I am sad to be living in a van today, because my system is violently rejecting yesterday’s delicious pork spareribs. But glad to be alone in my van, because it would be even more unpleasant if I was sharing my space with anyone besides Z.
I was glad to be in Arcata yesterday, though. We had a beautiful time at the beach. Zelda took off and ran like a puppy, so happy to be free. She met some other dogs and sniffed them nicely, then moved on, and ran some more. Lots of good smells, lots of room to run, lots of joy.
She’s the little white dot, chasing S and J and their dogs.
One of my standard strategies for using leftovers is to toss them into some chicken broth and call it soup. This is a fine strategy and results in some pretty decent soup, usually. But yesterday’s soup… well, I was in the stirring and tasting and making thoughtful “hmmm,”s stage, when S’s stepson said, “What do you think? Does it need something?”
I replied, “This soup is kickass. I’m pretty sure it’s perfect as is.” After eating a bowl and serving it to other people, my conclusion remains solid. We discussed over the soup what it might have wanted — a squeeze of lemon? A swirl of Greek yogurt? A sprinkle of herbs or green onion? And the group consensus was that it needed nothing and it was time for another bowl.
So, for my own future reference, perfect leftover soup for a cold day (mildly spicy, thick and solid):
In a little butter, sauté an onion in the bottom of the instapot until it is golden brown. Then, because you’re tired of standing around the kitchen, add a tsp or so of Ras El Hanout, even though it’s too early. Mix it in with the onion impatiently, instead of letting it bloom,* and wait another minute. Drain and rinse two cans of chickpeas, and add them, then cover them with chicken broth. The quantity of chicken broth should be enough to cover the chick peas, but not much more than that. Close the instapot and turn on the Soup setting. When it beeps (or sometime later), open it and use an immersion blender to lightly blend the soup until it’s creamy but still chunky. Some of the onion and chickpeas get blended but not all of them.
Then add leftovers. In this case, the leftovers were a chopped-up chicken breast and some roasted carrots and sweet potatoes, so perhaps they were the perfect additions to the chickpea-onion-Ras El Hanout base, but some rice, some pasta, some sausage, some greens would all have been good, too. Let the soup simmer on the Keep Warm setting of the instapot while you wait impatiently for your dinner companions to get home from work. Eat. Say yum!
*The link takes you to an earlier soup recipe where I explain blooming spices in more detail.
My van is parked in S’s driveway, which means my view is basically of her street and sidewalk. Most of the days that I’ve been here, I’ve had a very good view of a great deal of rain. Today, however, it is gloriously sunny. Still chilly — there was frost on the ground this morning — but blue skies and sunshine. Everyone is appreciative, including the cat and all the many passersby. While I’m writing in the van, I’m an invisible audience to their interactions. It’s pretty entertaining, because wow, people are chatty with animals. A third of the population wandering by admires the cats and another third says hello to the dogs. It’s really quite charming.
Yesterday, I went to a meditation class, where the phrase that struck me, in the midst of the usual “follow your breath” and so on, was “open-hearted curiosity.” I don’t remember the context, but when I got home, I wrote it on my white board. I want to be approaching Fen with open-hearted curiosity. I want to see where the story takes me/her. So far that has not transformed into words flowing, however. I also downloaded an app to keep me off the internet, so that I would be forced to stare at my document instead of running away to read news stories and Facebook posts. My hour of internet-blocking netted me 73 words today; not a success, but I’m going to keep trying.
Also, I finally went to yoga! I am lamentably out of shape. That’s not a surprise, actually — it’s been a long time since I managed any more exercise than a short walk with the dog. But there’s not going to be any side planks in my near future. Still, yoga’s like writing — the more I do, the easier it becomes. And I know that if I go regularly (at least for the couple of months that I’m going to be in Arcata), I’ll get better. Plus, it felt great, even though I was dropping into child’s pose every other minute. I still got to have the lovely ending meditative rest. And I would look up the actual spelling of the lovely ending meditative rest, but I’ve blocked the whole rest of the internet to force myself to work. So maybe later. And meanwhile, I should get back to the working part of the day.
But, per request, a snippet of Fen:
First things first. Fen needed to call a glider. She scanned the sky, searching for a moving shadow. She didn’t see one, but she waved anyway, arm moving wide across her body, a gesture as big as she could make it.
Then she stopped herself, feeling stupid. She’d just made herself invisible. How the hell was the glider going to spot her?
“Elfie, can you summon a glider?” she subvocalized.
There was a pause. Then Elfie responded, “A data access pattern should not summon a glider. It is not within the parameters of my function.”
“Uh-huh,” Fen said, voice dry. “We’re past that now. Answering my questions is your function, right? So I’m asking a question. Can you summon a glider?”
“I am capable of such a thing, yes.”
“Will you?”
There was a longer pause. Fen waited, beginning to muster her mental arguments. Gaelith had created Elfie to help Fen, Elfie was a non-traditional data access pattern for a reason, if Gaelith had intended Elfie to limit herself to merely providing information, surely she would have used a traditional design… but she didn’t need them.
“Yes,” Elfie said.
Fen let go of the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.
No guarantees that will make it in the final book, of course. And it’s quite random, it’s just what I was working on today, so also unedited, etc. But I will stop with the excuses, it’s a snippet!
Last night, I was cozy in the van, snuggled up under the covers, when S texted me, “Warm muffins and ice cream…?”
Um, that would be a yes.
I slipped on my sandals and maybe grabbed a hoodie and hurried into the house where I ate a gluten-free huckleberry muffin fresh out of the oven with some Haagen Daz vanilla bean ice cream. Yum, yum, and more yum. I am not going to start counting calories any day soon, but I’m definitely growing wary of the dessert potential of Arcata. Well, wary and appreciative, simultaneously. These were homemade muffins, but the local farmer’s market has a gluten-free baked goods stall, and the closest grocery store — two blocks away, so a quick walk — always has gluten-free options. And not the usual run of frozen Udi’s products, which are easy to avoid because I don’t like them.
Over our warm muffins and ice cream, S & I talked about plans. One of the reasons I’m ostensibly here is to help with the post-bereavement cleaning out and organizing. It’s a big job. But I think the more important reason I’m here, at least for this moment, is to be an escape companion. S wants to go places. She’s working full-time, so we’re mostly talking about quick adventures up in Oregon — Ashland, Medford, Gold Beach. I’m hoping the weather becomes reasonable, because traveling with three dogs is sufficient challenge for me without them being three wet, muddy dogs. But I’m already plotting out what should move from the van into the house for maximum space optimization for group travel, and it’s going to be fun to see more of Oregon.
Meanwhile, writing proceeds mediocrely. I am falling farther and farther behind my word count goals, not helped by deleting everything I struggled with last week. But I think the struggle was necessary to clarify some of my ideas about character and direction, so I’m trying not to regret that too much. And I do feel like I’ve resolved some problems, so maybe I can get back to the entertaining portion of the writing agenda.
Yesterday, I went to a meeting of the Humboldt County Writer’s Group, hoping to find some local writing buddies. A fun group, but I felt very old, not just in years, although those, too. But there was one other newcomer there, who I promptly invited out for coffee. She’s currently planning an intensive novel-writing April, so maybe we can join forces for some real-life writing sprints. Until then, I should get back to persevering on my own. Fingers crossed for a better word week this week!
My scenic shots are tending to be very gray. The writing group promised it would stop raining someday soon, though!
On February 1, I left Florida. A Cracker Barrel parking lot, a National Forest, a Walmart parking lot, a Texas State Park, a friend’s driveway, another Walmart, a Bureau of Land Management site, an independent campground, another friend’s street, a California State Park, an Army Corps of Engineers campground, and finally another friend’s driveway later… it was a long month. Twelve spots, most of them for a night or two, but the last one for over ten days now.
Yesterday’s sunrise! The rain started again, but it’s been on and off yesterday and today, which is much more tolerable.
So what was the best? The first thing that came to mind when I started considering this post was the art project Kyla and I did together. Toddler B was excellent company, which was part of it, but there was also something so satisfying about creating something beautiful and concrete. I’m not a craft-y person at all, but I love having my photographs hanging in the van.
The morning I spent in San Francisco was also terrific. It was a combination of nostalgia for a place that still felt so familiar but a simultaneous reminder of how big and wondrous and exciting the world is. The universe felt rich with possibilities.
And then the night sky at Palo Duro Canyon State Park was truly amazing. I don’t have good photos — certainly not of the night sky, which is way beyond my ability level, but even my daytime photos didn’t turn out well. But this one shows something of the sheer sense of spaciousness.
It felt like there was a lot of room to breathe at Palo Duro.
Lots of other good stuff in the month, too — Vietnamese food with Carol, pumpkin soup with S, a fantastic Finnish hot tub experience this week, roller-skating, even having fun with laundry. Not to mention that yesterday I got to play with puppies! The next door neighbor runs a rescue group and one of the puppies temporarily visiting her managed to escape and make her way under the van. I got rather muddy in the process of getting her out, but then got to thoroughly snuggle a puppy for my efforts — totally worth it.
But I want to acknowledge the sad, too. My cousin unexpectedly passed away this week and I’ve been grieving much more than I would have anticipated, given our lack of contact. He had a difficult life, and I hadn’t seen him in years, but his mom is one of my very favorite relatives — one of my very favorite people, really — and so his loss feels closer. And because he was part of my childhood, it brings back lots of memories of other people who I miss. Good memories, though. Still, one of the things that I’m working on right now has much in it about the nature of time (theoretical underpinnings that the reader probably won’t ever see, but that I’m thinking about) — and it’s annoying that time is so damn linear. But I’m glad that someday I will be able to look back on February 2019 and be reminded of both the good and the bad.
I was warned that Arcata, the town where I’m planning on spending the next few months, was a chilly, gray, foggy sorta place. I’m not sure any level of warning would actually have prepared me, though. In defense of my weather shock, my weather app keeps sending me warnings. Severe Weather Advisory! Area Flood Watch! Flooding rain will cause hazardous travel. Hard Freeze Warning in effect. Etc. Nine warnings over the past few days, which I think probably means that this weather is not normal, despite the cold gray reputation.
As a result, my new favorite possession is my eggplant coat, which S refers to as my “puffy.” I call it an eggplant coat because I think it makes me look like a plump eggplant, but you know what? That is just fine. I am perfectly willing to look like a plump eggplant. I’ve become so attached to this coat that I start to feel anxious when it’s out of my sight.
Yesterday, I ventured out of the van exactly twice, both times to walk Zelda, both times in the pouring rain, because it really wasn’t possible to just wait for the rain to stop. Or rather I did wait for the rain to stop and finally gave up. Fortunately, I quite like hanging out in my tiny home listening to the rain. Poor Z does not like the way I’ve been walking her, though, because I’ve been carrying her from the van to the street and back again. She thinks it’s undignified and wiggles to get down, but I think muddy dog footprints all over my beds can only happen once in a while, not twice a day, many days in a row.
In more fun news, S took me roller-skating on Saturday night. I’ve never really been a roller-skater, although I ice-skated some as a kid. I wobbled a lot and never got so comfortable that it felt like flying, the way it looked for some skaters, but I had fun. The best part was watching the other skaters, though. Roller skaters tend to crouch and lean forward, but there were a couple people skating who were probably originally ice skaters: they had great posture and a totally different way of moving. If the roller skaters looked like they were flying, the ice skaters (on roller skates) looked like they were floating. I don’t know which I’d rather do, float or fly, but it did make me want to try ice-skating again.
On the writing front, I’ve been flailing. I joined a FB group for writers of Humboldt County, hoping I might find some real-world writing partners here, to help keep me accountable and maybe meet up with me at a cafe now and again to help my motivation. I didn’t go to their Sunday meeting, though, because it was pouring. Maybe next week. Meanwhile, I added a new note to my white board: Trust the reader. I think part of why I’m flailing in Fen is that I feel like I need to explain things that you will have forgotten and remind you of things that have already gone by and anytime a writer has to “explain”, a story is stuck. Maybe Fen 2 is going to have to start with a note that says “reread the previous book” but one of my other white board notes says, “skip the boring parts, the reader will thank you,” and I am going to try very hard this week to follow that advice. Last week, I was stuck in a boring part and got nowhere, so this week I’m just going to glide right over it. Or try, anyway. I might fall flat on my face. But if I do, I will get up, dust myself off, and think about Badonald’s for later. Or maybe a nap.
Before the rain began, we had one quick trip to the beach. Z would have stayed and played, but it was COLD! We saw the ocean, took a picture, then headed back to the warmth of the car.
I have spent so long struggling to post my time-lapse sunrise that even though the quality loses everything I wanted to share, I’m still posting it. If you watch it very closely, in the bottom right corner, you might get a chance to see the sun sparkling on the water drops that covered the tree. In the moment, it was crazily magically beautiful. On the time-lapse… well, you can’t really see it. Maybe if you watch it in a very dark room, you might get a glimpse. Mostly, though, you’ll have to use your imagination and trust me that it really was gorgeous!
So! Moving on… I left Half Moon Bay on Friday morning and literally prayed on the drive into the city to find a parking place. Literally. Out loud. I apologized to the universe for asking for favors — I have a pretty strict policy of only praying in gratitude and appreciation and to ask for blessings for other people — but I was envisioning driving around and around in Serenity, finding only parking spots that would require parallel parking in tiny spaces. Instead, there was an open parking space — not parallel! — directly in front of my favorite dim sum bakery from decades ago. Yes, it felt like a miracle. A really nice minor miracle. I envisioned my guardian angel patting themself on the back in that pleasure and delight that you get when you find someone the perfect gift.
I parked… and then I did not go in for dim sum. I watched people going in and out, most of them taking packages of deliciousness to go… and I thought about how miserably sick gluten makes me. And then I thought about how much I love shrimp dumplings and pork siu mai. And then I thought about the sore throat and the aches and pains and the feeling of having so little energy that even standing up is an effort… And eventually my friend S arrived and we went down the street to Burma Superstar, currently the #8 restaurant in San Francisco according to Trip Advisor, and ate delicious gluten-free tea leaf salad and braised pork with coconut rice. I’m pretty sure that means I am never going to willingly eat gluten again. I don’t know how many times I’ve said that San Francisco dim sum would be the place/food that I would pay the price for, but apparently it’s not. Fortunately, lunch was delicious.
While we were eating, it hailed! I took a video but I’m not even going to make an attempt to post it, but here’s a picture from the window, including a little girl picking up pieces. Hail must be pretty amazing if you’re a San Francisco kid.
After lunch, S and I went to Golden Gate Park and took Zelda for a good walk, and then I dropped S off sorta close to the de Young Museum and headed north across the Golden Gate Bridge. I did debate going to the Museum myself, but I wanted to get to my campground before dark and I didn’t want to get caught in traffic.
That was a really good call. The campground would have freaked me out after dark. It was remarkably isolated, considering it was in Sonoma. No cell service, no electricity, and a steep and winding road in lousy condition to narrow, hilly campsites. Also mostly deserted. On Friday afternoon, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to stay.
But it was gorgeous.
Come on, Mom. Let’s explore!
Zelda had no such doubts. She was bouncy and excited, loving the weather — cold and sunny — and the smells. So we stayed through Sunday morning, with a mostly very quiet Saturday. I could have run the generator to give myself some electricity (I did manage to get it working again) if I’d wanted to use my computer or cook anything complicated, but instead I read books and ate leftovers. I wasn’t as tired as I’d been on my quiet day in Half Moon Bay, but it was nice to have a day where I didn’t have driving goals.
On Sunday, I headed off reasonably early, and finally finished my long drive. I arrived in Arcata around 3, pulled into S’s driveway and got comfortable. My journey lasted seventeen days, and over 3000 miles. Some parking lots, some driveways, some campgrounds — and I ought to count them up, but I spent a long time trying to get that video to work and I’m ready to move on to other things! But it was a good trip. I’ve driven across the country four times now, with timetables ranging from four days (not solo) to about eight weeks. Seventeen days was probably a little too fast — I’m really ready to not drive again and I was pretty tired by the end — but I think I managed a good balance of driving days and restful days.
Still, I’m glad to be here. Yesterday S didn’t have work, because of the holiday, so we did laundry, ate a big breakfast of bacon and eggs, went to the beach with the dogs (briefly, because it was cold!), and had pumpkin soup and salad for dinner. It was a lovely beginning to my lengthy visit. Today, I’m hoping to put on my yoga clothes and wander down the street to the nearest yoga studio — a five minute walk away — and go to my first yoga practice in over a year. But first, breakfast.
Edited to add: I can’t believe I forgot to include this rainbow. It felt like a beautiful welcome to California!
It’s very hard to take a picture of a mud puddle. At least one that demonstrates its depth and size without just looking like a dirty spot in the ground.
There is no way for Zelda to avoid this mud puddle when leaving the van. She doesn’t mind — she’s perfectly happy to wade in the water. But muddy dog + small van = sad dog mom.
Also, I am so tired that it took me three tries to spell the word “puddle.” I nearly went into that space where it stopped feeling like a real word. Puddle? Pubble? Pebble? What’s that thing called again?
Yeah, I’m guessing this is not going to be the most coherent blog post ever. But I’m currently at Half Moon Bay State Beach, which is a lovely — also, currently, extremely muddy — campground just south of San Francisco.
Not an impressionist painting, just a misty morning. It was rainbow weather, although I didn’t actually see any rainbows.
By about 2PM on Tuesday, Serenity’s tires were back in place and I was back on the road. I managed to get to Tehachapi in time to meet Carol (hi, Carol!) for dinner at Blue Ginger Pho, just one day late. Pho was just what I needed, because I was thoroughly cold-ish by then, tissues constantly in hand. I spent the night parked on Carol’s street and headed out early the next morning.
Wednesday was a grueling day. I had campground reservations that I’d paid for, so for the first time my schedule wasn’t flexible: I needed to reach Half Moon Bay by 5PM. I also needed to refill the propane. I’d filled it just a few days earlier, in Albuquerque, but it takes a fair amount of propane to keep a metal box warm when it’s 2 degrees outside and I didn’t want to chance needing it. And I needed to get the tires rechecked, to make sure the lug nuts weren’t working their way loose again. I also wanted to go to the grocery store. I managed all of it, except for the grocery store.
But when I woke up this morning, I proved completely unable to talk myself into doing anything else. Instead of going to the grocery store, I ate oatmeal for breakfast, lunch, and maybe for dinner, too. (I’ve got other options, but I’ve also got more oatmeal, and I haven’t had dinner yet.) Half Moon Bay is a charming town, lots of cute shops, just five minutes away. I did not explore it. My favorite sushi restaurant in the entire world is an hour down the coast, a beautiful drive. I did not go there. Instead, I hung out in the van, admired the sea gulls, and tried to keep Zelda out of the mud puddles on our brief walks.
Tomorrow, I’m going to briefly go into San Francisco. When I started planning this journey, I wanted to take a couple days and play in the city. But the closer I got, the more I stumbled over the reality of traveling with a large van and a small dog. Like every city, San Francisco has terrible parking. Once, when I was pregnant, I drove around my apartment for an hour trying to park and then gave up and drove to my brother’s house and spent the night there, because he had a driveway. So the sensible thing to do would be to leave the van outside the city and travel into the city on public transit. Except what would I do with Zelda? I’m not going to leave her alone in the van for that long. So I’m going to give San Francisco a try, but I’m not going to stress myself out dealing with city hassles.
A view from the van window. That’s ocean back there, but Z isn’t allowed on the beach.
Then one more weekend on the road, but by Monday — I hope! — I will be settling down in Arcata, ready to get back to writing the sequel to A Lonely Magic again. I tried today, even managed to pull off a few words, but I currently can’t spell puddle, so it’s not exactly gone well. But a previously written snippet made me laugh…
Fen sighed. “I wish I could turn into a bird.”
An owl would be perfect. Silent flight, good night vision. She could glide away on spooky owl wings. No one would hear her or see her. She’d just be gone.
“Why would you wish to do that?” Elfie asked, sounding puzzled. “Transformation is always fatal. The magic cannot sustain cellular life through the process of re-shaping and re-forming. If you became a bird, you would be a dead bird. This seems ill-advised.”
The van started making a weird noise while I was driving yesterday, so I did what all grown-ups do when their vehicles start making weird noises: I called my dad.
He said, “That sounds like a tire problem, probably a loose lug nut. Get off the highway.”
At various points in the last few days of driving, I have been very much in the middle of big deserts and extended mountain ranges: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and finally into California, and so my protest was automatic. “But I’m in the middle of nowhere.”
Even as we spoke, though, I saw the signs for an exit up ahead. Said exit wasn’t just an exit, it had an AutoZone immediately off the ramp. Yay! A place to buy a tool to tighten the loose lug nut. I drove into the parking lot, got out and looked at my wheel.
Hmm. “Loose” applied but only to the lug nuts that were left. Two of them were missing.
Inside the store, I chatted with the nice guy, who came out and took a look at the van and said, “You’ve been driving on that? Don’t do that anymore.”
He went back inside, talked to his manager, and sent me across the street to the Shell station. The nice guy at the Shell station said, “Whoa. That’s not good. You might have a real problem.” He jacked the van up, took the tire off, looked at the remaining lug nuts and said, “You were about five miles from disaster. And I mean a real disaster.”
Fortunately, the nice thing about being five miles from disaster is that you’re still pretty far away from actual disaster. As a result, though, I am now hanging out in an RV park in Needles, California, waiting to find out how much new wheel studs are going to cost me and when they’ll be able to get here.*
I don’t mind too much. I’m a little disappointed that I’m not on my way to Tehachapi, where I was going to introduce Carol to Vietnamese food (one of my personal favorites) tonight, but the park I’m staying at (Needles Marina RV Park) is the kind of resort park that I don’t usually stay at, with full hook-ups, laundry facilities, even a swimming pool. I will probably not be swimming, given that it was 41 degrees outside this morning, but I am going to take the chance to do some laundry and clean out the tanks.
I also will probably spend at least a little time trying to get the generator working. I haven’t been able to turn it on since Texas. I blamed both the elevation and the cold initially, but yesterday morning, neither of those things applied, and I still couldn’t get it working. I’m hoping that the problem then was that the battery was charging and pulling too much energy from the generator. (You usually want to let the generator run for a couple of minutes before letting things start drawing power from it.)
So, yeah, the technical difficulties of van life definitely reared their heads this weekend. So it goes. It’s impossible to feel anything other than really lucky, though, when I consider how much worse my yesterday might have been. There are youtube videos of people driving on the highway when their tires fly off — I’m guessing most of them don’t end well.
I also appear to have a cold: I thought it was allergies in Texas, was sure it was allergies in Albuquerque, but now… well, yeah, it’s a cold. Interestingly, a cold is so much less sick than a gluten-reaction that I’ve had trouble deciding that I was really sick. Congested, yes. Sore throat, yes. But until I added a cough this morning, I just wasn’t feeling the level of misery that would have deserved to be called “sick.” Even now, I’m not miserable. I just don’t feel well. I’m just as glad not to be driving, though.
Before I move on to the more useful parts of my day, however — a quick summary of the past few. I left Texas on Thursday and spent a long day on the road, winding up at Kyla’s house in the mountains that night. There was snow! Zelda liked it, I think. But there were probably also a lot of great smells around, because she was busy, busy, busy — heading off in all sorts of random directions. I was freezing, but she would have happily stayed outside for hours.
On Friday, Kyla and I enjoyed an art project. We took three of my photographs, and printed them out on canvas, then stapled them to pieces of wood. They’re hanging in the van now, and I love them. (Picture posted on instagram, so in the sidebar of the blog, if you want to see.)
Instead of returning to Kyla’s place in the mountains that night, though, I headed farther west, trying to get another hour or two of driving in. I spent the night in a Walmart parking lot outside of Gallup. Not my favorite ever parking lot, but it was cold and that was when I discovered that the generator wasn’t working. Friday was another long driving day. I’d intended to stay near Flagstaff, but when I got there, comfortably early, it was freezing cold and gray, with mounds of snow piled high on the corners of parking lots. I was so unenthusiastic. I might go back someday — it looks like an interesting place — but not in February.
So I kept driving, planning on continuing until I hit 50 degree weather. Fortunately, that happened sooner rather than later, and I spent Friday night and most of Saturday morning at Cerbat Foothills Recreation Area, my first (I think) Bureau of Land Management site. I was a little mystified when I got there — I’d pictured a road into the desert with visible spots where people would/could camp on the sides of the road. Instead, it was basically an unpaved parking lot with a low fence around it. I didn’t know whether to take a parking spot or to drive off the road into the scrub, but since I was only planning on spending the one night there, I just parked.
The sunrise was amazing. Walking the dog was terrific. It felt like I was out in nature, having an adventure, venturing into the unknown. I took dozens of photographs, and if I had more time, I would be sorting through them right now to find the best one. But I’d rather do laundry.
Little tiny white dot in the sky is a star. Many more of them were visible, but it’s hard to take photos of the stars.
Funny unrelated note: on Saturday night, I was tired after a long, largely uncomfortable day. I’d had a couple of restless nights, including one that was very much sweaty and miserable, between congestion and trying to keep comfortable in ever-changing temperatures. I looked at my bed and thought how much I wished I had clean sheets. And then I looked at the other bed and thought, um, self? It felt so lovely to crawl into the driver’s side bed with its clean sheets that night, and so absurd that I’d never really maximized my clean sheet potential before by using both beds. For the last two nights, I’ve slept in the driver’s side bed, which I’ve only ever done when I’ve had a tall guest in the van. Turns out, it’s perfectly nice. And the clean sheets felt like a luxury!
*I got new tires right before I left Florida. Apparently, you should check the tightness of the lug nuts after driving 1000 miles, which I never knew. I think I’m going to have to get myself the right kind of wrench for the job, though, because it would certainly have been useful to have about a thousand miles ago, well worth the space it would take up in the van.
I am sitting at the bottom of a canyon in Texas and it is cold. For the first time, the van really couldn’t keep up with the chill during the night. That was mostly my fault — there are a bunch of heat conservation tips to living in a van that boil down “cover windows” and “block off unused areas.” Basically, the van stays warmer when I curtain off the cab, close the bathroom doors, and put the shades down and the window covers up. Not complicated. I didn’t do it, though, because hello, canyon. Beautiful isolated rocky cliffs, incredible dark starry night, and the only light that which came from all the myriad ridiculous little lights that shine in the van all night long. Well, and off in the distance, lights to the bathroom.
From the van, I can see one lone tent camper, and I would feel sorry for them, except my friend P goes camping in snow, and at least there’s no snow here. I’m assuming those campers were prepared for the weather.
Speaking of weather, that’s why I’m in a canyon in Texas. (Did you know there were canyons in Texas? Total surprise to me. Not as implausible as discovering, say, a waterfall in Texas, but surprising nonetheless.) I was headed toward New Mexico and making great time, when I checked in with Kyla, who I’m hoping to visit. She mentioned the dreaded word, “snow.”
I am not doing snow. When I first moved into Serenity, I thought it might be fun to experience snow again, but it’s not. I don’t like snow. In fact, if you’ve read all my books, you probably know that because I’ve mentioned it more than once. My characters seldom like snow either! So I’m not going to places where the snow is or is likely to be, and for a couple days that included Kyla’s part of New Mexico. I could have gone on to Albuquerque and met up with her there, but it was raining in Albuquerque and I am not in such a hurry that I need to drive in the rain.
So I took a snow day and paused in Palo Duro Canyon, south of Amarillo, for a couple of nights. (The actual town name is Canyon, Texas, which I like, because it’s so very descriptive. Yep, that’s where we are. In a canyon.) On the first night, I was in the Hackberry Campground. I think the ranger gave me the site because it was reasonably close to the entrance of the park, within very easy walking distance to the bathrooms. Efficient, in other words. And it was certainly nice, with lots of short trees, which in the summer, when its hot, would probably be lovely, and a fun winding path up to the outside theater.
But on my snow day, I went exploring. I drove miles into the canyon, down to the river (lots of flash flood warning signs at the bridges), and took a look at a the campground at the very end of the road. And then I went all the way back up to the front and asked if I could switch sites. Then I came back to my new site and took a hundred photographs, none of which turned out particularly interesting. I think the light was too bright, actually — everything from the camera looks flat and bland. But here’s the view from the van window, taken with the iPhone.
And here’s my favorite photo from the last few days, also taken with the iPhone. It was at a rest stop on the highway, headed west.
