Strolling Amok

Pops goes on tour.

10 Oct 2013
2 Comments

Shootout: In Doubt

DSCN0154Today is Thursday AM. The 2013 Top Speed Shootout guys are having to contend with rapidly changing weather forecasts, which has made putting their wallets on the line risky. The problem for them is squirmy logistics. It isn’t exactly cheap for them to haul trailers of carefully-prepped racing equipment cross-country, or to buy no-discount airline tickets, or book motels or the local KOA campground. These guys are in the upper echelon of speed crazies, and most have sponsors to keep happy. To be sure, none of these guys are poor, but each has invested way, way too much in their speed addiction. I liken it to owning a horse. On the grand scale of things, you have to be comparatively wealthy to own and stable a horse. Once you do that, you are by all accounts no longer wealthy.

The salt surface has proven problematic, and a few days ago was deemed unsuitable for high-speed runs in Read more…

Posted in Daily Life and tagged , ,
08 Oct 2013

Oh, Correction to “Van or RV”

Watch your speed there, buddy!

Watch your speed there, buddy!

It seems I’ve entirely missed one other category in the motive choices available to wander through the beauty of Nature: pack mules. Some thirty years ago, a man decided to wander the West just as some of past generations had – on foot, with livestock in tow. In this case it was a mule. But these are modern times. Now he has three mules, and his lifestyle is freer than anyone in a car, van or RV – at least until the law hassles him. The Atlantic ran a very informative article about him and his mission to keep public lands available to the public. His Facebook page is here. Although he receives occasional donations of equipment and equine supplies, he does have monthly expenses which he carefully documents and shows. They’re about a tenth or less of what mine are, and his transport lends new meaning to the term “biofuel”.

Posted in Camper Nirvana and tagged , , | Leave a comment
08 Oct 2013
2 Comments

Busted!

It seems worthy to note that right on completion of a post mentioning that RVs have stuff that fails, my fridge went out. All the indicator lights read just fine, but it ain’t cooling at all. It thinks it’s running, and so the gas keeps going, which it’s not supposed to do. I goofed with it a little, and there apparently isn’t much to be done until I get to Quartzsite, 3 days away. So I shut it off. Food loss was minimal – mainly just a bag and a third of “Sea Varmints”: a frozen seafood mix of  critters dredged up from the ocean, and some frozen lima beans.

I’m not leaving in 3 days, though. Despite a forecast spritz of rain Wednesday and Thursday, I’m hoping the final speed event is able to take place from Thursday over the weekend. So, I’m changing my diet to foods that don’t require refrigeration. Desperate men do desperate things. To that end, I made a trip to town to mail off the failed Kidde smoke alarm, and for the dump station, diesel fuel, propane refill, laundromat, and food for my readjusted no-fridge diet.

On the way back, I went out to the Salt Flats entrance and saw Read more…

Posted in Daily Life and tagged ,
06 Oct 2013
22 Comments

Van or RV?

When this represents "very cloudy", you know you’re going to like it here. What will you reside in while you’re here?

When this represents “very cloudy”, you know you’re going to like it here. What will you reside in while you’re here?

When a few hardy souls, by circumstance or free choice, decide that a mobile lifestyle is the way to go for them, the choice of what type of contraption they will live in can seem like a difficult puzzle to put together. That’s only because it is. The options are wide, and small differences can make or break a choice.

What to choose, oh what to choose?

What to choose, oh what to choose?

I’ll claim right here that I’m not going to deliberately try to steer you toward the one solution that I prefer myself, though my feature preferences will leak into this post, of course. It helps that I’m not living in the type of rig I actually prefer, but what I do have does work quite well for me. I think you’ll know when to filter out what doesn’t apply to you, and so know whenever a particular type of rig may not be such great shakes for you, because you’re not me. Thank your lucky stars for that! Personally, I consider a converted van to be just another form of RV, but for the sake of this article, I’m pretending it’s not.

The major caveat is that I’m going to babble on here about full-timing only, and having no other housing available in the foreseeable future. Anyone can make do in anything when you have friends or relatives to stay at now and then, or some other form of Read more…

Posted in Camper Nirvana, Navel Gazing and tagged , , , , , , ,
05 Oct 2013

Out For a Walk

A canal feeding brine back toward the Bonneville Salt Flats.

A canal feeding brine back toward the Bonneville Salt Flats.

Nothing spectacular today, which is nice for a change. The daytime temperature edged back into the 70’s today, and since I was already out to pump the camper’s waste tanks into the Tankmin in the Furd, I went for a 2-mile walk down the road heading for the Salt Flats. There are two 12-inch pipes coming out of the ground, each a hundred yards from the roadway. There must be a heckofa pump or two somewhere, because the flow rate out each of those pipes is impressive, and they flow 24/7. It seems that a potash plant on the other side of I-80 is returning leftover brine back to the salt flats.

That’s good, because the Bonneville Salt Flats used to be 90,000 acres in 1963, and today covers only 30,000 acres because of that plant. For speed freaks, that has reduced the former 10-mile track surface to just 7 miles. 18 inches of salt have been removed, and this voluntary return is hoped to slow further shrinkage, not hold or reverse it. Potash is a key ingredient in fertilizer, and this result makes sustainable methods of farming look like an admirable thing to me.

The last few days have been inordinately cold and windy, with highs at about 50. Officially, wind gusts registered Read more…

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04 Oct 2013

More Trouble Than It’s Worth Dept.

Floating Trailer

The above is from a January 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics, showing a teardrop trailer loaded onto pontoons. Submerged wheel bearings and flexing pontoons aside, it’s an idea that captures the essence of the Forties and Fifties, don’t you think? It’s that “try anything” attitude. What a silly, impractical idea! Ha ha! Still, if you increased tube diameters, added a central one and boosted length a little, let’s see, the Enterprise, at 26′ weighs 7,000 pounds, and I could…

Posted in Camper Nirvana and tagged | Leave a comment
03 Oct 2013
5 Comments

The Salt Addicts

This was all lake a week ago.

This was all lake a week ago.

Well, the Top Speed Shootout 2013 is turning into a saga long before it takes place. The most respected and only surviving land speed event this year, it was originally scheduled for September 12th-16th. Heavy thunderstorms flooded it and several other events out as the salt flats went deep underwater. Even as recently as last week, the racing surface looked pretty hopeless. This event’s rain date was October 10-14, and then they decided to arrange with the BLM for October 7-12 due to racer requests. It’s starting to get a bit nippy out here. The BLM okayed that, but then Congressional Republicans nixed that idea by shutting down so many government services. Somehow, the local BLM office is able to restage it with the original 10-14 dates, so, weather Read more…

Posted in Tourista! and tagged , , ,
30 Sep 2013
10 Comments

Packrat Purgatory

Packrat Ethic meets Finite Space.

Packrat Ethic meets Finite Space.

What if you had to reduce the sum total of all your worldly goods into a new home measuring just 8′ x 26′? Not an 8×26 storage unit, but a living space complete with closets, couch, desk with computer, dining area with benches or chairs, bed, complete kitchen with stove, oven, microwave and refrigerator, cookware and servingware, lamps and lighting, TV and associated gizmos, bedroom, bathroom with sink, toilet, tub/shower and medicine cabinet, furnace and air conditioner with ductwork, space heater, water heater, water and waste tanks, all clothing for both hot and cold weather, and all of the hobby crap and books that you amuse yourself with? Don’t forget aisles that give you complete access from end to end, and no fair stacking boxes or bins from floor to ceiling unless you can tie them down for transport along roads rough enough to make an earthquake seem like Read more…

Posted in Navel Gazing and tagged , ,
30 Sep 2013
2 Comments

Oh, You Kidde!

New pump above, old pump below. Notice the gyrations the water had to go through to get to the old pump.

New pump above, old pump below. Notice the gyrations the water had to go through to get to the old pump.

Yesterday was not a good day, mechanically speaking. The day before at 11PM, the newish Kidde combination smoke & CO detector went off. That was odd, because nothing was going on that should have triggered it. It was signaling its smoke alarm. What’s more, pushing the “hush” button only made it hiccup, but not reset for the 10 minutes its supposed to. I paid a pretty penny for it, and it contains a lithium battery that’s supposed to last for 10 years. I set it outside for awhile to give it a change of scenery and some fresh air, but that made no difference, either. The only way to silence it was to turn a screw in the back that permanently grounded out the battery, so now it’s out of action. Hopefully, I can find my receipt and get Kidde to send me a new one.

The next day at mid-morning, the water stopped. That is, turning on a faucet did nothing. The water pump is Read more…

Posted in Daily Life, Mod Squad and tagged , , ,
29 Sep 2013

Quote

“You know, there’s this marvelous stereotype out there that when the white people came, the world here was perfect, that people lived in a paradise in which they were the most elegant, the most moral, the most elevated of all humanity. That’s not true. We were human beings, and we lived in our own societies, and we did things that all human beings do, and some of it was elevated and marvelous and admirable, and some of it was pretty horrible.”

JoAllyn Archambault

Standing Rock Sioux Tribe of North and South Dakota

Director of the American Indian Program at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC

Posted in Navel Gazing and tagged | Leave a comment

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