting on Saturday, we plan to roam down the Oregon coast into Northern California, stopping at Redwoods National Park and Eureka, at least. Should be some awesome photo opportunities along the way: sea lions, rugged coastline, Victorian houses, redwoods, giant sand dunes, etc. Stay tuned.
October 17, 2005 at 6:46 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Plans are always fluid when you are mixing business and pleasure. We didn’t find the Frank Lloyd Wright house I had heard about — I think we missed it in the dark the night before. That’s a drag but we will be back in the spring, I think, so we’ll try harder to get it into the schedule.
Rather than double back for the house tour, we pressed on to Council Bluffs to try to get some work done for a couple of days. I’ve been working every day when I get a chance, but really that’s not enough and it’s time to sit still and catch up. So now we are camped in Lake Minawa SP, which is a nice spot near everything but isolated by a pretty little lake. Hardly anyone here, either, despite wonderful temperatures and great fall foliage. Business requires that we stop in at the local Airstream dealer (a pleasure, really), and while we are here we need to take care of some maintenance on the Nissan Armada.
The process of settling into a site for more than one night is complex but with each time we find it easier. The GPS tells us where to find the local post office, grocery, and other necessities. The campground hosts are usually helpful with other hints, such as nice places to visit and eat. Setting up the trailer for a stop takes no more than 15 minutes (and that’s if we go to the extra step of setting the stabilizers). It’s amazing how simple things please us. A full tank of propane and a place to plug in, and we are happy.
We have also discovered that Indiana and Iowa also make it easy on RV’ers by having dump stations at every highway rest area. They never seem to have lines, either. This is a huge improvement over the northeast, where dump stations are hard to find except at campgrounds, and they usually cost money to use. The highway stops are free! Who would have thought I’d get excited about something like that?
There’s a bike trail right next to this campground. Tomorrow, since we are expecting unseasonably warm temperatures (low 80s) we will try to break away for a couple of hours to try it out. Emma will be ready to ditch her training wheels in a few months if we can keep getting opportunities to practice. Another simple pleasure …
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