Occupation of Independence

Eighty percent of the discomfort felt by a full time RV boondocker occurs during summer. It needn't be so. Step One is to stop going north in summer, as counter-intuitive as that is. Going north will only keep you cool during the shoulder seasons. Would that they lasted longer than a couple weeks! Shame on me for taking so long to realize that latitude is a secondary variable and that altitude is preeminent. Through a geographical accident, most of the high altitude towns are in the Southwest. It's easy to underestimate the pleasantness of the southwestern monsoon season, from early July to mid-September. Even before the afternoon sky-and-cloud show, the higher humidity mutes the sun. By noon cumulus clouds have formed foamy white tops and darkling bottoms. Their bottoms darken as the vertical development continues. Finally they flocculate into a thundershower -- transient, local, and topographic. This praise of clouds and rain must seem surreal to those of the P

When gasoline started getting expensive in the mid-Aughts, I stopped dragging my trailer to the Northwest in the summer. Would I really be able to stay cool in the Southwest in the summer? Soon after praising my high-mesa campsite near Santa Fe, we were hit by a violent thunderstorm. I should have realized the edge of a mesa is a vulnerable location. We abandoned the trailer and went to the van, thinking that it was electrically grounded better. At least it didn't have any propane tanks. If we had been in the trailer, the little dog would have been hiding behind the Thetford toilet. In the van, he just sat on my lap and quivered. I can't help believing that the standard theories about the domestication of wolves are wrong, and that it was thunderstorms that drove the Wolf to Man and the cave. New Mexico is having an unusually wet and stormy early-summer. Normally it's oppressively cloudless, and so arid that it sucks the spit right out of your mouth. Finger tips a

It's hard to believe what happened on my first day of blogging. But this is a true story... Central New Mexico. We visited an old Spanish church at an Indian pueblo, built in the 1600's. It is easy here to imagine yourself far away in time and place from the drab uniformity of modern America. Why, we might as well be watching the movie, El Cid, with Charlton and Sophia. Other than the Fortress of old Quebec City, where can you experience anything like this in North America? This fine old church was starting to redeem a day that had not started too well. We found plenty of fine, high-altitude land and beautiful old ruins. But there was barely a grocery store to be found--or a wireless internet signal. So we continued on our way to the old imperial outpost of Santa Fe. Halfway between Albuquerque and Santa Fe I suddenly realized that my worries about staying high were over. I hadn't checked the weather this morning because there was no internet. So it was pu