Having taken more than 15 of these long road trips, I can say there are two things I definitely do not like about them. First, the last day of packing. I get rid of the easy stuff first, before I start packing the office, the food box, the kitchen, the stuff box, and my clothes. When the temperature outside is in the 90s, it is very difficult to imagine that you might actually need a winter coat somewhere down the road. That is probably why I own about eight winter coats. In other words, I never thought I would need one, and then ended up buying one somewhere along the way. The only enjoyable thing about the last day of packing is Annie. She recognizes when we are getting ready to take a trip, and she does not let me out of her sight. As I walk back and forth between rooms, retrieving one item and putting another away, she follows me everywhere without exception. If she is concerned that I might leave her behind, she is sadly mistaken. Second, the first five days of the trip—especially the first. Transitioning from living in a spacious condominium to living in a vehicle roughly 1/20 the size is not easy. I figure I have about half the space per person that the astronauts had when they went to the moon—and their trip lasted only seven days or so. Finding where things are is not a chore. It is a mission. The consolation is knowing that within three or four days the shakedown will be over, everything will have found its proper place, and I will be in full swing with this new way of living—at least for the next few weeks, if my plans work out as I hope. I pulled into Coopers Rock State Park at about 4:30 and went immediately to the campsite I had reserved at the Rhododendron Campground, where Donner and I stayed once before. After surveying the site, however, I loaded back into the vehicle and we left. We drove down the road to the other campground and checked into a much more favorable site there. That is probably the first time I have ever done that in the more than 350 campgrounds where I have stayed. But the tripping hazards at the Rhododendron site were simply too great, and there was no reasonably level place to park the Grenadier so that I could sleep comfortably in it. One of the differences between tent camping and sleeping in the vehicle is that level ground has suddenly become considerably more important. As I may have written earlier, the storage shelf never arrived today, which seems to be typical of UPS these days. The vendor is having another one shipped overnight to Dublin, Ohio, where I will stop Thursday morning at an INEOS dealer to have it installed—that is, if UPS delivers as promised. Since I am writing these blogs on my iPad but taking photographs with my iPhone, I probably will not be able to include the photos in the posts themselves. Instead, I will send them separately, probably one at a time to stay within Google’s limitations. I think I will call it quits here and spend some time developing a standard operating procedure for closing up shop for the day and settling in for the night. I suspect that after a few days it will become automatic. There is no question that I miss tenting. There is something about turning a campsite into a temporary home that sleeping in the Grenadier cannot quite duplicate. But tonight, when I do not have to pitch a tent—and tomorrow morning, when I do not have to take one down—I may decide that the extra time is worth the trade-off. About 50 miles into the trip today I realized that I forgot my cane. I think this is the first time all the road trips that I’ve taken that I forgot something. There’s not a big deal because I did bring along a walking stick, and was able to pick up another cane like walking stick at Cooper’s rock campsite. Blow is a photo of our campsite that I just took on the iPad. We are staying in site number 13. For future purposes, I think I will only stay in this campground which is called McCollum, and try to get any of sites nine through 14.
No comments:
Post a Comment