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Camp Dead End

How many articles do you remember from glossy travel magazines? Believe it or not, I remember one. The title was "Camp Dead End." It was a warning against holing up permanently in an RV park, instead of 'chasing adventure out there on the open road'. The article was in harmony with the RV industry's economic self-interest, of course. But the article was still eloquent.


Travel writing is not as dreadful as it is because the writers are all blockheads. It's bad because it can be. Travel writing is just a thinly disguised infomercial for airlines, resorts, cruises, boats, and RVs.

Travel adventure is a misused phrase. Real adventure is something that must be experienced; it takes patience, luck, and real guts. The average American is lucky to have two weeks of vacation per year. They are too weary and frazzled to experience anything, let alone adventure. The best they can hope for is to shoehorn in some frantic consumption of luxuries and distractions that have a travel flavor or image.

But back to the article about Camp Dead End. RV parks attract nice, normal, conventional people who are not very interesting. The RV industry has made RVs so comfortable and bourgeois that the whole culture has been dumbed down to a lowest common denominator type of person, of the kind who runs two air conditioners all day long, while sitting in an easy chair and watching big screen television. Take away satellite TV and most RV adventurers would drop out in a month.  I want to become a van camper type hard-ass.

And yet here I have reposed, for almost three years now. Every new day is just another circle scribbled around a common center, and whose diameter shrinks almost imperceptibly. My life is circling the drain of deadening routine. It becomes smaller. Camp Dead End is death in slow motion. Lately I've swatted an average of five flies per day. Maybe tomorrow's adventure will involve six.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Your post is the perfect prelude to your mounting up and riding out of the Small Pueblo. I'll be interested to read what comes next.

When your old blog was still available, I recall reading that Salida, Co. held some interest for you. I wonder if that is a destination?

Tom in Orlando
No Tom, I have no interest in towns or cities anymore. I really don't get much good out of them other than buying groceries.
Anonymous said…
Real adventure isn’t always comfortable either.

I’ve been reading some blog posts from DownTheRoad.org where the authors have been world bicycle touring for a number of years and are now in Nepal.

Their adventures include things like horrific traffic, weather exposure, sweat and dirt, bug-infested hotels, unwanted attention, lung-busting hill rides, and dodgy sanitation resulting in travelers’ diarrhea.

All that adventure could get old after awhile, although it probably beats out life in a cube, spot welded to a chair and staring at a computer all day long.

I suspect a good life isn’t all adventure or dull routine but a symbiotic combination of both. bethers
DownTheRoad.org is quite the cycle touring adventurer. I read that website now and then. Travel and adventure have to be managed like other appetites: you need to let them rest sometimes.

Thanks for your thoughts.
Yes, I agree with Tom. Now that you've dumped on your shrinking existence in the Little Pueblo there is no choice but to venture out... to resume a wheeled life. It will be interesting to see if it's different this time.
Box Canyon Blogger, "to see if it's different this time." Oh dear, that's the subject for a whole post. At any rate I am giving the subject a lot of thought.