Archive for February, 2008
February 6, 2008 at 11:29 pm · Filed under Home base
One of the questions we get most often is when we will put Emma into “a regular school.” We’ve been wrestling with that question for two years now. When we started off on our full-time travels we had some trepidation about whether we could educate Emma properly from the road. Now, looking back, I can see that if we hadn’t gone off to travel she probably would have learned much less than she has. The road is great for kids if they are exposed to the variety of life that exists everywhere but in their living room.
I have to admit our homeschooling efforts have not been very consistent. Some days Emma learns from the ordinary experiences of our daily lives (a format called “unschooling” by some), and other days we go by the formal curriculum we bought last fall. This mixture is not a bad thing, as it turns out.
That’s partly because any curriculum would seem rigid to us, since we live rather unstructured lives. So we fiddle with the program to better reflect our goals and values. I also get annoyed by certain requirements in the curriculum that seem arbitrary or petty (“student must write her name on every page”). Even though we know why some of the requirements are set, we can’t help occasionally subverting the curriculum and come up with a more interesting way to accomplish the same learning task. For example, if the curriculum wants her to write her name on every page as a way to practice penmanship, or to learn to be extremely anal about her work, I’ll encourage her to write in her journal instead. She’s not training to be an assembly line worker, she’s training to be a citizen of the 21st century, and that means creativity and adaptability will be more important than learning how to fill in blanks repeatedly.
But having a curriculum is a useful tool to at least guide us along in areas where we otherwise would be swimming in deep water, metaphorically. Eleanor is strong in the arts, and I am strong in communications, and we both have interest in natural sciences, so we have those areas well covered. Neither of us have much interest in math, so we let the experts handle it.
As it turns out, Emma doesn’t need any help with reading, deductive reasoning, or logic — my best subjects — so lately I’m trying to fill in by playing music teacher. My background in music is limited to a few years of singing in high school and a series of hopeless rock bands in which I played bass. I don’t really think teaching her the riffs to some old Fleetwood Mac songs would be ideal, so we’re working on ukulele together. Today we worked on keeping time, using the old Hawaiian standby “Sophisticated Hula” as an example.
I can also contribute some teaching from my other interests, so I am occasionally the photography teacher and the history teacher. Eleanor is the cooking instructor too. I have great hope that someday Emma will be making us great meals.
We’ve made some possibly controversial choices of things to drop, as well. I am surprised, for example, that the curriculum puts so much emphasis on cursive writing. I haven’t written anything in cursive in over thirty years. It’s not a very meaningful skill in modern life. Why don’t they teach typing instead? Focusing on cursive today is like teaching a kid how to make chamber pots and inkwells. It has become a historic skill, like calligraphy and shorthand. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it won’t do much for you when you go to get a job or start a business. So we’ve dropped cursive and will let her learn typing instead.
Physical education has been part of Emma’s life since she was a tot, but she doesn’t know it. She did her first two-mile hike at the age of three, and until recently we were routinely covering 4-6 miles a day when on hikes in national parks. But being stationary has been bad for our exercise program, which is part of why karate class has become the new “phys ed” class. She loves it because there’s a lot of jumping and yelling, I think. Her assistant instructor said today that she was going to be very good eventually because she really focuses and tries hard. I only wish we could continue the program while we are traveling, but instead we’ll switch to swimming, snorkeling, and bicycling, as we have done each summer.
The assumption that Emma needs to be in a school to “get socialized” is something I’ve dealt with in previous blog entries, so I won’t go into that again.
We’ve learned from our experience that education is not at all about school. It’s about feeding a child’s natural inclination to learn. It’s like growing a lawn. You don’t need to tell the grass how to grow, you just need to give it the appropriate water (and maybe a little fertilizer) and let it find the sun on its own. (I think I’m starting to sound like a fortune cookie here.)
I am amazed at how simple and true this principle is, and perhaps I shouldn’t be. I think it strikes me as amazing because my own public school experience taught me that learning was something that had to be forced on a person with structure and discipline. The educational process I went through strikes me as being like the old Chinese practice of binding a woman’s feet to make them grow differently. It was only after I realized how ridiculous that was, that I began to learn myself.
My goal is to ensure we never put up barriers to Emma’s learning process so that she can explore as many of her interests and abilities as possible. The benefits of travel have helped us along, so I think we will continue to homeschool for the foreseeable future.
So there’s the answer to the question we get asked the most. We started this trip with misconceptions and concerns about homeschooling but having done it and seeing the results (in our child and many other people’s children), we’ve become believers. I know a lot of people won’t believe what I’m saying, and will cling to their prejudice that there’s got to be something lacking in home schooling, but so be it. It may be the sort of thing you’ve got to experience for yourself. I’m glad we have.
February 5, 2008 at 11:24 pm · Filed under Home base
I always hated the play “Waiting for Godot”, but that seems to be our story at the moment. We are waiting, waiting, waiting for the next thing to get done so we can finally move in to the house. At the moment, we are waiting for the cabinets. They are reportedly coming Thursday afternoon. The installer is supposedly coming Friday, and the next week will be dedicated to putting a kitchen together.
In the meantime, there are things to do but we have lost our taste for doing them. We are sick of spending money so we aren’t shopping even though we could use a few more things in the house. There are a half dozen little projects to be accomplished around the house but I can’t seem to get interested in them. And yet, we can’t leave because we are here to get this job done once and for all.
I’m not counting the days until we hit the road again, because I like it here, but I am counting the days until we can actually live in the house. This bifurcated existence is tiresome. We are constantly back and forth between the house and the Airstream, making meals and sleeping in the trailer, but working and doing our projects in the house. It’s a big tease — we have this house where it would be nice to finally settle in, but we can’t. It’s a crazy sort of limbo we’re in.
Still, I look back to where we started when we arrived here on Dec 22, and realize we are in pretty good shape. We are on target to be done this month. It will all work out, just like those stressful weeks last summer when we were hustling to get our stuff moved out of storage. Dealing with household issues seems to be what we do in between long stretches in the Airstream. It reminds us how much simpler and more fun life is on the road.
Other than my complaining, there’s not much going on. Today the highlight was the Ritual Rolling Of The Garbage Cans To The Curb. Not quite up there with the excitement of the past year, eh? Ah well, that’s life. If it were all exciting travel we might not appreciate it as much.
A big storm and a cold front yesterday kept our daytime temps in the 30s — a real aberration here — and we got plenty of rain. That’s the second good rain we’ve had this month, so I’m expecting some nice spring desert flowers in March.
The snow reached down the mountains so low that the Rincons, which sit just east of us, got covered. The Rincons reach up to 8,800 feet but the snow reached much lower than that. I’d guess the snow line was about 2,000 feet above us. In the photo at left, it has already melted away up the mountainside.
As far as I’m concerned, snow looks best at a distance, so this is ideal. Palm trees up close and snow-covered mountains in the background — that’s a view you can only get in the southwest.
February 4, 2008 at 10:27 pm · Filed under Home base, Travel / lifestyle musings
Last night when most people were watching the Super Bowl we were over having our first family dinner with local Tucsonians. Judy has been watching this blog for some time, ever since I wrote a rant about how New Urbanism and RV’ing don’t seem to mix too well. She and her husband Rick live in a New Urbanist-type community called Civano, which we seriously considered moving into before we bought our current house.
Judy and I have stayed in touch via email, and now that we are finally back in town, she invited us over for lasagna dinner with the family. It turns out we have a tremendous amount in common: they have homeschooled their kids (very successfully, I might add) and we share a lot of ideals about homes, travel, and lifestyle. I was also very impressed with their cozy straw-bale house, which is beautiful and exactly what we would have like to have bought if we could have found it for sale. (They built it themselves.)
The really significant thing about this dinner, for me, was that it represents the beginning of us finally making new friends in the local area. It was almost a weird sensation for me to recognize that — unlike virtually everyone else we’ve befriended in the past couple of years — they don’t own an Airstream. They’ve never seen my magazine, and thus the basis for our friendship is different from all the other people we’ve met lately.
Meeting people as a result of traveling in the Airstream has been very easy. The aluminum brotherhood seems to give us an instant camaraderie, which we’ve enjoyed. But without the Airstream to make our introductions, we have to make friends the old-fashioned way.
It’s a little harder. People in the RV world are used to becoming very friendly very quickly. You don’t have much time to sniff around when your new friend might pull out of the neighborhood in less than 24 hours. RV travelers seem to instinctively know this, and so they get right to the business of socializing as if you’ve been old friends for decades.
But in the “real world”, people take their time. You might meet at the gym, the library or karate class several times and casually chat before someone breaks the ice. Inviting someone over for dinner within 10 minutes of meeting them for the first time would seem “overly friendly” or even inappropriate in those settings, yet in campgrounds it happens all the time.
There’s something inherently friendly about the impromptu communities formed by groups of travel trailers. It doesn’t matter if we are in a high-end “RV resort”, a state park, or just boondocking in some lonely place. People just come up and talk and tell their stories as freely as can be. We’re so accustomed to it that it feels unfriendly when we see strangers walking by our house and they don’t stop in to chat — even though in polite suburban society that would be considered intrusive.
I think that’s why I had been looking forward to meeting Rick & Judy. It was clear from our email conversation that they “got” it, and so we enjoyed a fast warm-up and a fun family dinner. And having our Airstream friends dropping by has been nice too. Brett was here, Bruno & Leila were here, Jim was supposed to come (but he decided to stay in Quartzsite), Bobby & Danine are coming, and pretty soon we’ll see Dr. C too. All of those people know how to behave in “RV society”: you just swing the door wide and treat everyone like family even if you just met them half an hour ago.
But we can’t expect that of everyone. Don’t get me wrong — our neighbors have been wonderful and we like them all. We now count Judy and Rick among our friends, which is a really neat thing for us. But I think we may have come here expecting the City of Tucson to be one big happy campground, and we have to remember that most other people live by the traditional rules of the city. We’ll have to make an extra effort to be friendly and patient to make long-lasting friendships, until we get back on the road where the emotional juices flow a little more easily.
Uke song of the day: “Tonight You Belong To Me” by Billy Rose and Lee David. Popularized in the movie, “The Jerk.” See it performed by Janet Klein (for key of D tuning) or get the chords for typical key of C tuning here.
February 3, 2008 at 10:30 pm · Filed under Travel / lifestyle musings
I received a very nice note from a blog reader a couple of days ago:
Dear Rich and Eleanor,
Two years ago my husband said to me, “I’m going to make “Tour of America” our home page” on our new iMac computer”…and for two years your website, with all of your wonderful pictures and stories, has entered our home each day. Over the course of these past two years I have thought many, many times about writing to you because I have lived the life that you are providing for your daughter and I
just want to tell you that it is a WONDERFUL life, but I know that you already know that!
In 1970, when I was ten and my brother was six my mother and father bought a brand new 1970 Overlander in Jackson Center, Ohio. My parents decision to buy that Airstream was not only the beginning of the most incredible family adventure, but the beginning of a bond that would bring us together time and time again after we grew up. My mother and father were both art teachers and we traveled in that Airstream every summer for three months at a time until my brother and I went away to college. We went across the country eighteen times and my brother and I had a childhood that was so rich that we have spent most of our own lives trying to recreate similar experiences for our own families.
Today, my parents still have our old 1970 Airstream. My mom and dad have kept her up meticulously constantly updating her through the years. My brother, his wife, and his three children have their own Airstream, a 1972 Land Yacht, that they have completely rebuilt over the years. My husband, my two children, and I have a 1964 that we have restored and continue to work on. We vacation at least once or twice a year all together with our three Airstreams…our own little caravan!
Yet, the one thing that haunts me the most is, how do I provide an experience that I was so fortunate to have, for my own children? Sure, we have taken that week long or two week long road trip with our airstream and had a wonderful time, but I’m talking about that sense of time, of wandering across the US, rockhounding at Topaz Mountain, being invited to a Hopi Snake Dance, watching eskimos dry fish in Kotzebue, flying in a bush plane, walking under a bald eagles nest, canoeing in Prince William Sound, bicycling the Hawaiian islands, or driving around at dusk looking for wildlife. These are just a few of the things that I remember.
I have spoken many times with the now-grown children of Airstreaming families. Always they rave about the experience and tell me how formative it was. Universally they wish to give their children the same experience. Hearing these stories has helped us know that what we are doing for Emma is good for her as well as us. It also reminds me that we have not completed the experience. There’s much more to learn, and see, and do.
I’m also very warmed (on this blustery cool Tucson day) by the knowledge that the blog has enriched the lives of thousands of people. I know there are many who read it daily but never write in, and that’s OK, but when I do hear from someone who has been reading the blog for a while I really appreciate it. It makes the effort of writing every day really worthwhile.
That’s why I published this letter tonight. This blog is not just about the travel experience we are having, but the enjoyment of being able to share it all with you. Thanks to everyone who reads this.
February 2, 2008 at 10:52 pm · Filed under Home base, Travel / lifestyle musings
If we don’t need it, we don’t buy it. That has been our motto for the past two years. Living in a confined space means you don’t buy “stuff” just because:
- it’s a bargain
- it would look nice on a shelf
- it’s pretty
- we might use it someday
- it’s handcrafted (or variations like, “It’s Native American made!”)
- we want a souvenir of our visit *
- we can stock up and save
- somebody said we had to get one of these
- we collect _______ (fill in the blank) **
… even though these are all truly American reasons to buy, in normal circumstances. I know, in America it’s not what you spent, it how much you “saved” by buying it. But in an Airstream it’s not what you saved that matters, but where the heck you’re going to put it! For this reason, we try to focus our purchases on consumables and necessary equipment.
* We do get very small souvenirs. Eleanor buys pins at the national parks we visit and has bought a few tiny Indian drums about 3″ tall, and Emma earns Junior Ranger badges & patches. I don’t really get into souvenirs so mine are photos.
** Emma does have a rock collection but the rules are that no rock should be larger than 1″, only one sample of each type is allowed, and the collection periodically gets offloaded to save weight. Also, people are entranced by the cute little girl who collects rocks and so she gets a lot of them for free.
With this philosophy we have not only saved money but a lot of dusting of artifacts. But now of course we own a house and it echoes with emptiness. It is just begging for a whole bunch of “stuff” to decorate the halls, fill the shelves, and line the walkways.
A friend suggested that we make it a “zen house”, with very little in it. That way those few items we have will carry special meaning. “Keep it minimalist,” he suggested, and Eleanor agreed. We still remember the pain of getting rid of all the stuff we had in the last house. It took two summers, and we ended up giving away most of the stuff because — shockingly — nobody really saw any value in the various artifacts we collected, including us. It was really frustrating to open the boxes in our storage unit and find heaps of things that we paid good money for, and yet which we no longer valued. After a while all I could see in box after box was piles of greenbacks being tossed out. So we committed that we wouldn’t do it again.
But hey, we didn’t have anything to do today, so we thought “Why not drop by the Tanque Verde Swap Meet, and then the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show?” That’s a little like an alcoholic dropping by the corner bar just to see what’s going on with his old friends.
Fortunately, we met temptation and won, mostly. To our eyes, the Swap Meet was just a giant flea market filled with junk. It has been running in Tucson for thirty years, but in all that time they haven’t seemed to be able to conjure up anything other than the same stuff all the other flea markets have. Except for the product above: a box of breasts. They’re called Mimi Balls. (Who is Mimi?)
In the interest of journalistic integrity I squeezed one, as the box suggests, and despite the claim on the box (“breast ball with I Love You Sound”), it was silent. It also felt about as real as a porn starlet (only a supposition since I have never personally squeezed a porn starlet). Still, it could be an amusing gift in the right circumstances and I seriously considered buying a pair for my friend Dr. C.
Two other salient points: (1) Eleanor refused to pose with them for this blog — can you believe that? (2) The box says they’re for “Age 5 and up”.
I am grateful that the Tanque Verde Swap Meet had so little of interest to us, but Eleanor says it is really that our perspective on things has changed so much that we can’t bring ourselves to buy stuff that we’d like but really don’t need. We are well trained now.
So, wallet intact, the next stop was one of the 50+ venues of the giant Tucson Gem & Mineral Show. It runs from today through Feb 17. Our favorite stop is Tucson Electric Park, where there are enough displays and vendors to keep you busy all day. Emma spends much of her time looking down at the ground for bits & pieces of rocks to collect for free, and Eleanor hunts for beads. There were a lot of both.
We got out of Electric Park after about four hours without violating our guidelines. Emma bought a pair of little fossils of a leaf in sandstone for $3 (fossils are part of her rock collection), and Eleanor bought some beads, which she uses to make jewelry for friends. However, I got sucked in by a vendor who had a very nice collection of Roman coins. I’ve always wanted one for the same reason that I like meteorites: they are inspiring. Think about where this silver coin has been in the last 2,000 years!
The coin I bought depicts Emperor Gallienus and was struck in silver between 258 and 260 AD. On the face it shows Gallienus wearing his crown and on the reverse it shows him on the right receiving a globe from Jupiter, which symbolizes the gods’ approval of the Emperor dominating the world. It’s in good enough condition to clearly see the beard on Gallienus’ face, which just fascinates me.
Did I need a coin nearly two millennia old? This question plagued me while I was looking at them. The coin has no value to me as jewelry, and it has no useful purpose at all. Yet, here it is on my desk, with Gallienus looking up at me from history.
I will keep it in the safe place I keep my unwearable Hamilton Ventura watch, in the hopes that both items will appreciate in value and perhaps contribute in a small way to retirement. At least it is small and has some intrinsic value, whereas the Mimi Ball is just a fake boob.
Even with that justification in mind, it spooks me to think we could so easily get back on the path of collecting stuff we don’t need. Being back in a house, with less to occupy our time, we feel like dieters at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Buying stuff we don’t need is a habit we’ve all learned just as a result of being part of this society. We spent two years un-learning that habit, and now we’ve got to stay on the wagon.
It would be a failure if we came back to the house in the fall and found it full of things that we didn’t remember buying. If we are careful, we can keep our priorities on what matters: enjoying life, educating Emma, sharing with friends & family — all things that don’t cost much. As they say, the best things in life aren’t things. But sticking to lofty ideals such as that one is harder than it might seem.
February 1, 2008 at 10:26 pm · Filed under Home base
I think it is undeniable: we are missing the traveling life. Now that the house has ceased to capture our attention 24 hours a day, we are finding ourselves with lots more time and wondering what to do with it. I’m spending more time working, which is not my goal in life, and Eleanor is spending more time homeschooling (which is good for catching up, but unsustainable over the long run).
However, those extra hours at the desk aren’t really all that productive. I find myself wanting to pick up the atlas or a guidebook and plan a trip. I am starting to daydream about places we can go and explore. This is bad because I actually have a lot of work to do. I’m already well into the Summer magazine (Spring is at the printer’s now), and there are articles to edit and photos to hunt down. I’ve also got to get my writer’s pointed at their targets for the Fall issue, and so far I’ve only got a couple of them set. But I keep looking out at those mountains and thinking, “I could be hiking up there.”
Today Mike & Terri Church (authors of a series of excellent camping guidebooks — we carry a few in the store) wrote to me from the road in La Paz, Baja, Mexico. We missed meeting them in Arizona by a few days, and now they are down in the warmth updating their book on camping Mexico’s Baja peninsula. I felt a big pang when I heard from them, as I’ve felt pangs reading Bobby & Danine’s blog and Bert Gildart’s blog. Jim Breitinger called from Quartzsite — he’s still having a good time there. Everyone is out there traveling and it feels very weird to be sitting here in a house. We’re the ones who travel, remember?
I was thinking that stopping here to refit the house would be a good break from traveling, and in a way it is, but when there’s a lull in the house action it makes both Eleanor and I wonder what it is we are really doing here. Right now we are in one of those lulls. The kitchen cabinets are officially scheduled to arrive next Thursday afternoon, which means we have a few days to play before things get hectic again.
We are desperately out of practice at being stationary, and it shows. It is as if we had come back from a long safari in the wilderness, and lost touch with all the niceties and social conventions of modern life. We need to get “civilized” again.
A good start would be to make some local friends, and we are working on that. We are already meeting people with kids through Emma’s karate class. I’m hoping to get together with the Vanishing Tucson folks again, for another photographic foray. We’re also going to get together with a few local Tucsonians who read this blog. Once we know a few people in this town we may feel more like we live here, rather than feeling like we are just passing through.
Speaking of karate, Emma had her third lesson today. Watching James (the Instructor) work with the kids is incredibly entertaining. The kids love the classes. It’s a lot of jumping and kicking and fun exercises, and the tiniest tots in their miniature karate gis are just hilarious. The three-day-a-week schedule is an impediment to taking off in the Airstream but we can work around it. Emma looks forward to each class so we’ll try to not miss any days.
We have now settled on a firm date to return to the road: March 17, so everything we hope to accomplish here (house, furniture, side trips, karate, etc) must be completed by then. This particular date is driven by a combination of circumstances, including a houseguest and a rally in west Texas. We had considered going out for a while and then coming back to enjoy the fine April weather, but it didn’t make sense after traveling several hundred miles. We’ll just keep heading east, and take about three months to get to Florida and then up the east coast to Vermont. Until then, we have work to do, and I’ll have to let my daydreams suffice for the rest.
Appropriately, the uke song of the day is “Daydream Believer” by The Monkees. (Get uke chords here)
February 1, 2008 at 12:20 am · Filed under Home base
People sometimes ask me if Airstream Life will run out of things to write about someday. I used to worry about that, in the first year of the magazine, but I don’t any longer. Even though I only plan at most three issues in advance (nearly a year at our publishing schedule), I have learned that there are an infinite number of topics to learn about and share, if you take the time to be interested in the world around you.
I do a lot of the hunting myself, just as a consequence of being a curious person, but fortunately I don’t have to do it all. The magazine has attracted a group of regular writers who are likewise curious, and they are constantly tossing ideas at me. It’s my pleasure to field the queries. They range from ridiculous to genius, but they’re always interesting, so the process of reviewing them is mostly fun.
Today someone asked if we were planning an article on Airstream collectible dishes. My answer was no, but it’s an interesting idea. We’ll kick it around the editorial staff and see if anyone qualified to write it raises their hand. That kind of thing happens regularly, and with some nurturing it inevitably turns into a good article. The words you read in the magazine take an incredible amount of work to produce — literally weeks or months of a writer’s time, plus multiple editing passes, photography, fact-checking, and layout — but the process is fun because I get to indulge my own interests.
People ask me, “What is Airstream Life about?” and I sometimes answer that it is about whatever interests me at the moment. That really is more the truth than any other answer I could give, but I know it scares people, so I usually just say that it is about things that people who own Airstreams would be interested in. That’s a non-answer but it seems to satisfy questioners.
However, the things that interest me at the moment have little to do with Airstreams. For example, I am having lots of fun with my ukulele. I am using it as a stress relief and break from the computer. Every hour or so I get up from the table and work on a song. The song for today is “Something” by George Harrison, and it’s coming along nicely. Uke mania has really captured me and it is dangerous because it leads to the acquisition of more ukes. Everyone I know (in person or through the Internet) seems to have a collection of at least six.
There’s a saying in the uke world, “You can’t eat just one.” Gotta have all four sizes to start: soprano, concert, tenor, and baritone. Then there’s the variations on shape and sound: “pineapple” ukes, cigar-box, resonator, and the novelty ones, different colors, historic ukes … oh, it’s bad. I keep reminding myself that I can only play one at a time and I certainly don’t have room in the Airstream for a collection.
There’s the rub of having “interests”. They can lead to acquisitions and that leads to a house full of stuff. We are trying to avoid that. Even though we now have the space, we are trying to keep our lives relatively uncluttered by things. That means exercising our interests has to be restricted to intangibles and consumables, which is a real challenge with a couple thousand square feet of house just begging to be filled up. So I am continuing to direct my interests to things I can put in the magazine instead, even if only tangentially. I just need to find an angle for a uke story in an upcoming issue …
… which brings us back to where we started. Airstream Life will never run out of articles. There’s too much interesting stuff in the world. And I can’t fit it all in my house.
« Previous entries
