How strange it is that, after 16 years of full time RVing, I've finally had a chance to camp and mountain bike with other campers. It's wonderful.
Why hasn't this happened dozens of time? Just about any rig could be parked where we have parked this past week. About a third of RVers have bicycles bungeed to the ladder at the back of the rig. (Virtually unused of course.) So this isn't about "practicality."
In the 'Solitude' chapter of "Walden," Thoreau asked, "What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another."
Good ol' Hank. I think we can answer his question: it's about the 'vision thing.' Retirees and travelers look like they are in one big category when you look at them from the perspective of the whirring hamster wheel of normal American life. But they are actually quite different from each other.
They have different models of the Good Life, worshiped in the altar of the imagination.
During their working years, most people were not lucky enough to have had any kind of outdoorsy club to join, so they never learned how much fun it was to be like a dog at the dog park, but with a small tribe of active human beings. It never became a habit of pleasure to them. Or maybe they were so busy, busy, busy with the phony pragmatism of conventional life that they just didn't take the time for it.
Why hasn't this happened dozens of time? Just about any rig could be parked where we have parked this past week. About a third of RVers have bicycles bungeed to the ladder at the back of the rig. (Virtually unused of course.) So this isn't about "practicality."
In the 'Solitude' chapter of "Walden," Thoreau asked, "What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary? I have found no exertion of the legs can bring two minds much nearer to one another."
Good ol' Hank. I think we can answer his question: it's about the 'vision thing.' Retirees and travelers look like they are in one big category when you look at them from the perspective of the whirring hamster wheel of normal American life. But they are actually quite different from each other.
They have different models of the Good Life, worshiped in the altar of the imagination.
During their working years, most people were not lucky enough to have had any kind of outdoorsy club to join, so they never learned how much fun it was to be like a dog at the dog park, but with a small tribe of active human beings. It never became a habit of pleasure to them. Or maybe they were so busy, busy, busy with the phony pragmatism of conventional life that they just didn't take the time for it.
Comments
Jim
Jim
OK, cue the outrage from Boonie, Mark, Wandrin, Jim and Gale in 3, 2, 1.....
mark