Life on the Road

Wash your hair with beer and condition it with an egg. Those are two of the “home beauty tips” I remember from a little booklet of similar home beauty secrets we explored in Girl Scouts.

Normally, I don’t bother with conditioner. As thick as my hair is, the tangles pull out fairly easily as long as I’m the one wielding the hairbrush. But 2 weeks ago, I decided to dye my hair a nice shade of auburn.

And here’s where I got into trouble. The day after I dyed my hair, I took a shower and washed it with my normal shampoo. As the shampoo rinsed out, my hair felt…. odd. Crinkly. Hard. Scratchy. Damaged. Dry.

Other than the once-weekly conditioner that came with the dye, I don’t own a bottle of conditioner, and I’m allergic to several kinds of conditioner. I panicked. I thought back to my Girl Scout days, and remembered “ah ha! I can wash my hair with beer and condition it with egg!” The egg is supposed to act like a protein wash and it’s a natural emulsifier, so it should do pretty well at getting that protein to cover my damaged strands, right?

I cleverly called to my husband to bring me an egg. He brought it, and warned me to make sure it all rinsed down the drain. “Sure, sure” I called, cracking the egg and dumping it into my hair.

I scrubbed at it, but I quickly realized something was wrong. Dreadfully wrong. The “conditioner” was turning my hair into a clumpy mess. It wasn’t smoothing and conditioning– it was stiffening! Ack!

I rinsed the heck out of it, already dreading what would happen when I tried to brush this egg-glue tangle that was formerly a hairdo.

Later, after I was out of the shower and toweling off, I would dread that moment even more, as little bits of white stuff flaked out of my hair– egg whites that had cooked when exposed to the hot water beating down on my head.

I’ve since learned that the recipe for an egg conditioner requires using only the yolk, beating the egg in advance, and adding oil and water to the mixture– in other words, condition with mayonnaise.

Next time I decide to try a home beauty secret, I’m going to go with the beer shampoo. I’m thinking a six pack should do it. Some of it might even make it onto my head!

This is Bloggy Giveaway week. It’s also the end of my first month of blogging here on ustravel.today.com . Two great reasons to give free stuff away!

Here’s how to enter: Post a non-spam comment or drop your entrecard on any post at http://ustravel.today.com between right now and 11:00 PM August 1. On Saturday morning, I’ll draw three lucky winners.

The Prize: The prize is a set of 6 completely random post cards from my travels across the United States. You could get sweeping views of the Grand Canyon, or a funny alligator from Florida. You might not even get something destination-related; I have a lot of post cards! The post cards will be put into an envelope and mailed to you or, if you prefer, all six will be written on and mailed to you through the post within the month of August.

Remember: don’t put your mailing address in the comment, but do check your email or this blog after Saturday. I’ll announce the winners 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– I can only send post cards where the U.S. postal service permits. All spam comments will be deleted and are ineligible for entry.

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.

It’s birthday season around here. My mom’s birthday is today, and mine is coming up in a couple of weeks. I look around my little house-on-wheels and think “gee, what do I want for my birthday?”

I know what I don’t want: more stuff! There’s no room for the Stuff we have right now! But, like everyone who has everything they possibly could need, there are still a few things that I want. In no particular order, I bring you a short, handy list of gifts and guidelines for someone who has no space for anything, or who is trying to live a simple life:

•  Make the world a better place. Make a donation in their honor to a charity they care about. Most importantly, though, make this donation over the phone and be extremely explicit in telling the person taking the donation information that you do not want the recipient to receive newsletters, solicitations, ads, or follow-up mailings. If possible, ask to receive the thank you card at your own address and forward it to the recipient. It’s not a good gift if it comes with 3 years of headaches and junk mail.
• Gift the gift of entertainment. Find out what kind of entertainment (be it books, music, movies, or TV) that the recipient enjoys, and give them a gift that is weightless or re-giftable. If they have an iPod and know how to use it, an audiobook download from audible.com is a great one for book lovers with no space.  Only give digital gifts to those who already know how to use them. If you have to spend 30 minutes explaining how to use it, it’s a bad gift.
• Share a legacy. Have a favorite family recipe? Share that with a friend. Have some funny stories from your grandparents? Write them down and give them to your folks. It’s all right to re-gift a family tradition.
• Enjoy some time together. This one’s only useful if you live nearby, but it’s pretty common and acceptable for friends to buy each other a round of drinks or coffee for birthdays. Watching your pennies? Bring a picnic lunch to your friend or host a double date at home. Time with friends reduces stress and increases lifespan. Time well spent leads to more time.
• Give a service. This is an old, old tip from Dear Abby, but it’s still somewhat true today. Now, while Dear Abby suggested gifts for older friends and family that included trips to the hairdresser, the fact is that some people might consider that to be a not-too-subtle “hint” about one’s hygiene. Instead, find out if there’s something your recipient wants or needs– a website, a blog, some writing, a logo, their yard weedwhacked, and offer to do it for them. The problem I’ve always had with this gift is that I love to give my loved ones my time– but only on my terms. So, I’ll happily set up a web site, then spend no time updating it, and of course, the recipient has no idea how to do so, either. Tailor your gift to what the recipient wants, not what you think they need.

Come to think of it, these are good tips for birthdays, holidays, and business proposals as well. I’ll have to keep that in mind this week as I spend some quality time drafting some quality proposals.

My post on collecting on Ustravel.today.com was featured in the Rich Life Carnival #7  and the All Things Eco blog carnival today.

Check out the Rich Life Carnival for a cool roundup of posts about personal finance and self-improvement. All Things Eco features posts about the environment and living a sustainable lifestyle.

Living in an RV, we’ve had the opportunity to meet many nice, friendly folks on the road– opportunities which we’ve shunned, because let’s face it, other people are annoying. Therefore, I present to you 20 ways to annoy your neighbors when you live or camp at an RV park:

1. This weekend is the perfect time to start learning how to play the harmonica. Polka tunes for beginners only, please.
2. Wear your tightest speedo swimsuit to the pool. Make sure to sit on the edge of the pool with your knees wide apart.
3. Lie. Lie early, lie often. There are more retired U.S. CIA agents living in RVs than there are on the CIA pension plan.
4. Do the “I got me some steaks and you don’t got none!” dance whenever someone walks by your campsite. Then eat hot dogs for dinner.
5. Drink. Heavily. If you aren’t drinking a beer right now, or have just put an empty into the trash, you’re doing it wrong.
6. Tie your dog to the tree next to your campsite with the regulation 6′ leash. Bonus: yell at her when she whines or barks about being tied up.
7. Drop a melted marshmallow on the road, about 6 inches from the edge of the road. This will ensure that a pedestrian steps in it and wears it on her shoe for the rest of the day.
8. Park your RV under a seed-bearing or pine needle-shedding tree, then wash it daily.
9. Walk or bike in the middle of the road. You don’t want to step in all the marshmallows, after all.
10. Sewer hose? We don’t need no stinkin’ sewer hose! If you position the rig juuuuust right, the flow should go straight from the valve into the pipe, right?
11. Help other people park their RVs. Carefully detail which hand signals mean turn right or left, stop, and go forward. Then completely ignore those signals and wave your hands wildly around until the driver runs into a tree.
12. The ground is a perfectly fine place to dump your graywater.
13. RV tires don’t usually show signs of road wear. Break bottles in front of other people’s campsites. They will thank you for giving them a reason to replace their tires.
14. Show off your “converted” 1950’s bus, carrying photos around and suggesting to campground staff that “this park really needs to have a bus section!” Never mind that the only conversions you’ve done are to tape black plastic bags over the windows and set a hot plate on one of the seats.
15. When traffic approaches while you’re walking in the middle of the road, swerve to the left, then right, then left again before making it to one side or another.
16. Remember: poop bags are for other people’s dogs!
17. At the campground rec room, flip endlessly through TV channels until you find the most boring sport available (golf, bowling, and poker are all good choices). Then, if anyone in the room seems interested, talk loudly to them about how much you both like golf.
18. Compete with your neighbors (all of them) over lawn decorations and lighting. When you install a new bauble, take a photo of it and walk it around to the neighbors to show it off.
19. When a new camper comes in, stop by and chit-chat with them. Tell them to call you on the CB any time. Knock on their door, morning and night to ask if they have their CB on, cause you’ve been trying to chat with them.
20. Wander around the park with a clipboard and camera. Take photos of every third RV and campsite, then act cagey when they ask you what you’re doing.

Like this post? Stumble it!

With thanks and a nod to other great lists, like 248 ways to annoy people and Skippy’s list.

Something I notice these days is that we go through “fads” of activity. I was like this before, in the stick house, but it’s even more pronounced now that we have such limited space. I’ll go through phases of hobbies– for a few months, I’ll obsessively knit. Or I’ll want to do nothing but work on my novels. Or I’ll spent a month training the cat (yes, you read that right– my cat does tricks.)

With the cat getting sick last month, and my grandmother’s death this month and all the visiting that’s ensued, at the end of the day, we’ve found ourselves wanting to do little more than curl up with some DVDs on the sofa.

Except that, during the course of hanging out at my grandma’s and playing around on Facebook, and maybe in part as an extension of our recent obsession with Carcassonne, my husband re-discovered video and online games. Now, we’re far from the cutting edge of computer games– we play a couple of things on Facebook, online poker, and solitaire. He also re-installed Angband, which is an ascii-graphics computer game from about 20 years ago. And this morning, he actually pulled out the Playstation 2, a relic from our more acquisitive past.

I will not bore you with the details of the video games he’s into right now. It’s enough that he’s doing something fun and entertaining (and almost entirely free, since we already have the system and several games to play).  This dusting off of old pastimes to re-kindle an interest is a great way to put some controls on the endless rounds of building walls of clutter around us.

Hey! The post about ants on UStravel.today.com was featured in the Carnival du vert, a carnival of enviromental blog posts!

Last Fall, we had planned to go to Arizona to meet up with my dad and stepmom during their vacation, and visit Sedona and the Grand Canyon. We’d been to Sedona  in 1999 for our 1-year wedding anniversary, and were looking forward to a return visit.

I made reservations very early for September, but failed (in my way) to record them in any meaningful way. So the day after my reservation was supposed to start, I called the LoLo Mai Springs campground in a panic– we were about a week away from being able to get there, and they were very understanding and accommodating about changing the reservation to a date we would actually be able to make.

When we finally arrived at LoLo Mai, we were startled by what a long and windy and out-of-the-way path our directions told us to take to get there, considering there was a straight shot from a wider, non-windy highway just a mile up the road. But we pulled in and checked in. During checkin, I was amused by the presence of many animals in the office. What I was not amused by was the clerk’s inability to do simple math on a calculator. By the time we were checked in, I just let her overcharge me by $2 because I didn’t want her to make yet another mistake and this time come up with a $90 overcharge like she’d done before.

We went to the campsite and quickly learned that the satellite dish was not going to work– too many trees (they were brushing the top of the RV!) We were right next to the bathroom building, and I immediately saw that our side yard was being used as the pathway. Not cool.

We asked at the office about alternative sites, and they said they had none. We said “but you have wifi, right?” remembering the ad. “Yes, but the signal up at your site is broken.”

Uh, okay. That was probably not going to work for us. I had already tried using my cell phone with no luck– the signal strength was 0 and had been for about 3 miles before reaching the campground.  No satellite, no internet, and no phone mean no working!

We said we would have to think seriously about this. After conferring, John went down to the office to have them refund all but the first night’s charge (since we would be staying for the night). On his way back, he was startled by a family of skunks. It turns out their fondness for animals is not limited to the dogs and rats in the office. They feed several families of skunks and raccoons in a “habitat.”

We had a bit of culture shock at that one. After my meltdown, we went out to dinner and I lost my credit card– it fell right out of my pocket. We returned to the campground to ask at the office if anyone had turned it in. We had to wait at the office for someone to come back, and in the course of talking with them about it (and the fact that I couldn’t call out on my cell phone), I said that we would use the pay phone, which was at least up at the bathroom building next to our RV.

“Oh, that phone’s gone. There’s no phone there.”

I was really glad I was talking to someone with keys to the office, because she was at least able to let me use the office phone to call my bank and put my card on hold until I could call back with the complete information to cancel it.  I can imagine a scenario where I went back to the RV and found the phone gone, and no way at all to call and cancel my credit card that night. What a pain!

Understand: if we had been “trying to get away from it all,” LoLo Mai would have been an oasis of escape. As it was, we were trying to live our normal daily lives, just in a different place. We weren’t on vacation or retirement, so the disconnectedness of the park made it really unsuitable to our needs. They were also above-and-beyond understanding about our rapidly-changing travel plans, and did a great job of making it painless to escape their escape!

In the morning, we went scouting for a new campground and found an oversized parking lot across the highway from an Indian casino, called Distant Drums RV Resort. It had a pool and hot tub. It had wifi at the sites, but there were no trees to speak of, so satellite reception was exceptional.

It had some of the most beautiful desert sunsets I’ve ever seen. We would go out for a walk and just stand on the edge of the park, staring as the sky shifted through hues of gold and yellow and purple. It was sparse and surprisingly simple, given that it had the appearance of yet another overgrown parking lot.

It’s possible that Distant Drums is where I learned to love the desert. Certainly, it’s where I learned to love parking lot-style RV parks, where the park gives you the space to do what you need to do, the room to spread out just a little bit, while still enjoying your lifestyle.

Travel Details:

LoLoMai Campground
PO Box 3169, West Sedona, AZ
(928)634-4700
Distant Drums RV Resort
583 W. Middle Verde Rd., Camp Verde, AZ
(877) 577-5507

Yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon, the skies around our RV suddenly seemed very, very dark. The rain was coming down in droves, and thunder and lightning was flashing and booming.

After stowing the internet satellite dish (we don’t want to know what happens to a $14,000 piece of equipment when it gets struck by lightning), we turned on the weather radio on our CB. We’re ill prepared for bad weather at the moment, because our weather radio is only attached to our CB radio, so if the CB isn’t on, neither is the weather radio. A good weather radio turns itself on to issue an alert. We had been given one, but gave it back after one night when the unexpected nightly “test” alert made me leap ten feet in the air and shriek “hell no, we’re not keeping that!”The weather radio indicated that there was a tornado watch or warning somewhere in our vicinity. We pondered this for a bit, then packed the cat into the car and headed up to the office building for shelter. I grew up in tornado country, so I know that, while a motorhome is a great place to be in an earthquake, it is the worst place to be during a tornado.

When we arrived at the office, the office staff said “oh, yeah– there was a tornado– it just passed by.”

I replied, perhaps a little snarky, that gee, I was sure glad we hadn’t been hit by it. The woman at the front desk seemed unphased by my remark.

At my mother’s campground, down in tornado alley in Missouri, when there’s a tornado heading for the campground, she sends someone up to the sites to give a good holler, sometimes even doing a door-to-door knock to let people know they should evacuate. Sure, people need to also bring their own weather radio, but the fact is, it’s irresponsible to let people sit out in their screen tents (as we saw some doing) when a tornado is about to hit your park.  The winds of a tornado are severe and, despite depisctions in the movie Twister, you can’t just hang onto a barn pole and survive it.

Our estimation of the park had already been going downhill. There’s this sense of un-neighborliness that has been troubling me. Normally, I don’t give a hoot about what my neighbors are doing, but one of them recently wedged a glass bottle under our front tire. Stupid kid prank, or have we somehow offended one of the nearby residents, and if so, how? The recent storm brought this home– if even the park staff can’t be bothered to show a little neighborly concern, one can’t expect much better from the residents.

Yesterday, I poured some cereal in my bowl, tossed in a few strawberries, picked up my spoon and said “EUAAAAGH!!!! ANTSS!!!!!!” The bowl had three teeeeny tiny ants in it, which meant they’d gotten there via the cereal.

I want to be perfectly clear that I bear no serious ill will towards ants. While we were parked on top of an enormous ant colony for a month, I never once was tempted to borrow a magnifying lens on a sunny day. And I have very few phobias in general. I’m not afraid of any weather or geological events like tornadoes and earthquakes– respectful, yes. But not scared. I don’t even mind the occasional cockroach, provided it’s in the right place.

What I can’t abide, and what really, tremendously horribly gives me the heebie jeebies: bugs of any sort in my kitchen. I spent most of yesterday imagining that the little things were crawling over my skin, and scratching at my skin wherever I felt a “phantom” ant.

Now, allow me to reminisce again about my amazing grandmother. This is the week for reminiscing, after all, and this story will show you what a terrific naturalist she was. I remember once we were driving down to Cape Cod to visit my grandfather (in the cemetary, folks– he died 15 years ago), and she was telling me about how she gets rid of ants in her kitchen. Keep in mind, this is knowledge handed down, not something I have myself tried.

First, she finds out if they’re sugar ants or fat ants. Sugar ants tend to be smaller and more persistent. One way to tell is to leave out two saucers– one with a bit of corn syrup (not HFCS– just regular corn syrup for making candy, folks), the other with a pat of butter. Leave them out overnight. In the morning, one will have a bunch of ants on it. The other might have a few strays. Take both saucers outside (yes, crawling with ants) and shake them off, hose them down with a hose. Whichever bait worked, use that one again tonight. Put the corn syrup or honey out on a plate overnight. In the morning, take the ants outside and hose them off the plate. Repeat. The ants will eventually, through sheer determination, stop coming into your house.

That method takes too long for my taste, and it requires me to pick up a plate of ants inside my kitchen, something I realized yesterday (as I tucked my head beneath my knees to keep from passing out from the revulsion of finding them in my breakfast) that I am biologically incapable of accomplishing .

So I mentioned my plight to some other RVers (the email went something like “EWWWW!!! ENGFEH! YUCK!!!”) who helpfully recommended a few sites. This one says to use bleach or white vinegar to kill ants and clean off the sugar ant trails. We’ll be trying this tactic if the ants make a return appearance. I had my brave strong husband clean them out yesterday (feminism be damned– bugs in the kitchen are his job), but if they decide to come back, I have 2 gallons of white vinegar standing by.

Meanwhile this site suggests using moth balls around the outside of the home and ant bait traps. Obviously, treating the exterior of my home isn’t practical, since we’ll be leaving it next week, and I’m 99% certain we brought these ants with us from New York. My only problem with bait traps is the pesticides– I prefer to use as few pesticides as possible in my home. My cat eats bugs regularly, and he’s already recovering from a compromised liver. Boric acid may be an effective, natural pesticide , but it is also toxic, and cats can be especially sensitive to it. It may be all-natural, but so is cyanide. Still, if I have another breakfast of champion ants, I won’t hesitate to bring out the big guns.

Photo credit: by jurvetson on Flickr. Creative Commons by-2.0 license .