Occupation of Independence

It's rare to get a chance to smile at animals, aside from our domestic pets. The best shots at this occur when a normally boring or stupid animal suddenly becomes clever. For instance, ungulates don't seem like the brightest bulbs on Mother Earth, but under the right circumstances... Going down a road in the Socorro NM area I was surprised at the number of "hunters" parked along the road. Which season is it now ? But then again, maybe they were joy-riding four-wheelers, rather than hunters. The "lower" Rio Grande starts at Socorro by my estimate. It is reminiscent of the Mojave Desert, even though it is the Chihuahuan Desert, officially. Although I postpone "winter" locations in order to keep North America from shrinking too soon, it was fun to start walking arroyos again, which is something I only do in the winter. What really makes walking these arroyos delicious is the cold, dry air. On today's walk there were some cows. That'

Near El Rito, NM. It was finally time to come down from the high ridges and head to town to get the usual supplies. Hunters said that the only store in town was a restaurant that was humble, but offered tasty food. Victims of Bernanke's Zero Interest Policy like me have no business "eating out" but sometimes it is irresistible in small towns. It seems like you are really "making a difference" in a place that has the weakest commercial pulse imaginable. As it turned out, the restaurant was closed anyway. Typical. I drove through the town looking for a small grocery store, but found nothing. Ahh but there was something else. There were huge school buildings and athletic fields; police headquarters with high tech and expensive squad cars parked outside; and a Forest Service office. It was a large, modern, air-conditioned, office building, decked out in nice office furniture and the latest computers. Outside was an astounding number of motor vehicles; not just h

Go ahead and laugh. I responded to the news about the $500 Windows RT tablet by going to Walmart to buy a second Acer Aspire One (model 722-0473) netbook. This is the first time in my life when I've o wned two computers. I panicked into concluding that, over the ne xt cou ple years, the computer industry will kill off the netbook and leave the chumps only the following sorry options : 1) $800-1000 WINTEL "ultrabooks" or , 2) $500-600 tablets based on ARM micro processors , similar to those in sm artphones, that only offer a "half-internet" experience or , 3) inexpensive 7" tablets that are basically just smartphones with out the ability to make phone calls. Or call them vending machines for media consumable s from Amazon or the iShackle s tore (Apple's iTunes) . Last but not least, 4) the usual overpriced "walled garden" at the Apple store, built around its notorious iShackle media store, and incompatible connect ors and opera

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

Real travelers -- as opposed to mere sightseers -- might yearn for opportunities to learn of new manners and customs, languages and religions, and ways of life. But it's tough to do that without traveling to third world countries, with all the costs and risks. Even there you would need opportunities to live and work with the locals, rather than just gawk at them as quaint caricatures.  Perhaps one of the biggest advantage of dispersed camping on public lands is that it makes you so separate from the normal American that you get to experience what could be seen as exotic foreign travel when you return to the most ordinary metropolitan areas in your own country.  When the ol' desert rat or dispersed camper -- think of him as a Noble Savage -- returns to the city, what exactly happens to him as he becomes "normal" again? Adjusting to the obscene onslaught of noise, 7 and 24 and 365, is the most immediate and obvious change. Do most people see this Noble Savage as

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

Or... Navigation on the Navajo Reservation There is no denying that there has been much "progress" the last few years in GPS gadgets for the dashboard of motor vehicles. Just the same, I'm glad I've abstained, since it might have robbed me of a unique and memorable experience the other day. I was taking a "shortcut" paved road, supposedly, from Cuba to Grants, NM. The trip began on a secondary dirt road on BLM land. The washboard was so bad that the sewer hose jiggled loose and fell off on the road. When I drove back to look for it, the old superstition about 'retreating being bad luck' came to mind. As I headed west into the Navajo reservation I kept wondering why it was a dirt road road. The DeLorme and Benchmark atlases had never disappointed me before, except for a minor error here and there. Making a wrong turn isn't normally a big deal. In fact in the past I've accepted the outcome of wrong turns and just kept going, just to see w

The outcome of the first presidential debate has been historically important. (Remember, I don't watch the debates themselves.) Spinmeisters are probably correct when they say this is the first time President Obama has gone in front of so many potential voters without the protective force field set up by his adoring fans in the news media. I'm not for either candidate. The great Quotemeister of the Internet, Edward Frey , found a quote (see his 12 October 2012 post) from Business Insider pointing out that Ben Bernanke has not been mentioned yet in either debate. How careless of them! Yea right. The only solid reason for voting for Romney is that he has said he won't reappoint that narco-Keynesian clown. But what Romney has completely failed to do is come out with both guns blazing about breaking up the Too-Big-To-Fail banks. From George Will today we have: It is inexplicable politics and regrettable policy that Romney has, so far, flinched from a forthright endorsem

So far I've resisted adding links to dozens of "me too" mainstream RV travelogues because, when I'm the reader, a mile-long list of such links is too daunting to even dig in to. So I've restricted the list to friends' blogs. In other cases I haven't listed links to certain blogs because they already have huge readerships, so my referrals wouldn't give them the slightest bump. (Examples are toSimplify.net and theBayfieldBunch.com) But even more fundamentally I don't list mainstream RV travelogues because they are stereotypical to the point of self-parody. They are too much alike and too predictable. Does it sound like I'm in curmudgeon mode today? I admit to being fairly hard to please. But there is a constructive way to use reputed "cynics" and "negative thinkers": when they give a recommendation it really means something . I added cheapRVliving.com to my list of links. It's been built by somebody who I have never

I was checking out dispersed camping opportunities near Grants, New Mexico. Specifically I was driving along the side of El Malpais (the Badlands) national monument, a huge and rather recent volcanic lava field, all jumbled and black. Then I encountered a road crew doing some road repair. The flagman stopped my direction of traffic. Traffic was light so I didn't expect a long wait. But after 10 minutes of waiting I was starting to get irked. Finally the escort truck came to our end, reversed his direction, and led us off. Some monstrous truck was laying down a 2 foot high strip of hot steaming smelly asphalt, followed by another machine that spread it out to a uniform 4 inch thickness. Hey wait a minute... All of a sudden I started smiling, if not giggling out loud. There was something about the juxtaposition that was just plain cute. 

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