I am still grateful to the lady who explained to me that introverts are certainly capable of enjoying human companionship and conversation, but they feel drained afterwards. Then they need time alone in order to recharge. In contrast, extroverts actually feel stimulated and charged up by human interaction. At the time I was a bicycle tour leader and experienced proof of her theory on every tour.
This anecdote ties in with my recent role as a host to other RVers who are traveling through the Little Pueblo. It wasn't totally accidental: it is spring after all, and the seasonal sybarites of Arizona are headed north and east. But my goodness, three visitors in one week! Life has become a social whirl and I'm exhausted.
It was especially fun to meet a younger RVer, Glenn of toSimplify.net, who is even younger than I was when I got started in this racket. Of course, he is cheating: he is still working. Seriously, it is interesting to see the internet result in qualitative changes in how people live. (We are used to technology making quantitative improvements in speed and convenience about one thing or another, but such improvements are prone to the criticism that Thoreau famously made: that they are improved means to an unimproved end.) In his case, he can do his music thing while on the road and ship his product back to the boss in Los Angeles via the internet.
It is not easy to be a demographic misfit as Glenn most certainly is. Many people have read the book, Blue Highways. (psstt... it's over-rated. Don't buy it.) Once, at the beginning of his solo journey across America in a mini-van, a woman in Tennessee asked the author if he ever got lonely when traveling. She said that if she was doing what the author/traveler was doing, she'd at least have a dog. The author got a bit indignant: he thought the point of travel was to bump into interesting people and talk to them. (Talk about naive. Why would interesting people necessarily be within 100 feet of a paved highway?)
Later in the book, the author admitted that he had gotten flat-out lonely and that maybe he should have listened to the woman back in Tennessee. (He should have.)
My other wise-old-man advice to Glenn was to make longer stays in his favorite spots and get to know people who live there. (That is, forget about socializing with RVers, as such. Here today, gone tomorrow.) It's true that local yokels might never accept him as a real resident and will only see him as a licensed lunatic since his house has wheels under it, but partial successes do count.
After the fizzy romanticism of RV travel has worn off, it becomes a way of life, not an extended vacation. More than that, it should be seen as a serious profession. Any profession has brutal facts of life that the individual cannot immediately change. All he can do is take a professional pride in being tough in facing up to the brutal facts, working around them as best he can, or at least tolerating them.
This anecdote ties in with my recent role as a host to other RVers who are traveling through the Little Pueblo. It wasn't totally accidental: it is spring after all, and the seasonal sybarites of Arizona are headed north and east. But my goodness, three visitors in one week! Life has become a social whirl and I'm exhausted.
It was especially fun to meet a younger RVer, Glenn of toSimplify.net, who is even younger than I was when I got started in this racket. Of course, he is cheating: he is still working. Seriously, it is interesting to see the internet result in qualitative changes in how people live. (We are used to technology making quantitative improvements in speed and convenience about one thing or another, but such improvements are prone to the criticism that Thoreau famously made: that they are improved means to an unimproved end.) In his case, he can do his music thing while on the road and ship his product back to the boss in Los Angeles via the internet.
It is not easy to be a demographic misfit as Glenn most certainly is. Many people have read the book, Blue Highways. (psstt... it's over-rated. Don't buy it.) Once, at the beginning of his solo journey across America in a mini-van, a woman in Tennessee asked the author if he ever got lonely when traveling. She said that if she was doing what the author/traveler was doing, she'd at least have a dog. The author got a bit indignant: he thought the point of travel was to bump into interesting people and talk to them. (Talk about naive. Why would interesting people necessarily be within 100 feet of a paved highway?)
Later in the book, the author admitted that he had gotten flat-out lonely and that maybe he should have listened to the woman back in Tennessee. (He should have.)
My other wise-old-man advice to Glenn was to make longer stays in his favorite spots and get to know people who live there. (That is, forget about socializing with RVers, as such. Here today, gone tomorrow.) It's true that local yokels might never accept him as a real resident and will only see him as a licensed lunatic since his house has wheels under it, but partial successes do count.
After the fizzy romanticism of RV travel has worn off, it becomes a way of life, not an extended vacation. More than that, it should be seen as a serious profession. Any profession has brutal facts of life that the individual cannot immediately change. All he can do is take a professional pride in being tough in facing up to the brutal facts, working around them as best he can, or at least tolerating them.
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Carl