Month: July 2018

This is Part IV of a IV part series.  Part I, The Phantom RV is here (Booze, Aquifers, and the Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part I)).  Part II, The RV: Reloaded, is here (Fat Alec Baldwin, Sketchy Stores, and Car Miracles: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip, Part II).  Part III, RV the 13^th Part 3-D is here (Over The Mountain, Stevie Wonder and Clark Griswold: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part III))

“What are the most immediate threats to the world environment right now?”

“Litter?”

“Litter, yeah.”

“Forest fires?”

“Bugs?”

“Bugs, totally.  Yeah. I hate bugs.”

“Yeah.” – Buffy, The Vampire Slayer (Movie)

Yo, Schultz, you and I totally climbed that mountain.  You’d better comment or the Internet might think I’m crazy.  Again.

We woke up at the campsite the next morning.  Due to the extraordinarily dry conditions at the campsite, there was a complete fire ban in effect.  How complete?  Smoking outside was prohibited.  Zero flames were allowed outside, unless they were in a propane grill, which has the benefit of not producing sparks unless you actually set the steaks on fire and then ignore it for 20 minutes.

This was okay, since our camper had a propane stove built into it, and I made the assumption that we had propane. Thankfully, we did, since the nearest place to get propane was 45 miles away.  And cooking was okay – we roughed it and cooked on the stove.  Chili, butter-cooked pork chops (with curry seasoning), etcetera.  We ate well.  But we had planned all of these meals and had the food, condiments, and spices to make the meals tasty, and the enough wine to make the taste of the food irrelevant.

Our first day was simple decompression – we’d been travelling all the previous day, and enjoyed the quiet of the phone outage and Internet shadow.  Okay, it wasn’t entirely Internet-free.  You could attempt to download a web page (say, The Drudge Report™) and if you had five minutes, you just might get it, although with no images.  The camp owner explained that, due to the fire they hadn’t even had land line phone a few days ago.  “You should charge extra for that,” I joked.  He didn’t seem to think that was as funny as I did, having had no phone at all for several days.

During our vacation, we only took two trips out of the phone-free shadow.  On both of those trips I spent the majority of my megabytes attempting to determine if the mountain pass we needed to cross for the shortest trip was open.  It rained on Thursday, and that was enough – the mountain pass we needed to have open, was going to be open on Saturday, just in time for when we’d planned on leaving.

The RV camp owner came by and chatted with us for about 10 minutes.  Then he did a double-take.  He saw that The Boy was sitting in our ludicrously large lawn chair and his brain just didn’t process it for 10 minutes.  Yes.  It’s just as pictured, but ours is blue and doesn’t include a sassy brunette.  I don’t get anything but amusement if you buy one.  It’s not horribly comfortable, but it’s huge. 

This was our second significant camping trip with our RV.  We’d taken it one other time, but that was just a short, local trip.  But The Mrs. made an observation:

“You know, all of the people that we meet when camping like this, well, they seem very nice.”

John Wilder:  “Well, let’s look at it.  These people all like planning for the trip – they purchase stuff ahead of time so they don’t end up without necessities.  They saved up enough money for these,” I gestured at the huge trailers that were in all cases bigger than a college dorm suite, “and the huge pickup trucks that it takes to pull one of these.  And if you look at the toys they bring,” about every other campsite had a spare Jeep® or four-wheeled off road vehicle, “I imagine most of those are paid for as well.”

A typical campsite. They all come with rainbows.

“These people have a future orientation – they plan ahead.  They save their money.  They think through the possible outcomes before making a decision.  They’re like us.”

The Mrs.:  “You’re just writing your blog out loud, aren’t you.”

John Wilder:  “Yup.”

I took the family on several trips that didn’t take us out of the Internet’s shadow.  We went to the top of a mountain pass, and to an alpine reservoir that sits at over 10,000 feet in elevation (47 kilometers for our World Cup® participants).  Even the fish have oxygen tanks at this atmosphere.  On one expedition (more than a decade ago) we ended up camping at around 13,000 feet in altitude.  There were some winged insects up there, but the air was too thin for them to fly in.  Ha!  They should rename those things “crawls” at that altitude, not flies.

On one of these trips we crossed a railroad that was built in 1880 with more grit and determination than I think exists in the entire state of Massachusetts now.  Up at this elevation sits Crater Lake (not an official name, but the name the locals called it).  I was told, when I was a wee Wilder, that this particular lake, despite being only thirty yards across, was at least 1,000 feet deep.  In fact, I was told it was a volcanic pipe, and no one knew just how deep it was.

Crater Lake, not much of a lake, but maybe more water than the entire Mississippi in this one hole?  No.  Not even close to that much water.  But a good story.  Photo by The Boy.

This rainbow was really weird – I’ve never seen one like this before – it was just painted on a passing cloud, and no rain or anything.  Maybe this Rainbow had something to do with the Man on the Silver Mountain?  Photo by The Boy.

Looks like we’re not the only objects that were stuck there, but as Sigmund Freud said, sometimes a train is just a train?

So, the trains are a bit of a mystery.  There were miles and miles of train cars sitting up on the rails.  Miles.  Propane cars.  Petroleum cars.  Fertilizer cars.  Grain cars.  PEZ® transports.  But, as far as I can tell from both railroad maps and from scrolling through Google Maps® screen by screen, this railway is a dead end – there’s no way out.  And there’s no way that the small local communities used the stuff on these cars or could fill up more than a fraction of them.  So, someone took nearly a thousand rail cars and parked them on this dead end on purpose. That’s upwards of $25,000,000 American dollars, enough to buy a small one bedroom condominium in a bad neighborhood in Berlin.  It’s a lot of money to leave sitting on the rails.

The one time that I’d seen this sort of behavior previously was in the depths of the 2009 recession – in that recession there were several segments of trade that stopped cold – and the rail cars stopped as well as the economy began shutting down due to credit risks.  Some commodities were for sale at prices not seen since – heck, oil was for sale at less than $30 a barrel.  Since then, whenever I see a line of rail cars, I start to get suspicious . . . has part of the economy shut down, or has the rail company just found a good place to store junky old railcars?

Looks like a BBQ?

This particular fire was caused by a drought and an idiot.  It appears that a drought isn’t sufficient, you need an idiot illegal alien to add to the mix.  This particular idiot is shown below.  Don’t worry, when he gets home to Denmark I’m pretty sure that it is less flammable than here.  I hear that Danes are made of asbestos.

This man owes me six hours of my life.  Oh, and about 100,000 acres of forest.  Plus a few hundred homes.  He’s got a lot to answer for.  Let’s start with my six hours.  It’s small, right?  I should be due about $300,000,000 for my pain and suffering.

It was finally time to open the mountain pass – it had been advertised in the news that the mountain would open at 2pm, so we were ready to go at 1:15pm.  We waited patiently, and finally took our spot, about 10^th in line.  Given that we were underpowered up a mountain pass, we finished in about 200^th place.  I’m okay with that.

Was this fire caused by Global Warming®?  Although some folks blame everything from Elvis dying to running out of wine on a Friday night to global warming, I’m thinking there’s a group of folks that just like complaining.  Here’s a graph that shows the 1930’s were much worse than today when we discuss temperature.  I blame Stalin.

This picture was taken by The Mrs., and shows the last time we will see the mountains, until the next time we see the mountains.

As we drove the hundreds and hundreds of miles on this trip, what struck me was how empty it was.  Oh, sure, every 90 to 120 miles you could count on a place that you could get gas and some food, but there are entire sections of the road that you could lie down in the middle of and not be in danger for over ten minutes – these sections of road might see six cars an hour.  I’m not recommending you do this, but, you know, you could.

But if you live in San Francisco, or New York, or . . . well, any of those large metropolitan monstrosities, there’s land out here where you can grow and live free.  Unless you like living in an urban hellhole that stretches for miles and offers absolutely no zombie protection.  Because if that’s you, well, enjoy!

We got home.  3am.  All exhausted.

And we had a good trip, and I’m sure we’re closer as a family.  And now we can cook over charcoal again, because we don’t have illegal aliens to mess that up for us.  I’d make another crack about the Danish, but, you know, I’m 30% or so one of them.  I guess we just can’t have nice things.

Okay, so those are the travelogues for the year.  Back to the usual stuff.  See you Wednesday!

This is Part III of a IV part series.  Part I, The Phantom RV is here (Booze, Aquifers, and the Great 2018 Mountain Trip (Part I)).  Part II, The RV: Reloaded, is here (Fat Alec Baldwin, Sketchy Stores, and Car Miracles: The Great 2018 Mountain Trip, Part II).

“I don’t know much about wine, but I know you gotta keep it hot.” – Anchorman 2

In this photo by The Mrs., you can see the smoke from a 60,000 acre fire caught at sundown – the yellow “cloud” is really smoke.  This stupid fire caused us to have to detour around it, since our tires aren’t made of asbestos due to the silly concerns of people with lungs.  Of course, that detour added three hours to our trip . . . but we would make the trip NO MATTER WHAT.

As I said, we made it to the mountains.  We began to ascend the only mountain pass we’d have to take to get into the high mountain valley that was our destination.  The pass twisted and turned, with the speed limit being 25MPH (140km/hr) for most of the ascent.  We had decided to wait to have dinner on the other side of the mountain.

This proved to be a mistake.

We finally made it over the mountain, but it was 10:45pm or so.  We stopped to get some gas cans (the nearest gas station to where we’d be staying was 30 miles away) at Wal-Mart®.  We then went off to IHOP© to get dinner.  IHOP™s are open late, right?

Nope.  They closed at 11pm in this town.  The only thing we could find open was a drive-through window at Wendy’s®.  And if you’ve never driven an SUV with an RV through a drive-through window lane?  Don’t.  After ordering, I found that the turning radius was too tight for the Wildermobile® Mark III and the RV.  The fender for the driver’s side wheel on the RV started (loudly) scraping against the retaining wall.

I backed up.  A bit.  Now the front tire of the Wildermobile® Mark III was headed straight up a curb, which appeared to be the only way to avoid having the wheel on the trailer ripped off.  Stuck on the front.  Stuck on the back.  At least the engine was running.

Well, the Wildermobile® Mark III is a four-wheel drive.  Heck with it.  I gunned the engine and we jumped the curb and then I cut the wheel sharply to the left.

We thudded back to the concrete.

I ended up pulling the trailer out without damaging it, but the driver’s side window on the Wildermobile® Mark III was about 12 feet from the drive-up window.  Breaking (I’m sure) every policy in the Wendy’s® manual, I just walked out and stood at the drive-up window while they rang up my purchase and brought me my food.

After 14 hours on the road, The Mrs. was not pleased.  Getting food was important, but The Mrs. also had to go to the bathroom.

But it gets worse.

I stopped to get gas after we got our food.  The convenience store I picked?  The pumps were open, but the store was locked.  At 11pm.

Now The Mrs. was fuming, since she STILL had to go to the bathroom.

We finally pulled into the Valero® station, and their bathroom was open.  The Mrs. went first.  As the Men’s Room was being cleaned, I told The Boy and Pugsley that it was acceptable to use the Women’s room.  Pugsley danced right on in, but The Boy took some arm twisting to convince.  It just wasn’t right that he’d use the Women’s room.

But The Boy finally did.

And the nice lady cleaning the bathroom noted that had we just been a few minutes later, we would have found both of the bathrooms irrevocably locked for the night.  “Those young kids, they cause so much trouble, no?  Doing so many things they should not be doing.”

Sounds like they need to put up signs here, too.  There’s nothing a Sharpie® can’t solve . . .

Okay, The Boy just made this one up. But I can imagine an actual sign not far from this one, especially if the asbestos in town was especially tasty.

The Mrs. was still unhappy – so unhappy that the Wendy’s™ Single© and fries I’d purchased for The Mrs. to consume sat unconsumed between us.  Probably not a bad thing, since the French fries that came with my burger already tasted like they had been made out grease and cardboard – soggy and not at all flavorful.  I then took a long drink on my Wendy’s® Strawberry Lemonade™.  It was . . . hot.

But the top of the drink was . . . cold?  Huh?

I reached down to the cupholder on the Wildermobile® Mark III and touched it.  It was hot.  Very hot.  14 hours of full power driving had apparently turned the cupholder into a cupheater.  Not something that we’ve seen either before or since.  Perhaps it pulled its energy from The Mrs. white hot rage?

Yes, The Mrs. was mad.  And, it was at me.

A 15 hour trip is a long time, and you throw on top of it the scare with the car starting, the irritation of both bathroom and food, and, The Mrs. had a point, namely, that when I’m pursuing a goal, I get singleminded.  Like Captain Ahab chasing his white whale, or Clark Griswold attempting to put up 100,000 imported Italian twinkle-lights, I tend to get focused on a destination or goal to the exclusion of worrying about those around me.

After consulting with The Mrs., she indicated that this video best represents what it’s like vacationing with me.

We hit our final leg of the journey.  I could sense The Mrs. was still fuming, at least as hot as my Wendy’s© Strawberry Lemonade™.

I tuned the radio station to one of the three FM radio stations you could get.  Some 1960’s-1970’s hits station came on.  Eventually, a Stevie Wonder® song came on.

“Did you know that Stevie Wonder® played the drums?”

I did know that Stevie Wonder® was blind, but had no idea that he played the drums.

For the next twenty minutes or so, The Mrs. dazzled me with a rather encyclopedic listing of detail about Stevie Wonder®.  How he went blind.  What instruments he played.  His first hits.  His awards.

It turns out that The Mrs. had done some recent research on Stevie Wonder® to use as an example for some work that The Mrs. was doing in her undercover crime fighting day job as CEO of Wayne Industries.  The stories The Mrs. had were fascinating.  We then listened to a radio show that berated people without accents for not understanding people with accents.  I am not making this up, and apparently this wasn’t a one-time, but a weekly radio show (according to the end credits, done only by female feminists) where they berated people without accents for not understanding people with accents.  That’s hard-core nagging, and nearly enough to make me rethink my support for the First Amendment (the freedom of speech part).  Thankfully, I couldn’t really understand what the feminists were saying.

We finally made it to the campsite at about 1AM.

By the time that we had finished unpacking the trailer and setting up for the night, the stars were out over our campsite.  We shared a beer at 2AM after the trip.  “You’re lucky,” The Mrs. said, “that Stevie Wonder® saved you.  You know that you get a little too Captain Ahab.  A little too obsessive . . .”

John Wilder:  “Clark Griswold, right.”

“Yeah, a little too Clark Griswold on these trips.”

And The Mrs. is right.  The obsessiveness that keeps me focused on goals and objectives and that allows me to be successful in my day job (polishing lobster shells) sometimes takes its toll even on vacation.

Now time for some hot Wendy’s® Strawberry Lemonade . . . too bad it takes 15 hours to make.

Finally:  Forest Fire and Phones/Internet, Camping and Time Preference, Citizen Journalists