Simple Living on the Road

I have to apologize for yesterday’s post title– it was supposed to be about how I’ve felt like a truck hit me, after my 5-day, 5-plane trip out West. Instead, I whined about the airlines’ new policy on seating.

So, a return, I suppose. I managed to get through the entire trip without succumbing too much to the “stuff acquisition” temptations, though I did buy a couple of used books at Powell’s in Portland. I also lost a very nice gold bracelet on my trip, something that makes me sad whenever I think on it– my husband gave that bracelet to me, and it was the second nicest piece of jewelry I own.  One of the things I liked about it was that it had blue stones– nobody ever buys me blue jewelry because it doesn’t go well with my coloring, and my birthstone is peridot (which is kind of a crappy washed out green stone, btw). But he had seen this bracelet and decided to give it to me, perhaps thinking it would be pretty on my arm, or maybe because he realized that blue is one of my very favorite colors.

Dangit. I don’t mind parting with”things” if I’m ready to do so, but I hate it when I lose stuff.

Yesterday, before we left Eastern Massachusetts, I disassembled the great wheel that I inherited from my grandmother and took it to the auction house to be sold. My reasoning went like this: I don’t have space. For the amount of hassle and expense it will take to transport it from here to our storage locker in California, I can buy one out in California. It’s not a family heirloom; so far as I know, it’s been at least 5 generations since anyone in my family was a spinner, and we know the provenance of this wheel is that it was bought at a thrift store. It’s also non-functioning: in an RV, everything has to have two functions, and “a big block of useless wood” is not an acceptable function.

So, away to the auction it goes. I’m also putting up an eBay auction as soon as we’re settled in somewhere for a few days. I have a whole box of electronics that I need to get rid of, everything from my Sony Reader to a spare Bluetooth headset.  I’m thinking of writing the auction description something like this: “I live in a small space– a motorhome– and I need to sell this stuff so I can afford to buy ebooks for my Amazon Kindle. Please buy my stuff– it all works, and you’ll get many hours of amusement out of it, I promise!”

As ad copy, I don’t think it wins any awards, but every so often, someone comes up with a hilarious listing on eBay that seems to drive the price up.  And even if it doesn’t, at least I’ll have found homes for these various electronics that I’m, frankly, just not using anymore.

Air travel has to be one of the worst industries in America. I say this with a lot of respect for the airline personnel, who come into contact with the frustrated public every day, and do the best they can with the hand they’ve been given by the airlines.

Take, for example, Northwest. It’s an old adage in customer service that your employees will treat your customers the way they themselves are treated. While I am sure there are many happy Northwest employees, I can also tell that the airline isn’t making their employees happy, nor their customers. Their newest money-grab? Charging for the seat. No, not charging for your ticket. Charging extra if you want an aisle or window or exit row seat.

Personally, I would only pay extra for an exit seat– the only seat worth paying extra for is one where you are legally guaranteed there won’t be a 2 year old child discovering the joys of shrieking squirming on the lap of the person next to you.

After being wedged into an unusually narrow seat in between two ladies who were even larger than me (we were in an extra legroom aisle– these aisles have more legroom but less seat width, and they put three short, round ladies there…. why?!?) I resolved never to fly Northwest again. Ideally, I would like not to fly ever again– John Madden doesn’t fly. Why should I?

In other news, I’ll remind everyone that today is the deadline for the postcard giveaway! I only have a few valid, non-spam entries, so drop a comment or your entrecard today!

As promised, I’m going to hold another 6-postcard drawing, this one to celebrate my birthday, which is today!

Post a comment on ustravel.today.com or drop your entrecard between now and Friday, August 22. ONE lucky winner will receive a packet of 6 randomly selected postcards from my travels. You can ask to have all six mailed to you in an envelope, unmarked, or I can write random messages on them and mail them to you one at a time– your pick!

By the way, I contacted the winners of last month’s drawing, but didn’t hear back from 2 of the 3 winners. Go Amie and Simply Mayang , would you both please drop me an email at mortaine at gmail.com with your mailing address so I can get these out to you? Thanks!

Fine Print:

Don’t put your mailing address in the comment, but do check your email or this blog after Saturday the 23rd. I’ll announce the winner on Saturday and try to contact you if I have any kind of link or email address to use.

Your contact information will not be shared with anyone for any purpose and will not be used for anything except sending you the post cards. Non-US participants welcome, but I can only send post cards where the U.S. postal service permits. All spam comments will be deleted and are ineligible for entry. “Spam” is defined by my own internal filter. Like obscenity– I know it when I see it.

This giveaway/contest is being run by the independent writer of ustravel.today.com and has not been reviewed or endorsed by the webhost, Today.com.

Note: Comments are moderated, so if you post one and it doesn’t go through, don’t panic– it’s just being held for moderation.

Also, I know the captcha is annoying. I already get about 20 spam messages a day, even with it, and I shudder to think what it would be if I disabled it. The plugin my host uses, re-Captcha, uses words that have been scanned for inputting public domain works into online libraries which the OCR software is having trouble recognizing. So, as annoying as it may be, at least you’re helping to contribute to the availability of e-texts.

Lonely Planet USA by Jeff Campbell et al. ($28.99)
I will admit, this is the more current version of the 2006 book, which is the version we have (but I just didn’t want to link you to the out of print version). But this is a meaty book with lots to offer for travelers in the US.

One of the best things this book gives you, in fact, is the perspective of someone from outside the US. The introductory section is worth reading, because the assumed audience is clearly a European traveler coming to the States. The US’s foibles and strange little cultural quirks– which we take for granted– are exposed for all to see!

It also gives you a perspective of what people from outside the US (and many from inside) think of the “important” parts of the US to visit. So, California and Florida take up huge chunks of the book, while entire regions like “New England” are lumped together. This is a shame, in my opinion, if only because there is a great deal to see in the non-tourist states… but I suppose it’s nice to have all the tourists funneled into one corner or another. Makes us easier to keep an eye on, don’t you know.

It’s another one that’s worth buying if you’re going to travel the US for any length of time. It’s a particularly good pick for road-trippers and folks who hop from place to place for business, because many of the destinations are focused around cities, and the Lonely Planet editors have clearly paid attention to common business and conference-related destinations.

Since I’m going out of town this weekend, I decided this would be a good time to pre-write and post a few book reviews for your enjoyment while I’m away.

1000 Places to See in the USA and Canada Before You Die by Patricia Schultz ($19.95 retail).

This is a very handy book, especially if you aren’t squeamish about tearing pages out and carrying them around like a mini-guide. The book delivers exactly what the cover promises: 1000 places to go and events to attend in the USA and Canada. It’s a great book for RVers, because it gives us a guidebook to the whole US, not just one little section of it. Also, it’s inspiring to read the book and realize that, hey, a great historical or artistic legacy is just minutes away from wherever you are.

Are there more places to visit than listed here? Absolutely! There’s no doubt that any book like this has to leave something out– the beauty of guide books, of course, is that you can keep drilling down (1000 places to see in California… 1000 places to see in Lake Tahoe…. etc.) until you find yourself describing a visit to a single tree. For this book, however, that tree better be majestic to compete with the 999 other things to see in the US and Canada.

And, of course, this book is available on the Kindle. Since I carry my Kindle with me everywhere, having an enormous encyclopedic book of destinations without adding any extra weight… well, that’s just icing on the cake!

I don’t post very often about my work, because my clients like discretion. When you’re trusting a writer with your unreleased products and specifications, it’s a good policy not to “talk shop” in your blog. And I’m working on a project right now that requires me to be a little discreet with my own intellectual property, to keep the secret from getting out too soon.

On the one hand, I feel like things are “slow” because, well, I don’t have a lot of money coming in. On the other hand, I’m working on four major writing projects, including this blog.  And here we come to the crux of the problem with financial freedom and simple lifestyles: what do you do when you’re there?

I’m not there, not by a long shot, but we’ve reached a point now where we’re able to take a bit of a breather and pursue less money-intensive activities. When your adult working life has been driven by market forces, finding opportunities that do not devalue your skills while still celebrating the freedom of your creativity…. that’s hard to do!

Right now, I’m just going to focus on the four big projects on my plate. One is scheduled to launch in September. One in January. This blog is ongoing and already live. The fourth is a test project to help me build some skills for other potential projects coming in. November is spent doing NaNoWriMo, and I won’t be giving that up.

Whew! I guess things aren’t so light around here after all!

Bernie Mac and Isaac Hayes both died over the weekend. I liked Hayes in South Park, but I’ll be honest, I thought Bernie Mac’s comedy was irritating. Nonetheless, both did well in bringing more black faces to the small screen– the television industry’s chronic tokenization was embraced by both, then ruthlessly used to give them greater exposure and celebrity.

That’s one thing about living in an RV: most of the people we encounter at the parks are white. This probably has something to do with the longstanding (and not altogether untrue) belief among African Americans that there’s something inherently foolish about deliberately sleeping out of doors.

No matter where we’ve gone, from Arizona to Atlanta to Florida, the faces around us are predominantly white. I wonder if the lack of diversity is a function of the parks we’ve been to, or of the lifestyle itself. Certainly, we’re not in the urban centers, although we did stay terrifying close to Camden, New Jersey in June.

I suspect it’s due to the company, really. While our neighbors are friendly and helpful to us, I’ve found myself gritting my teeth and trying to think of a polite way to hold someone’s head underwater to get them to stop using “the n word” in a hot tub conversation. If I were contemplating going camping or even living the full-timer lifestyle, I would certainly think twice about uprooting myself from my own support network if I experienced that kind of welcome.

It does not speak well for the future fate of this nation when my overwhelming impression of our country is that too many people are too quick to judge others based on the colors of their skins. In addition to the “n word” guy, I’ve been told by some otherwise seemingly intelligent people that “the Cubans are all crooks, and you can’t understand them” (to which a quietly spoken “we speak Spanish” was enough to inform that, perhaps, we are not the people she mistook us for).

It may simply be an aspect of camping mostly in the South, as well, but I doubt it. We encountered “n word” guy, after all, in our own home town of Santa Cruz, California– a bastion of liberalism and tolerance (which is why I didn’t hold his head underwater in the hot tub).

My post on anger management in ustravel.today.com was featured in the carnival of celebrating personal development. Check it out for many, many posts for self improvement.

My favorite: Is extreme frugality a waste of time and money? Written for the entrepreneur, this post is about calculating how much money you really save if you do something for yourself, when you control whether you spend an hour on billable work or not.

Yesterday, my husband and I went out letterboxing. This is a bit like a scavenger hunt in the woods, or a low-tech version of geocaching. You get clues to the location of the box and you try to find it. The box contains a log book and a rubber stamp, often hand-carved but not always. You bring your own log book, your own stamp, and an ink pad. Once there, you exchange stamp impressions with your own stamp and the one included in the box. Rehide it where you found it, and go on your merry way.

Unfortunately for me, today’s hunt was more like getting lost in the woods. In fact, it was exactly like getting lost in the woods, complete with me uttering this sentence: “Maybe next time when we go hiking, and you pack a day pack with some water in it, you could actually bring that water with you….” (As you can tell, I clearly haven’t gotten rid of all of my anger issues yet.)

In any case, the instructions were something like this: “Go to the park, but I won’t tell you which entrance to use. Find the stone memorial.” For the record, we’re in Massachusetts. Everything is a stone memorial! We parked next to a stone bench in memoriam. We hiked up to not one, but two stones overlooking a soccer field, both dedicated to the memory of someone.

“Follow the ski lift down the hill to the trees on your right.”

Huh? Ok, it’s July. It is entirely likely that the ski lift is seasonal. More to the point: it’s Massachusetts. You can’t walk ten feet without walking into a tree!

I gave up at that point, because I never found the “trees shaped like a U.” Or the ski lift. Or the correct stone memorial. I did hike up a hill following some power lines, figuring they were the closest thing I was going to find to a ski lift, and since the clues are sometimes all “clever,” maybe the box hider was using “ski lift” more figuratively.

Anyway. I got home sweaty, tired, and wondering how the heck one hides a ski lift that completely in the woods!

Why haven’t I been writing about all the cool places in and near Boston that we’ve gone to? Because we haven’t gone anywhere!

It’s very hard to write about destinations when it rains every blessed day here. And not just light little rain. Torrential downpours. Tornadoes. It might be sunny and nice for 3 hours, but if we go out to do something, we’ll be holding newspapers over our heads and running to the car, hoping the lightning is a little further off than it looks.

It’s been so bad, my uncle’s workplace was actually struck by lightning. If you knew my uncle, this wouldn’t shock you in the least. Bizarre seems to follow him around. The man cut his thumb off at work 2 months ago.

We have a pile of papers we need to shred or get rid of– papers with enough personal information we don’t want to just throw it away. Guess what? All those lovely paper places, like Kinkos? They don’t take paper for shredding! They have shred-boxes on the premises, they use shredded paper in packing materials… it seems like a win-win for them to accept sensitive papers, shred them for customers, and use the shredded paper in packing. We have a teeny tiny shredder as part of our paperless lifestyle, but there’s a stack of backlog papers that would take days to shred in our little dinky home shredder (which would, no doubt, overheat).

So, what to do? Well, I suggested recently that we should have a campfire and burn the sensitive papers. Then they’d be destroyed and we would have one less box kicking around the RV. Plus I have a couple of old wax candles I don’t need anymore that could go into the flames. The problem? It hasn’t been dry enough at night for us to pick up a cord of wood and have a non-smoky campfire!

So, here’s hoping for a little less “weather” around here, so we might get out and enjoy the location for a change!