Occupation of Independence

There are huge advantages to hiking or bicycling with a group, and yet, it is difficult to make it work. T here are plenty of compatibility issues: where, when, how far, how fast? At times it makes you just want to chuck it. But in the case of road cycling one simply must try harder to make it work -- your safety depends on it. It's too bad more women don't cycle. Cycling requires no upper body strength, and women have strong legs. Perhaps they are bothered by the occasional boorish male motorist; or maybe they don't like the way they look in spandex.  When they manage to overcome such issues and form a girl's club, they always seem to have a great time, chattering away on the bicycles or off. Male cyclists have a special problem: they don't like getting their butts kicked. Think back to one of the platitudes of your school years: that 'sports build character.' I never really believed that pearl of wisdom back then, perhaps because I wasn't especiall

Isn't it strange how little training we get as schoolchildren in finding stuff that's worth reading? I can't help but think about this enigma now that the euphoria has worn off from my project of breaking the internet blog habit and going back to reading real books. In olden times idealistic school teachers might have thought it impertinent to guide students towards what they should read; after all, that should be a matter of personal choice for the reader; and they were paid to educate, not to brainwash . But if individual teachers still practice that today, when the teacher's union is an integral part of a political party and teachers are state-paid priests of political correctness, well then, they are indeed idealistic. In theory teachers and librarians should be just a s qualified to aim readers towards certain books as they are to choose academic courses for youngsters. Of course there was a time, circa 1970, when it became an educational fa d to "like,

Hey, I'm excited about what I read this morning about lead-carbon batterie s. I've never heard of them before. So far, an RVer has only had two choices: good ol' flooded lead-acid batteries, and expensive AGM batteries. But it's really nice to read about a third choice. This is an investment article  -- we're not talking about a science lab show-and-tell project here. Do you know of anybody who uses the new lead-carbon batteries in their RV?

It was an odd and pleasant experience to walk into the "breaks" near Socorro, NM; and of course that means I have to try to explain it. After all, if I don't think about and write about odd and powerful experiences, what should I write about? I don't know if most readers caught it, but d uring the discussion of my last post on this topic, history was quietly made: one of the outdoors-blogosphere's most notorious and incorrigible optical-sybarites (grin) admitted that a breathtakingly beautiful, 1200-foot-high, sheer vertical, redrock cliff is not necessarily 1.3333 times as breathtakingly beautiful as an identical cliff that is only 900 feet high. It is time to be a good sport and move on. I will nobly resist the tendency to be greedy by also trying to get him to admit that: We should stop calling things beautiful when they are just freakishly large, and therefore have been made into a national park. The freakishly large is certainly entertaining, but only

Yuma, AZ. You don't have to be in a snowbird town more than a couple hours before somebody pops the question. Yep, that question. I've tried everything: boycotting the question in a obviously jocular manner;  ignoring the question, and immediately changing the subject to, say, the weather or the condition of the roads; groaning out loud;  pausing for a noticeable period of time, then sighing, before finally giving a desultory and halting answer. (This is aimed at making them feel guilty.) I've tried 'em all. I've even tried just answering the question in a brief and neutral way. Nothing works. What question am I talking about? Aw come on, in a snowbird capital like Yuma? There's something about the body language that usually gives the culprit away, but sometimes they blindside you. "Soooooooo, where 'ya from?" My entire body locks up in a wince. The worst culprits are those who insist on taking a deadpan answer as a challenge. You ca