It appears that my wife has a “Bucket List” and a To Do List.
I have neither.
Her To Do List includes fixing a leak in the roof, which is required before the interior remodel can be completed. The remodel started in 2000; the roof leak appeared a few years later.
So this week I put the roof issue on my own To Do List, which was completely empty – actually I had to create a list. However it was too windy outside this week.
I discussed the installation of our ProPride hitch in the post, How much trailer can you tow — part 3.
We have now towed our trailer over 1,000 miles with the ProPride hitch. This has included driving in sustained 30 MPH crosswinds, some freeway travel, and several trips, most of which are around 100 miles round trip. One trip was 450 miles. We also have been subjected to big rigs passing us at high speeds. With all of this in mind, I thought I would share my impressions.
We just got back from a few days of camping, which happened to be the official start of Spring. It really didn’t matter that it was spring, we would have been out anyway — but it makes a nice headline for the post.
Springtime in the desert usually means wind, and some years it means lots of colorful flowers. With little rainfall this year, there won’t be the fabulous spring flowers. However the wind is here.
Hope this works. The hard drive in my laptop crashed and the restoration processs, if it works, looks to be at least a 10 hour ordeal.
Anyway, I don’t spend much time reading blogs, but I have been watching this one for nearly a year.
I’ll let the author explain it…
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National Geographic Fellow Paul Salopek is retracing on foot our ancestors’ migration out of Africa and across the globe. His 21,000-mile odyssey began in Ethiopia and will end seven years later at the tip of South America.
National Geographic is funding Paul’s storytelling from the trail—dispatches of varied length posted here every few days or at longer intervals. There’s a brief delay between his filing of stories and their posting. Paul is reading your comments and responding to some, so please check back.
Not long ago I was hiking in a remote area. Remote meaning I didn’t expect to meet any people. There wasn’t a trail to follow, no signs, and I knocked down the accurate cairns while leaving the inaccurate ones standing. I was heading to a sensitive historical area to which some bonehead had posted detailed directions on the Internet, which usually means morons will start visiting and damaging the site.
While I didn’t expect to see anyone else hiking in the area, there is always the possibility someone else will be in the area, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. I ran into a fellow who asked if I had a topographical (topo) map he could look at. Before continuing with the rest of the story, a brief discussion of topo is in order.
A conversation with a friend about art brought up an interesting question: Is photography art?
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a photographer.
Last year I shared our story of the vandalism and theft of items on our pop-up camper.
Last night or early this morning we were again the victims of a thief; a lowly creature who stole our left rear tire and wheel.
Last week I was in Texarkana. The one in both states of Arkansas and Texas.
When I left the hotel it was brisk 23 degrees F, but it didn’t seem that cold. I guess with all my trips to the east coast this year I must be getting acclimated to the cold. I had to meet with my client and then fly out to LAX at noon.
Once the meeting was over, I began to think about the weekend. I had a couple options, knowing the weather wasn’t going to be great. One was backpacking in the San Jacintos, which was going to require snowshoes, given that the incoming storm was predicting 2 to 4 feet of snow. The second option was we could go camping, but forecasted heavy rains can make desert travel difficult with road closures and flash floods.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about a backpacking trip that didn’t happen. I don’t particularly care for cold weather, especially since I have easy access to warm weather hiking in the desert. If I am going to take a trip in cold weather with the obligatory warm (and heavier gear), then I figure I might as well do it in the snow. Unfortunately there hasn’t been much snow in California the past couple of years. Last year I even headed up to the Sierras for snow, since the local mountains didn’t have much, and I struck out on that trip too.
After spending two weeks this month in sub-freezing weather (a week in Panama City, Florida and a week in Columbia, South Carolina) I decided to finally spend a few days in some really nice weather with Joyce and Corky. Daytime highs in the 70’s and nighttime lows in the high 40’s (F).
In Managing Your Recreation Inventory, I talked about Time as something that could be banked or managed as inventory, akin to how a warehouse manager manages the physical inventory. To me Time is a valuable commodity to be saved for productive pursuits such as backpacking or camping.
Shopping can be detrimental to your Time inventory. Time wasted by wandering from store to store, aisle to aisle, shopping center to shopping center. Not to mention time wasted driving to and from stores and the fuel consumed.