Occupation of Independence

Finally it's time to explain how I got on this "What are Mountains Good For?" kick, a couple weeks ago. I knew I would soon be in Ouray CO, wallowing in the friendly hospitality of the San Juan's best hosts of Box Canyon Blog. Before that happened, I needed to bust out and expand the San Juan experience. So I spent some time in the eastern San Juans, an area I didn't know too well. Enough (!) of the excuse that there is no Verizon wireless in that area; there is a roaming signal, and that's good enough. Actually it was high time I made those areas work, in general.  Remember, this isn't a standard RV travelogue that aims at the mission of comfortable, serial sightseeing.  The best way to expand into a new area is to take up some new sport or activity, there. I had the good luck to camp next to a couple fly fishermen , over there on the east side. It would be a good idea to stay open-minded about that sport. After all, the rivers (streams and

Recently I was camped with a non-self-contained van camper. It was remarkable how much fine cooking she could do just with a Coleman stove, ice chest, and picnic table. Mind you, her creations were done in the face of New Mexican "horizontal gravity," the wind. Unlike me, she was also organized with packing and unpacking her van. Clearly she should just go on doing what she has become good at. Then there's the rest of us. I never liked camping when I was young. How ironic that I became a full time RVer who emphasizes dispersed RV camping. If I had to do it all over again, I would. But how did I manage to do it in the first place?! It was just dumb luck that I managed to distinguish some outdoor activities from others. You can love walking or bicycling in the outdoors, and dislike housekeeping, cooking, or reading in the outdoors. You can like living in a small, hard-walled box and dislike tent camping. Don't let me or anybody else oversell the Great Outdoors. T

I don't talk about specific dispersed campsite locations and resent it when other people do. Why this should be so might be the subject of a later post. Today I want to tell you about a large area of dispersed camping that is now attractive, thanks to it finally getting Verizon cell coverage. How many times does a huge block of high quality public land open up? Actually it isn't all that often that Verizon adds a whole new tower in a rural area. This is news, folks. For years it has been a pleasant drive through southwestern New Mexico, going from Silver City to Springerville AZ on US-180. There were many dirt roads heading off into interesting public lands, but I seldom stopped for long, because there was no Verizon cellphone/internet coverage. What a pity. From the Catwalk, near Glenwood, NM.   This year I was delighted to pick up a strong signal near Glenwood, NM. I pulled over to scan the horizon for a new tower. The only one visible was on a tall mountain three m

Wh en a meme on the internet coasts along, year a fter ye ar, without ever being challenged or tested, it is only natural for it to get flabby and to load up with blarney. So take the following post in the spirit of sportive iconoclasm. It's not aimed to hurt t he feelings of any individual. There is a persistent meme out there in the travel blogosphere that needs to be debunked and de-gla morized for no other reason than it could misl ead RV wannabees and newbies. I'm referring to the "go anywhere, camp anywhere for free" meme. It is over-rated.  It is usually an advertisement for van-camping on a street or in a parking lot, casi no, or Walmart . (I s hould probably add that I like vans, have owned one for the last 16 years, and might be buying another one next year, for pulling a small travel trailer.) A small rig might allow you to park overnight on more streets and parking lots -- without being booted out -- than larger rigs. But so what?! It won't mea

Tucson, AZ. When a full-time traveler pulls into town, a ritual ensues. Much of it is just shopping and errands. But more importantly, the traveler begins once again to reconstruct a lifestyle, always hoping to improve on the last place. Metaphor #1. For some reason I never saw the similarity of this reconstruction to something I was "brainwashed" with, as a child. My father, a teacher, would go down to the woodshop and collect sets of four or eight identical pieces of wood, sometimes blocks, sometimes round columns or other shapes. He would sand them off nicely for his two sons. Those were our toys and we ended up with a large box of them. We didn't have many plastic commercial toys or gadgets.  Hour after hour, day after day, my brother and I would build skyscrapers out of these wooden blocks. When the skyscraper reached as high we could reach, we would admire it for 3 seconds, pull a block out of the lower corner, and then laugh with boyish delight at the collaps

OK I admit it: I'm a bit sad to leave Yuma tomorrow. That's probably a "first" during 15 years as a full time RVer. If a place is worth going to, it is worth staying at -- until something goes wrong. Usually the weather becomes uncomfortable, or you've used up your time limit, or you've acquired a noisy neighbor. It's fun to leave when you really want to leave. Otherwise you are just wasting money on frivolous sightseeing -- the thing that some internet-wit or other called "channel surfing with gasoline." Don't think that I've gone soft  in the head. Yuma itself is not interesting. But I hope to long remember how pleasant it was to get back into club road bicycling. The moral of the story is to stay flexible when "lifestyling". Once again the upward and northward migration starts. Once again I yearn for some way to start a loose caravan or club of outdoorsy RV campers -- as opposed to mainstream, sedentary, portable suburba

Yuma, AZ. Having just finished my best winter in many a year, it's time to ask 'why'. This winter's experience s upport s the notion that it is beneficial to live differently in the winter, compared to summer ; and not just a change of geography either, but a real change in lifestyle. For instance, it's a solitary life when dispersed camping for 9 months of the year. More solitary than is desirable. Why people treat Solitude as a sacred mantra has always been a mystery to me. 'Independence' has positive value, but Solitude doesn't. In contrast this winter in Yuma has been spent bicycling with a club of friendly people. Sometimes we've had as many as 50 people on a ride. It's true that the conversations at food stops are just noisy chatter. But that is all you are likely to get from human beings in the real world. To demand more will just lead to frustration, then to disappointment, and will u ltimately be crowned with unpopularity when ot

Yuma, AZ. You don't have to be in a snowbird town more than a couple hours before somebody pops the question. Yep, that question. I've tried everything: boycotting the question in a obviously jocular manner;  ignoring the question, and immediately changing the subject to, say, the weather or the condition of the roads; groaning out loud;  pausing for a noticeable period of time, then sighing, before finally giving a desultory and halting answer. (This is aimed at making them feel guilty.) I've tried 'em all. I've even tried just answering the question in a brief and neutral way. Nothing works. What question am I talking about? Aw come on, in a snowbird capital like Yuma? There's something about the body language that usually gives the culprit away, but sometimes they blindside you. "Soooooooo, where 'ya from?" My entire body locks up in a wince. The worst culprits are those who insist on taking a deadpan answer as a challenge. You ca

No readers obliged me when I begged them to talk me out of going to Yuma this winter. (Thanks a lot, guys.) For th ose unfamiliar with the snowbird culture of the South w est, Yuma is in a uni que position to love and hate. Although many places in the Southwest offer sunn y, dry mid-days in winter , most get chilly-to-freezing at night. Yuma is one of the few exceptions. On the downside, Yuma isn't the bargain it once wa s, and it is hellishly overcrowded. But it has the single best (roadie) bicycle club that I know of, and I've known a few. I only mountain bike when I'm dispersed camping on public lands. For safety's sake if nothing else, I think road cycling requires a club , which means "la rge city ", bleahh . After finding a half-lot to rent through the grape vine, I decided to drive to Yuma for a nother "round" of winter. Besides, isn't it a good idea for a person to take a winter sabbatical, a break, from whatever they do the res

Who was it that coined the phrase, "Nothin' beats a great pair of legs?" Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller, Juliet Prowse? Whoever it was, what counts is that the expression, whatever its veracity, is not of universal utility and applicability. For instance there are times when nothin' beats having the right set of balls. While doing some backroad exploring near Socorro, NM, I took the wrong road. (There was no sign.) The road surface was hard and smooth, b ut very steep, well past negative double digits in percent slope. When the road deadended at a ranch I realized my error, got turned around, and started to go back up the hill. Whoa now, st op, breathe, think.  It was time to let half the air out of the tires. We all probably forget to do this as often as we should. Even when extra traction/flotation isn't needed, lower ti re pressure makes washboarded BLM roads less brutal. The trick is to buy a good tire inflator so it doesn't take forever to put the air pr

Or... Navigation on the Navajo Reservation There is no denying that there has been much "progress" the last few years in GPS gadgets for the dashboard of motor vehicles. Just the same, I'm glad I've abstained, since it might have robbed me of a unique and memorable experience the other day. I was taking a "shortcut" paved road, supposedly, from Cuba to Grants, NM. The trip began on a secondary dirt road on BLM land. The washboard was so bad that the sewer hose jiggled loose and fell off on the road. When I drove back to look for it, the old superstition about 'retreating being bad luck' came to mind. As I headed west into the Navajo reservation I kept wondering why it was a dirt road road. The DeLorme and Benchmark atlases had never disappointed me before, except for a minor error here and there. Making a wrong turn isn't normally a big deal. In fact in the past I've accepted the outcome of wrong turns and just kept going, just to see w

So far I've resisted adding links to dozens of "me too" mainstream RV travelogues because, when I'm the reader, a mile-long list of such links is too daunting to even dig in to. So I've restricted the list to friends' blogs. In other cases I haven't listed links to certain blogs because they already have huge readerships, so my referrals wouldn't give them the slightest bump. (Examples are toSimplify.net and theBayfieldBunch.com) But even more fundamentally I don't list mainstream RV travelogues because they are stereotypical to the point of self-parody. They are too much alike and too predictable. Does it sound like I'm in curmudgeon mode today? I admit to being fairly hard to please. But there is a constructive way to use reputed "cynics" and "negative thinkers": when they give a recommendation it really means something . I added cheapRVliving.com to my list of links. It's been built by somebody who I have never

After getting sick of looking at infomercials on the internet I finally had a chance to kick some tires on real cargo vans, which we have all agreed are the ultimate towing machines for a serious RV camper. The exciting news in the cargo van biz is the new Nissan NV cargo van. (And once again I thank the commenter who brought this vehicle to my attention.) I found a used one for sale. Unlike the usual Chevy Express on the lot, this particular Nissan NV had both an auxiliary transmission lubricant cooler and an engine oil cooler.  Notice how square and planar the inside of the van is. Down with those rounded and irregular ribs that are on older Chevy and Ford vans! This Nissan NV van looks so easy to convert. The planarity of the top and sides ensures that only a slight bend would be needed for insulation and Luann plywood.   It even has threaded holes on a regular basis so you can add shelves, etc. At 5' 11.5" I can stand completely upright in the van. But by th

Southwest of Monte Vista CO, national forest, over 9000 feet. The aspen were at their peak blaze. I enjoyed it for -- forgive me -- a few seconds, and then looked for more interesting things to think about. After slamming one of the holiest cliches of the tourism industry, I should propose an alternative. I'll do so shortly. Seriously, why do people waste time and money to go to look at yellow aspens? Sure, bright yellow is a fun color, but you could stay at home, close your eyes, and imagine the color yellow. It would be just as vivid. If your imagination needs help you could buy a blue-ray DVD travelogue put out by National Geographic, say, "America's Top Ten Fall Color Road Tours." Don't underestimate how good the modern big screen televisions have become. If you are still not satisfied because your retinas haven't yet registered all that they are physiologically capable of, then go to menu-setup and blast the contrast or saturation on the television scr

Saguache/Del Norte, CO. In the upper left quadrant of this photo you can see a white speck. It is my van and travel trailer, camping alone with excellent Verizon service. The photo was taken from one of the dirt roads/two tracks that make for excellent mountain biking in the public lands near Saguache. Why should I camp alone, instead of sharing it with other campers that I have something in common with? I don't expect them to be mountain bikers, of course. Most people can be interesting about some topic or activity.  In fact I rolled into a parking area in a special recreation site near Del Norte CO, and quickly told the camper who was already there not to worry about having his little sanctuary invaded, because I just wanted his opinion on any special dispersed camping restrictions there. I did end up camping next to them and it was great. They had a pickup camper that pulled a small utility trailer. When he told me that he even helped a buddy turn a utility cargo trailer

Just think, my current rig (Ford Econoline van pulling a 21 nominal foot travel trailer) has given me shelter (and massive amounts of storage) 365 days per year for 15 years and for 200,000 miles. The combined cost was $26,000. I would say that I got my money's worth. Call it beginner's luck: I bought these units despite never having slept in an RV before, and despite doing very little homework. But their respective careers are winding down. Now that I'm only a year-and-a-half away from robbing the piggy bank (IRA withdrawals), it's time to knock the ball out of the park when buying new rigs. And this gives me a chance to play RV Wannabee, instead of RV know-it-all. This time around, homework will be done; I demand significant improvement from myself. Once again I will be looking for a low cost rig intended for dispersed camping near the desert-grassland/forest interface . This is usually where you can still get an internet signal, have the most variety in the scen

When your RV rig gets old you might as well start window shopping early, since finding something might take a long time. Of course, that problem is worse when the shopper is stubborn about camping in quiet and interesting places and avoiding unnecessary expenses and luxuries. You would make it easier on yourself, during the shopping process, if you thought like a mainstream RVer, but then the negative payoff would come later when you end up with a rig that is expensive and troublesome to repair, and you can't camp where you really want to camp.  Here's my most recent heart-throb: It's made by Tiger RV, circa 1990. What a nice camping experience these lucky people must have had! They had gotten to a campsite that big or "overhang-ey" rigs couldn't get to. They could walk right out of their rig to dozens of mountain bike/multi-purpose trails. Here is RV camping at its finest: the perfect balance of outdoor flavor combined with realistic and hard-she

At the beginning of Tom Jones , one of the first and most enduringly popular novels in the English language, Henry Fielding tried to give the reader a succinct and accurate description of what was coming in the novel, analogous to the bill of fare that a prospective customer might see on the door of a restaurant.  As a reader of blogs I can sometimes get annoyed with vague or misleading titles. They are used, presumably, by writers who want to harvest the greatest number of eyeballs, regardless of whether the reader's time is being wasted. It seemed long overdue to refine the subtitle on this blog so that readers can immediately decide whether they are barking up the wrong tree or not. So I've added "television-free" to the subtitle. Why is this important? A person can eat junk fast food on a frequent basis and not blimp out or develop health problems for a while, but it will catch up with you eventually. So too can you fill your eyeballs and brain with menta

Once, a friend in a bicycle club told me a little about his job driving a mini-bus for the city -- one of those buses that responds to individual calls to pick up people with special needs. His supervisors were quite systematic in the training they gave him to visualize big clockwise loops, with no left hand turns, and with no back-and-forth wastefulness. An RVer would benefit from training like that, especially now that the era of cheap oil is over, and the cost of maintaining motor vehicles escalates at double digit rates. I have found this easy to do on a "strategic" level. Even as a newbie RVer I had no interest in the mainstream RV cliche of 'visiting every state and Canadian province' on some sort of bucket list, and then buying one of those silly maps that you put on the door, and coloring in each mighty conquest as it happens. The freshman year was the last year for RVing east of the Rockies, for all the obvious reasons. It was also the last year for

It was time to get reacquainted with Ouray CO and Mark and Bobbie at Box Canyon Blog. I left the 9000-foot-high lava plateau (Springerville, AZ) this morning when it was still dawnlike and dew-soaked. It just didn't seem right to have been sleeping at night with a skull cap on -- in the middle of summer! I just left it on when I took off driving.  What a surprise it was to see clear sunny on the way to Ouray. I'd forgotten how dessicated the Four Corners is. The lowest and hottest spot on a trip in the West is the river crossing, the San Juan River in this case. I crossed at the town of Shiprock, named after the famous volcanic throat, nearby: To my eye, Shiprock is better looking than the over-photographed Monument Valley. From my " geology,rocks " Picasa album. The San Juan River doesn't even earn a 5 handle there (a mere 4900 feet).  I got out for lunch break and was reminded of what Dry Heat can be. How quickly a camper can get out of shap