One Year On

A year ago we were crossing the border today from cold and windy Arizona to cold and windy Sonora. The peaks surrounding the border crossing were dusted with snow. Masks were mandatory.

In a mere three weeks we hope to be back, better equipped with more knowledge and experience and with plans for much more driving. We hope to be in South America by June, an ambitious program, with a return to the US in 2026.  I always knew the idea of living in a 70 square foot van conversion was not for most people though we have thrived on the nomadic life. What has taken me by surprise is how rare we are to find ourselves thriving in full fledged retirement. We do no work, we want no work we seek no relevance. We drive to the edge of human experience and send back reports (Webb Chiles, not my words). 

There was a time when having children was considered a social duty and I have been told even in my lifetime that I was selfish choosing not to have children. People have told me to go ahead and have them, I’d like it if I tried it. To this astonishing suggestion I would reply if I really didn’t like it would they take the child off my hands? From which suggestion my critic would inevitably recoil. Consequently Layne and I are answerable to and responsible for no  one other than ourselves at this stage of our lives. 

It has been my misfortune to find solace in my life doing things that others find odd or reprehensible. Not in criminal ways or fashionably outré lifestyles. I’m not gay or bohemian or any of those cultural catchphrases that set rigid people off. I just like to wander and not put down roots and not feel obliged to accept socially acceptable nonsense. I enjoy my own company and I don’t fear death so I stumble a lot in conversation when I come across people who want to do things but are afraid to do them. These are the people that I fail and who make me feel stupid because I am unable to understand their fears. And to them always I feel I owe a huge apology. But I like living my life like this, on the road, not knowing what next, who next, where next. Most people do not. 

So therefore I have been astonished by the number of people who fear retirement who fear irrelevance and who find my ability to enjoy social irrelevance rather startling. There are a few hardy souls who live like me, Doug in Key West and Webb in South Carolina spring to mind who embrace their own paths with serenity but we are few. I know many people with the money to live away but who take jobs in retirement to find something to do. They are the majority and good for them if that brings joy. But not me. 

I have been fortunate inasmuch as Layne likes van travel. Rusty seems to put up with it well as he ages. In a world that has always been devoted to conformity that seems like a lucky break for me. But I don’t give advice or recommend or encourage others. My advice has always been to make a plan and enjoy the journey. Don’t do as I do but let your plan reflect what you want. There is no dishonor in never retiring;  on the contrary. There is no  reason anyone should leave their home town or own a passport or get vaccinated for yellow fever. Unless they want to.

The worst way to live is I think to yearn but to fear the path to fulfillment. That I would recommend avoiding at all costs. On my off days I fear we may be too old to be ambitious and I wonder if old age or physical failure will prevent us and stop us reaching Patagonia.  Have we left this too late?

We shall see as we go.  But this I will say, even if we time out on the road, I shall know that we did try. To try and not succeed is not as good a feeling as getting it done. However not to try at all is not living. 

We planned our retirement over twenty years. Layne sat me down in 2002 after our travels through Central America and insisted we get jobs with pensions. We paid taxes and social security and I sat still getting progressively more bored earning my union pension at the city. But it has paid off  and it’s thanks to her to have monthly checks and live within our means. 

Thanks to President Johnson we have health care good anywhere in the US with no insurance companies to deny us and minimal copays. Thanks to the Good Sam Club we have modestly priced medical evacuation coverage from anywhere in the world. It’s all just for peace of mind I hope and not to be used!  There are some advantages indeed to traveling when old and I don’t envy youngsters funding their travels by making YouTube diaries. That’s work! I used to save and go and then go home. 

The other half of the old age plan we hatched was what to do with total freedom. To that end we carefully planned GANNET2 as an off grid mobile home to function as simply as possible in less developed countries. We avoided the complexities of modern RVs which try to replicate modern homes with push button technology even as we gave ourselves basic but comfortable living aboard. We have a fridge and air conditioning but no hot water or built-in heat. We use no propane as filling stations in Latin America use different equipment in each country. Our toilet is portable for easy emptying in countries no equipped with RV parks and dump stations. That we never stay in RV parks and that we rarely plug in was all part of the plan. We wanted it this way, the true freedom to park and sleep where we like, not beholden to anyone. 

I hope it is clear one year in we have no regrets. To my astonishment Layne is as keen as ever and that commitment keeps us moving ahead. It is possible disaster lurks but it has been great fun living and moving with our home around us and it is true disaster strikes people who don’t move at all. If we break or GANNET2 breaks we come home if we can. 

Ten days in a house in Ocracoke was an interesting change and it came in very useful during the Great Freeze but driving the mountains of North Carolina is a welcome change, back “on the road again…”

Van life for me is very weather dependent and I don’t like the cold, perhaps even less if that were possible, while living in a well appointed, well insulated tin box. I move to the tune of the seasons, no bad thing. In a van I get to escape the cold if I choose. 

It is traditional to express New Years hopes at this time of the year and you don’t want iconoclastic me telling you time is a human construct and the New Year has no meaning (I told you I don’t accept normal social attitudes which makes me hard to be around) so I wish you all the best in 2023 and trust you will forge ahead with whatever makes you happy and with proper planning. And please don’t let the fearmongers hold you back. Fear breeds cruelty and cruelty is no way to live. 

I look back to Rusty romping on the beach at Puerto Lobos last New Year’s Eve and all the fearmongers who were convinced Mexico would kill him, not liberate him. If it had killed him he’d have died happy.

Happy NewYear Everyone and in the words of Joseph Campbell:

“Follow your bliss and don’t be afraid and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

Elizabeth City

When I lived in California avidly devouring sailing magazines wishing I could sail the east coast with all its inlets and islands and that magnificent waterway, I read about Elizabeth City, a place where passing sailors were treated to free docks and a warm welcome. You never got that in California! 

Up close the city docks are still there and not terribly interesting. I’ve since motored down the waterway on a friend’s boat and found it to be quite boring, freeway travel at walking speed. That’s how your dreams crumble!  But I liked arriving by van and wandering the town and that put all my youthful fantasies to rest, finally. GANNET2 put the nail into that coffin. 

We left the Outer Banks on a frosty morning with a plan to drive toward Asheville more or less. On the way I wanted to see Elizabeth City in person and Layne was amenable and Rusty had no vote, so off we went, an hour through farmland and woods. 

I wanted obviously to walk the waterfront but first we had a destination…

It’s not the winter palace though it looks like it. It’s a free museum displaying the history of people’s lives around Albemarle Sound. Museum of the Albemarle  leads you through the changes. 

The pre-European region was viewed with high approval by the Indians who discovered forests, fertile plains and convenient river highways. 

Europeans showed up and changed the map as usual. Things didn’t go well for the people they encountered. There again pirates liked this area too and they liked the wood to repair their ships and water to drink. 

But for the most part it was boring old farming and building and procreating and banking and cooking.  The usual. 

There was fishing too of course and boat building. 

It was an impressive display of artifacts and history but it was not terribly involving. We wandered and read the information boards. 

We noted the era of slavery and reconstruction, the arrival of railroads the creators and embodiment of progress and change. 

The complexity of change was not addressed.  Productivity at what price? What benefit? It seemed a bit simplistic but perhaps I was just overthinking.  

The shad boat was a local innovation. 28 feet long and invented by a local boatwright. 

Behind the museum there is an 18th century cemetery which I felt constrained from walking through by the presence of my dog. 

Rusty spent the time aboard GANNET2 and enjoyed the sun when I was back to let him out. I enjoyed the moment too, less spectacularly, reading A Most Remarkable Creature by Jonathan Meib. It’s a discussion of the peculiar characteristics of the caracara a super intelligent bird of prey found mostly in South America. I’m not an ornithologist but the natural history of South America is fascinating. 

Downtown Elizabeth City has great bones. 

Not fans of Rusty of his handler: 

Here’s the draw, public hot showers for five bucks right next to the city docks. You get two days for free on your boat but anyone can buy a shower. Even a van lifer. 

Nice views too. We sat and looked for a while. Snowbird season must be over. We saw no boats traveling. 

The Outer Banks

The Outer Banks are a hundred mile long sandbar sticking into the Atlantic Ocean. The weird bit is driving Highway 12 you have no…

…idea the ocean is right there. 

It is actually a waterfront highway but the ocean is hidden behind a berm. 

They need the berm to keep the highway open. Blow a storm and lose Highway 12. Actually the highway was reportedly a mess over the Christmas storm last week, with water and slush ice in the roadway mixed with wind blown sand. Fantastic I’m sure, but not for me. The melted ice was looking like a lake in the road: 

I can’t help but compare Highway 12 to driving through the Keys. This is a much more rural experience as this is after all the Hatteras National Seashore. The endless commerce and neon and tropical vegetation is a total contrast to the subdued North Carolina coastline.

In midwinter there’s no traffic - and no open businesses either! - but I’m told high season is a huge traffic jam half the time. 

Ocracoke was waking up yesterday as islanders came home from family celebrations on the mainland. Tourists came off the ferry looking  to get ready for New Years Eve celebrations so we, the contrarians rode the opposite way to Hatteras (below) with just half a dozen vehicles on the ferry. 

Rusty had no interest in the whole ferry experience. I told him it was only an hour and it was free but he curled up and slept. I did a crossword. Layne complained she had nowhere to sit. 

We wanted clam chowder on a brisk 45 degree day. There wasn’t any we could find so we settled for hamburgers at a place called Bros in the village of Avon where Layne’s Rueben and my spicy burger were excellent. Good enough even with no clams in sight. 

The Buxton Woods is one of the largest wilderness areas in these sandbars and I wanted to take a walk. It wasn’t Ocracoke’s waterfront Springer’s Point with ocean views but I enjoyed the shaded woods and so did Rusty. I also found out what sedge is. That would be the damp weedy bit of marsh between the higher dry land surrounding it. This is sedge:

We walked alone as Layne had had trouble sleeping Monday night  worrying about waking up early to finish departure preparations, the problem of not trusting your alarm,  so she took a nap while we walked. Then we all stopped at the famous Hatteras lighthouse. The 275 steps were closed for construction which was a bummer. The Bodie lighthouse is closed for winter so that was that in the lighthouse visiting department. Hatteras light was pretty though, almost as scenic as GANNET2:

There you have it for Highway 12. Everything except the basics is closed. You can buy gas and groceries but tourist tat is unavailable for the winter non season. Keep driving. 

Just north of Rodanthe the highway takes a weird turn to the left. The reason is that the old road got smushed by one storm too many, so they cut their losses and built a whole new causeway in the sound next to the low lying sandbar with the old road! Odd but it works all right and gives a nice smooth ride. 

There is no channel or passageway required for boats so the causeway is level with no hump in the middle to give you a view across the marshes. For that you have to wait for the spot where the road always used to collapse at Oregon Inlet. It won’t now because they have built a serious vast modern bridge there. 

There’s a marina near the bridge and the Bodie Lighthouse so deep sea anglers get out into the ocean and the bridge is tall enough for them to get underneath and out through this inlet: 

The funny thing for us sitting on Ocracoke with nowhere to go for ten days was hearing about how the ferry wasn’t running and everyone seemed okay with that isolation. Fair enough we thought, they are used to it. Then we heard questions about whether the highway north was open! That came out of nowhere and we wondered how that happened. It turns out the strong winds blew sand onto the road but beyond that the Christmas freeze put some serious ice and even dangerous black ice on the road which is decidedly not normal. Bummer. I was therefore glad to see a mere lake which was bad enough by the time we drove through. 

By Nag’s Head the road turns into a four lane Federal Highway and the scenery becomes chain and box store countryside with a giant hospital dominating the southern end of town, that big blue box: 

Kitty Hawk sits in much larger Nag’s Head’s shadow but it shines as the place where powered flight took off a hundred years ago. We visited the spot in 2013 when we first visited the Outer Banks on Spring Break and I wrote this post about it: 

https://conchscooter.blogspot.com/2013/03/kitty-hawk-flies.html?m=0

Our plan was to spend the night at the rest area which sits at the entrance  to Kitty Hawk from the north. 

Not busy in December it worked for us as an overnight stop. There’s a monument commemorating the first flight in the rest area. 

Rusty as usual ignored the whole thing. 

I enjoyed reading the milestones listed even though I’m not a fan of flying. Modern commercial travel is horrible but the whole notion of hanging in the air being propelled by internal combustion strikes me as slightly mad. That I enjoy the perils of highway travel instead of the statistically safer realms of flight makes me not so bright I know. My hat is off to people who like to buzz about in the clouds. 

That two midwestern cyclists decided to build a flying machine and change the course of human history boggles my mind. That they succeeded takes my breath away. And they didn’t die. Good job. 

Our stop for the night. Pretty romantic I think you’ll agree.