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Astounded by the Ordinary

It is fun to drive to town after a week of solitary camping.  It certainly is economical to limit your motor vehicle trips.  I used to go to town to do laundry, but now I have eliminated much of that by washing clothes at camp.  It doesn't use as much water as you think.

The other excuse for excessive trips to town is groceries.  Shifting your diet to grains and beans (and root vegetables, cabbages, and canned goods) can help with that.  A larger refrigerator would help a lot.  Being cheap with refrigeration is false economy.  (Even the most expensive refrigeration won't cost an extra $100 per year.  Look how easy it is to blow an extra $100 on transportation.)

Going to town is not abandoning nature for city-ishness.  I like to think of city-things as being natural, too.  For instance, going to town is the only chance I have to admire the human female.  These days, the safe and politically-correct cliché is that 'well, after all, women are just people.'  I say, Bullshit, to that.  For years now I had tended to look on human females as a type of wildlife.  It makes them more interesting and fun, to me.

At the coffee shop in town I noticed a couple young women in the bloom of youth, certainly, but on the other hand, they were so ordinary.  They had brown hair as most European women have.  They weren't wearing a mask of cosmetics on their face, nor were they sporting fake body parts.  They seemed so wholesome.

When I left the shop, I arrived at the door at the same moment as one of these lovely creatures.  She smiled at the near collision.  My goodness, there was an extra bounce and spring to the old boy's gait as he walked to his van.  Looking at big mountains or red rocks or red sunsets doesn't have that effect on me.  So why do we deify things like that as the very epitome of a 'natural experience', but we under-rate other types of natural experience -- perhaps we don't even think of them as natural experiences?

Comments

Ed said…
"Shifting your diet to grains and beans (and root vegetables, cabbages, and canned goods) can help with that."

I have been living that way for the past two months with only one trip to a Supermarket. I get most of what I need from the local small general store and what I order online.

The grains, beans, coffee and dry fruit all come from online orders. The local store carries root vegetables and surprisingly also carry nondairy milk. They had some regular yogurt in 32oz sizes for a couple of weeks but then only in the 5oz sizes. So I asked them to order me a case of 32oz nondairy which does require a larger refrigerator. HA

Ed, buying food online is something I should give more thought to. Of course you have it easy there, because you can ship things to the office at the RV park. Getting packages is a pain in the butt to travelers outside RV parks, although it is getting a bit easier.

Dried fruit, eh? I should make more of a habit out of dried fruit. Fresh fruit is not quite hopeless at the grocery store, but it is frustrating.
Ed, buying food online is something I should give more thought to. Of course you have it easy there, because you can ship things to the office at the RV park. Getting packages is a pain in the butt to travelers outside RV parks, although it is getting a bit easier.

Dried fruit, eh? I should make more of a habit out of dried fruit. Fresh fruit is not quite hopeless at the grocery store, but it is frustrating.