Catch Me If You Can

The Un-Oven

2012-02-09T23:48:00.001-06:00

Hey good-lookin' ! What's cookin' ?

It is a recurring fantasy of mine that one day I may get to travel again, at least loosely tethered to central Texas. Pursuant to that, I've purchased a small trailer, and I am slowly improving it in various directions. Unfortunately, it doesn't have an oven. This appliance, which used to be standard on even the smallest RV, is getting pretty rare on smaller trailers and motorhomes. The manufacturers seem to think it an extravagance. Maybe it is. For me to put one in would enrich Camping World by some $700. That might just kill my appetite.

Not that I used an oven all that much when I was gallivanting around the continent. Maybe once a week. When traveling steadily, it was too easy to dine out. But boondocking with a gas oven meant I could eat roast beasts and casseroles, bake bread and cookies, even enjoy the occasional lasagna. Did I mention cookies? I tell you there is something magical about fresh cookies, especially when you are parked in the back of beyond. It fosters the grand illusion that maybe it is possible to avoid the clamor of civilization without real hardship after all. Or even minor privation.

Hey, it's my fantasy, ain't it? A man can dream. And this one has wheels under it.

I thought for a while about a toaster oven. Cheap enough, but they require electricity, and that means running the generator. Who wants to listen to that? Shall I turn myself into one of Pavlov's dogs, learning to salivate to the tune of a mechanical contrivance? Besides, even a smaller oven of that sort would take up half my counter space.

Enter our Hero. The Coleman Camp Oven. Forty bucks from Amazon. A 12 inch cube that sits on top of one of your burners and claims to bake cakes, etc. How could I resist?

It arrived only yesterday, and I've been putting it through its paces today. Much to my surprise, not even once has it failed to please. It folds flat into a 12 inch square for storage, leaving my counters clear. It is all one piece, and folds out into a cube in seconds. You would be clever to make sure Tab A really goes firmly into Slot B before the thing gets hot. I neglected to lock the bottom down the first time, and the burner pooked it up during the biscuit exercise. No bother at all to fix when it's cold.

At full heat you can hold your hand an inch or two away without discomfort, but like any pot on the stove, if you touch it you will get burned. There is a thermometer on the door. I have no idea how accurate it is, but my burner drives it up to a nominal 350 degrees on high and just pegs there. It pays to preheat for baked goods. This takes ten minutes or so, but after that you can expect the cooking times stated on packages to be broadly accurate, just like in your big oven at home.

I got golden brown biscuits in 15 minutes. Perfect. I tried some toast, but it came out like oven toast everywhere: fine on the burner side, merely dry on top. If toast is your obsession, you can use tongs to turn the slices. It does brown up quickly. Crumbs everwhere, of course. Fortunately this oven can be upended and shaken out in the yard. No problemo.

A Crime punishable only when it's a hundred miles to the next croissant.

My 11 minute croissants got burned, because the so-called cook left them in there for 20 minutes. What can I say? He obviously had his head up his ... ah... book. They were not inedible. Not entirely.

But I did not eat them.

This incident reminded me of an epigram by the Roman poet Martial. Goes something like this:

"Sir? You do not think it fit
to beat the Cook for spoiling the broth?
Sir, I ask you, in all truth,
What greater crime can Cooks commit?"

No oven can perfect the careless cook. But meats are more forgiving. I seldom time them in any case, being more of a sniff and peek sort of cook. I broiled two chicken thighs for lunch. Checked at 30 minutes, a knife test showed they were done, but I took the foil off and put them back in for a quarter of an hour to brown the skin.

Enough Talk! Let's Eat!

Mighty Fine

There was a lot of burbling splatter-sounds going on in there while the chicken browned, and I dreaded the cleanup, but apparently little of it escaped the pan. What little grease popped up on the inside was wiped away in seconds with a spritz of Windex and a single paper towel. O, and this oven cools down quickly. Five minutes after the fire is removed, the metal is room temperature and can be folded up and stored.

I'm beginning to love this thing. I haven't got a thousand words left in me. But I do have a few more pictures:

Dinner Rolls

Cookies, of Course!

And finally, the Staff Of Life. In the mortal words of the Permanent Poet Laureate of Texas, Mr. Burma Shave:

The Dough has Riz
The Oven's Set
But here we iz
In Texas yet!

Things Could Be Worse

2011-07-18T21:07:00.007-05:00

Several people have been wondering why I haven't been blogging lately. The answer is pretty simple, but otherwise not so pretty at all.

I have been taking care of my brother Mike. He got out of Rehab on January 28th. On February 3rd, he was served papers for divorce from his estranged wife of 5 years. I lived with him for about 6 weeks while he slowly got better, and thereafter went over there just about every day to see that he got fed and to clean up any messes he couldn't handle.

He made sloooow progress through the end of May. Not great, but okay. The divorce didn't go anywhere. The wife was in and out of hospitals herself, and Mike didn't have the stamina to struggle with lawyers. Then he got the idea he wanted to move into an apartment, clearing out of the house while it was being sold. I tried to talk him out of it, as that would mean rent on top of a mortgage. And who knew for how long?

We moved him in on June 4th, 2011. And all during the week thereafter. If he listened to me, he wouldn't be my brother.

About a week later, he started having a relapse - unable to sleep, dragging his foot, weak and tired all the time, all symptoms he had largely gotten over months before. On the evening of Sunday, June 24th, I couldn't get hold of him by phone. When I went over there I found him lying on the floor of the bathroom, too weak to get up. In two weeks he had gone from walking normally to this. I got him into bed and called the doctor. He had a CT scan in the Emergency Room. They found 4 large tumors pressing on the right side of his brain. Which explained the sinister weakness.

We were both stunned. We thought everything was due to the accident. Just a minor switchback on the road to his eventual recovery.

He was transported to Scott and White in Temple. There they did further scans and found a large tumor in the high right lobe of his lung. It was stage 4 lung cancer, metastatic to the brain. There is no cure. All treatment is merely palliative.

We went for it anyway. He responded well to whole brain radiation. Without it they told us he might have died that weekend - because of Cushing's Reflex, where the pressure of the tumors on vessels in the brain would slow the heart until it stopped. Instead, the tumors shrank enough to allow him to start walking with a walker again. After a week in the hospital he went to a local nursing home, so as to be close to his regimen.

The radiation is over now. Tomorrow he begins chemotherapy, and Wednesday I am bringing him back to Georgetown so he can be close to friends, and I can be handy for emergencies. Like bringing him his usual menudo fix on Sundays.

His son and grandchildren came down from Pennsylvania all last week, staying at his apartment. They had a pretty good visit.

So this, my friends, is the secret of why I have not been blogging. It would have been entirely too depressing, and a violation of his privacy. Blogging is supposed to be fun, and when the fun dries up it is only natural the blogging should too.

I may get back into it later. Say in the Spring.

They say Mike has anywhere from 2 months to a year, depending on how he reacts to chemo. He may even go home for a while. But not for long. The damn thing is almost certain to come roaring back.

There is no cure. Any radiation or chemical treatment strong enough to kill the cancer will kill him first. So eventually they will call a stop, and Mike will go into Hospice, and pass away. He wants to be cremated, and scattered like a condiment on the Rocky Mountains, near Engineer Pass. I suppose I can do that for him.

He may get a sort of Indian Summer first, though. What the heck. We'll take it.

Bob G.

I'm the cute one. Mike is the other one.

Fall

2010-12-10T08:12:00.004-06:00

"Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie..."

- G. M. Hopkins

My shady past is not so shady any more. The eight large trees on my lot have dropped almost all their leaves, and there are days when sunlight brightens every corner. But it seems, now that illumination doesn't require much effort, the Sun has gone lazy. Most days here at the beginning of winter are gray, the sky off-white and darkening toward the corners, and leaves lie about in disorderly piles, much like the dead at Waterloo.

Waterloo was a long time ago. It does not oppress me now. But leaves do, for soon I must rake them up, bag them, and argue with the garbagemen about going 20 bags or so over my weekly allowance.

I tell them to blame God. I had nothing to do with it. Leaves fall from heaven, like manna. If they don't pick them up from me now, then they'll pick them up later. If I let them just blow, they'll be picking them up from my irritated neighbor, or someone further down the street. It is fate. I urge them to accept the gravity of the situation. It's only once a year.

Some years they have taken that argument in good humor. Some years they leave the pile of bags at the curb, diminishing it only by the miserly allottment of 5 bags a week.

Such are the trials of living in a stick house. If you are lucky enough to be living on the road, I advise you to stay there. Let the wind do your raking with a clear conscience.

I've worked up a couple of excuses to leave them lie. I'm industrious that way. I've had another cancer cut from my left hand, and the wound is still in stitches. Don't want to stretch that into a monumental scar, right? Another surgery, on my right hand, is scheduled for the 22nd. Soon I will have more stitches than Raggedy Andy. Perhaps even enough to keep you in stitches. And then there's this sinus infection I have only narrowly escaped, and still may succumb to. No point in testing it with all that leaf mold and dust up my nose.

I should really move all this unfortunate ambition into the New Year, where Resolutions belong. There, I'm convinced. Where there is life there is procrastination. Best to leaf it for another week, and work instead on developing a decent pun for the holidays.

In other news, Mike is back in Rehab. The infection that laid him low last Sunday has succumbed to the miracle of antibiotics. Deo gratias. He is still seeing two or three of everything, and is fed through a hole in his stomach, but he seems relieved to be back.

He even asked me to give him a haircut this weekend. Now there's a guy with a healthy sense of humor.

Bob

A Daffy Metaphor

2010-12-07T16:11:00.008-06:00

As I mentioned in the comments last time, Mike was doing great for a few weeks there. Then last Sunday afternoon he got a ferocious bladder infection, had his temperature spike to 107 degrees, and went into seizure. He is now back in ICU at South Austin Hospital. The infection is under control, but he's still running 99 degrees.

He finally got off the ventilator today, and guess what was the first thing he said to me in that croaking voice?

"Don't let this stress you out."

Me? He doesn't want ME to be stressed out? Same to ya, bub.

I was reaching for a metaphor recently to describe the process of Mike's "recovery". Nothing seemed to fit. Then I ran into this old cartoon on Youtube:

Yep. It's just like that. And thaaat's all, Folks!

(I wish.)

Bob

Saying No to Bro

2010-12-04T23:16:00.013-06:00

In normal times my brother Mike and I lead almost entirely separate lives. O, we manage to meet for Menudo most Sunday mornings, in lieu of Church. He has the run of my tool shed, and I of his. But my average pleasant day would probably drive him up the wall. He's not that much of a reader. And his enthusiasms leave me cold as well, since they often involve active interaction with a large group. I mean... bowling, for chrissakes? In a league? Even his idea of motorcycling was primarily social as well, like forming part of an "honor guard" with fifty or a hundred other bikers at various funerals. The racket was enough to raise the dead.

He was even involved with a "Biker Church". Holy Harley, Batman! Give me a break.

Mike hale and hearty? He has his life, and I have mine.

But Mike helpless? Mike lying up unconscious in a narrow room, surrounded by the casual brutality of a teaching hospital, with a tube down his throat? The sight of that Mike just knocked me right out of myself. My usual egotism was swept aside, forgotten, drowned. What was left was a fierce protectiveness.

It seems I am not quite the independent asshole that I thought I was. Imagine that.

It's only happened a few times, over the years. It always surprises me. I remember once in the seventh grade I picked up a kid my age by the throat and pinned him to the wall at the skating rink because he pushed my brother down. I didn't plan on doing that. I didn't even think about doing it. It just happened. Scared the crap out of me, when I came to my senses. I really could have hurt that kid.

It seems ridiculous to have that sort of reaction now. Not that I'm throwing anybody around. I'm an old guy. But I do have a completely automatic and unreasoning desire to stand guard over Mike. To keep him from harm. To make things better for him.

And as part of that I suddenly found it really hard to say no to him.

If he wanted to get out of his wheel chair, I'd scour the halls and round up nurses and such to get it done. I was polite, I think, but remorseless. If he wanted to get out of bed to take a leak, I'd do the same. It infuriated me that they would let him go in a diaper rather than show up instantly to help him to the pot. I would just commandeer help and refuse to take no for an answer. But then when he got in there, he often couldn't go, and then he wanted immediately back into bed. And then, half the time, he'd no sooner get his head back on the pillow than some therapist would show up to put him back in the wheel chair to take him down the hall.

I came to realize I was wearing out my welcome. There was a reason why they wanted him up in that wheel chair, whether he was comfortable or not. There was even a reason for the visiting hours I was ignoring. I was actually interfering with his recovery by indulging his every inconstant whim.

These people are professionals. They have a plan. And he has to get with the plan if he is going to get better. Whether he likes it or not.

There's a sign on the front door of the rehab hospital that says "Sometimes Caring Means Not Visiting". They are talking about staying away if you are sick, so you don't spread whatever you've got to the patients. But I think it applies to obsessively protective and indulgent brothers as well.

So now I've finally gotten to where I only go up there every other day. Mostly. I stay an hour, find out how he's doing, and what he's been doing, bring him his laundry and such, and then I leave him to it.

And he is getting better.

"Sometimes Caring Means Not Visiting". Sometimes it means getting out of the way. Letting go. It is the hardest part of love.

Bob

Why Am I Here?

2010-12-02T11:10:00.006-06:00

Where in the world is Bob?

And why have I not been?

Certainly I have not been at a loss for words. Perish the thought. Indeed, there are too many, as usual. But I am at a loss for discipline. For narrative direction. And without that, any extended tale becomes a jumble, a mucky tidal flat of vapid speculation, dotted with abandoned hulks of pointless blather.

A banal vision of rusty ruin, in other words. A low-rent Ragnarok. Gee, I'd like to avoid that. Wouldn't you?

And so I have been silent. It beats becoming a navel-gazing blabbermouth. But not by much.

When disaster strikes someone close to you, it changes their life. But it also changes yours. In fact, no one will escape some effect, from family and friends to the hospital staff to the usual hordes of imperfect strangers. On and on, in widening ripples of feckless fate. If you are reading this, that includes you.

Welcome to my metaphoric ripple. The boom will now shift as we jibe and bear away. Remember to duck. Ouch. Sorry about that.

Mike is recovering more or less on schedule. He is seeing the orthopedic surgeon today in hopes of gaining permission to remove the cast on his arm. He is still being fed through a tube until his swallow improves, but there is improvement. His memory is now pretty much intact, both short and long term. His mind seems entirely back, but he is bored out of it, and sick unto death with being helpless.

Getting his arm and leg free will, I hope, start a cascade of improvement. He will be able to get himself out of bed, and go to the bathroom without humiliating assistance. He will be able to move his wheel chair by himself. He will begin to walk. That exercise will improve his attitude and general fitness, and strength will flow from strength.

That is the plan.

There is a spot of worry about his eyes not focusing together. He can see reasonably well out of either of them, but not together. They track separately, and this results in double vision.

Barney Google, with the goo-goo-googly eyes.

He has an appointment with a neurologist specializing in opthalmology to see what can be done about that. Until then he has no depth perception to speak of, and tends to interpolate the edges of things erroneously.

So. First, mobility. Then learn to swallow positively enough that the epiglottis firmly covers the windpipe, and thus regain the ability to feed himself. I expect the next two weeks to be about that. Then maybe getting him out of that neck collar. Then we will deal with his vision.

He has disability pay until the middle of February. Things could be worse.

As for me, I can't see any prospect of travel before next summer. And I may sell the Beast.

This morning, I discovered that the City has slapped an impound sticker on my motorcycle trailer. It has been parked illegally in front of my house since Mike's accident. So right now I'm going to go move it over to his back yard. I'm surprised it took this long for the bureaucrats to swing into action. Perhaps they have been distracted by more important matters.

Bob, who had more to say than he thought. Maybe that will happen again tomorrow.

Bummer

2010-11-11T09:40:00.022-06:00

This blog is turning into a real bummer. I know.

It was intended to be an upbeat travel page, but since Mike's accident my life has been consumed with daily trips to the hospital, tracking down his bills and paying them out of my own pocket, and meeting with doctors and lawyers. Some trip.

"Lawyers" ??? Yeah, right, though I surely didn't want to.

There should be no current need for lawyers. There is no fight with the insurance company. They have agreed to pay. Any lawsuit should be put off until we are beyond their ability to pay - at the limits of the liability policy. We won't know how bad it gets, or what expenses will be incurred, for maybe a couple of years. There's plenty of time for that stuff later.

And we would certainly be unwise to put Mike's future in the hands of some fly-by-night contingency lawyer, who will try to take 40% off the top. Combat pay where no combat is needed, and none is offered.

But I am now seeing lawyers. I have no choice. There are people trying to take over various aspects of Mike's life while he is incapacitated, and I have to defend him against them.

My contention is that everything should be kept as much as possible just as he left it on October 1st. That is: his bills current, his job protected, and his house empty, so that when he recovers he can step back into his life and take up pretty much where he left off.

It has only been 6 weeks. He should be left alone to recover. We will know more about the end of this story in a couple of months. We can reconsider then. But some people are in a suspiciously great hurry to change things to suit themselves. It takes considerable expense and effort on my part just to hold the fort.

The good news is that Mike is now in a NeuroRehab hospital. He is responding to therapy. He is starting to regain his short term memory, and occasionally tells me "You told me that yesterday". The other day he recognized somebody from his office while they were still in the doorway, and greeted them by name. Yesss!!!

He left no power of attorney. He needs to recover quickly. If he does not, he could end up broke, disabled, jobless, homeless, and sitting alone at the curb in a rented wheelchair. Next to the garbage cans.

He deserves better. I will not let that happen. But much of it could turn out to be beyond my control.

As for myself, I find that stress makes me stupid. I know it's maladaptive, but there you are. I am usually quite capable of keeping several balls in the air at a time, but this is different. Sometimes my skull seems filled with Karo syrup. Doctors who appear to be about 12 years old can spout information at me, and it takes 3 tries before it fully penetrates.

Information no longer travels at the speed of light. If it ever did.

The thing is, I know what needs to be done. In a few hours, I could set up things to be self-paying for the next 6 months. Little by little, I am getting most of it done, indirectly, by taking a lot on myself. But Mike didn't leave me any tools to protect him with, other than the force of my personality. Much of the time I am reduced to grinding gears and stomping my foot on the brake.

My message to you is this: We all have a date with disability. It can come at any time. When it comes, you are going to need someone you can trust to handle your affairs. Empower them.

If you don't have anyone you can trust, you are already disabled.

Do something about that. Now.

Bob

Odd Signs Of Hope

2010-10-22T11:00:00.006-05:00

A Short History of Medicine

Patient: "I have an ear ache."
Physician:..
2000 B.C. - Here, eat this root.
1000 A.D. - That root is heathen, say this prayer.
1850 A.D. - That prayer is superstition, drink this potion.
1940 A.D. - That potion is snake oil, swallow this pill.
1985 A.D. - That pill is ineffective, take this antibiotic.
2000 A.D. - That antibiotic is artificial. Here, eat this root.

- Anonymous

Yesterday my brother Mike had what we hope is his final operation due to the motorcycle wreck, to reconstruct his face. The fractured bones of his cheeks and at his right temple were screwed to small titanium plates. The operation, by all accounts, went very well. When I saw him in the ICU afterward, I was surprised at how invisible the procedure was. The plates under the eyes were inserted from inside the mouth, and only a small suture at his right temple shows where that plate went in. Perhaps 10 stitches.

His face was not badly swollen. You cannot see the plates. She realigned his bite to where his upper and lower teeth met properly. He has something of a boxer's nose now, with a slight bend to the right. The surgeon tried to fix that, too,but the problem is in the soft tissue, not the bones. When she tried to insert a plate there, it showed through the thin skin, so she decided to back off. Instead he will wear a sort of splint on the outside for a time, to see if the tissue will straighten out that way. If not, further surgery can correct it when he has healed up from the rest.

I doubt he will bother with it. He is not that vain. Or perhaps he is, but in that curious way that sees a few scars and a bent nose as interesting.

One good bit of news: the attachment to the plates was stiff enough that she did not have to wire his jaws shut as a splint. He was talking up a storm in the prep room before surgery, answering questions, able to understand where he was and who we were. It was obviously a strain to be cogent, but he took the strain well. The principal sign of not being quite together was a tendency to repeat himself several times. Hell, I do that even on some of my better days.

This was the most he has been present with us since the accident. I fully expect that in the days to come we will not be able to shut him up, and he will begin to take soft food.

He even blew one nurse a kiss. I take particular heart from this.

And when another asked him how he felt, he said quite clearly "Not worth a shit." That's Mike. There's nothing he could have said that would done more to convince me that he was on the mend.

Bob

Give That Guy A Hand!

2010-10-16T10:40:00.013-05:00

Every day I go visit my brother Mike in the hospital. And every day has its ups and downs, but the overall effect is of idling in place. All the peripheral junk, like bill paying and insurance faxes and disposing of the remains of his motorcycle and cleaning up his house and yard - all that stuff has been taken care of, is being taken care of.

But he can't talk worth a durn. Only the simplest communication is possible. "Are you hurting?" A nod of the head. "Where are you hurting?" "Gurgle, gurgle, wha doan yah keh, gurgle, gurgle." "Okay, okay, just try to relax." A miserable tired smile, if only from the eyes.

I go for the nurse.

He can see okay out of his left eye. When asked what he saw out of his right, he said "Chalk". Of course he has a neck collar on, so mostly all he gets to look at is the ceiling. They are afraid that eye got dried out in the days after the wreck, when he was sedated and his eyes didn't close fully. Plus the right eye was more swollen. They now have a patch over it, to keep the lid closed. They are applying artificial tears, and some sort of ointment.

He has hallucinations. It may be due to what they call "hospital psychosis", an effect brought on by being drugged, naked, and helpless, not being able to move, never knowing what time it is, being awakened at all hours and never getting any rest, etc. It may be due to small bruises on both frontal lobes, where his helmet met the pavement. They seem to be getting better. There was also some bleeding at the back of his brain, but again it was not severe and is not getting worse, according to the latest cat scan. The area is beginning to be reabsorbed.

He spent some time the other day picking invisible things out of the air with his good hand. When I asked what he was doing, he said "Hairs". Then he started pulling at his tubes and poking at his good eye, so they tied down his hand. He fights the restraint occasionally, but not violently. Sometimes he can wiggle his toes on command, and sometimes he doesn't. He moves around quite a lot, by increments working his way down to the foot of the bed, or getting a leg over the guard rail on the left side.

They come in and reposition him. "Damn" he says. I think he would get up and run out the door if he could. I have the advantage of him there.

He has so much bloody stuff coming up from his lungs and down into his throat from his mouth and nose they can't keep up with it. And I'm not much good at suctioning, though I suppose I'm better than nothing. My principal talent is to run get a nurse when he seems to be in unusual distress.

I get lots of practice.

He's not getting worse. But he doesn't seem to be getting much better in a hurry, either. Supposedly he is scheduled for an operation on his facial fractures next Friday. But I don't see how they can suction out his throat with his jaws wired shut for weeks afterward. All that stuff is settled right on his vocal cords, and right above his windpipe. He could choke at any time, and suck it down into his lungs.

The surgeon and I are going to have a talk about this.

The nurses are better at cleaning him out than I am. They are not afraid to bring tears to his eyes. After they get through, he can occasionally make himself well understood. Yesterday as I was leaving I took his good hand and said "I'll be back tomorrow, Mike." And clear as a bell he replied:

"Don't have a wreck!"

I had to laugh. Still do, considering the source. Whatever else might be injured, his sense of humor is intact.

Bob

Bad News and Good News, etc.

2010-10-09T08:43:00.070-05:00

Off to the Races...

The bad news is that my brother's insurance company, Scott and White, refused to pay for his further care at Seton Hospital, where he was progressing through all the necessary operations, and where we thought he was being well cared for by competent, hard working surgeons and an excellent nursing staff. The insurance company insisted, on the very eve of plastic surgery on his face, on removing him to a Scott and White facility in Temple, Texas.

His facial surgery has been postponed for 7 to 10 days, "while he recovers and the swelling goes down".

The good news is that his new surgeon has a glitter of confidence about her, which is all I have to go on in this matter, at least in the last couple of days. And I will say she made a plausible argument for waiting, and gave a good explanation of the procedure. She will slip small thin titanium plates between his skin and the broken facial bones, and secure them to the fragments. She says they will be permanent, but will not show. He should look much the same as before. There will be two angled pieces under each eye, and another at the left temple. The rest of his face, in particular his jaw, escaped injury due to the full face helmet.

She says he will only have his jaws wired shut for a couple of weeks after the operation, as a sort of splint to prevent him from moving the healing bones above. Much better than the 6 weeks the other surgeon mentioned. The sooner he can talk the better. I hope to get some information from him before the operation so that I can pay his bills on line. I can't find anything in the rat's nest of his filing system. Just a short conversation with him will make long and tedious conversations with his creditors unnecessary.

More good news: they removed the ventilator tube and brought him up from sedation yesterday for the first time since October 1st. The only sign we have had that he was still in there for the last week was an occasional squeeze on a finger. He had a hell of a time clearing his lungs, but seems to have done so.

He started trying to speak Friday, but it was impossible to tell what he was saying at first, as the tube has been rough on his throat and vocal cords. He was able to respond to simple verbal commands. They are feeding him through a tube in his stomach because he is unable to swallow without choking. There is a continual drip of blood to the back of his throat, and I have learned to suction this. He is able to purse his lips and bring it forward.

I explained his situation to him in simple terms, but more out of hope than conviction that he understands. Then today he was able to get out a coherent word or two. As I was leaving for the day, he clearly said "Goodbye, brother."

That gave me a lift.

Another lift came from a late phone call from the insurance company representing the other party in the wreck. They have accepted responsibility in behalf of their client, and have asked for an itemized hospital bill to date. There may not be enough money in the world to pay for all his operations, but at least somebody else will be making a stab at it. The practical effect for us is that Mike will not have to make the 20% deductible. Even that is apt to be a sizable sum.

The bad news is that there is probably a limit of liability on the policy. In that short conversation I did not ask the agent what that limit might be.

The bad news is that I have heard rumors that they might move him out of ICU, once again, before the operation. I can't escape the feeling that it can't be good to be passed from one set of hands to another so often. Something is bound to slip through the cracks.

O, and the good news is that apparently his neighbors like him. They have volunteered to mow his lawn and clean up his house next week. Bless 'em.

Bob, trying to keep up.

O Brother!

2010-10-05T21:19:00.005-05:00

My brother Mike, in happier times, meticulously filing important documents.

I've been trying to figure out my brother's finances, in the hope of keeping his affairs in order while he is incapacitated. He's been unconscious since the accident October 1st. But going through his papers is like rummaging around in the bottom of a hamster cage. I keep thinking I'll find something meaningful, if I can just put together enough snips and bits of litter. Riiight.

He doesn't have files. He has piles. Literally. Stacks and stacks of old bills and papers laying around on the rug of an empty bedroom, in boxes in the corner of the dining room, and on, in, under, and behind his desk.

He probably banks on line. His computer might be helpful there, if

1) I could find a password file, and

2) if it were not actually the slowest computational device since the Babbage Engine, or at least since monitors glowed green on black.

I spent almost 10 minutes trying to get a single file to open. I kid you not. I nearly dozed off. But then I haven't been sleeping well.

I can't tell if he owns a checkbook. I do not have any power of attorney. I am perfectly willing to pay his mortgage and other bills for a while out of my own account, but before I can pay them I have to know what to pay and who he owes and when it's due.

When he recovers, I'm going to suggest that both of us go down to see a lawyer and draw up mutual medical and emergency powers of attorney. No one ever thinks they are going to be in this situation, until they are.

For now, I think, a tactical surrender is in order. I'm going to wait for him to wake up, late fees be damned, and ask him how to do this. That may happen tomorrow.

They finally took him off sedatives this morning, but then he had anesthesia during the operation on his right arm. They have to get him conscious tonight or tomorrow to do a neurological exam and see if there are further deficits and problems. So far surgeons have treated multiple open compound fractures to the right arm and leg, and a ruptured disc. They've put in a feeding tube to his stomach, but he is still on a ventilator. They cannot do a tracheostomy to insert an air tube yet because of the proximity of the fresh suture from his disc hernia repair yesterday. He's developed a bit of pneumonia from having his mouth open all this time. Along about Friday he will be transported to Brackenridge, where they will try to reattach the bones of his face.

I hope by the time his son arrives in town on Monday he will be recognizable.

And I really really hope he doesn't wake up for the first time tonight, alone in a dark empty room at 3 in the morning, in horrible pain, choking on intubation, with the terror of a near fatal collision as his most immediate memory. If he does, the nurses are going to have their hands full.

My only nightmare has been his "filing system". His will be worse.

Bob

"That Bike Won't Fix."

2010-10-04T21:53:00.135-05:00

Totaled. Note the intact windshield.

I don't know if it is a blessing or a curse. Maybe it's an artifact of being so long a fireman. But I don't immediately respond in an emotional manner to catastrophes. Instead it is delayed, while I get into the details. I have worked out Mike's leave from his job, and faxed the appropriate forms. I've been on line with MetLife, arranging his STD pay.

No, get your mind out of the gutter. It stands for Short Term Disability.

I've notified the Known Universe of Relatives. I've kept a diary of doctors and procedures. I've stripped his bed and done his laundry at his house, and pondered the complex futility of paying his bills on time without a power of attorney. I've recovered the contents of his saddlebags from the wreck, filed a claim, and documented the damage. I've arranged to receive an official accident report, and interviewed the officer first on the scene.

I'm running out of things to do. Things to keep me busy. It is only the surgeons who really can help him, and that leaves me staring at the walls of his room, feeling increasingly useless while trying to remain civilized and polite to well-wishers. He's going to need them.

The first jitters came visiting when I saw the wreck on Monday. Looking at that flattened front wheel made it real. I could see it from his point of view. And then I saw the helmet. I got the shakes.

He wore a full face helmet. He was just driving with the traffic. As he slowed approaching the signal at the intersection, the light turned green, so he proceeded through. Facing him in the other lane, an Isuzu Trooper abruptly turned left right in front of him. It was too late to stop, but apparently he tried. He collided with the passenger side of the vehicle. He flew off the bike, somehow clearing the windshield.

He landed on his right side, heavy leg bones snapping and bursting from the skin. And then he slid on his face. You can see the white crack on the chin bar of the helmet.

The helmet defines and outlines his facial injuries. He was injured wherever the helmet was not, a Lefront type 3 fracture running from one temple across the orbits of the eyes and the bridge of the nose, to the temple opposite. His face below the eyes and above the jaw has broken loose from the skull. His jaw and teeth were undamaged where the helmet protected him. His brow is intact. His brain sustained only slight internal bleeding.

I think that $400 helmet I kidded him about paid for itself. I just couldn't see it at the time.

One by one, surgeries are correcting the damage. It is estimated that he will be in hospital for at least 6 weeks after all surgery is complete. If all goes well. His jaw will be wired shut that long. Possibly 3 months. Then there will be months more of therapy.

Mike had a tediously slow and careful approach to riding. He wore his helmet and gloves every time. I kidded him about being slooow when we were in Arkansas. I could stop, fill up with gas, and go in to pay while he was still shucking his gloves and helmet. But he paid me no mind.

When someone turns in front of you, it doesn't matter how careful, how methodical, how thoughtful you are.

Car 1, Motorcycle 0. Every time.

Tonight I got the shaky blues again, sitting on the back porch, smoking a cigar. Trying to relax. I could just see him sitting in the chair opposite, sipping a beer as the sun went down, telling me about some character at work.

Mike is good company. But he won't be telling stories for a while.

Bob

One thing after another

2010-10-02T11:22:00.002-05:00

It's just one thing after another.

I got behind posting here while traveling back to Texas. Then I immediately had an operation on my left hand that interfered with typing. And then yesterday, just when I was about to finish up and post 3 or 4 items, my brother was involved in an accident on his motorcycle while driving home from work.

He is in ICU, with compound open fractures of the right arm and leg, and multiple fractures of the face. He had his leg set last night, and all is going relatively well so far, with no swelling of the brain and no internal bleeding. He is being kept sedated, and I have not talked to him. I am headed back over there right now.

I'll be back. But it's going to be a little longer. Wish him luck.

Bob

Fixin' Things Up

2010-09-28T11:12:00.031-05:00

Err.... I got it in a knife fight. You oughta see the other guy.

Well, I got back on Friday, just in time to mow a month's worth of grass on one of the last sweltering days of the summer.

There is also some news on the Save Bob From Himself front:

1. Remember my shock that I'd lost 4 inches in my waist? The warnings that unexplained weight loss was a sign of dire things to come? The inches are still off, but the weight loss was only 13 pounds. That must have been all in the waist. I can't explain it. My brother may have been right about motorcycles being good for your waistline.

2. The operation on my left hand for a spot of skin cancer was entirely successful. The surgeon had drawings to go by, or she might not have found the spot. Pathologist says there's nothing there, and the wound is healing nicely, though it is problematic to touch type.

3. I had my left leg X-rayed where I hit a rock while bouncing down a mountain road. Just a bone bruise, which will heal completely in time.

So far, so good.

The only bad news is that Le Daze got an owie when the suction cups that held the cell phone antenna to the back window let go unexpectedly and the darn thing fell and hit a bit of plastic trim:

Ping! Ouch!

Le Daze is in very good shape for her age. But the fact is that plastic trim dries up and becomes brittle over 18 to 20 years. It still looks good, but it is no longer flexible enough to take a sharp blow. I think this example can be cured with Superglue, but I really have to watch it. There is plastic trim everywhere, and it may be hard to find replacements at this remove in time.

That's the news from central Texas. Back in the house again. Catching up on "Mad Men". As soon as the bandages come off my hand, I hope to begin some of those Andy Baird inspired improvements to my travel gear.

Happy Trails till next time, buckaroos!

Bob

Home

2010-09-24T10:20:00.089-05:00

Double Rainbow in New Mexico - no pot, though, and no gold...

All right. Let's start out with a few cliches. You ought to be used to this by now :

"Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home." - J. H. Payne

"Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." - Robert Frost

"A man's home is wherever he prospers." - Aristophanes

"Home is where you can say anything you like because nobody is listening to you anyway." - Anonymous

Ah. I like that last one best, since it describes this blog so well. When I am here I am at home. Anyway, favorites are a matter of reciprocal loyalty. And judging from the comments section, Anonymous is by far my most faithful Reader.

Home. Today I am writing in one of them about driving one of them back to another one of them. Texas. Though were it not for a doctor's appointment for surgery on my hand, I might wander further west, toward that ocean inappropriately called the Pacific, along the shore of which there is every chance I might prosper.

That would be another.

When you buy an RV, you become a man of many homes, and returning eventually seems much like setting out. You may also become chronically confused about where you "belong".

Like most people, I settle for thumb rules.

Today I staggered out of bed with my eyes glued shut, reached around blindly and yet easily found my glasses, managed to get coffee started without fully waking up. Then I took a short walk - crunch, crunch, crunch - out into the nearby desert to take a whiz in the full bare sunlit glory of boxer shorts and sandals, without getting snakebit or freaking out any neighbors. A place where you can get away with all that is a rough definition of home.

It'll do for me.

But I have promises to keep, so it's back to Texas. Naturally I prefer the scenic route. I saw a place on the map called "Natural Bridges", and nearby the "Valley of the Gods". How could I resist?

South of Monticello I ran into fog and rain. Clouds actually floating just a few feet off the ground. The sky was inauspicious.

Natural Bridges National Monument is a small place, with a narrow one way road running round to the various sights. Limited parking at view points. The campground was designed for tenters, but was stuffed full of small RVs. I barely got through there in my 22 foot Daze and 16 foot trailer. All in all, not a place for big rigs. Be warned.

Speaking of which, the Ranger there warned me away from the road south to Muley Point. It was a good paved road, he said, except for about 3 miles of gravel switchbacks. "Right along there it is only nominally a two lane road. And the drop is spectacular." But I have been many close places in the Daze, so I was confident we could make it. Only 3 miles of it. Besides, I like the sound of "spectacular".

When we got there it started raining hard. There was a "last chance" turnout. I hesitated there a while.

The Valley of the Gods?

Then I started down, hoping not to meet another fool like me. The drop was sheer. The road was wet. I was very aware of the weight of the brakeless trailer behind me. Half way down I made a shaky stop to take another picture.

Whew. Made it. No gods encountered on the way down, either. Nor in the muddy valley below.

I can live with that.

Bob

Desert Daze

2010-09-23T21:12:00.180-05:00

I liked the night so well, I decided to sit right here and sample the following day. This is the busy season at the park campground, because in late September it is finally cool enough to bear being here. In the height of summer this place is a frying pan, and at noon even today it was 90 degrees in the sun, but only 72 in the shade.

So I stayed in the shade.

I read all morning, evading the sun as it wound around the Daze, moving on when it caught up with me. The Daze makes a serviceable sundial. And I am the photophobic minute hand. I spent the day quite literally close to home, circling the Daze in this way, thinking long thoughts about short subjects.

Hoodoo, Hoodoo, who do you think you're foolin' ?

This is, I suppose, about as green as it gets around here. Lots of rain lately. The largest vegetation is the Juniper, which dots the near distance with green. The brightest color comes from the tiny yellow buds of the rabbitbrush. The bees seem to like that stuff, though there is a strange dearth of rabbits. I suppose they come and go in cycles.

Then of course there is the ubiquitous fragrant sagebrush. Also a green and black plant called Russian thistle, which when dry is known to all as tumbleweed. It says here that this iconic plant of Western movies is actually a Russian invader, first introduced into North Dakota back in the late19th century. Immigrated out of Asia sans papers by hitching a ride alongside bundles of imported rapeseed.

The real Old West never had the stuff. Once it got here, though, it made itself to home, thriving in niches native plants couldn't be bothered with. It is sort of the kudzu of the high desert.

There's a lot of daily activity in this supposedly empty country. A small silver and black butterfly is flopping around amid the bees above the rabbitbrush. Ants ignore me, intent on their toil. Some sort of black beetle flits and buzzes above them, occasionally striking down and raising a bit of dust. I can't tell if it is eating the ants, or just annoying them.

Some sort of small peeping bird continuously claims the juniper the owl occupied last night, making patrol from branch to branch. A large crow went cawing by, but didn't dispute her ownership. While I was sitting behind the trailer, the wind picked up a small reddish torus of dust and played with it, which I thought entertaining until it turned on me and filled my ear with sand.

Not to mention my coffee.

A light green lizard whipped his long tail, skittering lightly over a warm expanse of rock. When he reached shade he stopped a bit to regard me soberly, then moved on. I am too big to be breakfast, and too small to be God.

Not much good for anything, then.

All these animals seem dignified, aware, and purposeful, busy getting on with their lives. Only I am on vacation. Only I am retired. Only I am idle. I understand there are authorities who claim that animals are conscious of everything but themselves, and humans of little but themselves. The only thing I know for sure is that out here in the desert consciousness requires lots and lots of water.

Whenever I quit drinking, I fall asleep.

Bob

Canyons

2010-09-22T12:32:00.011-05:00

The view from here...

I didn't have any place to be today, so I went out looking for one. I ended up in Utah.

The Beehive State

Lately I have not been into seeing things so much as being places. Less schedule and more staying. For my sins, I have been resisting this urge to always be going forward. Serendipity cannot bear too much planning. The desert west of Monticello, Utah, seemed like a good place to subvert travel and merely sit.

I didn't plan to be here. I simply arrived.

I arrived late, of course. Towards dark, 65 miles down a slow road, I found myself entering the Needles District of Canyonlands National Park, staring at a sign that said the campground was full. I had to go back 5 miles or so and find what rough comfort I could in the surrounding BLM land. That effort led to one of the best nights in a long time.

Didn't look like much at first. Red rock and sand. Dry. Flat. Quiet. Empty. But somebody left a jumble of a fire ring and a bit of wood. And then the moon came out.

Colors slowly deepened toward purple, then black. And the stars. My God, the stars. They took my breath away. Later, high clouds like fingers played hide and seek with the moon.

From a juniper nearby, an owl interrogated me. I built a fire and cooked a steak. After that, the only sound was what I made myself.

Perhaps I have been cooped up by the short horizons of mountains for too long. Everything is different down here. Without the thin brittle social varnish of modern technology, it would be easy to lose track of everything in these canyons, forget where you came from, your home, your job, your friends, yourself. And then perhaps in a year or two someone finds your bones, and wonders idly who you were.

Even people who thought they knew you might wonder that.

Not everyone is the dying type. Some dry up into seeds of themselves, waiting for some damp violence to bring them to thorny life again. You can see that sort of weathered waiting in a few faces down in Monticello.

Odd that such an empty place should people my imagination with spooks and nightjars. The wind has a lonesome feeling, but it is not cold. It does dessicate. I attenuate by the hour, turning transparent. It's an anorexia of the spirit, exhalting and frightening in equal measure.

Or maybe I just need an aspirin, and a good long drink of water. Moonlit thoughts on a moonlit evening, down in the canyonlands.

Bob, off to bed.

A Reverie Runs Through It

2010-09-19T20:03:00.462-05:00

"Suzanne takes you down
To a place by the river...."

- Leonard Cohen

I have been lazy today, after the Big Ride. Spent most of it down by the Dolores River behind my campsite, letting the sound of water carry my cares away. A few fishermen passed through, but mostly they left me alone.

And yet I didn't feel alone.

Not like being watched, exactly, but rather in good company, granted the sort of benign neglect fishermen allow each other, each content to pursue their own folly in their own space. Eerie to feel that sort of presence in the company of inanimate objects. But not scary. There was friendliness in the broad sunshine. Familiarity in the rippling water. Good humor floating on the breeze.

I went down there with a book, but didn't get much reading done. Just bearing witness seemed like plenty to do. Something kept winking at me, at the very edge of vision. Ah. Only light on the water.

Occasionally I moved my chair to stay in the shade. Tough job, this, but somebody has to do it.

Off and on I dreamed of Suzanne Langer. Ages ago, back in school, I ran across a book of hers, called "Philosophy in a New Key". The part I remember now is this: Music is an analog of thought.

Music has rhythm and order and change, challenge and response. It mimics our interior life. Music is mere sound taking the form of Mind. When we hear it, we recognize the familiar shape of ourselves. We see our shadow. That's why it appeals to us.

But what of the music of nature? All day long I kept returning here to sit by the river, listening to the whisper of wind in the trees, the mutter of water on stone. A dance of order and rhythm and change, going on and on.

O, sometimes Nature can break us in two. Bat us aside. Even hold us to account. But then, sometimes, we just get a bye. On a day like today, we can occasionally, unaccountably, be allowed the illusion of thinking, even deep thinking, without the unpleasant rigor of thinking anything in particular. Let alone coming to a conclusion.

Sitting by the river on a soft summer's day can be a bit like watching a campfire deep into the night. Flicker and flow, shiver and glow, but where does it go?

It goes where we cannot follow. Or maybe the other way around.

Ahhh. A lazy and undeserved pleasure it is to be alive. Like the gift of Grace without the worry of good works. Adam in Eden must have felt this way. And like Adam in Eden, I dabbled all day in the naming of things. I had this sense there was something important for me to hear, or perhaps to say, and yet when darkness finally fell all I could manage to salvage were a few cliches. I put them aside for later.

Cheap thrills. Perhaps that's all it was, sitting there hour after hour, completely content to loll about in the loose grip and grace of something that seemed greater, more complicated, more complete, more benign than myself.

There it is again. Dang. Missed it. Wait. There. Can you hear that? The band is still playing.

Bob

Silver Bob's Scenic Byway

2010-09-18T13:50:00.041-05:00

"So put me on a highway
And show me a sign
And take it to the limit one more time."

- Eagles, suggested by JG

When you have a Beast, every road is a Scenic Byway. But most of today's ride was actually marked so on the official state map. I strung several of them together for a Super Scenic Byway, most of which had "Silver" somewhere in the name.

Call it Silver Bob's Scenic Byway. I like the sound of that.

The ultimate reach was the Colorado National Monument at Grand Junction, and the "Rim Road" in the mountains above the city. I started off at 10 am, about 20 miles north of Dolores on 145. The road runs along the Dolores River up into Lizard Head Pass, and down the San Miguel on the other side. I think "Dolores" translates as "Sorrows", which is an odd thing to call such a beautiful bit of rushing water. Spanish is a romantic language.

Or maybe it's ironic, like calling a fat kid "Tiny". Or the next town up "Rico".

Rico may have been rich once, but that was long long ago. In particular it is poor in places to get breakfast, which was my first concern. I tried the hotel. One Chinese girl folding towels inside. She didn't seem to understand complete English sentences. I tried monosyllables.

"Food!"

"Ah!", she replied, nodding her head up and down. "No. Cafe. Down street." She pointed. I had already been there. It was closed.

Lots of buildings with some reference to food on their weathered signs, but they were all closed. After circling a bit, I went back to the edge of town and found a coffee shack behind the only business that looked open, a filling station. There was a sign that advertised coffee. And breakfast tacos. It was open. When I entered, the sole occupant was cleaning a grill behind the counter.

"Man, it's hard to find breakfast in this town!" I said.

Pause.

"Are you talkin' to me?" she says.

I looked around. One tiny room. Nobody else there. "How much are your breakfast tacos?"

"Six dollars. If I had any. But I'm out."

"Then I guess I'll just mosey on down the road."

"Okay."

And so, my stomach growling, it was up and over the pass and down into Telluride. Pity the fool trying to find a handmeal in Rico. Or a handout. Or a job.

The road down was treacherous to motorcycles, with ruts and heaves in the road. A car might just feel them as bumps, but some of them were wide enough to grab a motorcycle tire and send it flying. Fortunately this morning I could see them coming. At first I took them to be the result of too many heavy trucks, or frost heaves, but then I noticed they often extended continuously lengthwise down the road for a quarter mile or more, cracks two or three inches wide bisecting the right hand lane. Weird. Subsidence? But they continued in my lane even when it wasn't the outside lane. I found these things all the way down to Telluride, and then periodically west half way to Naturita. In my lane mostly, cracks down the length of the road, running for a hundred yards or more, reappearing every few miles. Bad base? Poor construction? Drunken bozo on the grader?

Bad mojo for motos. When I could afford to look up from the road, the country was gorgeous. I stopped in a turnout viewpoint and got my picture taken with the Beast. The old mine behind me, said the sign, was the site of the first AC electrical generating plant in the USA. Down there somewhere among the trees.

Bob tries to restrain the Beast

"O, that's beautiful!" the lady said, as she peered through my viewfinder at the Beast and me.

"I presume you are speaking of the mountain?" Lame but engaging, that's our Bob.

After she attempted to laugh, she said there was a Blues Festival in Telluride. If I didn't mind crowds I could find breakfast there. I nodded, but when I got down to the T, turned west instead. Given the choice between hunger and crowds, I'll put up with hunger for a while.

Finally I found some eggs over easy and hash browns for 7 bucks on the balcony of a yuppie-looking hotel in Placerville. At noon. That ought to hold me. Even prosperous looking businesses like this one have "For Sale" signs on them around here.

The surrounding cliffs turned from gray to red as made my way mile after mile down the San Miguel. There were signs warning me to slow for construction, but then I'd ride a mile or more, and no construction. Once I even encountered a guy with a sign stopping traffic, but after we went by there was nothing again for miles ahead but one bulldozer parked riderless on the side of the road. Finally, just before Naturita, we got out of all that construction, and the country opened up into one of the grand agricultural valleys that Colorado is famous for. Fine vista, but impossible to capture with any lens I had.

I turned north on 141 to stay with the river, which gradually cut farther and farther down through sandstone until I was riding along the rim of a deep canyon. I stopped to take a picture of the remains of the San Miguel Plume.

Sticks and stones can break your bones...

See all the little boards on the bare rock below? In 1888, this was the famous Plume, which carried water for miles down the San Miguel, gradually growing more confined and building up pressure until producing a stream powerful enough to cut the face of the cliffs themselves, revealing ... well, not much. The Plume was a wonder. The mine went belly up.

How would you like to be the guy who crawled out on that ledge with ropes and such to anchor those boards 120 years ago? Amazing that there is anything left to see, after so long a time. The past is different, and yet so much the same. Nobody building the Plume looked up into the night sky and saw lights moving from cloud to cloud, and knew that men were up there. But some did dream such things. What unlikely dreams of ours will some day seem so ordinary?

Soon after the Plume, the road descended to run beside the river. The Beast was just loping along with his usual gutteral grace, when suddenly I saw some greenery at a turnout that piqued my interest.

What's this?

Looking closer, I found a Weeping Wall, where a spring comes right out of the cliff 30 or 40 feet up, descends as just a sheen on the rock, and collects below in a rock cistern for the refreshment of travelers. There was an iron pipe in the bottom of the rockwork where water ran out.

I tried the water. It was clean and tasteless. People today probably think it undrinkable without an attached treatment plant and just zoom on past this thing. But in decades past many a dusty pilgrim must've been grateful to the unknown samaritan who took the time to build it. After decades of mining upstream, the San Miguel was probably suspect even then, when it ran at all, but water right from the rock face comes filtered by Nature Herself.

From there on, the canyon closed in colorfully around us.

We were coming around a corner at speed when the Beast came to an abrupt halt. What's this? A Fellow Beast beset by vandals?

A Beast in Need is a Beast Indeed.

Only one part need fail.

It was a 1982 Honda 500. Its rider, Brian, was nearby hiding his tent and other valuables. Brian was not having a good day. He had ridden his Beast all the way from Minnesota, only to drop it that morning and bust the front turn signals. Then, he thinks, he got some bad gas at Gateway, and it stranded him here. I told him there was nothing at all for 70 miles behind me, and it would be best if I gave him a ride back to Gateway and he could call a wrecker from Grand Junction.

He looked to heaven, but was not reassured. He said he had to be in a meeting in Phoenix at 6 pm the following evening. "My wife let me come on this trip...." He looked off. He was despairing.

So we tried some things, and spent an hour emptying his tank and his carburetors (remember those?), fed it some fresh gas, and it started, but only for a few minutes at a time. Finally he conceded that he probably wasn't going to make his meeting. He hid the rest of his stuff, grabbed the most valuable things in a small pack, and strapped them to the back of my Beast.

We gave him a ride 11 miles to Gateway. I let him off in front of a hotel at 4:10 pm.

"You're my Savior!" he said, shaking my hand. "Not me," I said, "your Savior is the wrecker you are going to call right now, an hour before he gets off on a Friday afternoon, and who decides going to drive all the way out here to bring your bike back in to Grand Junction where you can get it fixed. And maybe a flight to Phoenix by tomorrow night. You'd better get to work on that right away."

He nodded, said thanks again for "just having someone to talk to out there", and disappeared into the hotel.

An hour later I emerged from the mountains a few miles south of Grand Junction at Whitewater, where Hwy 141 meets Hwy 50. Here's a vista from just before that, coming round the bend:

It was 5 o'clock. If I turned north, it was Grand Junction for the night, probably in a cheap motel. No way to ride the National Monument and get back before dark. If I turned south, I might just make it. I really didn't want to ride that rough road up to Lizard Head in the dark, when I couldn't see the cracks and traps ahead of me. But I also didn't want to do the roach motel bedbug macarena.

I could probably make it. I turned south. The fabled Rim Road would have to wait for another day.

I admit to breaking a few speed laws on that flat broad valley highway down to Montrose, and ate quickly at a Mexican restaurant. "Amelia's", I think it was called. A carnita chimichanga, about a gallon of water, and a couple of margaritas. Somewhat restored, I then roared on down to Ridgeway, where I could see the mountains I currently called home in the distance.

Where I have been, there I am going...

I got up into the saddle of Lizard Head just as it got full dark. You know, when you cannot tell a white thread from a black. And it was cold. Like a fool I didn't put on my wind pants, mistaking numbness and tingling for residual warmth. My legs became really dead cold before I got back into camp at 9, and I got cramps later. But I slept almost 12 hours.

------------------------------------------------------------------

That's Bob's Big Ride. Too much for even a game geezer. And I didn't quite get to where I was going. 374 miles, 11 hours. Magnificent country, but I had to ride too fast on the way back. And next time I could be the one broken down instead of Brian. So I've got to restrict my rides in future to 250 miles round trip. That's about when it stops being fun.

More than that, and I just need to move the Daze nearer.

And never, never, never do I ever want to be self-trapped into riding mountain roads in the dark again. I can see far enough at 70 with my brights, but I am only safe up to maybe 45 with my dims. All the rest is cold and darkness. Either I am blinding and being blinded by oncoming cars, or passed at speed by those behind me.

Night riding is too much like rushing to an appointment with Fate. At my age, just being on time seems good enough. Or even fashionably late, as long as I have clean underwear.

There's a good chance, at speed in the dark, of finally finding that poor wandering confused elk who has my name stamped on his rump. An elk of that ilk would be awkward indeed.

"I am for you." You trekkies know what I mean.

Bob

Moving Day

2010-09-16T18:00:00.021-05:00

I've been at Haviland Lake for 8 days. It has been lovely, but it was time to move on. Not a proper attitude for fulltimers, this antsiness, but then I'm not really a fulltimer. I am on a trip. There is an appointment awaiting me back in Texas on the 27th.

O my. Places to go, people to see, busy, busy, busy. In an uncharacteristic dither, I determined to move one valley west to the Dolores area, and explore it in a Beastly manner.

I blew right by Mesa Verde. BTDT, several times. Much has changed in Dolores since I was last here. It seems less prosperous. Good restaurants have closed. The less good are still in evidence. But nonetheless a river runs through it, as MacLean would say, so it is hard to be dispirited.

I stopped off at the McPhee Reservoir camp, but it was hot up there in the middle of the day. The prime shady spots, all three of them, were taken. As I passed by, a large man in an undershirt lifted up from his bed to stare at me dull-eyed through the mosquito netting of his pop-up, before falling listlessly back into bed. Somewhere a dog barked. I slid into one place with scant shade, but when I got out I was greeted by a swarm of bees rising from a hole in a stump. There may be honey in the rock, but this was not a good omen. After an hour trying to reconcile my mind to the place, I gave up and moved on.

It got steadily cooler as I traveled north from Dolores on 145. After about 20 miles I turned off and followed a good paved road to the West Dolores Campground. This was more like it.

My well-shaded campsite:

And here's the back porch:

I have every reasonable hope that the river will lull me to sleep tonight.

Lo and behold, electricity has come to the farther Forest Service campgrounds. About a third of the sites now have power, and I haven't seen any of the old hand pump cisterns I grew up with. They even have threaded faucets so you can fill up your RV tanks. The new toilets look substantial and clean, but they have some kind of forced air drying system in the vaults below that will give you a thrill when you sit down for the first time. Feels like spiders are reaching out springy-legged to feel your privates.

But it's just wind. I think.

Problem is, according to our host, the composting toilets don't work at this altitude. Not hot enough. So these $65,000 toilets have to be mucked out periodically the old fashioned way, by college kids working for minimum wage, with shovel and rake. They say it builds character.

Maybe it'll settle them down and prepare them for grad school. Somewhere I saw a T shirt that said "Grad School - the Snooze Button for Life". After a summer spent shoveling out the vaults, I'd be looking for a snooze button too.

Not much in the way of wildlife. The black powder elk hunters may bear some blame in that. They are not having much luck closing on their prey, however. Some blame the forest service, which is having a controlled burn between them and where they think the elk are. But from the dark laughter and firelight coming over from there every night, they are having fun anyway.

The elk are escaping above the treeline while they can. They have not yet completely adapted to the fact that they can be killed from a quarter mile away. The high powered rifle guys will have a chance at them later.

Meanwhile the campground is idyllically empty during the day, and at night there are stories to tell. One pickup came back smeared from one end to the other where it was thoroughly licked by a herd of cattle. Well, why shouldn't they have a taste? It won't be long before the herds are culled, and then all the tasting will go the other way.

Bob

Hyperchondriac

2010-09-14T17:40:00.022-05:00

I'm not sure that is even a word. What do you call the opposite of a hypochondriac? A person who keeps imagining that he is well?

Whatever it is, that's me.

There's been a couple of odd things happening to my sadly neglected body lately. I have not mentioned them for fear they might seem too personal. Though that never stopped me before. So if that sort of thing is Too Much Information for you, stop here.

I do not refer to the results of the Engineer Pass fiasco. Unlike Mini-me, I've recovered from that fairly well. It was mostly just scratches and bruises, anyway, though I do have a big knot on my left knee that remains tender to the touch. The bump has solidity, like a piece of bone under the skin, but has not grown since the day the Beast got too big for his britches, and does not hurt if I do not push around on it.

Old joke: "It hurts when I do this, Doc!" "Then don't do that. That'll be $50." You can tell from the Doc's fee structure that the joke is conjecturally as old as I am. As long as the bump doesn't get worse, or otherwise interfere with my trip, I'm willing to ignore it until I get back home for my surgery on the 27th.

Speaking of which, that is Odd Thing Number One. The quarter sized lump on the back of my left hand, which had been red and swollen and thick before I left, has now entirely disappeared. There is no mark or substance at all to it any more. You can't even see the suture scar from the biopsy. If I did not know where it had been, I would not be able to pick out the spot. It would be easier to find Waldo.

Of course, my hands are completely covered with various marks and scars and freckles and sun damage from a lifetime of using them as tools. I always presumed that's what they were for. Another bump or two would be easy to lose in that crowd. So I guess I'll show up for surgery anyhow. After all, she's a professional. Maybe she can find it.

What can I say, Doc? I took the RV Cure for Cancer. You should try it on your other patients.

Where in the World is Carcinoma?

But wait, there's More!

The Other Odd Thing has to do with my belt. I've been needing a new one for a while now, but it's hard to find a plain brown belt, especially one that will fit the brass buckle I've worn for 35 years or so. But now I've got real incentive. This one has mysteriously gotten entirely too big.

Since August 23rd, when I left, I've lost more than 4 inches in my waist. I've gone from the first to the last hole in my belt. And it's still not tight.

Of course, when I took this pic, my pants fell off.

I have no idea what I weigh right now, and seldom do, except at the doctor's office. They are tediously insistent in their routine, so I climb on the scale. One such visit 5 or so years ago launched my last attempt to lose weight through regular exercise, and I did get rid of 40 lbs. over several months, but it has crept back since. I can't keep my mind on the subject for very long. I just really don't care.

But inches! That's serious. That means I have to buy new jeans! Maybe skip down two sizes. On the other hand, unlike at Ojo, my old bathing trunks fit just fine now.

It came to me gradually that something was wrong. My pants began to fold up around the waist like a cinch sack. Like I was wearing a Glad garbage bag. And now my belt has run out of holes. Hey, maybe in a few weeks I can just cut it in half and make a spare!

No ready explanation comes to mind. I haven't consciously cut back. I had a 12 inch pizza for supper the other night. I even made cookies, for goodness sake, though I gave some of those away. And yet there it is. Or rather, isn't. The Belt Does Not Lie.

I do sort of remember skipping a few meals, because I forgot to eat. Apparently there are more interesting things to do around here than eat. I'm probably not the first guy who got fat through boredom, and skinny again by having fun.

Okay, I'm not exactly skinny. I haven't been RVing long enough. But it's a good start.

Maybe I could turn this blog into the very next fad diet tome. Forget curing cancer. Diet books are where the big bucks are.

"The RV Road To A New You!" My fortune is made.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Lessee, what else, what else? O, Daze got the cutest neighbor. It's called a T@B trailer:

It belongs to Mike and Mary of Durango, who came out to Haviland Lake for the weekend, just because they can. I asked Mike how he could stand being all bent over in that thing, and he jumped inside, straightened up, and said "What do you mean?" Mike and Mary are not as vertically impaired as I am.

Besides the personal fit, he bought it with the idea of pulling it with a small SUV waay up some local 4 wheel drive roads. It does seem ideal for that: big wheels, high clearance, weighs very little, a large angle of departure to avoid dragging. The tongue wheel even has a hand brake. There's handles on the corners so you can push and pull it around to where you want it. If you get stuck in a sharp turn or a narrowing road, you just unhook, push it to where it needs to be, drive the car around somehow, and hook it up again. Easy.

Not for everyone. But Mary calls it her "little luxury travel trailer". There's a queen sized bed, a dinette, and a kitchen in there. And they are not hard to find.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've discovered another spa. And this one's got a discount for us suave senior types. It's Trimble Hot Springs in Hermosa. A Very Civilized Place.

For $9.50 you can spend all day using an Olympic swimming pool, a warm soaking pool, a hot pool, a sauna, and a wonderful long stretch of green lawn on which to lay out in the sun with all the aplomb of a large purring cat, or maybe a lizard lazing on a flat rock. Rotate through the Stations of the Spa. Which I did.

They also have covered tables, where you can picnic. Which I didn't.

You can rent towels, but who needs them? That's for people in a hurry, which I am not. That warm Colorado sun does a superb job of wicking you dry without benefit of terry cloth. The dappled shadows of trees creep slowly over the grass, insolent small breezes sneak very near to lick coolly at your legs and torso, intruding into your dreams with a shiver of unexpected caress....

Whoa! Was that a nap?

Bob, who's still fool enough to think he's getting better with time.

Lighten Up

2010-09-12T16:29:00.006-05:00

Long ago I saw an old black and white Stepin Fetchit movie - actually it was a Will Rogers movie, but Fetchit stole the show - where some children slipped a pair of dark glasses on him while he was napping. Then they woke him up.

"Whut? Where? O my God, I've gone blind! No, wait, I must've overslept. Where did I put that flashlight?"

He then did an extended schtick finding the flashlight, shaking it when it didn't work, pointing it this way and that, fumbling around in drawers looking for batteries, stumbling into and over things, etc.

I also have had sufficient reasons to cuss a flashlight from time to time, but I'm always buying more. And rather than blame my glasses, or my mind's eye, I'm more than willing to blame the fact that I just don't have the right gadget yet. Walmart is the motherlode of easy gadget solutions for me, mainly because they take back readily all the ones that don't seem to work. On this trip I've been on a quest for just the right light to shine on things, and I've had my ups and downs.

I installed a number of fluorescents in the Daze: one large one above the Reading Room, a couple of battery units in the trailer, and a small battery powered one in place of the dim DC light in the hood above the kitchen stove. I also found a clip-on LED number that attaches to the visor for map reading, etc. And one of my neighbors had an LED flashlight that clipped to the bill of his ball cap, leaving his hands free. Five dollars at Walmart. Of course I had to have one, and ended up with the $15 model with 3 LEDs.

But the most aggravating problem with light has involved the light from inside the Daze that shines outside. The eyes may be the window of the soul, but I don't want any souls out there in the dark watching me take a shower. I really don't want to be responsible for what that might do to their mental health. The usual thing is to have curtains or mini-blinds for privacy. The Daze has efficient blackout roller shades in the rear, and they work well. But there are mini-blinds in the kitchen, and the bath has only a vinyl curtain. It makes for an unpleasant clutter.

In particular, I hate mini-blinds. They are near impossible to get clean without damaging them, and to have them behind where you cook really exacerbates the problem. And any curtain that extends into the tiny shower just cuts down on your turnaround room. I determined to get rid of both for a utilitarian, cleaner, no-nonsense look.

I used Contac paper. I got the "Frosty" pattern from Home Depot, which is impressed with small squares that diffuse the light, letting in plenty during the day, but making things inside completely obscure to anyone looking in during the night.

Here's the two fixtures before:

Kitchen Miniblinds

Bath Window Curtain

And here is how they look after the Frosty treatment:

The "Clean Look" Kitchen

And the same in the shower.

And the view from outside is righteously obscured, even when all the inside lights are on:

Even the nosiest neighbors need not be offended.

I call this modification a success. It was easy to do, the contac paper can be removed and/or replaced, and it is easily cleaned with a swipe of paper towel and Windex. As for looking outside, all I have to do is slide open the window. Both these windows are inconvenient to look out of anyway, and as far as I am concerned are there merely to admit light, or, in the case of the bath, ventilate. They still readily do that.

This suggestion, which came from Andy Baird, gets the Bob Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Your mileage may vary.

I also got a little carried away with this idea when I applied Frosty to the bottom 2/3 of the Coach entrance door window. It did make it impossible to see in, but I didn't reflect how much I used that window in driving. It is right behind the passenger seat. I depend on looking around to see who is coming up to the right as I turn left, and without it would find turning into a 4 lane street a problematic thrill, like a blind corner on a mountain road.

I prefer not to run good ideas into the ground, so I took the contac paper off that window.

Bob

A Typical American Boy

2010-09-10T14:05:00.059-05:00

The Beast, full of himself at Haviland Lake

"You're a typical American boy,
From a typical American home.
You were born with a couple of breaks,
Couldn't leave well enough alone..."

--- Amazing Rhythm Aces

"The Man with a Plan". Sounds masterful, doesn't it? I always wanted to be one of those guys. The problem is, my plans are not exactly plans. They lack detail, for one thing. They keep changing, for another. Bob's plans require a certain latitude and forebearance. Bob's plans require a serene belief in serendipity.

Or even Providence.

Take travel, for instance. I once got so used to travel that it wasn't travel at all, but more like life. I'd like to recover that conviction, if I can, and in aid of that I'm trying various things with the Daze and the Beast. Including sitting still, here at Haviland Lake after two days of rain.

Now there's the real test of a full time travel plan. What happens when you have to stop? Do you get jittery? Break out in hives? Go up in smoke? Or are you still "at home"?

When I had a truck and a fifth wheel, the world made all kinds of sense. There was a psychological symmetry to the situation. I had a "house", with wheels, and when it stopped I "lived" in that particular place. I often got in the truck and traveled out from that place, but then I came back "home". "Home" was a series of base camps from which I explored multitudinous back yards and neighborhoods.

Okay, life was just a timeshare, but that's true even when you carry a mortgage.

But there's something deeply wrong with the idea of motorhomes.

You lose symmetry. Your house and your car are the same thing. When you are moving, no thanks to Newton, you tend to keep moving, because you have no "place" to return to. But when you stop, say to think about that, you can't rest. You are then "on the street", because though you may have a place, you have no car to travel out from that place. And if you do leave, you lose your place.

It is no real news to the Homeless that Law is asymmetrical, though they don't give a fig for Newton. Note that it makes no difference how much money you spent on the rig, it's still just basically weird. "My God," as Jennifer the Blogger sez, "I'm living in my car."

Man, this stuff is unsettling. I feel like Linda Blair. It makes my head go round and round. Which is why, in lieu of an exorcism, so many people with motorhomes soon come to buy a car to drag behind their car. It seems redundant. Hell, it IS redundant. But it's better than being homeless. And it makes your otherwise random acts resemble a plan.

I am no exception, save that I drag a Beast. And sometimes the Beast drags me. Today the Beast decided to drag me up a mountain.

The Beast just loped along at 60 to 80 per, as its Maker intended. Wahoo. Everything was fine until Silverton peaked through the pines.

Then, while I went into a BBQ place to fuel up on pulled pork, the Beast got to talking to a tough looking Taxi.

Next thing I knew, we were on our way to a little place called Animas Forks, at the end of a GRAVEL ROAD! Now the Beast doesn't do gravel, as a rule. But if he rides flat, and avoids lean like Jack Sprat's wife, he can handle it. But it slows him down and crimps his style. Worse than gravel is DEEP SOFT DIRT, which came next. Soft dirt is slippery stuff, and the Beast is a leetle topheavy for slippery stuff. And his tires are hard, and have narrow tread. But even that was okay until we got to the BOULDERS IN THE ROAD, where rain had actually washed away the roadbed, the up and down over which sometimes scraped his frame. The Beast just can't quite go slow enough for this stuff.

After a while, the Beast stopped for a breather by the Animas River.

I wanted to turn back, but the Beast was excited. It was JUST A LITTLE FURTHER, boss. So off we went again. And then there it was, just below Engineer Pass. An old mining town from another time, all leaning clapboard buildings and tailing piles.

All that vibration was too much for me. I had to go pee. When I came back, the Beast was eyeing the switchback up into the Pass. "No way," I told him. "But Boss, it's mostly like what we just went over, only zigzagging!"

I thought about when my brother had been with me up there in the Pass, going over into Lake City, and how great it would be to call him from on top. He once confided soberly that Engineer Pass was where he wanted his ashes scattered, as though I were going to be around to tend to that chore. It doesn't look like much down here, where the mountains hem you in. But up there, whole ranges of peaks sweep away from your feet. Just...right...up...there.

I wavered. I could always tell Mike this was all his fault. I was merely checking out plans for his disposal. And then we went.

We only got about 300 yards up the first switchback when I knew what was different about the road along here. It was STEEP. Like at a 45 degree angle. I decided to turn back. Which was exactly when the Beast found another soft spot and threw me down the mountain. Bob's aging body went ballistic, and landed on some sharp rocks, but fortunately the Joe Rocket jacket has "ballistic" inserts which did a pretty good job of taking up the shock. And I had my helmet on.

When I got up, the Beast was laying on his left side, taking up most of the road. Fortunately, his motor died, or he might have dug himself a hole, or skittered over the edge. I tried to lift him up against the angle of the mountain. And then I tried again. And again. Finally I got him upright.

But then I realized I could do no more. I was holding on to the handlebar brake with my left hand, straining like Sysiphus just to keep him vertical against the pull of the mountain. My boots were slipping on the downhill gravel. It was like a slow strenuous treadmill walk uphill to nowhere. There was no way I could mount. And no way I could keep him balanced without mounting.

Right at that moment, here came a jeep around the corner, and a guy leaned out and asked "Do you need help?"

Did I? Naw, this is the way I get my exercise. But I actually said, through gritted teeth: "Yeah, it weighs 600 pounds."

I got him to hold the uphill handlebar while I got on. Some chrome yellow dirt bikes with agressive knobbies passed by while we were doing this. They lost traction in the same place, though they didn't go over. For some reason this made me feel better. Then I turned Beast down the hill, and very very slowly, with Gravity as my Co-Pilot, brakes working off and on together, I inched my way wobbling and skidding to the bottom of the hill.

Whew.

The Beast was untalkative on the way back to Silverton. I was okay, but he had a dent low on the left side of his gas tank. I tried to persuade him to consider it something like the motorcycle equivalent of a dueling scar. It made him romantic and mysterious. He was not convinced.

But it was on the streets of Silverton, where I stopped for a homeopathic beer, that I discovered the real casualty of our folly. All but forgotten, Mini-Me had been riding in the left saddle bag. And the Beast had crushed her. Actually the computer part of her personality was still operating okay, but her looks were gone. Half the screen was rendered as a sort of collaboration between Miro and Jackson Pollack, where the metal back had broken through and shorted out the screen. Lovely, really, in its own way. The other half was responding to Windows, and actually attempted to show a whole screen of info in half the horizontal size. I didn't know it could do that. Eventually it quit trying.

Valiant effort, noble automaton! But no cigar.

Mini-Me becomes a half-wit.

At this point the Beast wanted to limp back to Haviland. But I was determined to have a little hair of the dog, so to speak, so we went on to Ouray. This was the real motorcycle road, with devil-may-care curves, vertical cliffs, and hair raising dropoffs.

Tell me this road isn't made for motorcycles.

But Beast was not Himself. He stuck to the inside of the lane, and wouldn't look over the edge. Nonetheless, I did manage to get off and click a pic of Ouray from above:

Tiny Ouray, the "Switzerland of America".

We got "home" to Haviland just about dark, a little before 8 pm. It gets cold fast up in the shadows here. Despite the tank bump, the Beast seems to be working fine. I've got a blue left knee and a sore left shoulder. I guess it could have been worse, trying to climb a mountain with a street bike. I'm not sure the netbook can be fixed, and in any case I'm more than normally confident that being crushed by a motorcycle on the side of a mountain isn't covered by the warranty. A replacement will probably be ordered.

O Mini-me! Alas, poor lass, we hardly knew ye! Next morning the Beast was contrite, and offered to do the laundry by way of amends. But it's all short wages. Mini-me is still a half-wit.

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This whole trip started out in the spirit of a test. I thought I was testing out the Beast and the Daze, but found out that testing goes both ways. In any case, when faced with a particular proposition along the way, I took it as a chance to explore possibilities, rather than simply consider whether it was sensible.

I wanted to know what I could do with the equipment I had, whether it was comfortable or not. And I found out.

The thing is, though... I've got a pretty sweet deal here. Maybe I ought to just relax and enjoy it, rather than test it to destruction. And thanks to a sporting Providence, I may still have that chance.

Bob, who needs a new plan.

Monthiversary

2010-09-07T09:31:00.004-05:00

Hello there. This is The Voice From The Future. Hoo hoo hah hah hah hah. The date is actually September 12, 2010, despite what you see above.

TVFTF is a clever device to inject timely commentary at precisely the right time. Huh? Well, unfortunately I seem to always be about a week behind in the blog, or more, due the exigencies of this thing called Life. I can do things, or I can write about them, but not at the same time.

I try to keep events in sequence, so thrilling adventures are not lost untimely below the fold. This morning I woke up with a sore shoulder and a blue knee due to the motorcycle crash (stay tuned). But before I hie me to a hot spring on this glorious Sunday, I'd like to note a milestone of sorts.

Today (real time) is exactly 1 month since I introduced this blog.

According to the pocket protector types at Blogger, there been 5185 "page views" in that time. Including one from China, oddly enough. Now whether that number includes 5000 bored and idle punters passing through, or simply 5 or 6 ominously compulsive stalkers, I want you to know you are welcome.

Even you robots, if you behave yourselves.

I never intended to collect numbers like this. I never have before. I have no idea what they mean, if anything. It's probably just numerical porn. And of course a month is an arbitrary slice of time. But since Blogger presents this information to me willy nilly, I thought I'd share it with you.

Thanks for the interest, I guess. See you soon. We now return you to your irregularly scheduled programming.

Bob

Unleash the Beast!

2010-09-06T23:18:00.088-05:00

Nothing but dust behind, and blue skies ahead...

After a couple of interesting days visiting and sharing ideas with Andy Baird (including Movie Nights on Andy's 27 inch Mac monitor - Thanks, Andy!), I determined to head on up into High Colorado and unleash the Beast on some true mountain roads. After lunch and a few housekeeping chores in Chama, during which I once again misjudged my clearance for a U turn in the highway, coming face to face with a railroad crossing sign during the circle, and briefly stopped traffic in both directions on a major highway, I got straightened out and made it into Pagosa in the late afternoon with few regrets.

Pagosa is one of my old skiing destinations, and there is a motel right on the river in town that has an interesting basement pool served by a really HOT spring. 109 degrees, as I remember. Some of the old Indians that come there can take that calmly, but I can only stand it for 15 minutes max. They give you giant flannel sheets to wind yourself up in and sweat and cool, and there are couches to lay back on. A nap there is not impossible. I was looking forward to reacquainting myself with that pool.

As I approached the middle of town, though, I noticed there was a LOT of traffic, and after I made the turnoff toward the motel I realized there would be no parking even close to it. I proceeded on, having little choice. In my distant memory of the road, there was plenty of room at the end to turn around.

Not today.

Like a slowly developing photograph, it became increasingly clear I was caught up in a crowd heading for some sort of music festival in the fields at the end of the road, and all the cars were being funneled into tightly controlled and crowded parking areas. The police were a definite presence.

Just that quick, I was trapped. This is a dark secret of motorhomes, which can't escape their size. Story of my life. I couldn't back up into the crowd behind. Ahead was a narrowing neck. So I stopped dead, and uttered a few expletives. A Sheriff's deputy approached. We had a tense but clarifying discussion. He directed me to turn left the wrong way into some one way streets by the Post Office. By a miracle I met no one, passing between the closely parked cars. Pointed out of town once more, I was relieved I hadn't run over anyone, and presiding officialdom hadn't simply decided to pave over me and start again. I found sanctuary at the foot of Wolf Creek Pass, in West Fork Campground.

Waking up in a new world the next morning, like any respectable goose, I unlimbered the Beast and headed east toward Wolf Creek Pass, South Fork, and ultimately Lake City. This is one of the most beautiful drives in the country, however you do it. Hinsdale and Rio Grande counties were once, and may well still be, the least populated counties in Colorado. Basically the road skirts the eastern and northern perimeter of the Weimenuche Wilderness. When I first travelled this road in 1967, it was loose gravel, and the descent from Slumgullion Pass was fairly hairy, especially when wet. One was constantly reminded that Lake San Cristobal was formed by a giant landslide from that very pass.

But it's all paved highway now. Quite civilized. I'd take the Daze up there. And of course to the Beast it was nothing much at all.

It was such an intoxicatingly beautiful day as we started out from West Fork. The sunlight was strong on the road, in high contrast to the deep black shadows in the ditch and woods on my right. It was mesmerizing. I was going about 50, and sensed a car coming up on my left, and looked into that mirror. And at that precise instant a mule deer doe as big as the Beast emerged from the darkness of the ditch and crossed right in front of me, maybe 50 feet away! I couldn't turn left into the car, so I headed at a shallow angle for the ditch, meanwhile trying everything I knew off to slow down without going into a sliding skid. There wasn't much time to make a plan. Fortunately Bambi's Mom didn't hesitate. That would have killed us both. When our paths intersected I was going perhaps 20, and I have an indelible memory of her delicate rear hooves in the air a couple of feet in front of my leading tire.

The car would have hit her, I'm sure, but he must have seen the dance I was doing and slowed way down. Everyone survived, for the moment. All's well that ends well. Whew.

About 10 minutes later I got a chance to get off at the end of that first rise, and took a picture of the valley below, and the stretch of road where I nearly died. Doesn't look so dangerous, does it?

The Valley of Death?

The rest of the ride into South Fork was mostly uneventful, though I had to stop and put on warmer clothing. I kept getting passed by a bunch of German motorcyclists, who would roar on up ahead, then stop and smoke cigarettes. Hurry up and wait. Twice I saw their Fuhrer pass cars into blind corners, and the lot of them followed dutifully behind. That is just suicide in these mountains.

But happily not today. Or not while I was watching.

Just past Creede, I saw this dead horse in a field. But when I stopped to render aid, he miraculously recovered. It was that kind of day.

Need help? Neigh.

After that I let it out a little, and didn't stop again for 20 miles or so, when I reached this beautiful turnoff with a view of the Weimenuche. I really wanted a picture of that country, but the Beast kept jumping in the way.

A passing motorist clicked this pic of me trying to restrain him. It wasn't as easy as it looks. Pictures sometimes lie.

Later on, as we got up around 11,000 feet, the Beast got his comeuppance. He began to flag in the thin air, and begged for a breather. It was all right with me, but he was a little embarrassed to be passed by this elderly recumbent bicyclist:

After that there was no stopping him until he roared over Spring Creek and Slumgullion Passes, and began to ease down into Lake City. Here's a pic of some of the mountains around.

There's the distinctive hook nose of Mt. Uncompahgre, a "fourteener". When my stepson Sean was 5 years old, he climbed that mountain, along with his mother, me, and his brother Cory. Well, his mother carried him part of the way. The little guy seemed to take fire as we got higher, though, and then it was him telling her to hurry up, Mom, come on, come on, come on!

Aaah. At last. Here's the eponymous Lake St. Cristobal.

We got a late start from West Fork, around 11 am, and it was now 3 pm, so there wasn't much time to fool around in Lake City itself, if I wanted to get back to the Daze before dark. I stopped by the bakery and got a couple of flaky meat pies. And here's where we ate them, at one of my favorite campsites, in the Wupperman campground, on a bluff above the lake:

It was a delightful ride back, the aspens just beginning to turn golden in Slumgullion Pass. I'd have enjoyed it more, though, if - darn it! - two young deer hadn't run right out in front of me! Again! What is it with these guys? There's nothing but empty road behind me, more of the same ahead, but these guys wait until I am almost on them to rush out across the road!

Fortunately this time I was watching for them, and it wasn't quite as hairy as on the ride up. A short hundred miles or so and a couple of beers in Creede later, I pulled into camp right at 7 pm.

A 300 mile day. I was a little tired, but entirely satisfied, happy to be alive. And the Beast was simply purring.

Bob

Mr. Wizard

2010-09-02T17:53:00.092-05:00

Mr. Wizard and Skylark

Andy Baird is a man whose hobby is also his home. There's nothing particularly unusual about this, among the retired. What is different is that Andy's home has wheels. I refer to the fabulous Skylark, a 2003 26.5 foot Lazy Daze, seen above with her luxuriantly bearded manager and confidant. Skylark was not Andy's first. That would be Gertie, a 1985 22 foot LD identical in all respects to the Daze Herself, with the added charm of a rare bit of age and wisdom.

When the Daze and I first met, I naturally was interested in questions of maintenance and improvement, so I got on the Web and soon found Andy. His page on "Improving Gertie" was a godsend. Andy has more ideas about RV customization than I could count on my fingers and toes, even if I were a centipede. Many are available on his website, and even more in his html book, Eureka 2, available on CD or by download.

Some ideas are of course always rig specific, but most of Andy's are generally applicable to any RV. If any of you are contemplating an RV retirement, his book is a must read. Andy has about got it licked. He has jumped into that ocean, got in over his head, regained his bearings, and learned to swim like an otter.

For instance, he lives full time in New Mexico State Park campsites with electric for $4 a night. How? Go ask Andy. Look at the website, buy the book. Short of Shakespeare in the Park, you are not going to find so much cleverness for 12 bucks elsewhere. Visit the "Life with a Lazy Daze" Yahoo group that he moderates. This is the best advice you'll get from me any time soon.

After I found his secret lair deep in the gloomy vastness of the forest primeval, Andy and I talked, and then he gave me a tour of Skylark. I'd read all about it, of course, but seeing some of his tinkerings in person gave me the modification bug, and in the days since I've implemented a modest few in the Daze. So here's some pics for all you gearheads:

1. A fluorescent fixture for the Reading Room:

Let there be light. Hey, it worked!

The fixture itself was a gift from Andy, there not being a Walmart handy. He "had a few he bought cheap". And extra bulbs for it. This got to be sort of a joke. Andy has "a few" of darn near everything stowed somewhere about Skylark. I think he's lassoed a pocket black hole to use as his personal "Fibber McGee" closet. I kept wondering if he had this tool, or that, and he never failed to come up with it. Finally I just asked him "Is there any tool you DON"T have in that thing?" He paused for a long auditing moment, then nodded. "I don't have a band saw." You could tell he truly regretted the omission.

2. Battery powered fluorescent lights in the trailer:

You can see the one above the door, and there's another at the rear. Given how little I go in there at night, if I can just manage not to leave them on by "accident", the 8 AAs in each should last for years. The DC lights that came with the trailer are weak, weak, weak. You will also notice the:

3. Large BC fire extinguishers, one in the trailer and one just inside the door of the Daze:

As a former fireman, I am ashamed to say I neglected Daze in this matter. It was on my list, but I kept forgetting it. I had several in my former trailer and truck, but all I had in the Daze was an ancient ABC powder unit, probably original, and no doubt caked up and useless these many years. Andy has them all over Skylark, and particulary a small foam unit in the outside LPG compartment, which is unlocked by law, and thus always available. I'm going to do that too, one of these days. :o)

4. A windshield cover:

This was also a gift from Andy. He had been "saving it to give someone". It was original with Skylark, but he replaced it since with a nice model that admits some light through its weave. The cover was not made for Daze, but I did a little trimming and put in a couple of grommets and ball bungees to secure it to the outsized mirrors. It made the inside a little too dark for my taste, which was also Andy's complaint, but then I figured a way to peel back one side and secure that with the same bungee.

I could put it up each night, but I find it easier just to close half the inside curtain. This still leaves the line of sight open for the radio remote control, and gives access to the glove compartment, etc.

5. Solar Fence Lighting from Home Depot:

These are a bargain at 11 bucks. I bought two. The outside light on the Daze is too high and dim to let me see my keys, of which I have a confusing abundance. This little light stores energy from a small solar array all day in rechargable AA batteries, which then discharge slowly into two orange LEDs at night. It is positioned just above my bolt lock, and gives plenty of light to see my keys. And it doesn't run down my coach batteries. Not bad for 11 bucks. Set it and forget it, at least until the AAs wear out.

Where did I put the other one? Hmmm. Now where do I need a light on all night, where I hate to fumble for a switch in the dark? O yeah.

We aim to please.

6. That's about all the innovation I can stand for one day. O, wait, I found some 6 gallon real water cans at the Taos Walmart, to replace the interim solution of a 5 gallon gas can. And a fifty foot hose to run my gray water off into the woods. And replaced the hood light on the stove with a bright LED like Andy's. And reduced the dangerous plethora of choices in my giant collection of CDs with a selection of MP3s on a few long playing CD-Rom disks. Yes, CDs are dangerous, because apparently I cannot drive and change CDs at the same time. And I got rid of (stored) the 19 inch TV to give me some elbow room at the table. The 17 inch HP is also a TV. Here's the evolving look in my main living quarters:

Other than that, here's some pending projects Andy and I discussed for the coming winter:

A. Bolting my Honda EU3000i generator left over from the fifth wheel to the tongue of the trailer. For too long I have thought of the Daze and the Trailer as two separate things, rather than as a Single Unit for Travel. I think the 3000 may actually run my A/C down in Torrid Texas, of dim dam memory.

B. Sliding my kayak up beside the Beast on rails inside the trailer, or alternatively install a roof rack.

C. Changing the Backup Camera sending unit from the back of the Daze to the back of the trailer, where it might actually do some good.

D. Packing a portable manual trailer dolly in the trailer. These look somewhat like an old fashioned rotary push mower, only with a hitch instead of blades. Wait, here's one. I almost got trapped in a cul de sac in Taos, where unhitching and moving the trailer around by hand would have been very useful. What can I say? The prospect of Thai food clouded my judgement. Another option would be a big front tongue wheel for the trailer, perhaps with some sort of brake.

E. Caulking the various wrinkles of the Daze, which are enlarging with age. Shhh. She doesn't know.

F. Painting the trailer, inside and out. The poor thing needs it. I think the floor and ramp should be covered with pickup bed liner paint.

G. Double the drawers in the closet. Who needs hanging clothes, anyway?

H. Replace the radio speakers up front, install them in a different place, and cover the holes in the doghouse with something tasteful. Okay, innocuous.

I. Tint my mysteriously clear back window.

J. Replace the scalding 140 degree thermostat on my water heater with a manually adjustable one. We actually did this simple improvement on Andy's rig while I was there.

K. Install a wonderful magnetic knife holder in the kitchen like Andy's.

I know there has to be more, but my aging brain cannot reclaim it all. That little list ought to keep me busy for a couple of months, and there's much more in Eureka 2. I'm telling you, folks, if you don't pick Andy's brain in these matters, you're gonna be sorrrreee!

Bob

The Ojo Escape

2010-08-31T23:07:00.070-05:00

Who ya gonna call?

"Only trouble is, gee whiz,
I’m dreamin’ my life away."
-- The Everly Brothers

Ojo Caliente is the name of the town and the spa, about 35 miles south of Tres Piedras. A little nearer to Espanola. The name translates as "Hot Spring", and I gave it the hot eye indeed when I saw it on the map. I was drawn irresistibly. I spent two nights there, in lieu of the rest of my life. I've discovered there's something besides air conditioning that will make me pull into a commercial campground, and that is the prospect of soaking in a hot spring. The campground was $20 per night, about par, with water, electricity, and a dump station. I thought I had a full hookup site, but it turned out the sewage line was clogged with what looked like...well... mud? Other than a couple of tenters, there was no one else there.

The Daze at rest.

As for the spa itself, I made the mistake of arriving on a Sunday, when prices nearly double. Folks from Los Alamos, Albuquerque, and parts farther afield (some were speaking Russian) pay good money for a weekend of what is advertised as "the Ojo Escape". And despite my native cynicism, it was that for me as well. What they have here in abundance, besides the expensive restaurant and "cottages" that go for $199 a night, is something money can't buy.

They sell it anyway. It's peace.

The "whisper zone".

This place should have been an ashram. If you are staying at the hotel, you are issued long robes, which many people never seem to get out of except to descend into some pool. Some robes are creamy white, and some golden. I never did figure out the spiritual pecking order in that, but there is no denying that there's something in the dry air and the quiet here in these caliche hills that just unwinds you right back to zero. Reboot. Add in a couple hours soaking in a hot pool, and you are apt to come away woozy and wobbly and wanting a nap.

The naps here are glorious, like drifting on a warm cloud. Whatever it costs, it has to be worth the money.

But as an RVer, the cost was minimal, at least as spas go. Twenty bucks for the campsite and $17 for all day at the spa. I defy you to use more than 3 hours of that. You'd turn into silly putty, and flow off into the hills. Speaking of which, I had my first experience with a mud bath. This is a matter of dipping both hands in a fine clay mud emulsion and rubbing it all over your body, after which you lay back in a lounge chair and let it dry and crackle and crinch up your skin. They say it is good for you. It certainly is interesting, and I can't say it did me any harm. The mud gives your skin a blue tinge, and the effect is of a bunch of B movie zombies, lazing about between takes. After you are effectively baked en croute, you wash it off in a pool, followed by a warm shower. It washes off easily.

There are 8 or 9 pools, not counting the "private" ones. I made the rounds of all that were open to me. My favorite was one of the hottest, with a pea gravel bottom that gave a good imitation of shiatsu massage. I think they called it the "iron pool". All the pools are named after various minerals, but I couldn't tell the difference between them, other than temperature. They do tell you not to drink the stuff.

In the Iron Pool, I got to talking to a Taos Indian who told me if I liked it here I ought to memorize the Taos zip code, as there was a big discount for locals. He filled me in on some of the intransigent local politics as well. He used a curious phrase to refer to crazy stuff going on off the Pueblo. You know, where the rest of us live. "The other side of the cattle guard." I told him that would make a swell title for a book. He tilted his head, looked up at the sky, and nodded. "Yes it would," he said dreamily.

The best seat in the house.

They don't allow cell phones on the grounds, other than in the rooms, but they do have WIFI. Sitting on the big wide porch of the hotel in the long afternoon, trying to stay awake while sipping a pricy beer, I got in touch with Andy Baird, whose Lazy Daze was recently struck by lightning at El Vado State Park, a little north of here. We arranged to meet in a campground in the Colorado mountains north of Chama, where he was waiting for an insurance adjuster to show up. So, after two days, I managed to leave just before I gave up all worldly goods and began chanting in some two-tone warbling Tibetan dialect. I loved every minute of it, but I didn't want to sleep away the whole summer. I'm not sure why.

I drove back up to Tres Piedras, and then west over the mountains toward Tierra Amarilla. I just love these Spanish place names. They are so multisyllabically musical. They all sound a little like the start of a love song. All that loveliness leaches right out when you say it in English. I mean, "Three Rocks"? And "Yellow Earth"? Instead of a caress, you get a mugging.

I spent the night up in the pass, with a view of forever.

And slept like a stone.

Bob

Daze of Wine and Roses

2010-08-29T19:01:00.004-05:00

When I increase my elevation, activity seems to increase as well. I get highper, and look for things to do. I suppose if I ever made it to space, I'd just explode. Well, of course I would.

I spent the night at a rest area above the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. They give you 24 hours here before confiscating your rig, or so the sign says. One could do a lot worse than throw down a portable chair and spend your evening here.

But before the sun went down, I got a lot done. I dismantled all the vents in the Daze and cleaned the screens. Then I started to dismantle the heater and work on a squeaky fan, but backed off when I realized the night was apt to be cold cold cold before I finished. Sometimes the squeaky fan just doesn't get the grease.

So I turned to the passenger chair. This is just wasted space for me, and even worse the back is hyperextended somewhat into the door area, where it got stuck when a previous owner wanted more leg room. Over the years the cable that controls the ratchet of the seat recliner stretched out until the little lever in the arm no longer engaged. So it was left that way, partially blocking the coach door. I invented a little Latin dance number to avoid it, but it nagged at me.

When I took the control apart, I saw the problem and went fishing in my junk drawer for a washer. Then I threaded it over the end knob, as below, and bent it double to make a spacer that wouldn't come off.

Success! While I was testing it out, looking under the chair at the track, I saw a control I'd never used, which seems to swivel the chair toward the door so that elderly people like I'm slowly turning into can shift themselves out more easily. Idly, I played with it. Wait a minute! This chair goes right on around! Well, except for hitting the seat belt mechanism. And the laptop table. Two bolts later the seat belt was off. A moment later, the table. Wow.

NEWSFLASH! VAST TERRITORIES DISCOVERED IN DARKEST DAZISTAN! NEW READING ROOM WITH COMFY RECLINING ARMCHAIR MYSTERIOUSLY APPEARS IN 22 FOOT MOTORHOME! CELEBRITY'S MANAGER FLABBERGASTED! "I DIDN'T KNOW SHE HAD IT IN HER!"

It feels like the Daze is 10% bigger inside. The chair reclines back into the dash, and daylight pours over my shoulders. I am not fighting that seat back anymore. The toilet door completely opens. I can sit back and view the world outside the passenger door window. No, not from the toilet. I can roll the passenger window down if I like, and catch the breeze. The couch is a comfy reading place, but nothing like this! And I can reach the stereo without bending over.

It is well taken that all old motorhomes have secrets. That is not usually a cause for joy. But this!

Of course nobody can sit there while the vehicle is in motion. No seat belts. But then again, nobody's trying. Besides, it only takes 5 minutes to turn it back around and reinstall the belt, now that I know how. And there's seatbelts back at the couch, for quick trips. The newly unburied original drink holder, which was holding up the laptop table, perfectly holds Mini-Me. The netbook's battery bump extends over the rear and locks it in place. The laptop table has regained its former life as a cutting board. And now - drum roll please! - I can actually for the first time stop the Daze, stand up, and walk to the rear without going outside!

Blow, north wind! Do your worst, wretched weather! Wreak wrack and thunder!

O, it's the Daze of Wine and Roses! Gentlemen may retire to the Front Reading Room for brandy and cigars! Ladies will be served sherbet and smiles in the Rear Lounge!

Bob G., feeling Giddy.

Gasp! Errors Found in Blog!

2010-08-28T16:36:00.006-05:00

The Evil Twins, HP and Mini-Me, who actually write the Blog. That's Mini-Me doing the lap dance.

I have been informed by people who check on these things that the Honda EU1000 has a 0.6 gallon tank. Which is about 5 pints, not 1 pint, as I erroneously averred. Perhaps I will correct the former post, when I get a chance. I was relying on a distant memory of the first one I owned, back in 2003.

Bad memory! Bad! Bad! Bad!

You can look it up. I could have looked it up. I apologize. I have no wish to misinform anybody, and will gladly correct any mistakes that are pointed out to me. But I am still impressed. Honda claims 8.3 hours for the tank of 0.6 gallons. When I get 4 or 5 hours to the tank (I am nothing if not imprecise), at an hour a day, that is fuel use in the range of a pint a day, or a little less than 4 gallons a month. ("Just to show I can do simple math," he claimed overconfidently.)

Maybe 11 bucks. For all the electricity I can use. Can you do that at home?

Let me tell you about this blog. When one sets sail upon a sea of words, as I have, sometimes the only way to make progress through the doldrums is to leave pride behind. It's mostly bilge anyway. This blog will always be a continuous draft.

Perhaps it is my mind and my habits that are on a shakedown cruise, rather than poor Daze.

There is some evidence I am slowly improving by dint of effort, much as she is. For instance, when I first made acquaintance with Herself, she got 7 mpg, just pulling her own weight. When pulling two motorcycles and a pair of large brothers around the Ouachita National Forest in Arkansas back in June, and even on the Interstate coming back to Texas (what was I thinking?), she got 6 mpg. I now realize that is because I was trying to go 70 mph and impress the truckers, instead of being content with 50.

Just last week, in the Panhandle of Texas? The Daze outdid herself: 7.9 mpg, pulling 1700 lb. of trailer with the Beast.

Okay, then, since I wasn't able to distract you, how have I improved? By schooling myself to not need the Internet. Of course a Blog is nothing without it, but there is no need to insist on writing only while actually on line, as I have been doing. Errors will creep in, when I cannot check on facts the second I commit them to pixels. Too bad.

Ben Franklin famously suggested that moral perfection is simply a matter of system and application. I guess I'll never know. Much of the time, given my penchant for sleeping in the high woods, there is internet service only when I pass through a large town, usually on the Beast, snatching a few minutes in some place serving ridiculously expensive coffee, or even outside sitting on the back of the Beast. This is not a climate suitable for extensive revision.

You know the routine from the soaps. Looking for Mr. Perfect? Or Mr. Perfect Right Now?

O, it's all such a sad story. When I AM fortunate enough to find an internet cafe, I am usually under time pressure, as I drove 30 miles to get there, and it's getting dark, and my back hurts, and the conversation people are having next to me is so much more interesting than what I am writing anyway, etc.

You get the drift. Any excuse will do.

The improvement part is that I'm trying to do a little editing before posting. Gasp. And then a little more. With patience. And that means I should not be in such a hurry to get every cherished nugget immediately into cyberspace. A few extra days won't kill anybody. Many an idle thought is best left unblurted. It's ready when it's ready.

I fear nothing will clear away every error. It was only a short while ago that I was just a bush ape, hoo-hawing through the trees. Now I am Homo Intelensis, Data Man.

But I miss the old hoohaw, now and then.

Bob, doing more than he is writing.

Bob and The Beast Take A Ride

2010-08-27T12:18:00.005-05:00

Damn. It's been a long time, boss!

The Beast is a Kawasaki Vulcan 900. He is NOT on steroids, like some of his brothers, but he weighs in at over 600 lb., and will travel all day at 70 mph. That suits me fine, though in truth I seldom spend much time over 50, since anything reasonably nearby is just a blur past that point, and I'm here to see what there is to see.

The Beast is all about muscle. He has tremendous torque, and accelerates smoothly in 5th gear from about 35 to somewhere north of 90. There are many faster bikes, and heavier, and more powerful, but for all around touring in the range of 300 miles, I like the 900. It is an essential part of my RV strategy.

The Daze is a house on wheels. As such, at 22 feet, she is actually rather dainty. Her 350 V8 proceeds at a dignified pace, and while pulling the trailer gets around 6 mpg. She has a first gear that will go straight up at 25 mph and never flag. But her top end is around 70, and she is most comfortable cruising at 50. There are many crowded or narrow places she would rather not go, because of her...ah... bulk.

That's okay. That's not her job.

The Beast is nimble and quick, and will travel practically anywhere there is pavement. He's a little top heavy for soft dirt, mud, or sand, but he will complacently proceed up any reasonably hard packed dirt road. And he will get 45 mpg while doing so.

The Daze is Home. The Beast is an Explorer. The Daze will get us comfortably near where we want to go. The Beast will then check out every nook and cranny for hundreds of miles around. With any luck, he'll let me tag along.

After enjoying a morning of cool weather near Sipapu, the Beast insisted on being let out. He was a little dusty, which surprised me, as I had thought the trailer was tight. A few pails of river water and a quick toweling took care of that. The Flipzilla camcorder leaped onto the handlebar, and we went back over the mountain to Mora, and explored Morrie Lake.

The little camcorder did its best to commemorate the event with a movie, but the beast vibrates quite a bit on bumpy roads. It helps if I hold it steady with one hand, but that sort of blows the ride for me. We are going to work on that process, and see if we can upload something to YouTube. So far, however, I haven't found a single wifi access point that will transmit a 5 minute video in less than an hour. And that figure is pure projection. Most of the time I'm just thrown off in mid-try.

I am aware there are helmet cams and such that threaten to do a better job of damping. I may explore those possibilities. Meanwhile, you will probably have to wait for these movies until we get back to Texas.

On Thursday we decided to motor over what is called The High Road To Taos, which is a ride from Taos up NM518, down 75 through Penasco, down 76 past Santa Cruz Lake to 503, and on to Nambe, Espanola, and back up Hwy 68 to Taos. The high part is spectacular desert country, and even US 68 is pretty along the Rio Grande coming back, once you have left Espanola. Espanola is a long strip town with heavy traffic, and reminds me of what Gertrude Stein said of Los Angeles in the 1920s: "There's no there there."

Fortunately Espanola is a lot smaller than LA.

The best part of the enterprise was simply Riding the Beast. That's hard to portray in still pictures, which can only show where we stopped. Here's some highlights:

A plastered tire fence in Penasco

A roadside shrine

There are many crosses along the road, usually marking where somebody died in a car crash. This one was more substantial, and had no name on it.

A roadside church

Santa Cruz Lake

Santa Cruz Lake again, from above

El Sanctuario de Chimayo

This is Penitente country, known for it's deep and somewhat weird Catholicism, particularly the processions of flagellantes during Lent.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penitentes_(New_Mexico)

On a lighter note:

A Volkswagen Busette? BugBus?

I passed this beauty at 70 on Hwy 68. I did a double take, roared up the highway far enough to give me time to get off and get out the camera, and got this picture of it going by at 55. Apparently he cut down the body of a Bus, and bolted it to the frame of a Bug. It was the cutest thing. I followed him for a while, wanting to talk about it, but he turned onto private land. Probably thought I was a stalker. Which I was.

A long but satisfying day on the Beast. After spending an hour at an internet cafe in Taos, I got caught by nightfall on the 30 mile climb back up to the Daze. Gets cold quick up here in the shadows. After a couple of beers and some jazz, I turned in and slept 10 hours.

I think this scheme is going to work out.

Bob

RV Alone Yet?

2010-08-26T19:46:00.001-05:00

These places can cost you a fortune...

"No, you can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you find
You get what you need."

--Rolling Stones

I've been a loner all my life. I do not brag. I consider it an affliction, and would start up a chapter of Loners Anonymous, if I thought anybody would show up.

No offence intended. I like you just fine. It's all those other people.

I do get crowded easily. Like in grocery checkout lines. It's a kind of mental pressure, a sort of high internal heebie jeebie. I guess that's really what I have against Television. It's not just the lack of quality, though there is that. Nor the incessant vapid insulting commercials. The real problem is that having a TV on is like having an instant crowd right there with you. Too many voices. It's bad enough just with the ones I can't turn off.

I am pretty much already a crowd of one. I can't spare the room.

O, I enjoy the company of people well enough one or two at a time, in conversation, or over a beer. Three is kinda iffy. Half a dozen and I tend to bolt.

Bolting is another name for RVing. You spend enough money to do this stuff, and you somehow pass from being crazy to merely eccentric. This enterprise gives license to us misanthropes to be ourselves. I am sure that when I started out, I had grand ideas about "independence" and "freedom" and "finding the inner Bob".

Bullshit. It's just bolting.

Yesterday, on the way back from biking the High Road to Taos, near Espanola, in splendid isolation, I had the bright idea that the Oh-Kay Casino would almost certainly have internet access for their patrons. Just inside the door I abruptly encountered a vivid vision of Hell: hundreds of people, circling the slots as though going round the Black Stone of Mecca, lined up 6 deep at the ATM machines, eyes absent, slump shouldered, evasive, either lost in dreams or afraid to be recognized.

They were actually LINING UP to give away their money. These people didn't need Access. They needed Escape!

Have you ever suddenly happened on something that made you physically levitate, as though magnetically repelled or bouncing off an invisible barrier? That was me, repelled before I actually even understood what I was seeing. I just knew there were TOO MANY PEOPLE IN THIS ROOM.

So I adopted the backwards facing motorcycle posture, and used the pillion seat of the Kawasaki as a desk for the Mini-me, my netbook. And sure enough, they didn't have free internet. So the place was Hell without benefit of Purgatory. The pure thing. Dante would be proud.

I know, I know. "Such a kidder, always complaining." After all, being alone has objective benefits. I'm sure I'll think of one in a minute. O, ya, it's "empowering". It "lifts you out of the day to day", and "lets you see the essentials of life."

But it's not a matter of profit and loss. There is no balance sheet.

I am reminded of a fan who asked Steven King why he only wrote horror stories. He just looked at her and said, "What makes you think I have a choice?".

There you go. I RV alone, and seem to be fairly happy doing so. This is my life. I got what I wanted, and it ain't so bad. It's a socially acceptable, even admired way to get the hell away from people. And there are many days I can actually hear myself thinking.

Or someone thinking. The voices in my head are a varied lot, and most usually seem to wish me well. They ought to like the hell out of me, what with the cheap rent and all. So on those evenings, like this one, when I get a little too satisfied with things as they are, me and the Daze and the road ahead, they often supply a sly rejoinder.

"Psst! Hey, Slacker! That's right, you, Genius! Have you ever considered that all this hard won heroic isolation may be one of those games where only the winners can lose? And that real success is a graceful failure? Just a thought. Have a nice day."

If you see me somewhere along the road, don't hesitate to knock. I could probably use the company. And I am likely to be there, even if I don't answer right away.

You see, a traveler is always at home.

Bob

Living In A Daze

2010-08-25T12:50:00.000-05:00

The world outside my door.

"A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread--and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness--"
-- Omar Khayyam

It may not be a wilderness, but it's sure a whole 'nother world up here than down in Torrid Texas. I'm now above Taos, on NM 518. On the road to Mora. Just your typical paradise, without a thou but with plenty of bread and wine. By a babbling brook. Or maybe I'm the one babbling.

The river is more of a low roar, but easy to sleep to. Last night I got up about 3 AM and stuck my head and the IR thermometer out the door. 39 degrees F. Man, that moon was bright. It bleached out the stones till they looked like soft snow, and veiled the ghostly conifers in silver and black.

Mirkwood with a motorhome. NOW you're tolkien!

The weather cooled off the moment I entered New Mexico, but I was dead set on COLD, so I didn't stop except briefly at Las Vegas, where I turned in at the Spic n Span Bakery for a sopapilla stuffed with carne adovada. Mmmmm.

When I came out, I looked up and down the street and got a case of deja voodoo. My memory could be playing tricks on me. Or maybe it was the psychedelic effect of New Mexican cooking. Yeah, I used to come this way with the kids years ago on the way to Taos for skiing, but that wasn't it. Wasn't this street once filled with Russian tanks? In the movies? In "Red Dawn"? The high school heroes were looking down on the invasion from a hill that doesn't actually exist.

Well, I can't prove it. But S&S had some fresh beef empanadas in the bakery case, so I picked up three with a side of red chile for later. That's a memory you can count on. In fact, I can share:

I cooked them myself. Yeah, right.

There's leftovers, and then there's LEFTOVERS!

After several days, I'm gradually getting adjusted to living in the Daze. The way you adjust a pillow by punching it into shape. Try this, try that, until you get it right.

For a couple of nights I slept in the overhead. The bed was made. It seemed like the logical thing.

But to heck with crawling up into that crevice, and to heck with not being able to sit up without bonking my head, and begone to risking a broken ankle climbing up and down in the night. I've now settled permanently on a low bed made from one of the couches. Not every couch you find may be comfortable, but these are about 8 inches thick and made from three pieces of variable density foam.

I sleep the sleep of the just. Which is surprising.

The couch bed is not quite as long as up top, but long enough, and offers a splendid view of the stars out the surrounding windows at night, as well as the slow shock of sunlight rolling liquid down the trees at dawn. That alone is more than worth the move. I thought it would be a lot of trouble to make up the bed every night, but it only takes about 5 minutes, and maybe less to roll up the bedding in the morning and stash it in the overhead. That's really what the overhead is good for. That and discouraging visitors.

I also sort of like not having to get out of bed to turn on the heater.

Here again is a picture of the Low Bed from that last warm night in Texas. I guess I could leave it down all the time, since I have the other couch for sitting. But it just seems so much more virtuous and moral to make it up every day. I don't know why. Can't be the amount of effort involved.

It's just more civilized. Hoo hoo hah hah hah hah. I'm not a young monkey anymore.

I really appreciate whoever installed the faux wood flooring in this thing. A quick sweep in the morning keeps it clean. I did put in a couple of throw rugs, but they are also easy to remove and shake out. In case of mud, which hasn't happened yet, I think I could wipe down the entire visible floor with Windex and paper towels in about 2 minutes. I don't know why people put in carpet.

To collect the sacred dirt of all 50 states, I suppose.

Well, that's all for now. I'm going out by the river and read.

Uh oh. Not much reading getting done here...

Bob

A Few Loose Tools

2010-08-24T18:00:00.005-05:00

Here's a few items I find handy along the road. With me, at times, it's a pretty primitive road. This is an incomplete list. No doubt there will be followups.

I have mentioned these before, in passing. The item on the left is a Hawking 8WDD WIFI antenna. Point the little dish in the right direction, and you can sometimes park a block away from a public wifi source and get a usable signal. Without it, nada. Also useful in commercial campgrounds whose wifi setup was installed by the owner's cousin.

On the right we have a Range Star portable cell phone antenna. It, or something like it, will often give you 3 or 4 bars when without you have zip. Both these devices have been replaced by models supposedly even better. Good luck. Also note low in the back window a little rectangular combo indoor-outdoor thermometer, clock, and voltage meter from the folks at Radio Shack. Here's what I use for that up front:

Some people perfer all the bells and whistles of a multimeter, shown on the left below, but for a casual daily check I like to keep it simple. The item on the right below will do that for AC circuits. I just leave it plugged in. If it says something is wrong, then I have to consult the manual and decide if it is worth moving.

A couple of years ago I picked up an IR Thermometer on sale at Radio Shack for 12 bucks. It has been incredibly useful, more than I expected. For one thing, it tells you how your freezer and fridge are doing. Then if one of your tires is running hot, it tells you that. If you wonder if it's freezing outside, just crack the window and thumb the button. I have checked it against bulb thermometers, and I now trust it implicity. You can even tell if a stream is too cold for the trout to bite. Highly Recommended.

Believe it or not, there are folks who could care less for web access, email, even phone service. But even they need something to plant dreams in their heads. So here's something Santa Bob has for them:

I put together this handy splitter kit at Walmart. I like it because I can use it sitting down, and split logs up to a couple of feet in diameter. Just tap, tap, tap, bonk. It takes a while, but it gets the job done. Forget Paul Bunyan and his mighty maul. Of couse the electric chain saw requires a generator. Besides firewood, I used it once to clear away a large Aspen that had fallen across the road.

Which brings us to generators. I hate the Onan that came with the Daze. It's loud as all get-out. It's hard to imagine a situation where I might be induced to endure it. Certainly I couldn't sleep through that racket. Maybe to run the chainsaw. I have a Honda EU3000 at home that I'd love to fit in that space, but I don't think it will. In the picture is an EU1000, which is just powerful enough to run some lights, small tools, and the rig's 45 Amp Progressive Intellipower converter/battery charger. It is whisper quiet. You can hold a normal conversation standing right next to it. It only weighs about 30 lb., and I get about 4 hours of use on the 5 pints of gas the tank holds.

That's pretty eco-friendly. Honda claims 7 hours, but that's when it's not doing anything, just idling along and polluting the air to no purpose.

I carry it inside the rig, because the gas tank has a storage setting on the cap that seals the fumes in completely. An hour's use a day keeps all five batteries topped off no matter what I'm likely to be doing with them. If the Fridge is on auto, you have to change it manually to gas, or the electric element inside will overwhelm 1000W, and the generator will disconnect itself. Just about any electric heat source will do the same, including your water heater. Turn them off or switch them to gas while using the generator.

But what about that huge gas can beside it? Isn't that dangerous to carry?

That is not a gas can. That is a water can. Walmart used to sell blue 5 gallon water containers in this form factor for little or nothing, but they've gone to a big square thing now that won't fit through my rig's compartment doors. So I bought the right size gas can, washed it out, and store it empty in the Daze against the eventuality that every now and then I will find myself in a forest campground where I can not get my rig within hose reach of the water source. Just in case, as happens rarely these days, that water source is a hand pump, I also carry a small collapsible bucket. Yes, it's an onerous mess, but the shower is worth it. And of course, if I really, really need to hitchhike somewhere and get 5 gallons of gas, well, there it is. If I allow that to happen, you may nominate me for idiot of the year.

So how do I carry gas for that little generator? And what about feeding the Beast, if I am fool enough to let him get Huuungry?

Well, here's where things start getting dangerous, liability-wise. The conventional answer is a tightly sealed unvented 1 gallon gas can, carefully stored rigidly upright in a vented outside compartment. But I noticed when I got the Daze that the Obnoxious Onan was furnished with a gas feed line from the 30 gallon tank that serves the engine, terminating right there in a handy place. So I came up with this:

The valve is a standard boat part, used to transfer the fuel feed from one dual tank to another. I just plumbed it backwards. It works on the Daze, and furnishes gas one bulb-squeeze at a time. Tedious but effective, and I don't have to have cheap leaking plastic Chinese gas cans lying about.

That's about all I and my buddy Forrest have to say about that, except the following:

*DISCLAIMER*

I do NOT suggest you try this. It is illustrated here for humorous purposes only. At the very least it will probably void your warranty. Perhaps your insurance. I did it, but I'm crazy. If you go ahead and try it, against my advice, I will NOT be responsible for the result. If you get gas everywhere, blow yourself up, need decades of therapy, burn down the whole town, or your engine's fuel system doesn't work right afterward, I WARNED YOU NOT TO DO IT!

And by the way, DARWIN WAS RIGHT!

*DISCLAIMER*

That said, I doubt you'll find anybody to do it for you. Life is unfair. Have a nice day.

Bob

A Message from the Daze

2010-08-24T17:57:00.003-05:00

Not long ago I ventured certain indelicate and unnecessary opinions about the intimate interior proportions of the Daze, taken from an unfortunate and entirely selfish perspective. Today I received a curt message from Herself. Here it is in its entirety:

"We are not Amused."

O dear.

Bob

Dark Decisions

2010-08-24T17:43:00.007-05:00

There are those who see travel as a great evil. It disrupts the painfully gathered sureties of existence, and stirs up primitive anxieties. Will there be room at the Inn? What will we have to eat? Loaves and fishes? Will we be able to sleep?

Or, as a stubbornly practical non-traveler told me, "When the urge strikes, I want to be sitting on my own pot."

An RV traveller has answers for all these questions, but the habits of a sedentary lifetime often rise up unbidden and shake his confidence. Will we find a campground? Will there be electricity? Will we have air conditioning?

That last question was on my mind as I left Lubbock, the Houston of the High Plains. It was around 9 o'clock, and I was driving into darkness, with a distant but spectacular thunderstorm in the offing. In fact, I was heading right into it, like Linda Hamilton at the end of Terminator. It had been over 100 degrees all day, the cab AC barely keeping up with it, and I was not looking forward to a sweltering night. But with the sun gone, the land seemed to be cooling, and there was a bit of a breeze when I got out to pump gas.

I had a decision to make. Looking for a campground this late stirred unpleasant memories of late night dashes from one none-too-clean cheap motel to another, looking for a temporary and bogus salvation. I'll bet I've not stayed in a commercial campground a dozen times in as many years because of that memory, and every time it involved a need for air conditioning.

Do I seek shelter? Do I drive on? Do I dare to eat a peach?

What the heck. There's something to be said for tradition, even a fairly recent one. Besides, I'm an intrepid Rver. I laugh at danger.

The night was young. I wasn't tired. I was listening to Benny Carter on the stereo. It was cozy in the cab, just me and Benny and the dim cool lights from the dash. Fifty mph, which had irked me earlier as the blazing sun ran round the sky, didn't seem so slow in the enveloping darkness.

In fact it was just about right. I let the miles roll by. Nothing nagged at me. It was the best part of the day.

Y'know, I saw where one RVer was embarrassed to admit that after a few years it felt like they were just "driving in circles". Don't we all? If you've ever been involved in a lasting relationship, you know what it is to go round and round. And then the earth spins round the sun, the year through the seasons. Dust to dust. You may think all that simple minded, but step back. Deep in the blood, we are all Lunatics, responding to the ebb and flow of tides. The only way any of us can manage to think of ourselves as going in a straight line is by flattening the whole of life and cutting it up into tiny slivers. It's like looking at a Mercator Projection of the World and believing those proportions are about right.

Circularity in life is not a problem, it's a relief. It makes a few things still dependable.

At any rate, late at night, cruising down a two lane highway in the panhandle of Texas, it was easy to imagine that in some sense I wasn't really moving at all, though the moonlit world rushed by my door. There was a stillness to my passage, because I was at home.

After a couple of hours I pulled into a rest area just short of Farwell and the New Mexico border. The high plains had cooled further, to a humid 79 degrees. I could live with that, but not in the overhead bed. Not enough air. So I made up a sort of instant sleeping porch on one of the couches, and opened both windows and the vent above for ventilation. I have something like a Fantastic Fan up there, very quiet, with a rain sensor on the cover. It's a different brand, though. Shurflo, I think.

I found some really handy red and blue flannel sleeping bags at Walmart for 10 bucks apiece. They can even be zippered together to make a double. I just spread them out flat, because the flannel grips the upholstery and won't ball up and crawl around like cotton sheets do. They have elastic bands on the ends, and roll up into handy little neck cushions that sit on the back of the couch. If they get dirty, you just throw them in the wash. Or at that price, buy a couple more. Come to think of it, plain flat flannel sheets would work nearly as well.

If you ever sleep where the truckers do, on the side of the road, there's something else you will need: ear plugs. The highway is right there, a railroad track even closer, and big trucks will rumble in and circle round occasionally in the night. But nothing woke me up, the next morning was mild and wet, and stayed that way all the way to Santa Rosa. I didn't need the A/C at all.

Bob

If The Shoe Fits, Buy It

2010-08-24T17:11:00.000-05:00

I only got about 50 miles north on 183 when my brother nearly caused the swift demise of this experiment. Not to mention me. He called me.

Well, I suppose it was a leetle bit my fault.

You see, the Daze is a van. A very pretty, gussied up van, just in case she's listening, but a van nonetheless. And if you are hardwired to drive a pickup, like I am, that can lead to trouble. When I reached for the phone, all those wires hanging off it got caught on the table, and the armrest, and each other, and I had to lean over to free it up. And promptly swerved into the left hand lane. At exactly the moment a big tanker truck full of gasoline was attempting to pass me. As you can imagine, I dropped the phone toot suite.

Fate gave me a pass, the truck slowed down, and I got my butt back in the right hand lane.

All Class C's are like this. They are squirrelly as hell. They are, after all, vans. I mean, you are sitting right on top of the steering box, and any little pressure on the wheel makes you careen off in unexpected directions, lickety split. There's very little forebearance. All I did was look to the right, and give the wires a flip, and in my truck that evolution would have been nothing. But in a van it was nearly suicide.

I need to have that printed on my forehead. When you drive a van, you pay attention to what you are doing. You don't fiddle with things on the seat, you don't try to write your memoirs, you don't even talk with your hands. If you drop something it's just gone until you can pull over. And God help you if try to pick out a new CD or sort through the million plus channels on Sirius Radio.

When you are driving, you drive. Got it? Yeah, I got it.

And while I'm finding fault with Her Majesty, I might as well let it all out. If you are 6 feet 4, as I am, you are going to be cramped. There's the engine hump on the right, and the door on the left, and a diminishing cone of darkness into which you may put your size 13s. It's not quite as bad as trying to drive an MG Midget, but you are going to be playing footsie with yourself, and over time you are going to get stiff, and when you get out after a couple of hundred miles you are going to have kids point at you and say "Mommy, why is that man walking funny?"

None of this is the Daze's fault, I know. It's what I get for outgrowing just about everything in Christendom, including my hair.

This shouldn't be a surprise. I noticed it when I was trying out the Daze, of course. But I thought it was just an upper body problem. "Ted," I said, "I'm not going to be able to drive this thing comfortably. I'm backed up right against the toilet, and I can't get far enough from the pedals to tell which is which, and that speaker is rubbing a hole in my knee....blah, blah, blah."

Ted just looked over behind my shoulder and said "I can fix that."

Sure, I thought. And pigs have wings.

This was on a Monday. On Wednesday he called me and said I ought to come by and take another look. Here's what I saw:

Now that may look to you like the Clampetts have gone and built themselves a car, but it seemed to work. I took it for a test drive, and it's amazing how much more comfortable it is just to be able to lean back a little. He had me. After that, I had to buy it. I mean, how many people have their RV custom tailored to their personal physique?

A pair of boots is one thing, but a motorhome?

Bob

Does Brownwood Ever Cross Your Mind?

2010-08-23T17:53:00.000-05:00

Workin' on it...

By the time I got to Brownwood, TX, I was feeling a bit peckish. Nearly getting run over by a tanker truck can do that to you. As I started out of town on 84 towards Coleman, I decided to pull into the Gomez Cafe.

To call this place a Mexican Food Cafe fails to give it its due. It is that, of course, with a decor heavy on the sombreros, but in addition it is square in middle of a fine old tradition of Texas Roadhouse Vittles. Redneck soul food. Steaks, chops, chicken - o my, they have fried chicken livers! That's a menu item well on it's way to the endangered edibles list.

I had to have it.

On the way in, I managed to circumnavigate a man mountain perched on a quivering chair that completely disappeared beneath him. This guy was probably called "Tiny" in the seventh grade, but seldom since. He was 600 lb. if he was a stone. He surrounded a table all to himself, loaded down with platters. I couldn't help thinking that if he keels over into that mountain of fries, they'll have to take out a wall to drag him away.

Such reflections did nothing to kill my appetite. My appetite is the only part of me that still thinks I'm going to live forever.

The Gomez is truly an old fashioned kind of place. Good food, lots of it, and don't spare the gravy. The sort of place where they leave a pitcher of ice water and a squirt bottle of salad dressing resting permanently on your table, and the big red plastic water glasses advertise a local used car lot. People don't take off their ball caps when they eat here, and excessive conversation is apparently considered an insult to the cook.

It's a place for serious eating. Show a little respect. If you can talk, your mouth ain't full, and why the hell not?

There were voices, though, floating down from the speakers above as from Heaven Itself. I fully expected to hear the ghost of Paul Harvey muttering about "the rest of the story." Not quite. He must have been busy.

But Hank Williams, Jr., was definitely in residence:

"Why do you drink?
Why do you dope smoke?
Why must you live out the songs that you wrote?"

O Man. Eatin' greasy food and feeling sorry for yourself. Does life get any better than this? Well, there could be Beer. I blame the local Baptists for holding back perfection.

To prime the pump, the waitress, who had perfected the persona of everybody's no-nonsense Aunt, brought out a big gratis basket of tortilla chips straight from the fryer, and an entire decanter of hot sauce, just so you don't run out.

When the livers came quickly behind, gliding in on a tray crowded with six other platters, it was a rare monument to engineering. I picked up one of those home made french fries - the sort with the bark still on it - and a big crunchy liver fell off the plate and skittered across the table. I caught it.

That platter redefined the concept of "full". It was a balancing act, with the food arranged not side by side but in layers: on bottom two large pieces of "Texas Toast", followed by a dozen or so large livers crowding a substantial salad toward and maybe a bit over the edge, and on top of everything was piled what looked like a half pound of french fries. And don't forget the gravy, which well deserved a bowl unto itsownself.

O Man. I did my best, but I couldn't eat it all. As I happily stood at the door and paid my 8 bucks, another plaintive voice descended softly from the radio: "Does Ft. Worth ever cross your mind?"

Well, uh, no. But Brownwood certainly does.

Burp. Er... I mean

Bob.

Le Getaway

2010-08-23T09:18:00.005-05:00

I have a superpower. Something I can do better than anyone in the world. It borders on the supernatural. No, it's not procrastination. I'm only approaching genius level at that. And no, I can't fly, though that would be nice. I wouldn't need a motorhome.

What I CAN do, beyond any other mortal, is lose things that are right in front of me. Which makes it tough to make my getaway. Maybe when Alzheimer's finally sets in, it will be a blessing. Not only won't I remember where I put things FIVE MINUTES AGO, but I won't remember that I even needed them. Which I probably didn't. Smiles all around.

In the meantime, I end up buying two of almost everything. Well, there's only one Daze.

I have discovered there is some appetite among the congnoscenti for endless pictures of the most mundane aspects of the Daze. She is something of a celebrity, and I have become merely her manager. So here are some of the latest pics taken by the persistent and annoying Bobarazzi. Stay behind the rope, please.

At the top of the page is Her Grandiloquence, moments before setting out on her whirlwind tour.

Below, her lowly manager's quarters, with a rat's nest of necessary wires. I'm not sure how to clean that up. It all has to stay loose, so I can grab the phone when pestered by her adoring fans. There's also connections for a cell phone attenna, cell phone charger, netbook, and GPS receiver. Ain't we connected, though?

Here's a closeup of two handy items that Daze recommends. The item on the left is a WIFI signal booster. And on the right is that portable cell phone antenna. Both items are of a certain age, but then so is the Daze. They all still manage to get the job done.

The Daze is nothing if not...ah...commodious.

Here is Le Pantry:

Le Office:

Le Closet:

Les Potznpans:

Le Auxiliary Power Center:

Le Boudoir:

And let's not forget the absolute necessities, manager-wise. Coffee pot, paper plates, tabasco. Ahhhh. And sometimes you feel like a nut.

Against Her Splendor's emphatic instructions, I attempted a pic of the bath, but it's too close in there to get one. It's quite a large shower, but I just can't get far enough away to focus on the whole room. My other camera has a macro lens. Would you like a full page spread of the soap dish?

Well, that's lenough of lecraplikethat. We are off and away. Next missive from Le Road.

Le Bob

Training Videos

2010-08-21T18:30:00.034-05:00

Here's my latest toy, bought with the blog in mind. A Flip Ultra HD camcorder, seen with its little ...ah... protuberance hanging out. $179 at Sam's Club, HDMI cable included. 8 Gig of internal memory, about two hours of video. Academy award not included.

But this is no ordinary camcorder. It has a secret identity. Add the flexible mini-tripod I got from a well-wisher at Christmas, and it morphs into the awesome

Flipzilla!

You are being watched.

Defender of the Camera-Impaired! Scourge of the Nikon Snobs! Princely Enabler of YouTube!

Uh-oh. Flipzilla has encountered an alien life form:

O Nooo, Mr. Bill !

Stand back, Folks! This is a tense situation....

Okay, I'm not really 12 years old. But then again, here's Flipzilla peeking out of a magnetic mount motorcycle tank bag. I think you can tell where I'm going with this....

Uh. Maybe I should learn how to manage a still life before I undertake suicide videos.

But hey, just to illustrate once and for all that I really have no shame, I'm going to premiere right here - today! - my very first videos posted to You Tube. These are going to be real collector's items.

There's your Tour de Lazy Daze. I'm learning a lot as I go along. In fact, I made a list:

1. I probably need to prepare a script or better yet produce a silent movie. It turns out that if you put a video camera in my hand I'm liable to say any fool thing that comes into my head. Not unlike this keyboard. My dreams of a late career in Hollywood are herewith on hold.

2. There's quite a bit of shake from just holding the Flip, so I'll have to work on that, maybe use a tripod. This bodes ill for my plan to attach the thing to my handlebar and go for a rumbling video ride on the Beast. However, the mere prospect of imminent disaster has never stopped me yet.

3. Video takes a lo-o-o-ong time to upload onto Youtube. Ratio of about 15 minutes to 3 minutes of video. And this is supposed to be a 1.1 Mbps upload connection. So the idea of doing this on the side of the road through Verizon is a nonstarter. In fact, there's every chance that casual video may be the Death of the Internet.

Watch the YouTube videos soon, if you harbor a masochistic streak. For I'm liable to come to my senses and delete them at any time. I'm well aware this is pretty lame stuff. But I literally just got this thing out of the plastic. I hope to acquire polish as time permits. With a little practice, I may soon be able to competently entertain you with ... O, maybe a photogenic chipmunk or two.

Really. No, really! Quit that.

Bob

Too Much of a Good Thing?

2010-08-19T13:36:00.013-05:00

Is it possible?

Jennifer-who-lives-in-her-car, who just got back from Alaska, wrote something in her blog the other day that has been bonging about in my head. I recommend reading the whole thing: http://www.livinginmycar.com/. But for the purposes of this discussion, here are the relevant statements:

"I’m bored. As I’ve made my way back to the Texas Gulf Coast, I’ve had this nagging feeling of… So now what?" And again: "I like natural settings, but after five months I’m getting bored with sitting in scenic spaces."

The first thing that came to mind was an old song by that great philosopher Peggy Lee: Is That All There Is?

The second thing was to remember I had the same problem, though it took me a little longer. I went to Alaska in 2005 at the end of 3 years of wandering the West. Travel became routine. I got bored with the beauty of it all. Just goes to show that there's nothing so perfect that I can't screw it up.

After 3 years of wandering the lesser 48, all that emptiness up there just filled me up, though it felt a lot like emptying out. The usual bullshit got displaced and rearranged. But I can't really blame Alaska. It was time.

I needed a break. I needed a vacation from all that vacation.

The travel bug - certainly the retirement travel bug - seems to have a natural average lifespan. Judging by a quick tour of the longer travel blogs, the fever seems to abate after 3 or 4 years. They get a job, or fall in love, or out of love, or out of money - or maybe just get tired, or a case of the terminal lonesomes - but at some point the fever breaks, the sense of adventure leaches out of what they are doing, and after a period of touch-and-go recuperation the victim slides gratefully back into what is often called "a normal life".

It isn't always so. There are interesting outliers. Sometimes there is a serial infection. But the unexpected there-and-back-and-done syndrome is actually quite common. And those who are planning a life of "full-timing" in retirement might want to bear that in mind. It's a bit easier to go back over a bridge if you don't actually burn it down behind you.

Everyone has a different reason for travelling. Some people are running away from something. Some think they are running toward something. Some people just like running. Some people run right out of one reason and into another. Inertia plays a role.

Which brings me to why it is hard for me to initially get moving on any journey, including this one. Here's a little dialog to illustrate the problem:

---------------------------------------------

Pangloss: "You have to get into the right frame of mind. It's all about attitude. It's about tuning your mind to appreciate what is going on around you. All travel is really inward. If you simply get on the Interstate and go 70 mph all day, you're not travelling. You're just moving."

Candide: "But, but, but.... how can I appreciate what's around me if it's not around me yet?"

Pangloss: "Sigh. You'll never even get to apprentice philosopher at this rate. Being bored isn't a matter of going too slow. It's a matter of not going slow enough."

Candide: "Professor, this isn't slow. This is stopped."

Pangloss: "Ah, now we're getting somewhere. And while we are stopped, you have to ask yourself: 'Is this all there is?'"

Candide: "Not according to the map. There's a lot more about 400 miles to the northwest..."

Pangloss: "Is that all there is?"

Candide: "Well, there's here, and there's there. And there's a whole lot cooler than here...."

Pangloss: "Sigh. I don't know why I bother."

Candide: "No bother at all, prof. Here, have a beer. Want me to drive?"

----------------------------------------------

Those guys. They do go on. And so do I.

Bob

Dazed

2010-08-18T20:43:00.010-05:00

This one's for Reader Mike, who asked about the motorhome.

I was quite comfortable for 4 years traveling in my pickup, pulling a 27 foot fifth wheel. 42 feet of vehicle, all strung out. It was a clumsy thing to park, or even tow through a town like Portland or San Francisco. I went right on by many a roadside attraction, because there weren't 40 acres handy to turn it around in. I probably didn't miss much, not seeing the Snake Lady. But after 100K miles, it really was beginning to show it's age.

Then I saw this cute little number on Craig's list in Round Rock. A 1992 Lazy Daze Motorhome, 22 feet long, 58,000 miles. That ought to be able to scoot around in town all right. And even park straight in at the curb. Pretty nice looking for its age. New Michelins, good paint. I got it cheap. It had some obvious problems, but that was part of the charm. I kind of like working on these things. Good thing, huh?

Would you take $9700?

I spent $500 getting the fluids changed and everything checked out. Only two mechanical problems showed up. A top-off can of freon fixed one of them. The other was a slow mystery electrical discharge that would kill the battery if you didn't drive it for a week or so. I tried to trace it down, but it eluded me. It was tiny, so I finally fixed it by overpowering it. I put in 4 golf cart batteries to serve the coach (I like to boondock), and a dashboard switch to trickle charge the engine battery directly from them. That's nearly 500 amp hours, all told. It might leak down over the winter if I didn't plug it in, but I do, and a knife switch on the engine battery completed the fix. If I drive it every 2 or 3 days, the alternator keeps it topped off. So it would never bother me on a trip anyway.

As for the Coach, there were a string of small things. But what fun would we have without problems? I hired someone to install a new fridge. It took 4 strong men to wrestle it through the back window without dropping it or breaking something. That was the big item, about $1300. Then there was a Sirius tuner at Best Buy, around $200.

Everything else I did myself: new bathroom faucet, water pump, converter/charger, 1500W inverter, backup camera, heater thermostat, closet shelving, 4 golf cart batteries, compact fluorescent ceiling lights and halogen reading lights, a laptop stand, stereo speakers, and a good foam mattress for the overhead bed. That's not quite the whole list, but you get the picture. Most of these were not so much repairs as improvements.

I believe it is now slightly better than new. But now of course I have around $14K in it. Not so much of a bargain.

I am reminded of Sterling Morrison, and his Kleenex Theory of Kar Ownership. I just can't live up to it, though I have to admire it as a singular bit of ... ah... integrity.

As long as I knew them, Sterling and his wife Martha happily drove a series of vehicles that might charitably be called wrecks. I suppose Sterling's chief claim to fame came very young, as a guitarist and singer in a band called The Velvet Underground. You can google it. Anyway, all that fame and fortune was behind him on the afternoon when he shared this impecunious insight. We were both graduate students at the University of Texas. Sterling was majoring in Beowulf and minoring in beer. Having a major interest in his minor, I was helping him study it in a joint called The Other Place, and he was pondering between pitchers whether to get new tires for his car.

"It didn't pass inspection. But a set of tires would cost almost as much as I paid for the car!" he grumbled.

"A ticket may cost you more. And anyway, ya gotta have tires..."

"But it's the principle of the thing. You ought never put more in a vehicle than you are willing to walk away from. Otherwise it's just an albatross hanging around your neck."

Albatross. All my friends were literary back then. "Walk away from?"

"You know, park it, take off the plates, stick out your thumb. When it begins to cost more than you will ever get out of it, it's like used Kleenex. You wouldn't try to patch that stuff. You blow your nose and you toss it."

Up until this point, I had thought I was pretty darn cheap. I hardly ever solved a problem by throwing money at it, and still don't. It feels like cheating. But it was clear to me that day, in a beery sort of way, that I was in the presence of The Master.

We lost touch after I dropped out of school and into the Fire Department. But I heard Sterling finished his doctorate in medieval studies and drifted down to Houston, where he eventually became a tugboat captain. Most people lead stranger lives than most people suppose. And it seldom proceeds in a straight line.

But the Lazy Daze does.

Bob

Trouble Getting Started

2010-08-17T16:27:00.004-05:00

It's always like this.

I'm not sure I can explain why it takes me so long to get started. I was supposed to leave two weeks ago. When I was working, I would have gone and already been back.

I have lots of excuses. The surgery. The heat. Plumbing problems in the house. Fooling around with getting this Blog started. One excuse is a reason. Too many excuses is just.... too many excuses.

Enough. Yesterday I packed the Beast away.

Grrrr. You do know it's hot in here, right?

Today I washed the vehicles and mowed the lawn. Tomorrow I will pack the Daze.

Oboyoboyoboyoboyoboyoboy!

And Thursday I'll be gone.

Lights Out

2010-08-16T21:27:00.012-05:00

8:15 PM

I am typing this by candlelight. About half an hour ago my on-line existence came to an abrupt end when the power went off.

So this is the afterlife. I was hoping for more Grace.

Maybe the new battery in my laptop will last until the city gets things going again. And then there's the Netbook, which is good for 8 hours or so. I've never had a power outage last longer than a couple of hours here.

Georgetown is not Iraq. Not yet.

It is still a little bit light outside, but quite dark in the house. I can't see the keyboard. Thank God for touchtyping. I suppose I can get on line with Verizon, if I can see to connect it by these cursed candles, but my cable connection went down with the modem. I would repair handily to the Lazy Daze, and may yet, but it's still hotter than blazes out there. In fact, it's starting to get warm in here. A portent of my eventual destination.

I did go out and start up the generator. It is not running well, spitting and surging. But it is running, and so is the AC. It may take two hours, though, just to get temps down into sleeping range.

Uh oh. Dooooom. The AC in the Daze switched off, due to low power from the Onan. This is not good.

Even 60 years ago, many houses in the South had a summer "sleeping porch", situated to catch what breeze there was. Men were giants in those days, and houses had ceilings to match. I remember using one at my Grandma Harvey's house in Baytown. Or Goose Creek, as it may have been then. She also had a whole house attic fan. You had to hold on to the covers when that thing revved up.

All one now with Nineveh and Tyre. This house is old enough to have been paid for twice. But it doesn't predate air conditioning.

The power just went on, briefly, then off again. Dang. I'm dooooomed to a hellish night.

It's an old sad story. If you never use it, you lose it. I may have to clean that generator carb before I leave. "Or maybe if I run enough gas through it, that will do the trick," he thought, economically.

When things go wrong, the chain of redemption falls back to its weakest link before it fails.

Once again, that was me.

Bob, posting in the dark via cell phone. Just because he can.

Why Blog?

2010-08-15T20:42:00.002-05:00

Well, there's all this fortune and fame, of course. Everybody knows how lucrative this endeavor is. Other than that, it's a bit like looking into a mirror, hoping to see something new.

Hey, didn't I go to high school with that guy?

This is a place where I get to talk about what's going on in my life - blathering rights - in the hope of inadvertently stumbling over something true. Or at least entertaining. RVs, motorcycles, photos, and travel are a part of that.

But so is whatever else passes by in front of me. Catch me if you can.

Just the bare possibility that you might show up has kept me from being completely self indulgent. Thanks. Unlike, for instance, that guy holding forth behind you in the checkout line. Have you ever considered there may actually be people who stick a dongle in their ear just so they can plausibly win imaginary arguments?

C'mon. Does anyone really think that guy has a girlfriend? Let alone one he can talk to that way?

But a blog, now. That's a whole 'nother thing. People can get away with darn near anything in a blog. Nobody reads this stuff anyway, right? And even the ghostly armies that might show up can hardly be captured. That would be like trying to juggle water.

I'm not that good. And you're not standing there waiting to pay for your groceries.

So hey, I'm just tap, tap, tapping away. Sometimes the person I'm reaching out to looks awfully familiar. Sometimes I don't know him at all. I have every hope life will be more interesting with all of us in it. But whatever happens, if you hang around here it's not my fault.

Blame the guy over there behind that tree.

Bob

Surgery Scheduled

2010-08-05T11:15:00.005-05:00

I went to see the surgeon who is going to operate on my hand today. It's an interesting procedure, called Mohs Micrographic Surgery. Apparently the old way to take off skin cancers was to just hack an overlarge circle around the obvious tumor, and then sew the whole thing up, or apply a skin graft if the hole was too big.

This way is more cautious. Basically she cuts out the obvious, and a little circle around it. Then she carefully examines the edges of the tissue removed to look for cancer. If she finds any, she makes another small cut in the direction of that evidence (she is both surgeon and pathologist). This is repeated several times until no more cancer can be observed.

The object is to do as little damage as possible and yet be sure they get every bit of the growth, which is sometimes asymmetric beneath the surface. Afterwards I have to keep my hand up on my shoulder in a sling for a couple of weeks so it will heal properly, and I'm all done. Maybe some therapy if the scar is too tight.

"Is there any medical reason to rush into surgery? I was on my way up to Colorado on a motorcycle trip."

"You should go! When will you get back?"

"I was thinking maybe October, after the aspens change..."

"Oh." She was taken back a bit.

"Do you have to be gone so long? A few weeks is okay, but I wouldn't wait months."

"How about A month? Sometime in September?"

"Well, there are no guarantees, of course. But that ought to be all right... Wear your helmet."

Beneath the startle I could see a little envy in her eyes. Here she is, making money hand over fist, a whole office catering to her every whim. But there was one thing she could not afford. She could not afford to take off for a month to see the aspens turn.

What the hell, I waited 30 years to get in that position myself.

I am set up for 9 am September 27th. It will be in office, under local anesthetic, and could take up to 8 hours, depending on how many times she has to cut. I plan to bring lunch and a couple of books, and drive my own self home.

My ex is giving me grief on this. Can't say I blame her. I know I am being ornery, and I do appreciate the concern.

"I can NOT understand why anyone would leave CANCER anywhere in their body for ANY length of time!"

"But, but, but... darlin'... that's my clutch hand she's cuttin' on.... I wouldn't be able to ride for weeks!"

Bob

Cancer

2010-07-30T11:25:00.010-05:00

Bet that got your attention. Scary word, huh?

Well, it turns out I've got one. But maybe it's not so scary. I was getting ready for a motorcycle trip up to Colorado, and I noticed a couple of itchy bumps on my left hand and arm. I do try to see a dermatologist once a year or so, just for grins, and it had been a while.

When I called, they told me he was leaving the practice that very week. So if I wanted to see him, I had to come in the next day. So I did.

He looked me over, and did biopsies on the bumps. One turned out to be benign, but the one on the back of my hand is a "squamous cell carcinoma", which I am told will have to be cut out.

Hey, it's just skin. It is NOT a melanoma. The back of my hands have suffered much from a lifetime of sun exposure. So now I'll have to go see a dermatologist twice a year instead of once. The only danger is if it gets really large before it's treated, and that takes years. Or so I'm told.

So I'll have it out. He referred me to a surgeon. Damn. This is gonna cut into my trip something terrible.

Lord knows I've got enough scars on my hands. Mostly from being too cheap to let somebody else work on my car. One more little nick won't kill me. Well, that's the plan.

Hey! Maybe I can claim it as a "fencing scar". That ought to impress everyone. Not as good as a Super Bowl ring, but what the hell.

Bob

Reading Es

2010-07-16T19:00:00.033-05:00

I am a reader. Mea culpa. As a teenager I found it very useful to be suddenly "somewhere else" at a moment's notice. Bored of living in a small town? Welcome to Paris. Tired of your inane neighbors? Meet my friend Quasimodo. Or maybe Rikki-tikki-tavi.

Reading freed me up that way. So it is no great news flash that reading can be a liberation. It took Amazon to turn it into a trap.

They've come out with a new Kindle Reader for $189. And a WIFI-only version for $139. If I hadn't already paid $400 for the old one, I might have bought it. But that's not the sort of trap I mean. Heck, I've paid thousands of dollars over the years for a series of sorry approximations, looking for a usable E-reader. A Hiebook, a subnotebook, a netbook, various laptops. So I am not afraid to throw money at the problem. It's just that none proved really useful. My objections were technical. Primarily to do with the wretched screens.

My current objections are to the Amazon business treatment of Ebooks. It turns out that a new Ebook generally costs as much as a paperback. And at that price the paperback is simply superior technology. It is easier on the eyes, has greater contrast, is completely portable, very durable, doesn't need batteries, and once you buy it you own it outright. You can lend it out when you finish it. Sell it. Or give it away.

And it is unlikely that any vendor will sneak into your house and steal it back from you.

That is exactly what Amazon did last year. They got into some licensing difficulties with a publisher, and as a result deleted "1984" and "Animal Farm" from the Kindle devices of people who had paid good money for them. Orwell, of all authors. Of course they refunded the money. But they didn't ask permission to take them away half read.

Apparently you don't buy ebooks from Amazon. You just pay to check them out for a time, subject to random seizure. Read fast. Big Brother is watching.

This is old news. You can read about it here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html.

The Kindle is not properly a reading device at all. It is merely, as one wag put it, "an Amazon Vending Machine".

There are two caveats to this conclusion. For the traveler, there is some utility in a portable book store at desperate moments and in intellectual deserts, where books are not readily available. Rural America is full of places like that. When I was in Harrison, Arkansas, last month, trapped in the motorhome by continuous rain, I went to a nearby Walgreens and asked the clerk if there was a book store in town. "We used to have a Christian book store," she said, "but they went out of business. Have you tried Walmart?"

I suppose when you are faced with questions like that, the Kindle can seem like a Real Good Thing.

But you don't need a Kindle to read Kindle books. There are a number of reading apps Amazon has made available free to suck you into their scheme, including Kindle for PC, Mac, Android, Iphone, Blackberry, etc etc. And here's the best thing of all: these programs allow you to download from the Kindle store, absolutely free, the first chapters of almost any book you might be interested in, and read them on screen.

This is an invaluable aid to figuring out what Treekiller Books you might want to actually buy. Or even obtain at your local library.

So don't waste your time with the Kindle. But check out the free Kindle apps.

Bob

Chicken Fried Bacon

2010-06-01T12:55:00.245-05:00

My brother and I took a little 231 mile jaunt on our motorcycles the other day. My ass is gradually getting broken in. We ran down the back roads from Georgetown to Somerville. That's where my Dad grew up, and where we used to visit Grandma's house. I haven't been back there since I was about 12, when we went to her funeral.

I remember afterwards Dad and Uncle JD burning an enormous pile of old books in the back yard. Even then, I thought that was just wrong. But when I protested, I was asked what I wanted to save. I didn't have a ready answer. It's easier these days. If information becomes inconvenient, we just delete it.

Poof.

It took a while to find the house. The old place seems shrunken, and certainly in disrepair. It used to be enormous. Yegua Creek, which once meandered lazily nearby, has been drowned by a large lake. The lake comes right up into town, about a quarter mile down from where Dad went to high school.

The past can't be recovered. It's like trying to find a nail you once pounded in a tree. At most you'll find a knot where it used to be. It is an oddly haunted thing to even try. If you want to own the past you have to invent it. And then it isn't past at all.

What the heck. Childhood is like many a vacation destination. A great place to visit. But you wouldn't want to live there.

Mike and I headed on up to Snook. We've been on a mission, ever since I saw a thing on TV about Sodolak's Country Inn. We got there in time for a late lunch. I had the "extra small sirloin", which weighed in at 16 oz. Delicious!

But the item of real curiosity was an appetizer: chicken fried bacon and gravy. The bacon was very lean, and did not taste particularly greasy, though of course most of its calories had to be in the form of lard. Not bad, actually, though I wouldn't want to make a habit of it.

And as a silly kind of redneck quest, it was irresistible.

I managed to finish it all off. My brother left half a piece (the wuss). And here's what he looked like in the parking lot afterward.

Bob

Doggone!

2010-04-27T10:54:00.001-05:00

Here's a problem I never considered solving:

I was at the dealer getting a new front tire when a guy road up on an Electra Glide with one of those little chinese dogs (chi-poo? something like that, with blond hair in it's eyes) sitting in the rear seat. Nothing holding him in but will power. The little dog waited patiently while he stopped and parked the bike, then jumped into his hands. I asked the guy how far he had ridden like that, and he said a couple of miles from his home.

The dog rides everywhere with him around town. When he first started carrying it, he tied it down with a leash so it couldn't jump off. It never tried, so he left off the leash. He did say he never goes over about 30 mph like that. For longer and faster trips he uses a pet carrier strapped to the seat.

O, and the dog wasn't wearing a helmet, either.

Bob

Kawasaki!

2010-04-22T10:44:00.009-05:00

Geshundheit.

Purty thing, though, ain't it? A 2006 Kawasaki Vulcan 900. This photo was taken up at Stillhouse Hollow Lake, on a boat ramp below the Lampasas River bridge.

I blame my brother. He got one, so I had to get one. That's the Law of the West. East too, I guess.

Now I have to figure out how to use the thing. And that's not as easy as it sounds. O, it's not the riding part. That comes back amazingly fast. Nor even the weather. I have a rain suit, and the sense to get into it.

It's a bit more fundamental than that. It's a butt problem.

The last time I had a bike was back in the 1980s. I drove it up to Colorado for most of a month, camping out in the boonies, sleeping on the cold, cold ground. Ah, those were the days....

When I finally got back, my butt was so sore it clouded my mind a bit. After the Yamaha 1100 sat unused out in garage for several months, I sold it to a cop. I'm told he wrecked it within the month.

The sad fact is, most all the pleasure of riding is in the first 30 minutes. And it's no damn slouch. You know, that blue sky feeling, the crazy illusion of balance and beauty and grace, a blurred rush of ground beneath you like an electric sander approaching your toes, the wind in what's left of your hair, etc., etc. All that stuff.

Over the following 15 minutes, though... Houston, I believe we have a problem.

From then on it's just one fresh hell after another. Hot spots rise up beneath you like little solar flares. Your back siezes up in the Vulcan Death Grip. And then there's that incessant funny little dance from the waist up at 70 mph, leaning and twisting and rising, trying to find relief. Any relief at all. It's sort of the reverse of clogging.

The bike still looks good. But it feels like this:

"Do you expect me to talk?" "No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to die."

So where can you actually travel on a motorcycle? The answer so far seems to be anywhere that takes less than an hour. All the way to Arkansas appears to be out of the question. But I've already gotten acquainted with half the back roads in two counties, in a broad arc from Bertram to Belton to Bartlett and back. Next up is a swing to the south.

Is this really travel? Or just a carny ride? Maybe it doesn't matter. It's fun to go driving just for the heck of it. I used to do that in a pickup. I'd got out of the habit, over the years, in an age of 2 dollar, 3 dollar, 4 dollar gas.

The Vulcan gets 45 mpg. I don't even have to think about it.

So now it's just me and the motor and the maize out here in the country, rolling along between the fencerows at 40 mph, not a care in the world. Maybe today I'll wander up to Weir, check on the Weirdos. Or Walburg, pick up a beer and a burger. Practice that little lefthanded low down wave us bad bikers give each other. I think it's required, once my probation is up.

Pure bliss, rented by the hour. Not bad. But after the hour is up, or until my butt is beaten into shape, I have get off for a while. No, I haven't figured out the right frolic-to-rest ratio just yet. But I'm working on it.

If only I could leave my ass at home.

Bob