Occupation of Independence

You have to admire the constitution of campers who can actually sleep in a noisy parking lot in town. Do engines ever get shut off? You get to enjoy trains, boom cars, loudspeakers on the pole lights, semi-trucks pulling up in the middle of the night, and perhaps worst of all, predatory strafing of your RV by the parking lot Zamboni. So why do it? There are practical advantages such as minimizing driving while accomplishing shopping errands. And there are plenty of $30 per night RV parks that are half as loud as a free parking lot. There are tricks in parking lots that will get you a few hours of sleep: 1) It is surprising how quiet a semi-truck can be if you are parked aft of its trailer, rather than sideways-adjacent to the engine and Thermo-King refrigerator. 2) It's also surprising how restful it can be to sleep next to a busy freeway, since the sound is so steady. 3) White noise helps quite a bit too. You can use music, a DVD movie, or whatever. 4) Stay up late at night an

Several times now, somebody expressed surprise at learning that I was an NFL football fan. They usually say something like,"You don't seem the type," whatever that means. The same people would probably be surprised that I was excited to learn that Grand Junction CO had a Cabela's store. Soon I was there, poring over the latest and greatest multi-tools and LED flashlights. It's odd that, with so many items in such a gigantic store, it's only these two items that interest me. Besides, I already have a high-end Leatherman multi-tool and never bring it along, because of its weight. Imagine how easy it would be to criticize female shoppers fawning and coo-ing over some expensive and useless trinket just because it was kyooooooot! The sidewalks of Ouray CO are full of such shoppers. But one Sunday morning Coffee Girl and I went on a nice hike on that remarkable network of trails than emanates from the town of Ouray. Afterwards I finally found a restaurant that

It's hard to believe we were returning to the scene of the crime, to the foot of Book Cliffs north of Grand Junction CO, where, four years ago, my little poodle ran away in panic from noisy target-practice shooters, and disappeared for fourteen days before he trotted up to an elk hunter's pickup truck. The full story is on the tab, Sad Story at Book Cliffs, at the top of the blog. His extended life has been a good one. Would he remember this awful place? He seems to remember people and places from one year back, but not four. And besides, he's mostly deaf and blind now. I stopped the rig about a quarter mile short of the camping turnaround that I remembered all too well, since I wallowed in angst and guilt there for a week, hoping for his return four years ago. At the end of the week I accepted defeat, went to the Grand Junction animal shelter, and adopted Coffee Girl. We walked the rest of the way in order to inspect the road condition. As we approached Book Cliffs,

Having just gotten camped in a new location, it was time to do something that I hadn't done in a long time: pop the outer door open, while letting the screen door face right at the southern sun. At this time of the year, the sun is getting quite a bit lower; we're only two months from the winter solstice. I'd forgotten how glorious it is feel the Southwest's sun through solar screen. (Years ago, I'd replaced regular RV industry screen with 85% blocking solar screen.) It's easy to under-estimate how pleasant it is to feel, simultaneously, cool autumn air and warm, moderated sunlight through that solar screen. This might seem like a trivial experience to people who are not familiar with the Southwestern sun, or who spend all summer in air-conditioned domiciles or cars. It might also seem like nothing is accomplished by suffering heat in the summer, without an air-conditioner, only to get the pleasure back in autumn; you could argue that it averages out, over a f

Oops. In considering where to go when, I overlooked that I would be camping higher and cooler than the cities in the valley. So it was time to leave the upper Uncompahgre River, "conflow" with the Gunnison River -- isn't conflow what you do at the confluence of two rivers? -- and then "float" down to the Grand River. What a marvelous experience I owe to the Johnsons over at Box Canyon Blog!

Contrast is probably the quality that most people value highest in a landscape, since prettiness per se is insipid. Badlands, eroded from Mancos shale, are quite a contrast from the volcanic extrusions in the San Juan mountains. I get to admire both from my campsite on a mesa outside Montrose CO. Sigh, I really don't look forward to flowing downriver this Friday.  

Somebody needs to come up with an old saying analogous to 'you can't see the forest for the trees' about mountains. It's hard to appreciate what is happening to a mountain range if you are right in the middle of one and your view is blocked by a mountain. On my little mesa near Montrose CO, I am 25 miles from the edge of the San Juan mountains, so I can appreciate the big picture. During storms the entire mountain range disappears in minutes. The tiny bright speck in the center is the morning sun reflecting off a building.

How many times have you smiled at a school bus? But I did yesterday. It was labelled as "Gunnison Watershed Something-or-Other". It's rare to see something labelled as XYZ Watershed, but in a state like Colorado it should be common. To finally see "justice" done was a delightful surprise. I smiled myself into a nostalgic fit over it. So many American rivers start here, although the Colorado River, ironically, isn't one of them. But we needn't rehash the sorry history of that bit of political chicanery, perpetrated in 1922; you can read on it at Wikipedia. When RVing in Colorado for the first time, many years ago, it was difficult to memorize the names and locations of individual mountain peaks; there are too many of them and the names are not always interesting. So the brain aims at unifying this clutter of details: it groups them into mountain ranges , or studies up on the geology and orogeny of the area, seeking order from the chaos of individual

When a person starts off on round two of their traveling life, they need to stay open-minded and flexible so they can do a better job than in round one, not that round one really needed much improvement. But without improvement and progress, what are we to do with ourselves? It's easy to become bored and jaded with the progress in gadgets: thinner, lighter, more gigabytes, etc. How about some progress in some other field? In the traveling biz there has been remarkable progress, back around 2000, when Honda brought out that remarkable line of alternator/ inverter-based generators. Quiet and fuel-sipping. Of course a chain is no stronger than its weakest link: I'm not sure whether the RV industry has modernized their converter/chargers; they used to just put out 13.6 volts, which can not fully or quickly charge a battery. But there has been remarkable progress in bringing the cost down of real, three stage, battery chargers that put out 14.X volts DC, and twiddle the "

I step out of the rig before dawn to let my little poodle do his old-man duties. I stand close, guarding him. Off in the distance the sagebrush stands out slightly from the surrounding grass; under the full moon, it looks like a patient, lurking, coyote-sized predator. A full moon does a fine job on a high, lonesome, and wind-less mesa. But all of this had little effect on me. It was the temperature that mattered. It was chilly of course, but to just the right intensity. It's funny how certain "hardships" stimulate a person. The hardship must be of the right kind and adjusted to the proper intensity. For the first time in several days, the chilliness left me feeling confident as I braced against it. Perhaps I should celebrate the occasion by rereading Toynbee's chapters on "Challenge and Response." What he described about several societies in different eras -- he was gloriously time-agnostic -- applies just as well to an individual's life. It is the

It might just be a fluke of a small data set, but it seems that RV travelers are already too far south this October. "There he goes again, running down people who have different tastes than himself," say a few readers. But actually, I'm not talking about tastes at all; I'm talking about geography. North America is 10-20 times smaller in winter than in summer, after taking into account what most travelers desire. This causes two problems: 1) a noticeable population compression in the places that are desirable in winter, and 2) you run out of places to go in the winter. You get tired of the same old places. Population compression (#1) does not enhance the camping experience unless you enjoy lines, crowds, generators, or higher prices and reservations at RV parks. Problem #2 is real, but not severe. I like the places that I've gone to, in winters past. Still, there is a limit to how long I can stay interested in places like the Mojave Desert or windy southern N