Category: travel

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of gas alone

Happy Monday team.  I spent most of Saturday putting the finishing touches on the RV route/itinerary.  Since that’s all I did, it’s what I’m going to write about (again).

An engineer decided to go on a cross-country RV trip.  One of his chores in preparation, most assuredly, would be to create a spreadsheet.  Spreadsheets are great for everything.  Budgeting; planing back-country hikes; cataloging collections of things; and of course charting the miles and stops of a cross-country RV trip.  My spreadsheet does this and more, and is, not to put too fine a point on it, a fantastic achievement of nerddom.  Want to know the minimum speed (miles per hour) you’d have to cruise at to get from A to B in the estimated time?  OK.  Want to know how much you’ll likely pay in sum-total for the horrendous cost of “crisis in the Middle East” gasoline required for the trip?  Sure!  Some of the more interesting figures (and the ones with the most complicated nerd-math behind them) are those which I use as “indicators” for the overall “fun ratio” of the trip.

While I’d imagine there is “fun” to be had while driving on a RV trip: seeing the sights, hugging the curves, waving at other travelers, etc., I’ve decided that the most heavily-weighted predictor of “fun” is actually going to be the amount of “free time” we have.  This is defined as non-driving time, but is more complicated than that.  What I wanted to ensure was that our “usable non-driving” time (I notion I defined for the purpose of this calculation) is by far greater than our “non-usable/driving” time.  I wanted that ratio to favor the usable non-driving time by a lot, more than 2:1 if possible.  In this way, I felt like I’d be giving us the best possible amount of “family time” or “free time” to see sights, hang out, and enjoy the rest and relaxation.

For the record, “usable non-driving” time is defined as any time each day that not sleeping, driving, setup/takedown, or “breaktime.”  For the further record, there are about ~14hrs each day of this type of time (for the adults, that is).  This may sound dumb and overly analytic.  It is.  Oh it really is.  But I wanted a “finer grain” way to conceptualize how much of our time is really our time. My previous method – comparing the number of days with any driving to those with zero driving – is still a valuable statistic, but it’s not detailed enough.  You have to look at both to get the whole picture, see.  No… maybe you don’t see.  Maybe it’s only me who sees like this, who cares like this.  On the off chance not, here are some fun statistics about our coming trip:

Total miles 8,037
Total days 45
States driven through 28 (+ DC!)
“Zero days” (parked; no driving) 19
Days driving/not-driving (ratio of days with some driving to those with none) 57% / 42%
Hours driving/not-driving (ratio of “usable hours” spent driving vs. spent doing whatever we want) 23% / 77%
Estimated cost of gas alone assuming national average of $3.75/gallon $3,265.42

I love data. I really do. As you can see, I was able to do really well (I’m happy with it, at least) with that “usable hours” ratio – spending less than a quarter of our “free time” driving and the rest of it doing whatever it is we’ll be doing.  I was also happy that I was able to arrange several different “kinds” of RVing: big-rig restort camping, state/national park camping, truck-stop camping, and boondocking.  There were so many “layers” of things I wanted us to be able to do, and my anal data-addiction enabled me to get most of them accounted for.  Let’s hope that it’s worth the planning, right?  To close this trip-narcissistic entry, a compiled list of the places we’re going that I’m most excited about, in-order per our planned route:

Although we’re booked pretty solidly, I’m hoping there’ll also be plenty of “World’s Biggest Ball of Twine” and “96oz Steak Challenge” stops to boot.

OK… I think I got it out of my system for another week at least.  Apologies for the indulgent Monday.

See ya.

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home from oregon, that is

Hey happy Tuesday internet.  Or Wednesday.  Whenever this gets posted.

Spent most of the night working on the blog I setup for Keaton to document the RV trip.  I get pretty silly about making it look and feel just so, and tend to spend way yonder too much time tweaking.  I think, however, that I got it just how I want it.  I also spent time mucking with my cellphone and laptop, getting things just right so we’ll be able to use the cellular signal/network to post from the road when there’s not a proper internet hookup available. I like to think that I’ll have energy and desire to update the page as we travel, but I also have doubts.  And again, yes I am obsessed, quite so.

Flying home yesterday we were the Van Winkle family. Each one of us, from the biggest and strongest down to me took advantage of the snap-quick flight from Portland back home to sunny California.  Cohen napped in Sharaun’s arms and Keaton fought it as long as she could, long enough to get her apple juice – you better believe that.  I was out with my paperback in my lap, I never even cracked the cover, and Sharaun with her head on my shoulder.

Three times on planes now I’ve had a front row seat to a guy having a stroke.  It didn’t happen yesterday or anything, but when I fly now it almost always crosses my mind sometime during the flight.  It’s a horrible sight, the muscled rigor and robotic vomiting and bulging full-of-fear prisoner’s eyes, stuck in a body that’s plain-out short-circuited.   I once watched it happen to a gentlemen just behind me and across the aisle, his wife was seated next to him and was first to notice something was amiss.  I turned to look as I heard her calling his name, at first with simple curiosity and later, by the fourth or fifth time unanswered, with panic ’round the edges.  You know that special “thing” you have with your mate, the “thing” where, with just a glance or maybe even conversation over the phone, you can tell something’s not right.  I imagine this wife having that feeling about as intensely as one can as she began to realize her husband was stroking out.

The poor guy was as stiff as a board, muscles standing out in knots like his whole body was a Charley horse.  His fingers were clutched in claws, and I could see his slacks straining against his clenched thighs.  His teeth were clamped shut but his lips were parted just a little in this confused and pained expression.  And his eyes, maybe that’s why the memory is so clear in my head, I can see his eyes.  I remember at the time, as I stole my quick glance at the poor man and his wife, that there were two likliehoods behind what I saw in those eyes.  One, the man’s eyes were the only part of him still “connected” and outputting the right readings.  Two, his brain had shut down and frozen them as they were, stuck.  Either way, they bulged and just looked terrified.  At the time I could almost read them, “Oh dear God what is happening to me?!  I can’t talk; I can’t move; there’s an electrical storm in my head.”  He vomited copiously through clenched teeth.  All this I saw in the span of one or two quick backwards glances; I didn’t want to treat it like entertainment.

Once in the third grade Sarah Bean had an epileptic seizure in class.  I was off to one side of the room and only heard the commotion, not really seeing the action.  I can remember Mrs. Forinash talking to the aide in the room, hollering about, “Hold her tongue!  She’s choking on her tongue!”  At the time I thought choking on your own tongue seemed about the most impossible notion in the world to me.  Everything turned out OK, however, but it’s another one of those indelible things scored into my gray matter.  Sometime shortly after Sarah’s mom came into the classroom and talked about epilepsy and what a seizure is; I remember being fascinated.  Poor Sarah Bean, whose body had turned against her, just like these unlucky fellows whose relays and synapses revolted on them while we shared a flight together.

I honestly have no idea where this all came from.  Something about flying home from Oregon.  So… maybe I meant to say, “We’re home from Oregon.”

And… we are.  Home from Oregon that is.  Goodnight.

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can’t really avoid airplanes

I’ve been taken by this vision, fantasy really, of one imagined morning on our coming RV odyssey.

We’re in Yellowstone and the morning is cool.  Or maybe we’re in the grand canyon and it’s warm and the dust hasn’t yet been kicked up into the morning air.  Come to think of it, it doesn’t matter where we are.  Maybe it’s better in Yellowstone because we’re there so early in the season and we’re posting up at such out of the way campgrounds that there’s a good chance we’ll be the only ones there.  Maybe not, but I see it that way in this daydream.  It’s just us parked in the middle of some sprawling wilderness.  The kind of place where there’s a stream and maybe you see a moose wandering around in the morning mist.  But it’s just us.  Three or four little parking skirts on dirt loops, no hookups no wifi not even vault toilets.  It’s true, we’re staying two nights at places like this.  The ranger I called and spoke to said there’s a good chance we’ll be lonesome out there, since the spots only open that same week we arrive.  Maybe that’s what planted this seed.

Anyway it’s early morning and I’m awake and the family is awake and maybe I’m standing outside the RV smoking my pipe.  The scenery is enveloping and the silence is like when my buddies and I used to wake in the morning while camping – not a modern city sound to be heard.  Birds and condensation dripping and a stream rushing and maybe the rustle of a breeze.  But no engines and no sirens and no airplanes.  Can’t really avoid airplanes these days I suppose, even period-piece movies get shots fouled by airplanes missed in the editing room.  You’ve got Sir Gawain on his steed charging up a pastoral green hillock and real faint way off in the background the contrail of 747 bound for LaGuardia.  The bored passengers have no thought for their unintentional anachronistic cameo.  Some jerk on the internet first noticed it in the theater and then someone screencapped it from the Blu-ray.  So maybe there’s a plane; you can’t get away from them as well as you can everything else, but it doesn’t really matter.

I’m standing outside, the door to the RV is open and the family is knocking around inside.  Their close and I’m glad we’re here together but I’m having what they call a “personal moment.”  Gazing out into God’s country and thinking about how small I am how the stuff I worry most about in the world is some of the most insignificant in the world.  E-mail and human resources; paltry compared to the glacier-cut granite slopes hemming in our private campsite.  I’m out there marveling and puffing my pipe and – listen this is the important part, the part that makes the fantasy, the daydream capstone  – from out of the RV’s front-cab windows pours the Grateful Dead.  Yeah I said no noise but in this case it’s not noise it’s all compliment.

It’s not just any Dead.  It’s the 1976 New Year’s Eve show from the Cow Palace.  It’s one of my personal favorite shows; the band was so hot, 100% on and soaring.  I think it’s an underrated show.  If you haven’t heard it, you should go listen to it.  Sharaun says she finds the Dead repetitive; it’s actually a pretty fair criticism as criticism goes so I can’t really fault her.  But in the morning of this fantasy maybe “Eyes of the World” is blaring and it’s just blending perfect with my morning in the middle of everything and nowhere.  Tobacco always makes me salivate, so I’d be spitting on the very landscape I’d be adoring – maybe that seems contrary but it has some sort of old-country charm in my head.  Anyway, the Dead are just burning with a fever through the cab’s windows and for those ten minutes everything is about as perfect as things get.

It’s me and the family and God and the wildness and the Dead.  Oh man how silly.  But that’s the fantasy, that’s it to a tee.  I see it all the time and I’m the kind of foolish that’ll try and make it happen when that morning comes.  I’ll put on the Dead and light my pipe and stroll around and it’ll be good.  Kind of silly to pre-see it like that, though.  The best mornings will be the ones I haven’t pre-seen.  Those, those’ll be the knockouts.  I sometimes think I have too much time to think about this trip; that I better cool it with all the daydreaming or I’ll ruin the thing for what it can actually deliver. We’ll see.

No proofread; go.  Goodnight.

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not bad for freeloading

One of the most memorable things I’ve done in my thus-far far-too-short life was a thirty-six hour Greyhound bus trip from Florida to the hill country of Texas.  You wanted adventure, you got adventure.

Maybe not adventure like Bond would find in Monte Carlo, but adventure sort of what like Sal and Dean found on the road.  OK maybe thirty-six hours can’t compare, but there were some real now etched-in-stone moments for me during that trip.  When I visualize the time in my head I see that famous ending shot of Joe Buck and Ratso Rizzo and I hear the Simon & Garfunkel song, “America.”  I know, you’d expect Nilsson, but Simon’s bus-ride anthem lines about, “Michigan feels like a dream to me now,” and, “We smoked the last pack an hour ago,” seem to fit so perfectly.

In Defuniak Springs Florida a young overweight guy took the seat next to me.  I didn’t really want to talk, but he did.  I can’t remember his name, but whatever it was it should’ve rightly been Bubba.  Bubba was leaving his dad’s house in Florida and heading to his Mom’s somewhere I can’t remember.  Once there he was going to finish one more year of school and join the military.  His innocent eyes gleamed with the recruiter’s details: A career, authority, fat pockets and world travels.  On the bus in the first place to go visit my buddy in the Air Force and not wanting to knock the military, for there really is no reason to do so just because it’s not your chosen path, I played it non-committal and agreeable.  Turns out Bubba was a downright nice guy, like nearly every person I met on the bus, actually.  I saw him off somewhere in Alabama or something.

Somewhere, still in Florida, I decided to take up smoking for the rest of the ride.  The knot of folks gathered as they indulged at each stop was what convinced me; it was where the socializing happened.  I bought a pack (one of probably a handful I’ve ever bought in my entire life) and joined them astride the coach to talk about whatever bus-folks talk about in the middle of the night while they share cigarettes.  I didn’t even think about eating, they never stopped long enough to consume anything proper.  When hunger started to kick in I bought a family-size bag of potato chips and one of those pre-made sandwiches from a gas station.  In thirty-six hours that and a bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes were my sustenance.

That night a dirty skinny dude got on from the middle of nowhere Louisiana, likely going nowhere to boot.  Guy had the shakes, DTs, white-horse  jazz-step, whatever you want to call it.  He sat a couple rows behind me, bopping and scratching and mumbling.  Made everyone around pretty uncomfortable with his retching sounds and junk-sick ticks.  Somewhere near the Texas border, in the middle of the damn night, the driver stopped the rig and actually put the sad sucker out, said something short like, “It’s my bus and you’re not on it anymore.”  Right out onto the road into the middle of nowhere from whence he came.  I remember feeling so bad for the character, turned out into the dark with only whatever hooch or scag he had in his backpack to last until those shakes and visions came back.  Hope he got where he was going.

The time I spent in Texas was awesome, one day I’ll write more about it (I’ve done a little already, again from the tobacco angle), but this was about the bus.

My bus back left Dallas on New Year’s day.  The station was absolutely packed to the gills and every single bus was running late.  I couldn’t find a place to set up camp inside so I wandered out into the pull-through area where there were already several groups of folks sitting around on the concrete.  I settled down near a group of not-yet-old black guys who were sitting atop their suitcases and duffle bags, situated in a circle tossing dice, smoking, and seemingly having a grand old time.  After a while the asked me to join them and I enthusiastically accepted.  By this point the whole trip had me pretending I was some windblown road-dog character from a novel, out cutting his teeth on the world or something.  I had a great time playing some Dallas bus-stop variation of Gin with the guys, smoking menthols and swapping stories.  When it got late (or early, maybe) I excused myself to curl up and sleep.  The guys gave me a tip before they wished me well, “Better sleep on yo suitcase ’round here; else it might not be there when you wake up.”  Good advice, and I did.

When I did wake my new friends were gone and my bus was still not in from wherever it was.  It was going on first light now and I wanted to get out of Dallas.  I saw folks climbing aboard a bus marked for Atlanta, which seemed a heck of a lot closer to Florida than Dallas.  I walked up like I belonged, handed my suitcase to the porter and watched him stow it below the bus, and walked aboard.  When the driver walked the aisle to do his ticket-check, I feigned sleep.  Soon I was Georgia bound, and it all felt even more romantic, breaking the rules and all.

In Atlanta I played dumb, pretended I had no idea how I’d got on the wrong bus, things were crazy in Dallas, all messed-up, I’d said.  The agent took pity on my ignorance and told me she could get me as far as Tallahassee.  Better, but not home yet.  In Tallahassee things went much the same as Atlanta, but this time I was only looking to go another few hours.  After a short terminal nap I lucked into another bus headed further south.  Before I left I called Sharaun from a payphone (no mobiles in those days, my friends) and told her I was five or so hours away.  In the end I beat the bus I was booked on by three hours, not bad for freeloading.

Man that was a fun trip.  Never again.

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ain’t no flies on me

At the top of my lungs I yelled, “I DIDN’T WRITE YET THIS WEEK BECAUSE I WAS BUSY.”  The emptiness of the void brought my own voice back to me, diminished just a little, ‘I DIDN’T WRITE THIS WEEK BECAUSE I WAS BUSY.”  Turns out that few minutes each night I don’t write where I feel pangs of regret and maybe even some kind of personal-guilt (which is, I think, a mostly Catholic thing) really don’t matter.  There’s much to be proud of of and happy about.  Out here in my corner of the internet are some 900,000 words, so there ain’t no flies on me.

I guess the past two nights I’ve been doing work.  Not sawmill-work but instead the lustful work that is getting to 80% on the itinerary for our coming RV odyssey.  The approach has been more structured than I first thought it would have to be.  At first I was trying to fit a trip into a number of days, but realized quickly this wasn’t working.  Realizing I had to first set some boundaries, I instead started by defining the average miles we’d be willing to drive on a driving day.  Next, I defined a driving vs. not-driving ratio to ensure we had sufficient “off time” to where things would feel like a vacation instead of an extremely long drive with no real destination.  With those two guideposts, it was easy to come to reasonable totals for both total trip miles and total trip days.

Oh and things are moving forward.  We have a start date, we have budget, we have an end date, we have a better-than-rough route, we have a good number of “zero days” sprinkled throughout.  In fact, today I put $300 down to reserve our thirty foot RV.  Not only that, but I made the motions at work to get the slotted time away.  I mean, things are coming together, and I’m a little more sure this thing is actually happening – even if the cost is somewhat “extravagant” for a family vacation (although, as six-week-long vacations go… eh…).  One day in the future, when I get each night’s campgrounds defined, I’ll share a more detailed itinerary.  But tonight I’m excited enough about the major stops and locations that I just wanted to run them down.

8,200 miles.  Where are we going?  What are we seeing?  A day at Crater Lake.  A stay with my family in Oregon.  Four days in Yellowstone.  Half a day at Mt. Rushmore.  A morning at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  A day at Niagara Falls and a day at Antietam.  A couple days to tour DC.  A two-day drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway with a back-country overnighter.  A dip into the deep south to hang with our southern folk.  A day in the Ozarks.  The better part of three days in the Grand Canyon.  Hoover Dam and a day in Death Valley.  Independence day with friends in the California high desert and then back home again some forty-five days after we leave.  Those “days” I mention are what I call “zero days,” no-driving days, stoppage days.  On top of that we put thousands of (hopefully scenic) road underneath us.

Yes I’m sad that we had to cut Glacier and Badlands and Arches and the Rockies and the Keys and New Orleans.  But man, I think we’re doing really well for six weeks.

There’s still lots to be defined and tons of details to settle.  That means I should get my nose back in these books and websites and sign off now.

Goodnight.

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decant, decant, decant

Spent the morning working.  Well, I say that… but in reality I probably spent about two hours working and another two hours playing around with the details for the coming of our planned RV odyssey.

I’m glad I did.  I always plan in a series of refining steps, like some alchemist who decants, decants, and decants some more in search of the Philosopher’s Stone – a perfect itinerary.  Today my re-plan, my second-layer planning, led to a couple revelations: #1, I don’t have to burn any vacation like I’d thought – I can take six weeks of pure “paid family leave” and be just fine; #2, Even my second itinerary, which I intended to slow-down the aggressiveness of my first try, was yet still too aggressive.  In re-evaluating things, I started from basics – asking myself how many “zero-mile” days made sense per week of driving.  In other words, what’s the ideal driving vs. not-driving ratio for a “leisurely” RV jaunt?

I Google’d, asked friends and family, and in the end decided that a 40/60 driving/not-driving ratio is ideal – with an even 50/50 split being as miles-heavy as we’d be willing to go.  Coming to this realization meant we had to do some tweaking to the route, taking out the southernmost Key West and the northernmost Glacier National Park spurs.  With the route streamlined to around 7,500 miles we were able to hit near the 50% ratio.  We still plan to hit most all of the same landmarks we’d planned on, as well as visit with family and friends, so the plan didn’t suffer too greatly.

We also got a chance to do some more thinking on the type of RV we want to rent, and get a better idea of cost for the ~30ft Class A vehicle.  Yeah, it’s all in the master spreadsheet.  I also found an hour this past week to register a new domain where we’ll host Keaton’s roadtrip video diaries.  It’s just a  bunch of test entries in an unfinished theme right now, but it’ll do nicely I think.

It’s kind of silly to stop for a minute and think about how excited I am for this trip (which, I might note, is just an ambitious “plan” until we put some money down – which will chart our course more deterministically).  Being that it’s five some months away and, as mentioned, solely on paper at the moment.  But… I think it’s the realization that I’m bound and determined here… it’s going to happen… we’ll make it happen.  That kind of stuff.  And, for reals y’all, the anticipation is high already.

Until tomorrow, when I wake up back in California – see ya.

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a vacation surrounding

In the morning in Florida when you sit on the right couch in my in-laws’ living room you can see the river across the yard.

About a quarter-mile through the palm and oak and across the short-cropped St. Augustine is the water.  Sharaun and I talked about how much we didn’t notice the scenery all those years we lived here – but it really is beautiful.  Right now it’s still early and the sun’s at a slant so it’s just glancing off the tops of all the leaves, looks awesome.  I can see it reflecting off the water of the pool onto the ceiling of the porch outside, rippling.  All of it together is close to perfect for a vacation surrounding.

I ate too much yesterday,  need to watch that.  We picked a day to head over to Disney… after Christmas.  I read some of my book and played with babies and watched television.  I didn’t check e-mail.  I texted with some friends back in California.  It was a great day.

Later.