My Trails

This is my new home. It is a 2002 Minnie Winnebago. Compared to my van it is a mansion. I now have the ability to sleep in a full size bed, take hot showers, bake a batch of cookies, and best of all, stand up inside and walk around. It has a generator to power an air conditioner and microwave, and a nifty little hot water tank for all those cleaning chores.

I learned to be quite comfortable while living in my van and It served me well as I traveled around the country. For a single person in constant motion, exploring and living for adventure, finding new places every day, It probably is one of the best modes of travel. With good gas mileage and the ability to reach back country places in forests and hidden roads, you can’t beat a van. But it was time to move to a bigger home.

While the ability to live the vagabond life is still important to me, I realize that a lot of my time will be spent parked in one place. A van dweller usually lives outside more than inside and this system works great as long as the weather is nice. The problem lies in the fact that there are places around this country where it may rain for several days in a row. That is when the interior of a van can get a little confining.

I hope to tell more of my new lifestyle in short and fascinating posts here. The travel will be slow and the traveler’s mind has always been a little slow, but I want to chronicle even the silly and ordinary so I will never forget.

Sometimes when I’m in my camper I wonder how the outside is doing. When I’m outside I sometimes wonder how my camper’s inside is doing. Often when I wake in the morning I wonder how cold it got in the night. Now, a lot of that mystery is taken care of with my new little weather station. I was going to call it a thermometer but that seems too simple for all the tasks it performs.

I’m heading back to Mesa today for some overdue family time. I also need to do a few minor repairs on my adventure vehicle. This trip has been a test of my new solar system and continuing boondocking skills. Everything is working great but I still have an idea in the back of my head that I should look for a new adventure vehicle. Maybe I will get to check out a couple bigger RVs when I get to the city.

Wow! What a difference a day makes. Yesterday it was almost 90 degrees. All I felt like doing was sitting in the shade, sipping on a grape drink, wishing for a little breeze to come through. In the night the wind picked up until I was forced from my bed to roll up the awning before it flew away. Today has been windy and chilly, a good day to stay inside and read. I stayed in my pajamas until 11 am.

Last night a BLM ranger stopped by to tell me they were enforcing the 14 day stay limit and I had better not be here when she came back in two weeks. I agree that you need some rules out here to keep homesteading folks under control. I asked her why I see some people camped out here for most of the winter? She said it is because they don’t have enough Rangers to enforce the law. I’m heading back to Mesa tomorrow.

I was thinking today that I have become like the ancient cliff dwellers of the west who disappeared without a trace hundreds of years ago. They knew how to write in a fashion. We have found many pictographs of symbols and art they left on rocks and caves, but nothing that really tell us why they just picked up and left. If someone stumbles on my blog in the future, they may think I left, too.

Home

Today I bought a new thermometer. It is one of the fancy kind that has a wireless sensor you hang outside and get a digital readout on a little monitor inside. I could have just hung a basic thermometer outside the window, but where’s the fun in that? The thermometer tells me what I knew all along – it is hot here in the desert near Yuma, AZ. Tomorrow should be cooler but windy.

I rode my Time Machine into the past today. Even though it was just a little bit, I do feel younger. The trouble was when I had planned to stop at 4, and then realized it was only 3, my head was all messed up.

I drove more miles today than I normally like. It was rainy and spitting snow across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois so I made a detour before I got to St. Louis and headed south towards I40. I think I am far enough south now to avoid any snow or freezing rain.

Last night I stayed at a state park near Dayton. It was way below freezing this morning but I stayed warm snuggled in my sleeping bags. When I wake up I kick on my heater and within minutes it is warm in my van. The park was basically closed but not closed. All the roads were open and I had my pick of many sites.
Tonight I am at a Walmart about 100 miles north of Memphis. It is still raining but way warmer than yesterday. Now that I am out of the worst weather I will slow down and take it easy for a few days.

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