Occupation of Independence

People, who have RVed only half as long as I have, can easily be more experienced about rigs in general, since some people change rigs every couple years instead of holding them forever like me. It would be kind of fun to experience different rigs, and measure up their pro-s and con-s. But unless a person is an awfully good trader, it seems as though you would be eaten alive by the chain of ancillary expenses that ensues every time you change a rig. Perhaps I am thinking about that more than usual because of the squatters' camp that has gotten established in my neighborhood. Three Lazy Daze Class C's are detracting from the view from my prestigious view-property, further up the hill. At the very least they could have parked with uniform spacing, parallel or perpendicular to the paved highway. Just think what they are doing to my property values! But let's not be small about such things. I welcomed these campers to my BLM estate, but they can't even make it over

I've certainly experienced it before, and many times. But it has been awhile since I enjoyed the exquisite pleasure of a partly cloudy day. It was bright and cheerful enough. The solar panels could charge the batteries. But what you really notice is how kind the world seems when you aren't under relentless attack by the sun. May and June are the worst months in the Southwest. It takes a special effort to appreciate the importance of this kindliness. You just have to slow down, stop running around like a postcard tourist, and let it soak in. My dog and I biked up to the top of a large ramp called the Uncompahgre Plateau, west of Montrose CO. It is not as steep and photogenic as the newer orogenies of Colorado, therefore it is less popular with sightseers. Even Wikipedia virtually ignores it. It is a place that only locals and old-fashioned outdoorsmen go. But the lack of extreme verticality makes it more fun to mountain bike and RV-camp on.  But occasionally there are peek

Readers have heard me say it so often they are sick of it, but nothin' in this old world of ours beats living partially outdoors. I am enjoying the chilly morning air in a Colorado forest, at 7000 feet, especially with a sunrise coming through the screen door: I would sleep all night with the IMAX screens open if it weren't for the possibility of a bear getting a whiff from my kitchen and then walking into the trailer! And I'm back on the mountain bike again, after a 2 month long hiatus. Coffee Girl and I are both out of shape. We like the dirt in the ponderosa forest near Dolores CO and the views of Mesa Verde.

Apparently my boondocking travel trailer has been sold. Tomorrow I drive up to Utah to pick up my new trailer, a rather standard cargo trailer.  Those who do something like this might be wise to order a trailer in the slow season, that is, any time but spring. Of course your winter location might be a long ways from your state of residence, where you will need to drive to, in order to register the trailer.  Because spring is the busy season, I would have had to wait ten weeks if I'd ordered a trailer just like I wanted. That pushes the conversion into the Dry Heat of June, quickly followed by the monsoons in July. Thus I bought one off the lot. Doing a conversion needs more than just good hardware stores and lumber yards. It should benefit from a commercial infrastructure of  "hard hat" and truck industries. There are remarkably few practical cities in the Four Corners area. Farmington NM is such a place, probably because of its oil and gas drilling economy. Bette

I have a bumper-pull travel trailer for sale: 1997 AeroLite, 7 X 21 foot (nominal), weighing 4000 pounds loaded. (I am the original owner.) It would work best for a single person . The inside standing height is 6' 3.5".  At its weight you can pull it with any half-ton pickup truck (e.g., Ford F150), Tacoma or Frontier, or truck-based SUV, Chevy Astro, or full size van (e.g., Econoline). You wouldn't want to use a crossover utility vehicle (CUV) or a 4 cylinder truck. This travel trailer would be a clever way to slip into boondocking if you are uncertain whether you will really like the lifestyle, and you don't want to spend a lot to give it a try. It would be a fair test; otherwise you might use a rig that just isn't meant for dry camping, with the result proving nothing.  This travel trailer would also be ideal for someone who doubts their skill or interest in volts, amps, sabre saws, and electric drills. All of that has been done a long time ago. You ca

Once again it is winter, daylight-wise.  A precise solar calendar of cliff and grassland. Just walk to the same spot every day. And that means that this camper is once again fighting the Early Bedtime Syndrome. This is no laughing matter, at least for some of us. Nothing degrades the quality of sleep like going to bed too early. What if I could make a lousy two minutes of improvement per day? Just think, an hour per month! In working on this project, you can't help but appreciate how general this issue is. Once I was biking up Snow Canyon (St. George, UT) and passed a mother who was towing a baby trailer behind her bike. In it was a 25 pound youngster. I kidded her about persisting with this hill-climb over the next year, and getting stronger and stronger as the child gained weight. She smiled and referred to some folk tale (or fable) about carrying a calf when it was young, and continuing with this habit until it was a cow. Five points of extra credit to any reader who

A couple posts ago I was celebrating having camping playmates who actually mountain bike. That's the first time I've been that lucky in 16 years of full time RVing. And they could even dispersed camp! Sigh. The gods punish men who look too happy, lest they get cocky. My playmates have been lured over to the emoluments of an RV park. So goeth the Way of all Flesh. (Or at least married flesh.) And what is the big attraction? Showers. Bottomless hot water tanks for taking a shower. At least I have the satisfaction on this pulpit of rejecting the extremism of both the False Prophets of the Desert (aka, the Ascetics ), as well as the mainstream Sybarites. Few things are more sensible than a navy-style shower with hot water.   Effective and non-wasteful. One gallon is enough. It is helpful to visualize a simple graph of Benefits versus Gallons. Remember that one of the quiet, but profound, satisfactions of RV camping is the daily discipline of looking at what you consume, and

Following our fearless leader up and over a crumbly cliff near Moab, I nonchalantly grabbed onto a boulder, about 2 feet in diameter. When much of my own weight was transferred, the boulder pulled out of its matrix, missed my leg by a bit, and crashed down onto a jeep road. Some day a jeeper's adventure will be interrupted by this boulder in the middle of their thoroughfare, and they will be forced to get out of the vehicle and use muscles to move the boulder. (They will then use that as an excuse to go shopping for a new GPS system or smartphone with a new app that identifies boulders on jeep roads.) This really wasn't such a close call, but it was the largest adjustment of the Earth's surface topography that I have ever been responsible for. Later in the scramble I was forced to wedge between two larger boulders. As I transferred my weight to one of these large boulders, I wondered how evil Murphy really was. Imagine if that boulder pulled into the other one, with my

It is hard to believe that only a month from now I will be in southern Arizona, paying rent (gasp!), and riding a road bicycle with a large club. How strange it is that some of my "fellow" cyclist-snowbirds have already been in that furnace since the first of October. How could doing the same five rides/routes for seven months of the year be the Good Life? Isn't Dry Heat something you'd wish on your worst enemy? But they enjoy the shoulder seasons there, somehow.  And they agree with me on the cycling, something that is rare amongst gasoline-besotted Americans. It is probably common to expect less and less of other people as we grow older. But the situation is different when somebody, who you thought had something in common with you, shatters your comfortable expectations of compatibility. This might be the sharpest kind of loneliness. Be it a sports club, a church, or a political cause, you can befriend each other easily when you appear to have a bit in common.

Camping in popular places and times is something to avoid. Places like Moab UT. There is very little dispersed camping still left there thanks to its overuse and misuse and mass popularity. But I had a couple reasons to be here. So I rolled into a dispersed camping area close to sunset, in order to assess the neighborhood before committing. Gee, it was rather uncrowded and quiet at the end of the road, where I found a nice flat spot. Maybe people were scared off by the oncoming rain and windstorm? How foolish I was to think that everybody was already there by sunset: I was projecting the travel habits of a full-time RVer onto time-constrained mass tourists. An hour after sunset I heard some vehicles outside. One glance out the window at the height of the running lights identified them as toy haulers, and I knew that my paradise of one hour was lost. They didn't even wait until morning light to start the madness. Suffice it to say that camping neighbors like this are the reason

We interrupt this story of embarrassing foolishness, and will leave the reader hanging in suspense about whether Ol' Boonie gets off the mountain in one piece. But we'll get back to it next time. Newbies to the RV blogosphere might be unaware how much silly nonsense they are about to encounter. Most of it is harmless as long as they take it with a grain of salt. Much of it is due to "boondockers", since RV park "campers" are so middle class/suburban/boring that they seldom blog. The blarniest of the blarney-ers are probably van campers, or worse yet, stealth van campers. The last thing the RV blogosphere needs is one more smelly fool bragging about how he hasn't paid to camp for years because he camps for free (next to railroad tracks) in cities or on public land. Or how he sleeps in the trunk of his Toyota Corolla, together with a week's supply of his own poopies in double garbage bags, and washes himself with Baby-Wipes by "rubbing a littl

South Fork, CO. There is a quiet, but profound, satisfaction when using a mountain bike for "foraging" and reconnaissance, rather than mere entertainment or exercise. The more business-like camping and exercise become, the more authentic they feel. That's what makes this a job, rather than a vacation. It's an under-rated pleasure to mountain bike on a perfect forest road; one that is smooth, graded, hard, and relentlessly, mercilessly uphill. The shade held up well, and it kept getting cooler. The forest changed into thick, overgrown spruce at 10,000 feet. Other than the shade over the road there isn't a single good thing to say about spruce forests. Finally I got an open view of the neighborhood mountain. Alas there was probably no way to hike above tree-line from this road without bushwhacking through that disgusting spruce forest. Finding this out was why I was there. Some automatic mechanisms clicked into place when I found the best dispersed campsit

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

Some time ago I joked about RVers who have been diagnosed with the Early Bedtime Syndrome . But actually, sleep is too serious a matter to joke about. If the problem were merely one of rising too early in the morning, that wouldn't be so bad.  But the real issue is that going to bed too early also detracts from the depth and quality of sleep.  Snuggling in early on a winter evening, in front of the catalytic heater. This problem becomes even worse if you need to camp in some noisy campground or city; there  you need to stay up as late as possible, so that the din has a chance to die down some.   Currently I'm basking in a week of success at overcoming this dreadful scourge, so perhaps it's time for an update. The long days of June are certainly the time of year to get serious about beating this sucker.  My earlier theory was that the Early Bedtime Syndrome was brought on by not running enough lights at night. The good news is that the LED lighting revolution has

...positive inches, when you're lucky. I've done a lot of back-and-forth about whether my next travel trailer should be a converted cargo trailer 6 foot or 7 foot wide. When we discussed trailer size a few months back, didn't an experienced RV camper say that width doesn't matter much? He wasn't necessarily wrong, of course. It all depends on your camping style. If you spend a lot of time camping in ponderosa forests, where trees are far enough apart to suck you in, width does matter. Note the driver's side mirror and the nearest tree. To heck with 7 foot wide trailers. Six feet is the width of the tow vehicle. But in this case, I was using a flank attack (where width mattered) rather than a direct frontal assault, where ground clearance was even trickier. It's an example of how logically-distinct design criteria blur together in the real world. At any rate, the campsite (near Luna, NM) was worth it. The forest fire last year near Glenwood NM. 

Baby Boomers should have something to say about consuming information as a way of life. When we came into this world, the great blight of television befell the world. Today, toward the end of our passage, the internet is taking over. These are two information revolutions just as big as, but far more sudden than, the invention of the alphabet or Gutenberg's movable-type printing press. Baby Boomers, destined to eventually become America's Worst Generation, started off life as the first generation raised on television. TV-haters (like me) would love to believe that that proves cause and effect. Whether you buy that or not, it is strange how uncritically many parents welcomed TV into their homes in the 1950s. Soon the living room furniture was all arranged around the TV set. Many children grew up with no restrictions on their TV habits. How ironic that many a traditional father in the 1950s kept a gun in the house to 'protect his family', you know. And yet he allowed th

It has been some time since I was camped at the right distance (say, 4 miles) from a train. A busy track lies beside Interstate 40. The overall route has been popular over the decades for many forms of transportation, and for good reason. It reaches the Pacific without crossing any mountain passes.   A ppreciating the quiet rumbl e of the train and its whistle is more intense if you frankly acknowledge how obnoxious they are up close. W hen you hear that soothing sound from 4 miles off , you have to wonder how it could be the same machine. In a stationary hou se you would be quite lucky to be at just the right distance for the train to have the optimum effect . In an RV park you would probably be squeezed between the interstate highway and the t rain track.  But a dispersed camper ca n easily move a mile closer or further aw ay. W ith that idea in mind Coffee Girl and I mountain biked downhill a ways yesterday until we could see over the last ridge. There it was, still a couple

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

On Mogote Ridge, near El Rito, NM. Would you smile about being woken up at 5 in the morning? No? Well I do, and remember, I'm the alleged curmudgeon. Hunters really do keep some strange hours. The funniest thing is when they go by at 5 am with six hounds in kennel boxes in the back of the pickup truck, all baying at full volume. One bear hunter stopped at my campsite today and told me that one of his hounds was lost or perhaps stolen. The dog had a GPS tracker on its collar, which went blank a couple days ago. He said the hound cost him $4000-5000, after training and other overhead. On top of that he has five other hounds, a thousand dollar rifle, a hunting license costing several hundred dollars, GPS gadgets, and a $50,000 four-wheel-drive pickup truck, which of course is a requirement for getting to the places the bears are or might be. That is getting to be one expensive bear. So much for my stereotype of male consumers as sensible, no-nonsense sort of guys. How strange an

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