Trailer Life

Wow, what a week that was! My friend decided last year to host a gathering of runners and ex-runners who have been part of an internet-based group for over 20 years (so, yeah, we’re all older now and that kind of explains the ex-runners…). We met up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and had a wonderful weekend of it. My head is still kind of reeling from all the people, stories, and photos!

One of the things I love about Lancaster (and this is my third visit since 2017!) is how very photogenic everything is!

One of the group activities was a driving tour around Amish country. Which led to horse and buggy meeting a Tesla sedan and two other cars on a one-lane road.

Later on, we saw another example of worlds colliding, this at the oddly named town of Bird-in-Hand. Which is just up the road from Intercourse. Go figure…

Sunday’s group walk/run was on a route with two covered bridges, so I convinced the cyclist in the group to pose for this shot. Was thinking of my nephew, Tim, as I took it (and check out @SoCalBikePT on instagram if you are a cyclist!).

Monday, it was time to pull up the stabilizers and head out. Into the rain. All day. Pulled into a spot at a campground in Western Pennsylvania just in time for the sun to come out. Stupid weather.

Tuesday morning, I went out early in the morning to see the Flight 93 National Memorial. I hadn’t realized I would be within a half-hour of it, so I called an audible and drove there before starting the day’s trek west. I can’t do it justice in a paragraph; it deserves a separate, sobering post.

Today, I’m heading west. Also doing that on Thursday. And Friday. And Saturday… I should make it to the Denver area by Tuesday, and then be based in CO until the end of July. I’m definitely looking forward to less humidity and more mountains.

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It is more important to click with people than to click the shutter.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

Happy Independence Day, United States! In our 243 years of life, there have been many, many growing pains and sometimes the way forward had been bitterly contested and the people sharply divided. My fellow Americans: let us remember the good things about America: pick a few that are meaningful to you and think on those as you watch the fireworks tonight. 

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I spent the much of the last week in Maryland, splitting my time between two campgrounds. The first one was not only just 20 miles from Gettysburg and a great dinner with friends, it was also about 20 miles from Mater. Yes, the star of Cars! Well, maybe not the original Mater, but it was a pretty good replica and my friends and I had fun snapping photos. 

The next day, I had the surreal experience of shopping for groceries in an early Frank Gehry building in Columbia, Maryland (after lunch and catching up with my camping buds who live nearby). 

And then, I had an even more surreal experience of getting hit by a van while I was sitting inside my car with the engine off. Sigh. The good news is that the bumper actually popped back out during the drive home in 90F weather so there was little permanent damage except for three spots where the paint had been scraped off. Down the road, I’ll fix it but for now, I’m just relieved my tow vehicle is OK.

The weirdness actually started earlier in the week when I arrived in Maryland to find out my dump hose (that thing that empties the pee and poop out of the trailer and into a dump tank at campgrounds) had decided it didn’t want to leave the South as much as I did and made a break for it somewhere on a backroad road in Virginia. I took a tip from a fellow Alto owner and made a little clip for the hose container. If the new hose gets out, it’s a Houdini hose!

On to better things…

On April Fool’s Day, I got online at 8AM to score free entry tickets to the National African American Museum of History and Culture. So this week, I met up with two friends and we toured the museum on July 1st. Well, half of it. It is a LOT of museum to cover! I’ll feature my visit in a separate post, as visiting here was a fitting conclusion to my Southern Tour, in a lot of ways. 

From Maryland, I headed up to Pennsylvania, letting out a yelp of satisfaction when I saw the “Mason Dixon Line” sign and the “Welcome to Pennsylvania” sign on opposite sides of the highway. Although Maryland considers itself not really Southern, the Mason Dixon line remains the divider between the North and South in a lot of people’s minds. Now I am well and truly out of the South for the rest of 2019. 

One of my buddies in the 52 Frames project lives in York, which is a few towns over from where I am staying, so we met up in real life (a rare treat for me and internet friends!) and had lunch from the “Breakfast All Day” menu while we talked photography, careers, and other things. The time sped by, and it’s great to know I have another person in PA to visit in my touring America travels. 

Then, and I *know* you are all waiting for it, it was a return to The House of the Daylilies in Lancaster, PA. Don’t try to google that place, that’s not it’s real name. It’s the house of my friends, Peg and Larry, and Peg is a truly dedicated gardener who loves her daylilies. And this is the perfect time of year to visit.

Three years in a row, I’ve scored here it comes to daylily goodness. Longtime readers might remember that two years ago, I was here with hand freshly liberated from cast, and took photos as therapy both physical and emotional as I rehabbed that hand. Look for a special post dedicated to the 2019 daylilies in future. Here’s a little taste of this year’s crop…

And having had my fireworks last night, thanks to the local country club and a nice roadside perch a few blocks away, I’ll have a quiet night. Next week starts the big adventure to the West, so I’m spending time this week sprucing up the Alto, cleaning things out, and installing a few upgrades (yeah, more on those in a later post, too). Stay tuned and stay well, my friends.

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True patriotism hates injustice in its own land more than anywhere else.

Clarence Darrow

That’s a wrap for the Southern Tour. After 320 straight days in the southern United States, I crossed the border from Virginia into Maryland yesterday and left the South behind for the rest of this year.

When I moved my domicile to Florida in January of 2018, I honestly didn’t think I would spend a lot of time in the South so it was surprising to me to find myself spending 11 months straight deep in Florida, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, and Virginia.

Counting all of 2018 into the mix, I’ve spent 14 of the last 18 months in the southern states. I have the map to prove it, hanging on a cork board in my trailer for the last year, marking routes as I planned and then followed them. 

I have hiked a lot, including parts of the Appalachian Trail, explored monuments and museums devoted to civil rights and racial justice, met up with friends eager to show me their cities, camped with friends old and new, and attended a writers’ retreat and a women’s weekend.

I wasn’t sure what I would do in the South. I had a vague idea of exploring our nation’s racial history that turned into a self-directed series of lessons about the true history of America, exploring the Civil War and its aftermath, seeing the iconic places of the civil rights movement and hearing from people who lived through it with courage and grace. I’ve read books by black authors, watched documentaries on mass incarceration, and learned how sheltered and unaware I was in my little bubble of white privilege. Spending time in the South has truly been a life-changing experience for me.

The South also definitely has weather different from where I’ve hung my hat in the past. I’ve been hailed on, hidden in a concrete bathhouse during a tornado warning, kept an eye on half a dozen tornado watches (one step below a warning), jumped at the crack of thunder over my head, and watched rainstorms so fierce I wondered if my Alto would indeed float if it came to that. And then after the storm, the sky and the sunset. The South does that really well, too. 

Now I’m headed by stops and starts up and over to the Pacific Northwest. I’m excited to revisit people and places I’ve missed in the last three years since I left Seattle on this vagabond road and I’m looking forward to making new adventures in new places. Onward!

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Instead of trying to make your life perfect, give yourself the freedom to make it an adventure, and go ever upward.

Drew Houston

Just as I was writing this week’s update, a huge gale blew out of nowhere and sent everything flying at the campground. Part of a tree crashed down about 10 feet from my trailer (and when I say “part of a tree” I mean something about 12 feet long!) and my Clam shelter tried to become airborne despite being well-staked. So forgive me if this is a shorter than planned post; my heart is still pounding and I’ve got one eye on the NOAA Radar app on my iPad. The cover photo is what the lake looks like when it’s NOT hosting a gale-force storm.

It’s been a slow week for me (only one move), one of the last quiet weeks for a long while, so I’ve been doing little cleanup chores in and around the camper. Yesterday, for example, I scrubbed the seats of the Outback with leather cleaner for an hour or so. Yep, the life of a vagabond can be incredibly exciting, folks. (The seats look much cleaner, by the way.)

One fun thing about this week has been hanging with my friend, Ann, who I first met at the writers’ retreat weekend back in March. She lives not far from where I’m camping this week, so we’ve met up twice and even hung out doing laundry. Sometimes, it’s the “normal” things in life that are special when you’re a vagabond. 

Last Friday, I took my camera over to Bassett, Virginia, home of the Bassett furniture I’ve seen for so many years. The factories and warehouses are all closed now, and the town is a shell of its former self, but it makes for good photos and a story, which I’m working on for a separate post. 

Finally, despite the crazy weather, the sunsets here have been gorgeous when the skies are not full of rain and thunder. I haven’t been out kayaking yet, the weather has been turning on a dime this week and I haven’t felt lucky enough to bet on it. Fingers crossed for the weekend, though, when the forecast looks more stable.

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The art of being happy lies in the power of extracting happiness from common things. 

Henry Ward Beecher

Note: Yes, it’s Thursday, not Wednesday, the usual day for my weekly update. Yesterday was one of those days where nothing went right, from showing up at the Subaru dealer where they didn’t have my appointment on the books to getting lost on the way home. So I decided not to test the internet connectivity gods and postponed the update till today.

Last week was a slice of life in the small Southern town of Floyd, Virginia. My friends Jack and Lee have lived near there for decades (I know, we’re all really old people when you get right down to it) and seem to know everyone around. We did happy hour at the local pub, lunch at a local cafe, and dinner at a great Italian place, and in each location, there was a constant stream of friends coming up to say hello. Having lived in big towns all my life, I quite enjoyed experiencing this bit of small town life and learning how everyone was connected to everyone else. 

One such connection led me to play tech support for a few days. My housemate in Gainesville has a brother in southern Virginia who runs a rental property just up the road (and UP is the operative word here). It has a beautiful view. Honestly. This is from the balcony, no filter, no post-processing. Just Blue Ridge beauty right off the back deck. 

The trouble was, his wireless camera on the back deck had stopped working right about the time their wireless router was replaced. Hmm… Jack, who of course knew the guy, and I ended up puzzling it a bit and then called tech support and got it working again. My payment? I get to look at that camera view whenever the mood strikes me, so that’s kind of cool.

We drove through Floyd a few times, and Jack was kind enough to make sure I didn’t miss that Floyd has its own confederate statue, that one on the left, right there on the front lawn of the county courthouse.

I still don’t get the confederate statues thing. I mean, I know how the United Daughters of the Confederacy erected many of them in the waning years of the 19th century, long after the Civil War had ended. The Lost Cause still pervades the southern states and at some point, we as a country need to reckon with all that belief system entails. (Yes, those are links, and good ones, go read the articles at the other end of each link.)

On a lighter note, there were two amazing things about staying on Jack and Lee’s piece of land. First was the red-tailed hawk, who I met the day I left. Lee has been a falconer for thirty years (!) and this is the newest hawk she’s training. And, yes, I stayed well clear of him.

The other amazing thing is probably only amazing to people who grew up in the desert that really is Southern California: their property has SPRINGS OF WATER! It just comes out of the ground, all the time. Holy crap. It’s like a miracle. Water coming out of the ground, you don’t see THAT in Southern California, people!

After I’d marveled over the bird and the springs, it was time to hitch up in the pouring rain and head down the road to my next spot, a return to a lovely Corps of Engineers lake I visited briefly last year. This time, I got a paddling session in between thunderstorms and crazy bouts of wind.

The lake is way higher than last year; Virginia has had a TON of rain and it shows.

In fun news, I got a shiny new Solo Stove (portable fire pit) and tested it out this week. It’s awesome. No smoke. Seriously. I wish everyone in the campground had one and then there would be zero smoke all over. Smoky fires are the worst. 

I’ll close out with one photo of the six zillion I took this week of rhododendrons in bloom all over the campground. They are beautiful. 

The mountain laurel have faded out, the dogwood is on its way out (that’s this week’s cover photo), but the rhodies are just getting started. Fun with flowers, that’s what my campground walks have been since the day I arrived. 

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It’s quite a thing, if you’ve never been in or known a small southern town. The people are not particularly sophisticated, naturally. They’re not worldly wise in any way. But they tell you a story whenever they see you.

Harper Lee

It’s been a social week here in Virginia. I committed several weeks ago to step out of my comfort zone and attend Camp Unite, a nationwide weekend event for women campers, which grew out of a Facebook group I’m in. I didn’t know any of the women in the VA/WV, but it seemed like a fun idea and a way to spend some time with women who camp and the group was planning fun activities, so I signed up. And that’s how I found myself last Wednesday driving up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Roanoke. It was a perfect day for it, blue skies, little to no traffic (one reason I love the BRP), and I had fun taking some shots of all the literally “making hay while the sun shines” opportunities.

Last week’s 52 Frames challenge was black and white, and while this one didn’t make the final cut, I still like it so I’m putting it here. My friend Dave in Aptos always loves a good tractor, so maybe he’s the only one besides me who will think this is a cool shot.

In Roanoke, I hit up my favorite Holiday Inn Express (unlimited hot showers, laundry, free breakfast!) and went out to dinner with two friends from the area (who also have an Alto, which is how we met). Good food and good conversation beat out the thunderstorm that chased us all evening.

The next morning, it was back on the Blue Ridge Parkway up to Stuarts Draft, VA. The BRP is a beautiful road to drive, 45 mph and no traffic lights, no commercial traffic, and not a lot of traffic at all during the week. It has plenty of overlooks where you can pull over and enjoy the views of the valleys and mountains. The cover photo this week is from one such overlook. And this time of year, it’s way cooler temperature-wise, so I enjoyed low 70s while the valleys below me were well into the 80s.

The road down from the BRP was steep and twisty enough that I moved my car to manual and went down in second gear. Only the second time in a year I’ve felt the need to do that! Soon enough, though, I found the campground and made my little campsite home for the weekend.

The women I met were amazing – a diverse group of people, RVs, and backgrounds, but all of us had a sense of humor and a sense of adventure, so we mixed together pretty well. A buffet dinner, some rock painting (I enjoyed watching that), and learning how to make dreamcatchers (that’s mine below, thanks to Denise making it better about three times in the process), along with a lot of casual talk and nighttime fires and singalongs made it a really fun weekend.

The RV park we camped at might have been one of the largest places I’ve ever stayed: several hundred RVs, most of them seasonal campers (local people that leave the RV there year-round and come out on the weekends). Saturday night they had a DJ and an outdoor dance floor with neon lights. All the golf carts circled round like it was a drive-in movie. Kind of crazy but it was fun to watch! The days were quieter and in my search for a good B&W photo, I had fun with this campsite.

Monday, I said goodbye to my new friends (miss you all!), promised to keep in touch, and headed south, back down the Blue Ridge Parkway. Again with the wrong turns and a few unplanned roads, but eventually I made it to Smith Mountain Lake State Park, where I settled in for a quiet night and did some binge-watching of The Orville, my new fave TV show (thanks, Brandon!).

Tuesday was another travel day down twisty roads, through small towns, and one last section on the Blue Ridge Parkway, heading to my friends’ spread in southern Virginia. I’m now parked in their garage, which doesn’t actually do justice to the place. It’s a huge piece of land, and from here, I can see some old outbuildings but not their cabin (yes, it’s an actual log cabin, which is way cool to someone who grew up with stucco tract houses in LA). The view is pretty nice out my front door, too.

It’s June now, and, yes, I’m still in the South, for one more month. I’m still trying to find words and images to explain all I’ve experienced here, but I’m finding I need to let some time pass and think more deeply before writing, so it’s been slow going. Hang on, more pieces about the Southern Tour will come out eventually.

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Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy;
they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

Marcel Proust

I’m back from my digital vacation, 10 days with little to no Internet. I not only survived, I thrived. It made me realize how much time I spend on social media (yeah, I’m looking at you, Facebook…) and how much less I can do there. It’s a great place to catch up with friends, and keep on top of who’s where in my circle of camping friends, but it can also be the great time suck.

So where was I the last 10 days? Grayson Highlands State Park. Literally, I was right there, under that grey awning, spending a lot of time in my easy chair reading and writing and thinking and sometimes just watching the wind play with the leaves around me. 

One day, I hiked a bit of the Appalachian Trail. Beautiful timing, weather-wise, and the views were amazing in all directions. My Garmin InReach tracker showed I stopped about 1/3 of the time overall and I’m going to say that most of that was taking pictures rather than resting or drinking water. 

And there are wild ponies at Grayson Highlands! Here are three of them, mostly so my friend Sue can say, “oh, wow, horses!”

Two of my other hikes were deep in the forest, one down, down, down to Wilson Creek (and then hiking back up…) and the other to Little Pinnacle and Big Pinnacle, the highest places in the park.

It was a windy freaking day up there, but the views were worth it. I took this shot looking down and across to where I hiked the AT. I started where that field is at the lower right, went up that road to the far right, and then across the whole of the photo and up to that rocky peak (Wilburn Ridge) at the upper left. 

Back to the little/no internet thing… I had some good breakthroughs about my writing projects and set some goals for myself that I’ll be working on the next several months. No announcements yet. Oh, wait, I do have one. Since you’ve read all the way to the bottom of this post:

I’m on instagram as @UncertainVagabond and you’re welcome to follow along on my adventures there. I post photos there that I don’t feature here or on Facebook, focusing on moments in my day that are special in some way. 

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We refuse to turn off our computers, turn off our phone, log off Facebook, and just sit in silence because in those moments we might actually have to face up to who we really are.

Jefferson Bethke

It’s been both a social whirl and a struggle to get connectivity the last week or so. I’ve been camping with friends and had a great time, from the coast to the Blue Ridge and the edge of the Smokies. Man, it’s beautiful country here. 

That’s the road north of Asheville heading into Tennessee. Some serious grades but the views and the greenery are worth it.

For a bit of contrast, here’s a trail I was on last week in South Carolina. Yes, I have finally said my farewells to that state, after spending pretty much half of 2019 so far camping in their state parks.

I also bid adieu to North Carolina, so I’m definitely working my way north now. North Carolina did leave me with one beautiful thing: lady slipper orchids in the wild. These were all over the campground last weekend and they were beautiful to behold. 

I’m back at one of my happy places, writing and kayaking and hanging out in the sunshine. I could use a bit more bandwidth, but I don’t have it so this is shorter update than normal, but with some good photos 🙂

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you have to find the place that brings out the human in you,
the soul in you, the love in you.

rm drake

I’m just going to skip over much of the last two weeks because a serious head cold had me down for a lot of that time. They say a cold lasts a week despite meds and rest, and I found that to be pretty accurate. All over but the sniffles and tiredness now.

Instead, I’m going to post a bunch of beautiful coastal images I took before I left the beach scene for the slow, steady trek up north via two more months in the South. 

This was an overcast day at Edisto, which is yet another beautiful South Carolina town and beach. Not much there as far as stores or “things to do” but it’s a peaceful place to just hang out and enjoy the beach. Which is pretty much exactly what I did, when I wasn’t sucking cough drops or sleeping off cold meds. 

We went sightseeing over to Botany Pay Plantation Heritage Preserve/Wildlife Management Area and the beach there had some cool dead trees. As regular readers know, dead trees + beach = perfect conditions for me to spend an inordinate amount of time photographing everything in sight. 

Even the clouds were in my favor at Botany Bay!

But, all good things must end, or to put it more positively, the best is yet to come, and so I left Edisto and headed inland and a bit north. Now I’m in the forest again, enjoying the insanely pretty green leaves that surround me. 

I’ve almost beat this cold, although the cough is still hanging around just enough to be annoying. It’s not stopping me, I’m meeting up with friends over the next week and looking forward to that, even as I will be saying a fond farewell to South Carolina. 

And lest you think that South Carolina has only golden rice, plantations, Confederate statues, and beaches, I spotted a sign earlier this month as I went through the very tiny wide spot in the road that is Spring Gully. The sign? Birthplace of Chubby Checker. So there you go. They got culture here in South Carolina. 

Go on, do the twist. You know you want to.

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I was born in South Carolina. On my dad’s farm, I didn’t have much. I’m just a poor kid who worked in a produce market.

Chubby Checker