Deep Springs area along 168

Mexican – Door – Box Desk – Musings in a new house 4months after the end of our trip

{4 months after fulltime rving}

My wife doesn’t like my box desk.
To be fair it isn’t just a box desk, it is a box/door desk. Old boxes support the door top work area. The doors were taken from the little wet bar area off the dining room. They were about as necessary to conceal the wet bar area, as the wet bar itself.  The doors were laid across the hodge podge of Imac and speaker boxes and is 99% level. A green, and white striped Mexican blanket top is draped across the door to give it a real touch of class. And that’s not stereotyping, it is a Mexican blanket, from Mexico. Pronounced Meh-hico.
It is a thing of beauty in my eyes, practicality at its in its most pure form.  But she keeps saying, “you should get a desk”… but it comes out in very sinister fashion. Well, as sinister as my wife can be at least.

With each new item that enters our house I give up a little control. The shackles get an extra linkage of weight for me to drag. My goal of one thing in two things out is not really panning out, though I am rooting through boxes and bins rooting out items that don’t bring some immediate heart felt intrinsic value.

We’ve been very good thus far not adding too much more than vital furniture. New beds, for the comfort of friends who visit. That’s enough, we’re good, I think. But this house is pretty big, and societal pressure to fill it up with stuff is strong. Will we stray? I hope not. Someone got us a subscription to Country Living, and looking in there tells me we don’t have near enough nick-nacks in here.

On the bright side, the more folks I talk to the more I hear that they are moving away from the material substantiation model that is born from the illest side effects of capitalism.
“He who dies with the most toys wins”, is a dying slogan, that grew strong in the 1980s.  I remember my Dad saying that was the dumbest thing he ever heard when we noticed a bumper sticker that said that as we he was driving me to school one day. It had that same effect that “I want to boogie till I puke” did on my Mom, but that is another story. What a “dipshit that person must be”, my Dad said. But to be fair, he said that about just about everybody. And he toiled way too much with his compost pile at the time, so I am not sure I appreciated what he was espousing at the time. That said, my father installed the idea that more stuff doesn’t mean more happiness in me long before there were studies to prove it.   Just before we decided to sell the house, buy an RV and hit the road we were searching for just the right sectional for the basement. Something happened, and we abandoned that quest, thankfully.

Experiences and life changing moments matter more than stuff filling our homes, sucking electricity, and collecting dust, ultimately making our lives more complicated than bringing joy. Alexa, you sneaky Russian spy, please stop recording my discussions with my family and friends.

So, as I sit here typing this upon my box desk I am not thinking about new stuff for the house, I am thinking about how we can see more of this country, like this spot in California.

Deep Springs area along 168

Deep Springs area along route 168 –

This one my favorite photos from the trip.
I took it out the passenger window as we were zipping through a middle of nowhere type desert in surrounded by the Sierras. Liz was driving, and she had just come through a HARROWING, narrow pass where we had to keep honking the horn because the road narrowed to one lane and we were afraid we would have a head on collision with someone coming from the East. Here’s a little clip from one of the sections…

We saw one other vehicle on the 30+ mile stretch of the 168.
So it felt very remote, and I miss these vast expanses of the west very much. To say the trip changed us would be accurate and the kids and mom and dad all want to hit the road again this summer, hopefully to Glacier National Park. Westward, towards new memories and experiences.

Accomplish a lot….

My father always said,

“you’d be surprised how much you can accomplish when you are supposed to be doing something else.” ~ Big Jim

I am living proof of that.
I have a subconscious that covertly aids the procrastinator in me. I have been meaning to get started writing for sometime. I can list any number of excuses here, but they all provide no measure of relief to my frustration in having not been posting my thoughts. I should have been writing more all along the journey, and in the recent months after, if only for my kids. I owe them my thoughts, as once I am gone, they will be left only with questions about their Dad like I am for the guy I quoted above. There we will be things they know, and that which they don’t. Leaving only memories and questions. So should I get over my subconscious hurdle of “not writing” – these words will be for those two kiddos that make this world so great. (Sorry, I always over share, so I suppose overwriting, will come pretty natural to me.)

I hope to get rolling recounting our trip, scheming new adventures, and attempting to make some of you laugh. I will continue to get inspiration from others (below) who do a much better job than I, and continue on creative adventures that create lasting memories.

https://www.traveliszen.com/

http://www.michaelvalliant.com/

Mile 8937: Get it in gear!

Well, we’ve been trying to Find Fun… right?
Whatever that means. So writing hasn’t been tops on our list.

We’ve been keeping notes about our adventures, but the goal after the work is done for the day is NOT to sit back down in front of the computer screen to hone our blogging skills. So we apologize, because many of our friends have chastised us for our lack of updates.
“Where are you now?”
“Is it incredible?”
“Did you steal from me, and my family before you left town?”
These are but some of the texted questions that have blinked up on our cell phones.
In all seriousness we appreciate the positive comments from friends about what we are doing.
So here’s a quick update as I attempt to get my writing groove going, and post daily!

We are currently in the Enchanted State! New Mexico.
Liz spent her formative years here, and so she is excited to return and show the place off to our kids. We spent 4 days in the Roswell area which was a bit of a homecoming for me as well. I have always wanted to visit the area where my intergalactic relatives landed in 1947. We hit the INTERNATIONAL UFO MUSEUM as soon we rolled into town. It was a cute little homespun museum with plenty to read, and fun imagery to let your mind wonder. I think the kids wanted a bit more, but I learned some things about government cover ups, and bad Alien movies, and we got a sticker for the Jeep, so I was happy.

We spent the next 3 nights at Bottomless Lakes, which were 15 miles southeast of Roswell, and remote enough you couldn’t hear any road or highway noise, which to me is what we are after when we settle in for the night. Windows open, sounds of crickets and frogs putting to sleep as the breeze blows through the RV. This hasn’t happened much. Bet what we did hear on two consecutive nights were Raccoons in our storage compartments underneath the cabin rummaging through our stuff in search of food, and expensive watches or whatever raccoons are after.

I say this because even at partially full this camping area was providing enough food for these marauders to get fat. We listened to them go in and out of the trash cans throughout the campground after dark each night seemingly unconcerned with the ruckus they were creating. But they weren’t satisfied with being simply ‘Trash Pandas’. They felt compelled to invade our space after a gold mine of dog food. Thankfully our stuff was sealed away in a bin they couldn’t crack. I few prods with a tripod later and they slinked off and back into a thicket of trees to plot there next ‘home invasion’.

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The Lakes were strikingly beautiful and alluring to someone that needs to swim in nearly every body of water he encounters… to say he has. If you read the rules after you do something, then you are exempt from the fretting that comes with doing something you know you shouldn’t. I didn’t see a sign. I am sure there are native American bones at the bottom of this lake, or a craft waiting for the signal to arise. The landscape in this state park begs this sort of pondering.

The flies were kind of crazy in numbers but didn’t bite. The park is surrounded by cattle country and maybe this contributed to the number of pests that hung out in the sunny hours. So we spent our time on the move, mountain Biking, Liz did her first real one, and is already looking at new mountain bikes, when all she needs are new tires. : ). The kids enjoyed hiking the same trails, and it is a win when you get a “I really want to do that again” and it doesn’t involve money, or electricity.

We headed to Albuquerque today and bypassed the Large Array unfortunately, because the youngest had a touch of altitude sickness. Either that or the eggs I made for breakfast weren’t nearly as good as I thought. We’ll settle in for work and homeschooling and a visit to the New Mexico Museum of Natural History.

Remember when I said being away from road noise is the goal?
As I type this I am approximately 100 yards from I-40 in a KOA in Albuquerque. If you close your eyes you might imagine the cars zooming by are waves crashing on the seashore that covered this area millions of years ago. Or you can turn on the AC so you can sleep. : )

Live each day with a thankful heart.