Vanishing Point

When I left L.A., my plan was to spend two nights in Blythe and use the day in-between to clean and reorganize my van. Then I saw the weather forecast for the day I planned to leave Blythe and saw that it was going to rain for the first time in a couple of months. When I learned to drive in the midwest, I was taught to be careful during the first few minutes of rain because the water would mix with oil accumulated on the road to create a slick surface. When I moved to California, I was taught to be careful during the first rain of the season for the same reason, but bigger -- since it likely hadn't rained for several months, the amount of oil on the road would be much greater. That first rainy season, after I thought it had rained plenty to clean off the roads, I took a freeway on-ramp just a little too fast and started to fishtail. The main part of the road had gotten enough water and wear to clean it off at that point, but the ramp was more lightly traveled and was still slick.

When I started this blog, I intended to show off the inside of my van very early in my trip. However, I soon figured out that I'd brought along more stuff than I could store neatly, and I didn't want to share pics of a mess. The last couple of days I took most of the loose stuff out of my van with the idea of reorganizing it for the return leg of my trip. I did some reorganizing, but mostly I put stuff back in the same place. I realized that I would either need to get rid of stuff that I'm not ready to get rid of, or make peace with things being messy. Also, now that I've sort-of learned where I keep things in the van, I don't want to confuse myself any more than necessary. So, here, finally, is a mini tour of my van. I have storage under the bed, storage under the table, a couple of plastic sets of shelves, and a few hanging features that can hold things, but I knew I would be staying in motels at least some of the time, so I stored some things in suitcases and

sat.u.ra.tion     /ˌsaCHəˈrāSH(ə)n/      noun      The state or process that occurs when no more of something can be absorbed, combined with, or added. Have I become sensorily and emotionally saturated with traveling after 49 days? That's 7 weeks. I've never traveled this long before. Looking back, I think it may have actually happened about a week before now. My interest in doing things has waned, and I feel increasingly like sitting still and doing nothing for a while. I put together some statistics last night. Of those first 49 days, there were 33 days when I traveled. I define traveling as picking up and moving where I would sleep the next night, no matter the distance. There were 16 days when I didn't travel, and I woke up in the same place where I would go to sleep the next night. I slept in my van 10 nights, I slept in the houses of friends or family 9 nights, at a retreat center for 2 nights, and in motels 28 nights. (Quite a few of those motel nights were free

Not necessarily in that order... My plan was to return to Arizona via Barstow, California, in part because I was there a really long time ago and I am curious to see that area again, and in part because it would allow me to avoid the greater Los Angeles area. But then a cold snap hit California. Pretty much the whole state is experiencing unusually cold temperatures. And the route to Barstow? It goes through Tehachapi, which has a weather forecast of snow and wind at the time I was planning to travel through there. My van is not properly equipped to drive it in snow. So... changing plans. Now I'm going back through Los Angeles. I'll do it on the weekend, so it will be with relatively light traffic, so that is good. Before I decided to change plans, I had been looking at places to visit along my intended travel route, and I noticed a town called Taft near Bakersfield. I'd never heard of it, so I googled it and found its Wikipedia page. Someone in Taft clearly has a passi

In some ways it is really good to be back in the area where I've spent most of my life. Although much is changing, I am still able to visit places that I remember fondly. Yesterday I visited with a human friend and at an old favorite location, Hakone Gardens:  http://www.hakone.com/main.html  It was a beautiful day - exactly what I picture when I think of a perfect, crisp, sunny, fall day. We were up high where we could look down on Silicon Valley and see the mountains on the far side of the valley, and the air was clear enough for the view to be pretty. I took some photos of the landscaping and wildlife. There was a particularly majestic tree: A photo of me under the same tree: And some turtles sunning themselves with fish hanging out nearby. The larger koi were all huddled together in a dark, shady spot the whole time I was there, so I was not able to take any good photos of them. This photo from the park's Wikipedia page shows how big and colorful

I'm in familiar territory and visiting with friends these days. I expect to do that for the next week or so before I start traveling again. I probably won't be blogging much until I hit the road again. My foot continues to improve and now usually doesn't cause me to limp. I hope to start doing more exercise during this next week and to start building up stamina again. It would be really wonderful to be able to go on some hikes as I move back East across the country. Here's a photo I took out the back window of my van this morning. I backed up to a hedge and then the dew did it's thing overnight. I thought it looked pretty cool through the tinted glass. Laissez les bons temps rouler! (Let the good times roll! -- I'm writing this on Fat Tuesday)

I'm not Catholic, so why would I want to visit a Catholic mission? I'm intentionally going to avoid talking about theology in this post as much as possible, because I count people of many beliefs among my friends. What I can say is that I've noticed that some places make it easier for me to feel stillness and peace than others. The first few times I happened upon a place whose stillness interrupted whatever was going on with me, I was surprised. Then I started to seek out that kind of experience, and look for it in certain places. The Missions of California are that sort of place. They each have a church, and because they were constructed to be like a fort to make them easier to defend (they tended to do some things that provoked a less than peaceful co-existence with their neighbors), they have a courtyard. In some cases the courtyard is intact, and in some cases it's no longer completely enclosed. The churches often contain beautiful art and architecture, but

Morro Bay wasn't working out the way I hoped. The town is designed for small vehicles. Parking my van in the part of town I'd have liked to stay in was pretty much impossible for someone like me who doesn't feel up to walking a few blocks to get where I want to go. So I went to the motel on the other side of town with plentiful parking to get all my electronics charged up and do other indoor stuff. I found a campground near Hearst Castle that sounded nice and I drove over to check it out. I popped in and out of the fog on the way there, but the last few miles were dense fog that didn't look at all attractive for camping. I didn't even go into the campground because I didn't want to try turning left out of the access road onto the highway in that fog. I found a place to turn around on the other side of the road and went back to the motel and stayed there another night. By the time I got back, the motel was socked in with fog and stayed that way the rest of the

The drive from Blythe to L.A. was really beautiful. I made that drive in the other direction when I moved to Indiana a few years ago, but I don't remember it being that remarkable. It could be due to weather, time of day, or my state of mind. Whatever the difference, this time the main thing I experienced was the beauty. As I left town, I took the 101 freeway out of Los Angeles over toward the coast. At one point there is a long, winding downhill stretch marked as a 7% grade. As I was managing my speed going down the hill, I noticed the van downshift at one point, when I was going about 60 mph. From then on, as long as I kept my foot off the gas and as long as the hill continued to be steep, my van used engine breaking in Drive to stay at 55 mph. Pretty cool! Since then, I've noticed it kick in on other highway-speed down hill stretches. So now I wonder -- is this because I'm driving a van, or is it because I'm driving a much newer vehicle? For those of you with fairl

I took my first big road trip for my 50th birthday, which will be 10 years ago in May. On that trip, I took along a tent and a few miscellaneous things that would allow me to stay overnight in a campground, but I never did camp on that whole trip. My previous experience with camping was either a trip someone else planned, or sleeping outside at a rustic conference center when I had activities keeping me busy all day. I was open to the possibility of camping on my 50th birthday trip, but I just never found the idea as attractive as staying in a motel, and I didn't push myself. Just taking that trip by myself was a big deal. My next big road trip was when I moved from California to Indiana. I divided it up into 300-mile chunks (anything much more than that in a day and I become fatigued in a way that isn't in my best interest or anyone else's on the road). I had my critters with me, and I couldn't leave them unattended in my car for longer than it took for me to use the

I will soon get back to talking about where I've been and what I've seen, but this post is more about my inner journey. What do I mean by "Being Goldilocks"? I mean two things. First, I mean searching for the things that feel "just right" to me. That's about trusting my gut and looking for situations that suit me. Second, I mean searching for the "just right" in the things that I find. That's about how I hold whatever happens -- looking for the gifts in situations that may not appear on the surface to be "just right." Now on with the story... I've gotten pretty comfortable with handling my van, but I have not yet mastered a big vehicle state of mind. This is much more noticeable now that I'm in California. The pace of traffic in Los Angeles was intense. I expected nothing less and after my initial resistance, I got in sync with the pace of it and didn't seem like such a big deal. But I expected that after I got o

I've been catching up watching some of the nomads whose YouTube channels I like to watch, and I'm comforted to learn I'm not the only one finding it too warm for comfort in Southeast Arizona the last few days. Apparently this has been unseasonably warm weather, and others have been heading off to higher elevations or other areas sooner than usual this winter. The warmth also means that insects have been more active, which is why I've started to have issues with bees that I didn't have earlier in January. Since I'm this far West, I want to see some folks in California before deciding what's next. I'll see what the weather's like at that point to help me decide where to explore. In the mean time, here's a photo of an amusing street sign in Quartzsite: And a link to an article in the New York Times about the RTR:  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/31/style/rubber-tramp-rendezvous-rv-trucks-vanlife.html?

After I heard about the upcoming eclipse, I knew I wanted to camp in the desert that night, and get up early to watch. I made plans with the friend I'd arranged to meet up with at the RTR to connect back up and camp together that night so that we could watch it together. While we were each off doing our own thing between RTR and the eclipse, she injured herself hiking (just a strain, but a very painful one that flipped the tables on us -- I was suddenly the more mobile one of the two of us). Her new campsite was everything she wanted except the cell phone service was poor. She could text and make short calls (calls would frequently be dropped) but she could not use her phone as a wifi hotspot to do research online. So she texted me and asked if I could find her a chiropractor in one of the nearby towns. We managed all the logistics of that, and I met her at the chiropractor's office after her appointment Tuesday morning. We had lunch and then she led us both back to her camps