The last time I slept on land under the care of the Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, it was sublime.
Continue reading “Running The Gamut”Running The Gamut
Tag: travel
Happy Faces
The Joshua Tree Music Festival has wound down.
The campground is almost empty. All that remain are memories of the event — and photographs, many of them of happy people enjoying themselves.
Here is a group of happy faces, photographed on the last day of the festival, during one of the final musical performances on the main stage.
A Place to Sleep — Part I
Sleep is all about recovering. So if you’re not sleeping, you’re not recovering. And if you’re going to break your body down a lot, you better find ways to build it back up. And the only way to do that is get a lot of sleep.
— Tom Brady
During the first few weeks of my journey from Middletown to Colorado and Portland, Oregon, I followed major highways — especially I-80, which carried me through four U.S. time zones and nine states.
Continue reading “A Place to Sleep — Part I”Benefits of Wandering
When I’m traveling, sometimes a need for some minor adapting travels with me. Obstacles do crop up from time to time. Such was the case when I pulled into Tacoma, Washington, a port city of nearly 220,000 about 30 miles south of Seattle.
Continue reading “Benefits of Wandering”Ready for my Closeup
Dollar Slices
All men are hungry. They always have been. They must eat, and when they deny themselves the pleasures of carrying out that need, they are cutting off part of their possible fullness, their natural realization of life, whether they are poor or rich.
— M.F.K. Fisher, How to Cook a Wolf
I consider today the true start of my journey, my first chance to take a break from eight- and nine-hour days driving my diesel-powered Mercedes Sprinter van west on the never-ending I-80, and to slow down — the speed limits out here are typically as high as 75 mph — and observe what I’ve been passing by since starting out from Connecticut last week.
Continue reading “Dollar Slices”Bridge Ices before Roadway
Life “is like driving a car at night. You never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”
— E. L. Doctorow
I’m parked at the Portage Service Area off I-80 in western Ohio, balancing my laptop on my legs, and every tractor trailer that enters the rest stop passes right in front of me: Dominion, AmeriFreight, Prime, ITS Logistics, and so on.
Continue reading “Bridge Ices before Roadway”251 Court Street
Anna, whom everyone calls Queenie — a childhood nickname that took hold — lives down the hall from my now-empty third-floor apartment. It’s not really a hall — more like an elevated walkway with a full wall on one side where the apartment doors are and a half-wall on the other side open to a four-story atrium with skylights that sound like snare drums whenever it rains.
Continue reading “251 Court Street”On the Road to Find Out
I said the road is my redeemer
I never know just what on earth I’ll find
in the face of a stranger
From the song “Jesus In New Orleans” by Over the Rhine
When I share that I plan to travel the country in a camper van, some people tell me it sounds exciting or that they’ve always dreamed of making such a trip.
Others ask: “Why on earth would you do that?”
Continue reading “On the Road to Find Out”The Lure of Lithium Iron Phosphate
I will be “building out” Nautilus this spring and summer.
I named my Sprinter van after the submarine that Captain Nemo piloted in Jules Verne’s prophetic tale of adventure, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Consider that Step One in the camper van building process.
What’s Step Two?
Continue reading “The Lure of Lithium Iron Phosphate”