Archive for Travel / lifestyle musings
October 16, 2007 at 7:01 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Our attempt to spend a few days in Vancouver was stymied by circumstance. I needed a campground with wi-fi available, to catch up on work, but I hadn’t thought to research it before we went into Canada. Once we got to the Vancouver area, it was raining (of course, because that’s what happens in the Pacific Northwest in the winter), traffic was heavy, and we had no clue where to find an appropriate campground.
After meandering aimlessly through Surrey for a while, and having lunch in a parking lot, we decided to head back across the border so that I could catch up on work with my Verizon card and phone, and skip Vancouver this time.
The good news is that we are safely on the Pacific coast. We got past the final barricade of mountains along Route 5 in British Columbia without incident. Although the weather will probably be rainy here on the coast whenever it isn’t foggy, it will mostly be mild. For example, the weather forecast for Birch Bay (about 100 miles north of Seattle) is virtually the same for every day this week: highs in the 50s, lows in the 40s, and a high probability of rain. Beats snow.
So we can take our time from here. We’re no longer racing against the calendar. Our only scheduled obligation is to meet some friends for Thanksgiving in southern California, and even that plan is still tentative. Worst case, we have a month to drive 1,250 miles through Washington, Oregon, and California. That’s my kind of schedule.
The current discussion is whether we want to return to home base for Christmas. Eleanor and I had another one of those early morning discussions in bed about it. No conclusions yet. We have several possibilities and considerations which make it a tougher decision than you might think.
For one thing, in December RV’ers have a limited range of destinations. For decent weather out west and no risk of snow, we’ve got the valleys of California and Nevada (San Joaquin, Death Valley, and Owens Valley), the Pacific coast, southern Arizona, southern New Mexico, southwest Texas, and Mexico. Any place over 4,000 feet is suspect. Anything over 6,000 feet is very risky. That rules out the entire Colorado Plateau, and most of the western national parks, for examples.
But this is a fun problem to have. We’ll continue to mull it over as we cruise the coastline, and by the time we get to the San Joaquin Valley I’m sure we’ll have something figured out. In the meantime, the next stop will be in the San Juan Islands for a few days, and then over to Olympic National Park this weekend.
Our location: 48 °55’7.11″N, 122 °44’17.03″W
September 24, 2007 at 3:40 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Today is a “down” day, which is a good thing. Cody has gotten a little fall-like weather, with temperatures in the 40s and gray skies today, and we’re all taking the opportunity to stay close to home rather than doing tourist stuff.
Our Airstream is parked next to this campground’s “tent” area. A couple from Vermont with their six-year-old daughter were camped near us, and watching their tent through our window last night I was remembering long-ago nights in a tent in freezing weather with Eleanor. They spent the evening out, probably in a restaurant or local store, to avoid the chilly evening temperatures, while we were comfortable in the Airstream watching a movie and snacking on popcorn. I do like tent camping, but on a night like last night, I’m glad we have the Airstream. Our neighbors are heading into Yellowstone today, as their last stop before they have to head back east.
It won’t be any warmer in Yellowstone. This week when we go there it will be freezing every night and the warmest we will get in the daytime will probably be in the 50s. I’ve been digging through the storage bins of clothes under the bed, making sure my long underwear and warm socks are still there. Fleece hats and gloves are in the closet. Since we’re meeting Bert and Janie there, I expect to spend a day out in the cold stalking wildlife or some such thing with the camera. It’s good to be prepared for the worst when you go out with Bert. He has a knack for finding “interesting” situations.
Eleanor used some of her time today to clear out the freezer, defrost, and find some long-forgotten food that needs to be cooked soon. There was enough “snow” from the freezer to make a slushy for Emma, and now the trailer smells like Thanksgiving as Eleanor turns the various freezer surprises into something delicious.
Down days are an essential part of the full-time life. We do the sorts of things we used to do on quiet Sundays in fall back in Vermont: clean, putter, read, cook, and generally catch up on the little things. One of my things to do in town on a down day is to hunt up a local barbershop and get a month’s worth of haircut. Since I never know who is going to cut my hair, or what sort of job they are going to do, it helps to have low expectations. Usually Eleanor looks at my hair as I come in the door and scrunches up her nose, but today she actually liked what they did. Maybe I’ll have to come back to Cody for all my haircuts from now on.
Emma is doing homeschooling but she doesn’t realize it. She’s done a few pages in her math workbook, passed a little math test I made up for her, read a story, given me an oral book report, and now she’s writing in her “Book of Stories.” The best kind of homeschooling is the kind that is nearly invisible to the child.
The weather today reminds me that the days are getting shorter, and winter is really coming. We’ll experience a few weeks of cold (and damp, up in the Pacific Northwest), and then start down the west coast through California. Eleanor and I sat down with the atlas and a list of ideas, and worked out a tentative plan for the next two months. We’ll probably spend most of November traveling through inland California, with little side trips to the national parks that aren’t closed for snow, and eventually end up in Arizona by December. When we get there, I want a giant burrito from Nico’s. Then I’ll feel like I’m home.
Visiting California is like visiting an entire country. Tackling California is the hardest (and yet most appealing) planning task of all our full-time travels. It’s huge from north to south, and we have dozens of friends and acquaintances who live there — all of whom we want to see. The routing is nearly impossible and there’s no doubt we will keep tweaking it right up to the last minute. Where will we spend Thanksgiving? Do we want to go Point Reyes or Napa Valley? Route 1 or inland? Redwoods or San Joaquin Valley? How best to avoid the snow in the Sierra Nevadas, yet have a chance at Lassen Volcanic Park and Yosemite?
But these are fun problems to work out, knowing that no matter how we go, we will have a great time. I don’t know how to have a bad time in California. It’s a great state. And today, our “down day”, is the best time to work it all out.
September 16, 2007 at 8:09 am · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
One of the things I like the most about our lifestyle is the endless opportunity to meet interesting people and learn about things I’ve never thought about before. If you read the archives of this blog, you’ll see we’ve been surprised by all kinds of interesting things.
For example, this week one of my photos on Flickr was selected by a group called Cityparrots.org. There’s no fame or fortune to accrue from being selected, but the photo was featured in the group and it assists the research that the group does.
What I find interesting about this is that my little contribution to Flickr paid me back by introducing me to something interesting and new. Once I heard about Cityparrots I had to go check out their website and read the discussion form on Flickr. I learned that parrots thrive in urban environments, and they are in more places than just San Francisco (where this picture was taken). I was surprised to learn that other species of parrots live in New York City, where I would have not expected they could survive the temperatures.
It’s just another example of the broadening effect of what we do, but also it reminds me of the value of sharing what we do with other people. I like having eclectic knowledge and new experiences. Last week I got a chance to try fire-eating. Last winter I got to fly a Bell jet helicopter simulator. Next month we’ll go hike to one of the last remaining glaciers in the US. All of these things resulted not from our own creativity and initiative, but from sharing our experience with people of all stripes, who then shared their perspective on the world with us.
So it comes back to the friends we have made along the way. Meeting people — especially people who are different from us — is the key. There are six billion ways to look at this world, and the only way you’re going to appreciate them is to meet some of the six billion people who inhabit it.
Yesterday we drove down to Colorado Springs to see some relatives. We took a drive up toward the “Seven Falls” area and stopped at Helen Hunt Jackson Falls. The volunteers there had set up a little spot where children could paint watercolors of the falls, which Emma and her cousin did very happily.
Since I’m still reading Dee Brown’s “Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee,” I was intrigued to find that Helen Hunt Jackson was also an important documenter of the history of how Native Americans were displaced and systematically destroyed by the US government in the mid-19th century. Her book, “Century of Dishonor” is still available in paperback.
Today we are gearing up to move northward on Monday. It seems odd to leave, because we are so comfortable here. Colorado is a favorite state of ours, and there’s an incredible amount that I want to do still: mountain biking, hiking, touring a gold mine, the Air Force Academy, several museums, more friends, etc. But we are working against the weather. Interesting things await to the north as well, and if we are to see them we will need to get going soon. Colorado will get another visit next summer, I hope.
September 8, 2007 at 9:41 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
Faithful blog reader Stacy has gently taken me to task for ignoring Kansas yet again, and rightly so. We habitually treat the plains states as things to simply “get through” rather than the subtly interesting places they really are.
Sure there aren’t a lot of high-profile attractions here. But the points of interest, such as grassy prairies and the wildlife, history, geology and scenic beauty that go with them, are still well worth investigating. Attractions like this take effort to fully appreciate, a willingness to learn, and a bit of imagination.
We have all those things, but we lack one other essential component: time. We are working against the impending winter. There are so many places we want to see before the mountain passes become impassable (to us, at least, towing a 30-foot, 7500# trailer) that we must advance west rather rapidly. It must seem strange to have full-timers complaining that there’s not enough time, but it’s true. There’s never enough time. This is a big country.
Guess where we are tonight. Yes, another anonymous roadside stop, somewhere in Kansas along I-70. It doesn’t matter where, since all Wal-Marts are pretty much the same. We decided to crash here for the night and then proceed in the morning to a state park recommended by our good friend Joe.
We thought we’d be stealth camping, following our usual procedure. We keep the curtains shut to make it less obvious we are in the camper. We stay hitched, of course, and don’t put anything outside to reveal that we are doing more than parking for a few hours (not even the entry step). We do some shopping in the store to show our appreciation. We also checked in the store to make sure it was OK to be here.
But not everyone follows these rules. Some folks think Wal-Mart is a campground instead of just a parking spot.
These folks are enjoying a lovely warm evening in their lounge chairs, not far from us. Subtle? Not hardly. They’re one step from putting out a hibachi, it looks like. I hate to see people being too obvious, because it encourages local campground owners and residents to clamor for a ban on overnight parking. Pretty soon we’ll all be forced into campgrounds every night by town ordinances. It’s already the case in dozens of cities we’ve visited across the country. It would be a shame to lose the option to just park somewhere for one night (with permission), but that’s the way things are headed, especially in a few high-impact areas where RV’ers have abused the privilege.
Parking overnight is a lot different from camping — if you do it right. It’s about a quick overnight stay, not spreading out. It’s a convenient way to stop without going through the hassle and expense of finding a campground. Nobody likes to pay $30 for parking space, which is pretty much what a campground amounts to when you arrive at dusk and leave in the morning.
I also am particularly annoyed by some campgrounds that ask for a whole personal dossier (names of all parties, vehicle and trailer descriptions, license numbers, ages, location of identifying body marks etc). I remember one which asked for all of that (except the body marks) plus more. The check-in took about 15 minutes, the stay cost $30+, parking in the site was a nightmare, they dumped a pile of paper on us about the rules & regulations, and that was all for a stay of less than 9 hours. We didn’t even hook up to the utilities or unhitch the truck.
Tomorrow we’ll find the state park and stretch out a bit. We have a free day to enjoy since we are ahead of schedule on the driving. From what I’ve been told, I’ll be glad to pay for that campsite, and after two days of heavy driving it will make a good break.
September 7, 2007 at 7:57 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
With all the business this week I forgot to mention the results of our service appointment at Airstream. They aligned the axles, replaced a few broken parts under warranty, re-packed the wheel bearings, verified that the disc brake pads are still good, and tweaked a few other things. Overall the Airstream has a clean bill of health and should be good to go for quite a long time before it needs service again.
This morning we hitched up and moved out again, away from the “Mother Ship” Airstream factory and on the road west. As we were prepping the trailer, we noticed the folks from the previous night who had locked themselves out of their trailer. Someone had decided to give them a “trailer dumping seminar” at the Airstream dump station.
I have never considered giving a seminar on dumping holding tanks, but from the rapt attention of these folks, it seems like I’d have an eager audience. We ran into the new owners again a few hours later, at a gas station in Illinois. They were on their way home to California. So I gave them a quick summary of overnight parking procedure at Wal-Mart, Cracker Barrel, etc. to which they reacted politely (but I could tell they were thinking, “Never in a million years.”)
Little stops like that are all we are going to get today and tomorrow. We are moving faster than usual in order to get a few stops completed, and up to Montana, before the weather starts getting too cold and stormy in the mountains up north. This means we have to make tough choices and skip some places where we would otherwise have stopped. Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas will all get passed over for the most part, so that we can spend time in Colorado, Wyoming, Montana and Alberta.
Covering 1200 miles in four days is do-able, even for us with a kid in the car. I just hate the sensation of covering miles without seeing much. On the other hand, I’m alone in the truck and it’s a chance to really think about things. If I want to talk to Eleanor and Emma I have the walkie-talkie, and if I want distraction I have the iPod.
I have come to measure distances in songs rather than miles, during these long drives. Perry GA to Vermont was 353 songs. From Vermont to here (St Charles MO), I’ve listened to only 186 songs (I’ve been thinking a lot). The iPod has 1,542 songs so I should be good all the way to the west coast, which we will reach sometime in October. By then we’ll have dropped off the Fit for temporary storage and I’ll have E&E back in the truck, so I may not get much further down the playlist. When we’re all together it’s hard to listen to music everyone likes.
The new blog is pretty much set up now. Let me know if you encounter any problems with it. Once I’m comfortable with it I’ll try to add some nice features for viewing photos, etc.
August 17, 2007 at 7:53 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
For my birthday last week, my brother gave me a few magazines. That’s a great gift for a full-time RV’er, since magazines are fun and consumable. I like to see what other magazines are doing, for professional reasons, and yet I rarely go to the bookstore and buy them myself.
One of them was a wakeboarding enthusiast magazine. It was the sort of typical pumped-up “extreme sports” angle that you see on all kinds of sports, with macho and jargon-filled ads, articles about pushing oneself “to the limit”, and plenty of photos of buff young guys doing amazing tricks.
Now, I like to see the photos of guys showing the possibilities of wakeboarding. It’s inspirational in a way, even though I know I’ll probably never practice enough to do the things they do. But I was irritated by intimations by the editors that people who don’t do the sport they way they think it should be done, aren’t really wakeboard riders, but rather poseurs. They even went as far as to claim that a certain trick isn’t up to their standards, and therefore people shouldn’t do it. And of course there are plenty of hints that if you don’t have the expensive equipment (board, boat, etc) you’re not a legitimate practitioner of the sport and probably should just stay home.
That sort of attitude is something I work to keep out of Airstream Life. We don’t run articles with titles like “Monster Tow Vehicles — Whose Is the Baddest?” and “Why Triple Axles Rule the Roads!” and “Extreme Marshmallow Roasts!” and “Camping the Proper Way.” It’s not my business to tell people that their camping style or equipment doesn’t meet some arbitrary standard. Unless you’re using your RV as a meth lab, my rule is that if you’re having fun, you must be doing something right.
Of course, Airstream Life doesn’t feature a lot of photos of buff 20-something guys with their shirts off, busy making a campfire or hitching up their trailer. (Perhaps we should, we might sell more copies on the newsstand.) RV’ing is not the exclusive domain of retirees anymore, but the reality is that a lot of us guys don’t have the 6-pack abs anymore (if we ever did!) and we tend to keep our shirts on while we’re camping.
Thankfully RV’ing isn’t likely to become an “extreme sport”. It’s more of an equal-opportunity recreation, friendly to the young & old, fit and not-so-fit alike. It gives us Baby Boomers something to do when the knees don’t allow us to go skiing anymore.
And therein lies the beauty of it. You can do it in any way that works for you, without fear of crossing some rules ordained by a puffed-up National Association or popular magazine with delusions of majesty. I have written about our form of travel and adventure for a long time, but I’ll be the first to acknowledge that what works for us may have no relevance at all to how you’ll do it. That’s fine. All I want to do is give you ideas and inspiration. If your style is totally different from ours, that won’t be any impediment to us becoming friends when we meet on the road.
There are few rules to traveling or camping in an RV, and the arbiters of etiquette are relatively moderate. Just have drive safely, and have a nice time. Your experience will not be mine, your tow vehicle and RV probably aren’t the same as mine, but that doesn’t matter in the slightest. I’ll share the road, some tips, and perhaps a nice campground with you all the same.
July 26, 2007 at 6:51 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
One of the problems I have discovered that I face in writing up our experience from two years of mobile living is that we have had an almost uniformly good time. From a writer’s standpoint, it’s boring. The best travel stories, it is said, come from the worst trips, or at least travel to the worst places. We had a lot of sunshine and few mishaps, poor fodder for a travelogue.
Our travel was through the settled and safe USA, where civil war is an unlikely experience. Nor is being stranded deep in the veldt, or having our passports held by a foreign consulate, or other classic tales of globe-trotting reporters. Political intrigue, bomb-shattered cities, attacks of dysentery, unreliable cabbies, or even airport delays are not contained in our experience. The State Department has not issued any frightening cautions about the places we’ve been.
If I were writing for National Geographic Adventure or Outdoors magazines, I suppose we would have taken the Airstream overseas and tried to find a campground with amoebic water and sparking electrical outlets. Or we might have set up rope and climbed the Canyonlands of Utah in the thunderstorm season and hoped for a flash flood adventure. If none of these things worked disastrously, we’d write it up in a breathless Gen-X style that at least made it seem exciting.
But I’m not seeking adventure solely for the sake of a good story, so instead we have roamed the 48 states and parts of Canada and Mexico in perfect safety, enjoying good food and friendly natives at every turn. Nobody has died or even been injured, and in fact nobody has gotten an illness more worrisome than a bad cold or a migraine. We’ve suffered no financial disasters, haven’t been ripped off by an unscrupulous mechanic, haven’t been strip-searched at the border. We haven’t even been short-changed by anyone. Our trip is almost defined by the lack of dramatic things that have happened.
This is, of course, a good thing for us. We had a nice time. But in reviewing other travel books, I find that the authors celebrate the angst of the trip even if they are really having a pretty good time. In Bill Bryson’s “A Walk in the Woods,” he manages to tell a funny yarn about what would otherwise be a monotonous hike up the Appalachian Trail, thanks to his dysfunctional hiking companion. The companion becomes his comic foil, and revealing his many faults is a big chunk of Bryan’s writing. If I did that, I’d be facing divorce. It is not for me to pick at my travel companions. They might write a book about me someday, too.
Paul Theroux, in his under-appreciated story of hiking the coast of England (“Kingdom By The Sea”) sees black and ruined industrial towns, threatening nuclear plants, strange and dishonest innkeepers, football hooligans and skinheads, and dismal seaside resorts virtually every step of the way. This is his interpretation and he’s welcome to it but while I can imagine a dark perspective on everything we’ve seen and done, I prefer not to go there. I am unwilling to suffer as I travel, or view everything with the eyes of a critic. I can do that, but it takes the fun out of the trip for me, and I feel no particular need to poke holes at the fabric of American society. Plenty of other people already manage that job.
Although I must confess I’ve considered it. At one time I was thinking about writing two blogs, this one and another “dark side” blog in which I revealed my most satirical, cutting, and no-holds-barred impressions of our experiences. I didn’t do this and didn’t even keep notes, but believe me there was plenty of material.
For example, we have seen hundreds or even thousands of examples of the lingering “white trash” mentality and behavior that forms the basis of the popular image of RV’ers. There’s a lot of truth in the stereotype, but I am looking for and documenting the exceptions to the rule, the people who travel with purpose beyond a quest for the local Early-Bird Special. The world of RV travel has changed already but the popular media are just now catching up with it. The Boomers are not doing it like their parents did, and I want to document that.
Still, I find myself wondering if we should take some sort of risk in the waning months of our full-time travel, to create a startling tale as the centerpiece of the trip. We could go backpacking with open food containers in bear country, join a research trip to the Arctic, scuba dive the sunken airplanes deep in Lake Mead, or at least smuggle a ton of prescription Zyrtec out of Canada. Any one of these would likely give me that sort of dramatic opening line that writers strive for: “I remember clearly the glaring sun over the ice when the polar bear began to chew on my leg.”
Nah. I’ll cure this problem the old-fashioned way. A good story can be told of any adventure, no matter how hum-drum it might at first seem. The writer is responsible for telling the tale interestingly, and every tale has an angle. Several friends who are avid readers — and even a few writers — have written inspiring emails with fantastic advice. I am saving those emails and reviewing them periodically as I digest the events of the past two years.
Of my first attempt at an essay, my friend Tom (a professional writer) said: “I think you netted the whole panoply of what moves people to take to the road, and how you pare down to essentials, and see more clearly what means something and what doesn’t. If you’re able to put that kind of theme and structure in the book, it will be a winner.”
My legal advisor, Don “Nacho Grande” says, “The characters and situations you encounter along the way make for the most interesting read to me. Tell me more about the Victor Valdezes of the world singing by their homemade walking sticks; Boots Hinton and his Bonnie and Clyde Ambush Museum; and of course, Ayres T. Reem.”
He also went on to say, “Rich, what I really want to say is write whatever stirs your soul. To hell with the ultimate consumer. Forget about making a buck on this one. This should be for you. Take a page out of Eleanor’s book and go a little crazy with your herbs and spices. Listen to the bread’s crust. Poe’s meter. Hemingway’s metaphors. Take some literary risks and try to SCARE yourself by your own audaciousness. Use a pseudonym if you’re afraid of tarnishing your good name. Make Jonathan Swift roar with laughter!”
I think the pseudonym is a particularly good idea. I’m thinking of using the name “Don.”
My medical advisor, Dr. C, was helpful also, with a detailed suggestion that I go find Paul Theroux in his home, roust him out of bed, and shake him roughly until he confesses all his secrets of writing to me. Well, actually, the good Doctor didn’t quite go that far but he did provide Theroux’s home mailing address, quite a handy feat. I’m supposed to write him for advice. Instead, I’m thinking of asking Dr. C for the home address of some of my other heroes. Perhaps they’ll have courtesy parking.
By the way, Theroux completed an overland voyage from Cairo to Cape Town a few years ago, at the age of 60, and wrote the book Dark Star Safari about it. You can read his interview about the conditions in Africa here. It may be particularly relevant to those planning the Cape Town to Cairo trip in 2009.
Now there’s an adventure in the making. Never mind that public and private caravans traverse Africa routinely. It’s still a rough journey and the spirit of exploration calls all the more loudly because of it. That hasn’t been our experience but I’d sure like to do it, and in fact we are reserving the option to drop in for at least a portion of the trip.
“When travelers, old and young, get together and talk turns to their journeys, there is usually an argument put forward by the older ones that there was a time in the past — fifty or sixty years ago, though some say less — when this planet was ripe for travel. Then, the world was innocent, undiscovered and full of possibility. The argument runs: In that period the going was good. These older travelers look at the younger ones with real pity and say, ‘Why bother to go?’ ” — Paul Theroux, Sunrise With Seamonsters
I think if you are reading this you already know why to go.
Yes, our North American voyage has been relatively free of strife but nothing is 100% free of risk. I tell you about my writing challenge because Nacho Grande’s and Theroux’s advice applies to you, too. You have to “hike your own hike” as they say on the Trail. Nobody can define what your travel will be, or the product of your travel. When people tell you what they fear will happen, they are telling you their fears, not what will happen. So don’t worry about what other people think, or whether they will find your trip interesting. Just go — and find your adventure on your terms.
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