Usually my photography is on the road recording what I see for my diary. Today I get to post a bunch of pictures I took for wandering me, and that’s only because it was Rusty and I wandering the gardens at La Bonanza camp ground.
Outside La Bonanza there is a paved two lane road which runs from the town of Piendamó for 45 minutes through the hills to the town of Silvia. There’s no sidewalk, all land bordering it is fenced and private so our walks stay inside the campground and on the solitary trail through the woods nearby.
It’s annoying to be stopped for the moment in our travels but these walks are my sanity check, getting out between rain showers, living under the gray skies, watching Rusty have fun while looking for pictures.
It reminds me of walking Rusty in the Keys, looking for colors or shadows and light in the mangroves, the places we walked which only had mangroves. I’ve seen a few of those mangroves in our time together as the young Rusty raced through them.
A day in the city tired old Rusty, and he’s going gray, as am I, Layne will hasten to point out.
Kika and Anwar have a great gardener keeping this complicated garden under control and blooming.
I just get to wander and using black and white I get to do something different from the usual recording of life on the road.
This is Mischief the campground dog and she has the energy of a puppy even though she’s seven years old.
She annoys Rusty sometimes but he gets really annoyed at me if he sees me being nice to her. He is a jealous dog.
To overland in the traditional sense of the word you travel by vehicle through foreign countries and here we are not quite overlanding right now. We have learned to slow down and enjoy not speeding and the privilege of being retired makes that possible.
Webb Chiles says he’s not retired because he hasn’t had a pensionable job for almost all his life. His job is to be Webb Chiles which he is doing very well even now. My job was to get to my birthday each year without declaring bankruptcy. I’ve managed that at least.
Now we are driving the PanAmerican Highway and our job is to get to Ushuaia at the southernmost point of Argentina. That’s 5500 miles away from La Bonanza where we are now. Naturally we won’t be driving that direct route, there will be many more miles.
Webb wrote to me empathizing with our latest blockade and noting the freedom of open waters by contrast. He has a point and it’s well taken. For me the challenge of the road does something that sailing never did for me. It’s been a thought in my mind for a while and sitting still in Colombia has brought it home.
Lots of overlanders fantasize about taking a sailing trip which is funny because when we say, oh yes we did that, they look at us like we’ve grown a second head. To drive a car is a skill anyone can master and we all do, so we can be independent and go to work or take our high school classmates to school and be cool. But to sail away? That’s different , that is in no way practical and can even be dangerous as people drown in water. When a van breaks you pull over to fix it, you don’t sink obviously.
I didn’t leave the sea because I was afraid of it so much as I was curious about the land. I know so much more of Mexico from driving it than I learned from harbor hopping the coast.
I love driving and the Promaster is a great van to drive, comfortable, quiet with light controls and easy steering with front wheel drive. I really enjoy maneuvering the van in city streets or sitting back and rolling down the highway sitting high above the traffic watching South America go by. I look forward to the act of discovery that is driving.
I never did die at sea, I didn’t sink any of the sailboats I owned and despite a few remarkable survival stories I managed to get through it all without hurting myself or anyone else, at least physically. I wasn’t scared but I never felt at ease, I always wanted to arrive to see new places; I never entered Webb’s “monastery of the sea.”
I met a French couple at the campground about our age and driving over the next month to the port at Cartagena where they will put their Peugeot van into a container bound for France. I’m sorry I said (I speak French) the adventure is over. Oh no she said, soon we will be home in France her eyes lighting up at the prospect.
With almost three years on the road living in a van we aren’t normal anymore. For most people the PanAmerican Highway is a journey with a beginning and an end. If you are young you may have only a matter of months or possibly a year and a fixed amount of money, or if you are older you may have a sabbatical or simply a strong desire to get back to your grandchildren. Time is measured in weeks and months for most overlanders.
For us in our weird child free world time is elastic and even endless, our journey ending in old age and immobility or even death. Or boredom and exhaustion, those enemies of effort. I get more homesick than Layne does and I miss wild camping in the States more than she does. But if we are held up by a problem all we have to do is wait. It is an immense privilege to have time and to be paid each month and to be on the road with no obligations. I wake up every day and thank the Key West Police Department for my pension.
There are some Belgians in the gray Fiat van that looks like a Promaster but I haven’t even spoken to them, I expect we shall exchange platitudes at some point but I can only hope they have traveled widely and have an open schedule and if they don’t speak English Layne would be excluded so what’s the point?
Language is the curse of travel and the expectation that fellow overlanders will speak English can be intensely irritating to the many Europeans on the road. And yet at a gathering of several nationalities most of the time English is the common language like it or not. And for many travelers conversational Spanish is out of reach.
It’s a funny old life on the road, a mish mash of cultures and expectations, frequently not met, of irritations and setbacks all made worth while by the realization that every day is different and intense. On the road time doesn’t flash by, you don’t live a routine that allows you to forget what you did or how you got where you are. This isn’t commuting and repetition or even expectation. And that makes it worthwhile to me. And I have grown because of that.
I cannot foresee a time when I will long to settle down. I will have to but part of me will remember this as the best time of my life when I have the maturity to appreciate how I am living. And you don’t have to travel to have that happen; for me apparently I do.
