The Nomadic Life

It’s been two months now since I sold my home and I’ve been on the road. I began my roadtrip with a couple vague ideas in mind. My son and grandson would be visiting the US for a few weeks in July and August. The first plan was to meet up with them out West. The history of the planet is upfront and center when you look at the geology in Utah. It can dramatically alter your perspective. I wanted my grandson to experience this. However, the trip from Vienna is an adventure in itself without traveling further than the many miles already allotted to visiting immediate family, all of them closer to the eastern seaboard. 

Although their plans altered, aligning with reality, I remained determined. I would go to Willie Nelson’s picnic on the Fourth in Austin. I mean, how many more chances was I going to get to see that lineup? The Mavericks, Asleep at the Wheel, Avett Brothers, of course Willie who has given us so very much and honestly, Bob Dylan, the chronicler of our times? And how much more American can it get?

Thus, I began heading southbound. The plan was to stop in and see friends in St. Pete where I lived for a number of years, mostly Deadheads from Skippers, maybe a friend I’d met working in the Everglades and a couple others I’d met at the Spirit of the Suwannee Music Park, then onto see my cousin in Gulf Shores. From there I would visit New Orleans, after all it’s been awhile, far too long actually. All of that would follow exploring the wetlands in North Carolina. As you may know, I’ve got a thing for wetlands.

Well, as noted in a previous post, I was victim to a horror in the wetlands. Great for allowing natural oils to be-shine your locks, there is an insidious downside to primitive camping where daily hot showers are not easily come by. And that is CHIGGERS. A dastardly chigger attack rerouted me from North Carolina to more northern territories.

Nonetheless, I had my ticket to the picnic and by golly I was going, so I’d just have to pick an airport I could fly from. Somewhere along the line, I saw that Jeffrey Foucault and Miss Tess would be performing at the Porcupine Festival along Lake Superior in mid-August, and was toying with the idea of hanging out around the Great Lakes. I had been invited to stay with a friend at the Jersey Shore for a week following the Mountain Music Jam at New River Gorge in West Virginia. From there, I could head up to explore a few of Canada’s national parks and then head westward. The airport in Detroit began emerging as a distinct possibility. And a few more stops along the way began raising their hands seeking consideration. My sister-in-law and her husband in Newburgh, New York. Acadia National Park. 

My intent for this post is to focus on the minutiae. What it’s like day-to-day “when you’re on your own, with no direction home, a complete unknown, like a rolling stone.”

Funny isn’t it? How the zeitgeist spills over into our minds. That ol’ subconscious stream rolling on. The documentary “A Complete Unknown” came out in parallel time, unknown to me.

So here is how I generally roll. I keep a bag of easy ingredients to heat up and enjoy, like coconut and curry sauce over pasta, preferably organic rice noodles, but I’ll settle for the best the local grocery store offers.  Fresh, ground organic coffee, cream and coffee liqueur are mandatory.  Hot coffee is how I start my day. Often at a campground table surrounded by fragrant pines and birdsong. But really, anywhere beautiful is fine. The photo above of my propane canister, piezo igniter, pot of water, coffee filter and trusty thermos was taken at a roadside rest area along Traverse City Bay. I keep a 2 1/2 gallon BPA free plastic container filled with water for cooking and washing clothes and me, as well as a few reusable water bottles, refreshing them as the opportunity arises. Potable water is not always readily available.

I like oatmeal in the morning as it helps my digestive system function without a hitch. Then throughout the day as hunger calls, there’s peanut butter, jelly, canned tuna with quinoa or beans and corns, organic fruit, tea, spicy bourbon honey from Louisville, trail mix, just things I like. If I’m not staying at a campground or hiking, but rather on the road, I find a pretty roadside rest like the two above. It’s really pretty amazing how many beautiful places there are. And if you don’t have anyone slowing you down by refusing to stop, or any other reason to overlook life in the cause of making time, you’ll notice that these gifts of beauty present themselves in a more or less steady stream.

I don’t have any space for or much interest in maintaining a cooler. I’ve got a super comfy foam and air mattress and a bunch of pillows and blankets in the back of my Subaru. I’m only five feet long and not terribly wide, so I actually look forward to settling in to my little nest. I’ve got a good travel pillow for sitting up to watch movies or read on my kindle when the sun has set and I’m too tired to be out but not tired enough to drift off. I began this trip with a 10x10 canopy and several tapestries, but that set-up has since been replaced by a ridiculously large but fun and easy to assemble mosquito shelter I was able to order online and then pickup at a Canadian Tire in Quebec when a mean ol’ storm rolled in and destroyed my fairly strong and lovely canopy while I slept soundly. Making that happen was an adventure in itself. On the whole, Canada is not only less populous, but not as heavily focused on consumerism as the US. There are large expanses of roadway with no stores at all, let alone stores selling mosquito shelters. Given the ubiquity of mosquitoes you might think otherwise, but alas, it’s not the case. I don't have an address for delivery and I seldom know far in advance where I’ll be next. So there’s that.

In this instance, there was also the challenge of not speaking French in a locale where that’s all that was spoken. Anyway, I’ve got the mosquito shelter in the car now. Assembled, it’s about 15x15. Roomy enough to dance. It’s hexagonal, so that’s my best guess as to size.  I have a cool little roll-up table. The kind you could load in a kayak or canoe if you were going outback camping. It’s maybe thirty-six inches square. The largest and least forgiving item is my hammock chair, which is a stupid extravagance except that it is my answer to the question “If you were stranded on an island and could only have one thing, what would it be?”  Hands down, my hammock chair. I learned about this item from Luke, the amateur astronomer at Staunton River State Park. If you haven’t read that post, you should. For the marriage proposal story, if nothing else. You can lean back in that chair and scan the night sky as long as you like and still have neck support. That’s critical. You can do yoga in it. Remember,  there are hours when it’s raining and I’m in my shelter, so I want a relaxing chair. 

I also have two vertical canvas containers around three and a half feet long with compartments and side mesh packets for clothes and everything else. Every couple days I re-organize them as they spontaneously explode into disarray. I’m okay with that. Under the folded back seat I’ve got my tapestries, towels, coats, bins with toiletries, camping accessories and books. The composition of the front passenger seat varies, but usually has notebooks, binoculars, water bottles, my Bluetooth speaker, glasses. I’ve got two mesh bags, one over each seat with extra knickknacks I need fairly regularly: first aid stuff, natural air fresheners (rose and orange), satin eye masks I can reach as I’m drifting off.  I actually have a couple of these around because I habitually thoughtlessly misplace them. It sounds like something I could remedy with organization and routine, but that’s not the case. You whip them off when you need to. And come morning, well, life simply doesn’t begin to make sense to me until after I’ve had my cup of coffee. In sum, these over-the-seat organizer bags hold those odds and ends you have around the house and you need, like string. 

Where I was going with all of this is that since I don’t have a cooler, I primarily fulfill my dietary needs with dry good ingredients. Yes, I know that on such a diet I could get scurvy. I mean, sailors did way back when. And probably rickets. The literature on why sailors succumbed to rickets is not as clear as scurvy, so I just bear in mind it’s a possibility. I take this seriously. Maybe not as seriously as I should, but then I don’t even know what rickets is, but it sounds bone-related and rickety bones from aging alone is quite enough thank you. And so procuring  fresh greens is an ongoing quest. 

Quests are good. Check out this absolutely divine salad from a Turkish restaurant in Burlington, Vermont. Seriously, it was good enough to make me consider moving to Burlington. I asked to keep the menu during my meal as the other offerings looked so good. This is an unusual scenario for me. Food only interests me if the chef is extraordinary. Even though I couldn’t eat more than the salad that afternoon, I still reveled in imagining how the other dishes might taste. The vegetable quest yielded a side benefit that day.  I could scope out Burlington, which I’d never done. And so, I strolled around the neighborhood of the restaurant and walked around the harbor side of Burlington, situated on their east side of Lake Champlain. It was charming. 

If you are just traveling from Point A to Point B, you’d blow right by the Exit signs and you’d never know.

Back to the grind, which is never truly a grind. Sometimes I have something I need to accomplish, like getting my oil changed, tires rotated, a new car battery or groceries. When you have a home, you have your regular haunts, but when you are on the road, you need to find a place you hope will accommodate you. I won’t bore you with tales of hanging around auto centers and the like, but will point out that attitude is everything. The most mundane task can open doors you’d never imagine. Talking to strangers can be like reaching in a jelly bean jar and pulling out a frog. Or, depending upon who you meet, a wish.

It was a long day and a tiring road trip due to a number of heavy storms and unsuccessful attempts to find a car battery I realized that I needed after reviewing the check-out receipt from the auto service center that changed my oil and rotated my tires the day before, the repair supervisor reviewing the receipt and telling me confidently that everything was good, but a note in the receipt indicated otherwise.  My battery was actually too drained and unstable to measure. So there was the quest of finding an open auto center on a Sunday in Canada. Even Canadian tire does not offer auto services on the sacred day. Still, it was interspersed with a few cool experiences. One being that I bought some THC products from an unregulated native-owned dispensary. That’s was trippy. What product contains 50,000 mg of THC? I read: instant death. I’m more of an 5-10 mg kind of gal. Toward the end of the afternoon when I’d abandoned the battery quest, deciding to quit worrying about an issue that may or may not have been pressing,  I figured I could do laundry in Ottawa. It had after all been an helluva day, driving through downpours in heavy traffic in crazy construction zones where only the closest white vehicles were visible. A laundry mat would put the brakes on the unhealthy adrenalin floating about the car. To that end, I recommend to you, fellow traveler, the laundromat on Somerset near Chinatown in downtown Ottawa. Mostly because of the colorful characters. Not for the cost. That’s for certain. But because the neighborhood was eclectic. Homeless people, an upscale Italian restaurant, a taco joint, a couple Korean restaurants. The gentleman who managed the laundromat helped me out with change as I had no Canadian currency (Canadians are more than willing to trade dollars one on one because ours are worth more, but it’s fine because the hassle of exchanging them makes it a wash). He took his job super seriously. He wore a thick-knitted beanie cap although it was unbearably hot and humid and he moved my laundry from washer to dryer and timed my laundry to the minute. His observations about laundry machines and laundry made me smile.

Perhaps the biggest upside about not knowing where you are going is that you are not in a hurry. You are already there and you can examine things more closely and listen to people with the attention their stories deserve.