Strolling Amok

Happy New Year!

Ya gotta love Despair.com and their Demotivators poster series. Perhaps one has to have a certain sense of humor to appreciate them.

On this special day, I look back and… it turned out pretty well, actually. I was able to avoid much of the wearing heat, and got to see some pretty neat stuff! So much so, that I keep thinking that this coming touring season won’t be able to match it. But I have to remind myself that I’ve thought that every year since I first hit the road. And every tour has had its high points, the kind that make it all worth the effort, in spades.

It’s taken me this long to complete putting the Intrepid back together after its visit to the dealer. Reassembling it takes more care than tearing it apart, and I’m not up for tackling challenges these days, so I just do what I can and use the rest of each day absorbing all the information I can. About what? Everything I’ve never been exposed to. A psychologist might say that I was distracting myself to avoid the chores, and he’d be right, but there’s so much out there in my areas of interest that it is truly fascinating. Unfortunately, I have a reasonably wide span of interests, and always have.

But there’s plenty to take care of around Rancho Begley, and I can already feel the modest press of the probable ten weeks remaining here before the “winter” season ends and it begins to get too hot to stay. The Intrepid needs some intensive external fabric wall cleaning and a solar mod, which I’ll post about here. The Evelo Aurora needs its new aftermarket battery grafted in so that it doesn’t abandon ship on a bumpy trail. Provisioning for the tour needs to be completed (items difficult to obtain on the road), and clothing needs to be reviewed based on last year’s actual usage, and altered. There’s only so much storage space on this buggy, so anything taken along for the ride has to be well thought out. Theory and “what if” have their place, as do Plan B items that might be needed in case of issues that crop up, but looking at what has actually proven necessary in the past has its rightful place as well. I still haven’t given a thought to how I can transition my diet into a form that’s workable in the road, where certain kinds of basic healthy foods that have proven helpful resemble unobtainium.

Still, I’m not feeling rushed or overwhelmed, not yet at least. These days are to be enjoyed as well as be productive. There’s something to be said for wintering near Yuma, where the days start out refreshingly nippy before they eventually ease into the seventies. Life is good here at Rancho Begley, and I have this weird assumption rattling around in my head that the rest of this year will include much to enjoy as well. The Four Wheel truck camper is just as happy parked in some idyllic wilderness as it is in a rest stop or RV park during my commute, and the Mighty Furd’s fuel mileage is still easing upward a tad as the miles add up. The only difficulty I face is trying to imagine how things could be any better.