Sarah Wynde's Blog, page 52

Best of July 2017

At the moment, I’m on Whidbey Island, sitting in Serenity. Both dogs are curled up next to my leg, enjoying the dappled sunlight falling through the evergreens. There’s a morning chill in the air, enough so that I’m wearing a sweatshirt and socks while I wait for R to come wandering by so we can talk about plans for the day, which I hope include washing the van. I finished off the last of my Pennsylvania blueberries this morning, with some absolutely phenomenal Greek yogurt and pretty darn good granola. (I think I overdid it on the sunflower seeds in that batch.)

Yesterday, we went to the beach and it was brilliantly clear and sunny, hot enough to feel the burn on the back of my neck, while the water was so cold that it bit. We could see snow-capped Mount Whitney in the distance. A bald eagle flew by overhead, close enough to see its white head and tail. Zelda slept in the sand, as thoroughly asleep as if she were safe at home, tired out from multiple long walks through the woods.

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Mount Whitney in the distance

Last night, we ate sous vide steak, mashed potatoes, and sautéed zucchini for dinner, finishing it off with a strawberry-nectarine crisp topped with vanilla ice cream. Such a summer meal, such a summer place. Lying in bed in Serenity, I could see the moon and the stars and hear owls hooting. It was the closing moment of July and I was perfectly content.

On the other hand, before I declare that the best moment of the month, July also included lunch with my dad in North Carolina. Walking along the beach with my niece. Picking blueberries with my brother. Ice cream with my aunt. Being mystified by my insta-pot with E in Ohio, and then eating spicy sweet potato hash when I was really hungry. (I think the hunger made the hash more delicious.) Admiring the Badlands & Mount Rushmore. Seeing a moose in Montana. Cooking salmon at the scenic overlook.

In terms of places, I’ve been in three driveways, two houses, and three state parks (two in PA, one in Ohio). Also three independent campgrounds — the KOA in PA, and the two in Montana. And a lot of parking lots, so many that I think I’ve lost count. Five or six, though. Walmart, Cabela’s, Flying J ‘s. Omitting the driveways, if I was going to pick a place to go back to, it would be Spring Creek in Big Timber, Montana, definitely. If I was going to pick a driveway? All of them, I like them all. But I very much like this one, both because it’s a lovely place and because right now I get to go spend time with R.

If I was going to paint July of 2017, it would include much gold and green and brilliant blue. It was a beautiful month!

Gem Mountain, Phillipsburg, Montana

I had such a nice morning on Friday. You saw the pictures on the last post — the sunrise that looked celestial, the granola and blueberries on the bench in the early morning sun. It felt so peaceful and pleasant, but I knew I needed to keep going.

Driving long distances is not my idea of fun. I don’t think I would make a good trucker. But there’s a point where you get into the zone and it gets easier and easier to just keep going. Suddenly two hours starts passing without notice and driving into the night is almost easier than stopping. Unfortunately, my break in Billings definitely broke me out of the zone. When I got back on the road on Thursday, I lasted barely an hour before I was thinking about stopping. And I wasn’t exactly eager to start again on Friday.

But I had a plan. Ever since Crater of Diamonds in Arkansas, I’d intended to go sapphire mining in Montana. When I googled, one of the mines was reasonably close to Highway 90. It would add maybe an hour of extra driving along a scenic highway, plus an hour at the mine, but it would be a nice break in the middle of the day and something to look forward to, helping to keep me motivated on the road. I thought I’d get there about 2, be back on the road by 3 or maybe 3:30, and then maybe make it to the Montana border before stopping for the night.

It was so nice at Spring Creek, though, that I started late. And then I took a break at a rest stop to try to get online, as well as write about the campground and answer some texts. And then there was a tiny little wrong turn that put me on the highway headed in the wrong direction… Suddenly it was 3:30 and I was pulling into Phillipsburg and realizing that I’d screwed up. My Google directions hadn’t taken me to a mine, they’d taken me to a store. A nice store, where people could rinse of jugs of gravel and hunt for sapphires, but it wasn’t what I’d been looking for. The store, however, had a sign that said, “Free camping.”

I like signs like that.

It turned out that the mine was about half an hour away, in the direction from which I’d come. Bummer. But behind the mine were campsites, first come, first served, and if there was still room, I could spend the night there. And if I got started quickly, I’d still have an hour to play at the mine.

Done.

The mine was, in fact, not much like Crater of Diamonds. Instead of sitting in the dirt and digging, you buy a bucket of gravel for $25. They give you a mesh grate, some big tweezers, and a thing like a test tube with a plastic top with a hole in it. You put some dirt in the grate, rinse it in a wooden trough of water, then dump it out on a table. Carefully, because if you’ve rinsed it right, the sapphires are sitting on top of the pile. They’re the heaviest of the rocks, so as you bounce and rock the grate in the water, they should be sinking to the bottom. One of the guys working there gave me a demo to get started and when he dumped the grate, there was a blue stone sitting right on top of the pile, exactly as advertised. It was both delightful and also sort of like winning the slot machine on your very first quarter. I did wonder whether I was going to spend the next hour feeling like a failure when I didn’t find any more.

Nope.

By the time I finished, I’d found 41 tiny sapphires. I did not once dump the dirt without finding a sapphire in it. One time I picked one out of the dirt without even rinsing it and another time I picked one out of the dirt as I was rinsing it. I’m not even sure I found all of them, because I was one of the last people there, so I was trying to hurry by the end of my bucket. Results aren’t guaranteed, of course, but they do say every bucket has some sapphires in it. Most of them aren’t worth processing (heat-treating and faceting), but people do sometimes find larger sapphires, 3 carats or more, that after processing can be worth hundreds of dollars. So there is still that element of playing the lottery, but one where you’re guaranteed to win something.

Plus, free camping!

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Gem Mountain camping

Unfortunately, my anxiety level on Friday evening was limiting-ly high. I wanted to take a long walk with Zelda — we haven’t been getting nearly enough exercise — and I just couldn’t. Bears, rattlesnakes, strangers… I was totally scolding myself, but I was also not leaving the van. Just not.

The best I could do was about five minutes where I took the above picture. It was a beautiful moonrise, an incredible setting, and I took a minute to enjoy the crystal clear and cold air — and then the smoke from my neighbor’s campfire started me worrying about forest fires. Despite being seriously annoyed with myself, I couldn’t sleep until I had the van entirely packed up and ready to go, in case we needed to run away from fire in the middle of the night.

Sometimes I hate my brain.

On Saturday morning, though, I forced myself to walk Zelda down the road toward the mine. I wasn’t going to try to do anything challenging — no wandering into the forest or off on any trails — but I thought I’d walk along the road out to the main road and maybe along it for a while. I’d started to relax and enjoy the beautifully chilly morning when we rounded a curve in the road and a big brown thing lifted its head and looked at us.

Total jump.

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Not a bear.

And then a relieved laugh.

I’ve always wondered what Zelda would do if faced with a bear and I think the moose gave me my answer: she would take her cue from me and back cautiously away. She definitely saw it and she was definitely interested, head tilted, ears up, but when she saw that I wasn’t going any closer, she followed me away from it without any protest.

I also saw a green hummingbird, a chipmunk, and a pretty little dark brown squirrel. No bears and no rattlesnakes, much to my relief.

I didn’t linger, though. By about 8:30, I was on the road, not exactly making up for lost time, but definitely making progress toward my goal. It was a long day of driving, through smoky hills in Montana, into and beyond Idaho. I stopped at a scenic overlook in Washington, admired the Columbia River, and enjoyed one of my favorite parts of #vanlife — I cooked and ate sockeye salmon with basil and garlic over brown rice, with a side salad of mixed greens, radishes and avocado, with balsamic vinegar. Road food is really different when your kitchen travels with you.

I then spent the night at a Flying J, and now I’m sitting in a Safeway parking lot, drinking my morning coffee, and getting ready to get on the road. A few more hours of driving and I’ll be saying hi to R!

Spring Creek Campground, Big Timber, Montana

I’m not sure what impulse drove me to stop on Thursday. I needed to get gas, that was definitely part of it. And I really wanted a shower. Mostly, though, I think I just saw the signs for Spring Creek Campground at exactly the right moments.

Whatever drove the impulse, it was a great one. Although I don’t think I’d like the campground as much when it’s crowded — the sites are really close together — it wasn’t crowded, so it was perfect. I could hear the river from inside the camper, and it was so still and peaceful at night that I didn’t bother closing the blinds or putting up the window covers. I just appreciated the darkness and the sounds of nature.

I feel like there’s so much more I want to say about it, but all my words feel like babble. If a picture is worth a thousand words, what are several pictures worth?

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The front of the campsite. I was parked facing the water, which was the Boulder River.

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The campsite viewed from a distance. A pond on one side, a river on the other. So peaceful!

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Sunrise while I was walking Zelda.

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Breakfast on the bench.

I Heart Montana

I wish I knew how to do an emoji in a post, because I’d make that word in the title an emoji if I could.

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First Montana rest stop

When I decided to do my epic cross-country run to play with people in Seattle, I planned a couple days in South Dakota — the halfway point of the long drive — but anticipated the rest of the trip going by in a blur of highways. No real stops in Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin or Minnesota (although I did spend the night in Indiana and Minnesota), and no real stops on the other side of South Dakota, either — Wyoming, Montana, Washington. I was just going to drive until I got to my destination. I knew I’d need to overnight on the road, but I figured I’d make it most of the way through Montana first, probably stopping in Missoula, and then reach Seattle the next day.

The temperatures in South Dakota changed the first half of that plan and the plumbing problems changed the second half. I wound up spending Wednesday night in Billings. On Thursday, I was waiting to see if Merta RV could squeeze me in. It was the fourth place I’d called. The first, Pierce RV, wanted a $150 priority charge — money for nothing except moving me to the front of their queue — plus $175 an hour after that. The second wouldn’t have been able to take a look until August 1. The third could see me on August 9th, but gave me some other names to call. Marta said that they were really busy but would see what they could do and call me back, and when they called back, said I could come by at 3 on Thursday and they’d try to squeeze me in.

So there I was in Billings, waiting for a 3PM appointment. What to do? On the spur of the moment, I decided to try to take care of the other things Serenity needed or would need in the near future: an oil change, her tires rotated, her 20K mile inspection. I stopped by the Dodge dealer to see if they could fit me in. They could, they did. They let me bring the dogs inside and every single person I spoke to was so nice and so friendly. I probably chatted to five people along the way and everyone was welcoming and cheerful.

They were finished by 11:30 or so. On my way out, I spotted CostCo. Living without water makes washing dishes difficult and I’d been wanting more road-friendly snack food. My preference is definitely to cook delicious meals, but not when I don’t have electricity, or water to wash dishes with. So I swung into CostCo and bought some snack-type foods, plus bear spray. Yep, I’m finally ready to go hiking in the western woods. The bear spray seemed expensive (and I really hope that I don’t wind up spraying myself with it someday) but I looked it up on Amazon and it was actually a good deal, $40 for two cans. While I was standing in line, the guy behind told me it was both a good deal and even better, a long expiration date. Apparently he has a closet full of expired bear spray at home.

Done at CostCo, I decided I might as well go wait in the parking lot at Merta and do some email, maybe even write. The writing didn’t happen, because I’d barely been there twenty minutes when the service guy came and took the van away. He very nicely let the dogs stay in the van. I closed the bathroom doors so he could work on the bathroom while they stayed in the interior, but it felt like such a luxury to be able to leave them in a safe place. And in no time, he was back, handing me the keys and telling me I was done. Again, everyone I spoke with — probably six or seven people along the way — was friendly, cheerful, warm and helpful.

By 2PM I was on the road, debating what came next. Four nights in parking lots (the Billings parking lot was at a Cabela’s and lovely), plus some stress, had left me pretty tired. Did I want to push into the driving zone, knock another five hours off the trip? Maybe more? Or did I want to find a place to relax, maybe take a shower, eat a good dinner?

And I am out of time. Must get moving! So… to be continued.

Year Two Begins With a Splash

Yesterday, July 25th, was the one-year anniversary of the day I said good-bye to my house and hello to life on the road. It started auspiciously enough in a Walmart parking lot in Minnesota.

Yep, my first Walmart parking lot. It was fine. Better than fine, really. The night before I’d spent in a Flying J parking lot in Indiana, and although I hadn’t slept as horribly as on my very first parking lot night, it wasn’t exactly relaxing, either. At the Walmart, I was out of the way, in a quiet corner, facing a field. I put the window covers up and slept as well as I ever do. Maybe it was Minnesota, too. While I’m sure Minnesota has its problems, the Walmart was the kind of place that had a trash can at every single cart rack and no trash visible outside the cans. Go, Minnesota.

Although I’d decided I was going to try to get to Mount Rushmore, when I looked at the map I realized that if I did, I’d miss the Badlands entirely. My plan had been to dry camp, aka boondock, in a primitive campground in the Badlands for a couple of days but I hadn’t realized how far west Mount Rushmore was. But, I figured, no problem — Mount Rushmore had been waiting for a year, it could wait a couple of days more.

I started off on a relaxed drive out of Minnesota and across South Dakota. I had plenty of time, so I took it slow, pausing at rest stops, reading, writing, checking email. Unfortunately, it just kept getting hotter and hotter and hotter. At one point, my outside temperature gauge read 103, and even with the air-conditioning running full blast, my temperature monitor was sending me alerts that it was over 80 in the van. Both dogs huddled under the AC vents.

When we got to the Badlands, I paid the $20 to enter — my first national park, yay! — and drove slowly through. I’d given up on the idea of boondocking at the cool primitive (i.e., no electricity) campground. Space was probably available, but we would have been miserable. And when I drove past the campground with electricity, I gave up on it, too. It was reasonably crowded so there might not have been space, but even if there was, it was in unrelenting sun.

But it wasn’t just the sun — it was windy, with that kind of dry wind that pounds at your ears and makes you immediately want to lick your lips again and again and again. If I had been a pioneer woman in South Dakota, I would have been one of the ones driven crazy by the isolation and the wind. I would have been hallucinating monsters and terrified to leave the house in no time.

So I kept driving. I’d been reading signs for Wall Drugs all the way across South Dakota — either billboards are cheap in SD or Wall Drugs has a lot of money to spend on them. Maybe both. Anyway, it sounded fun in a seriously kitschy kind of way so instead of the Badlands, I figured I’d find a place to stay in Wall and explore the town. Except when we got there, late afternoon, it was still so hot that I would never have been willing to leave the dogs alone in the van.

New plan: back to the old plan.

Mount Rushmore!

I checked online and Mount Rushmore is open until 11, so I headed that way. Between stops to feed and walk the dogs and dinner for me, it was after 8 when I got there. It was… interesting. Smaller than I thought it would be, but also more impressive in a way. From a distance, the faces are very high up on the mountain.

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Look close. The gray hills in the distance have the faces of the presidents on them.

I thought it would be good to see it in the evening, less populated, and that it would make me feel patriotic on some level. Instead it felt a lot like I had secretly drifted into a universe where Disney had taken over America. There’s a ton of stuff around Mount Rushmore, all aimed at tourists. I could see having fun there, if I had lots of money to spend on silly things, a kid to enjoy looking at random stuff with, and didn’t have to worry about dogs/heat. As it was, though, I decided against spending $10 to park, and did a literal drive-by.

I then went back the way I came, driving about another 45 minutes, until I reached the highway and a Flying J truck-stop that I’d passed earlier. My third night in a row in a parking lot! But it was by far the worst — busy, crowded, with a casino nearby and a ton of trucks. People wandered by the van until late at night, and I was awake until after midnight, then up at 5:30.

When I woke up, I just got behind the wheel and started driving, thinking that we’d do the morning routine — clean clothes, coffee, dog walks, food — at the first rest stop. Reasonable plan, except somehow — sleepiness, I assume — I missed the first rest stop and it wasn’t until after 8 that we finally reached one. Poor Z had been staring at me earnestly, the way she tells me that it’s time to go for a walk, for about forty minutes by then.

And the bathroom floor was sopping wet. I had a fleeting second of wondering if a dog had given up on me but it was clean water. Clean water, unfortunately, coming from behind the toilet. Yeah, a pipe broke. I then spent all day — the first day of Year Two — trying to deal with it.

If it wasn’t so damn hot and if I hadn’t been driving all day and into the night for the past couple of days and if I hadn’t slept in parking lots for three nights in a row, I think I’d be dealing with it a lot worse than I am. I think I’d have the energy to be really pissed off about how many things have gone wrong with this tiny house on wheels and how Winnebago’s approved repair place wants $150 just for agreeing to see it, plus $175/hour to work on it. I feel like fury and frustration are reasonable responses, but I’m just not feeling them. It’s tedious, but it is what it is.

On the other hand, if I weren’t so tired, maybe I’d be making better choices for how to deal with it, too. But it definitely feels like Year Two has started with a whimper, not a bang. Or maybe that should be a splash and a sinking feeling? At any rate, before I discovered the water, I drove out of South Dakota, through a tiny (beautiful!) corner of Wyoming, and into Montana, so I am now hanging out in yet another parking lot, this one in Billings, Montana, hoping to fix some broken plumbing before moving on, and wishing T-Mobile had coverage in Montana, which apparently it does not.

Updated: no internet, so couldn’t post, and it is now Thursday morning. I’m still feeling fine about the plumbing problem, maybe better than fine. It’s annoying, but it is what it is. I found a place in Billings able to take a look at it this afternoon, so it might be resolved soon, and if not, I’ll use bottled water. The lovely Facebook Travato Owners group has given me lots of advice and help about trying to fix it myself, but it feels ambitious to try to remove the toilet on my own. In 90+ degree heat. In a random parking lot. Yeah, not optimistic about that. But hey, at least the leak sprays water into a room with a drain in the floor. And a plastic floor, too. It could be worse!

Caesar Creek State Park, Wilmington, OH

I have so very many things I want to blog about. So very many!

Random thoughts:

Highway rest stops must be like art galleries for dogs: so many interesting smells, such fascinating traces of other dogs and people, so rich with the canine version of color. And possibly over-stimulating? B has to stop every two inches for the first ten feet and then he’s all, “No more, no more, I must take a nap. Immediately.” And Z wants to smell ALL the smells, every last inch of grass. It does not make for fun walks.

Illinois has a seriously annoying toll system. Every ten miles or so, you have to pay another $1.50 or $2 or even $3. I’m sure it’s fine for the people who live there and whizz through on their e-passes, but at 5AM, only one cash booth was open at every stop and it always had a line of five or six cars in it. It was actually sort of stressful to be hunting for money in that line, knowing that the people behind me just wanted to get going.

Wisconsin has gorgeous wildflowers happening right now. Lovely and colorful, deep yellows, light blues, waves of lavender. Not literal lavender, I don’t think, but that color of light purple. I, of course, can’t tell you what any of them are, but I think some of the deep yellows were brown-eyed Susans.

Ending the random thoughts:

I spent the weekend at Caesar Creek State Park in Wilmington, OH. It is not a park that I will be returning to. It contains the dubious distinction of having the worst showers of any that I actually used within my first year of van life. Apart from that, I think it’s probably a really nice place to stay if you have big water toys to play with — motor boats, wave runners, that kind of thing. For me, it was just a vaguely pleasant, grassy parking lot near a place where my friend E was visiting for work. But the trails were too muddy to appreciate; the weather was either sweltering hot or raining; and the sites didn’t have water hook-ups, which was inconvenient — especially because the showers were not cool. Literally, in the case of one of them, which was jammed on a temp of “fill the entire bathroom with steam.”

Due to circumstances beyond our control, our time together was cut a little short and E was without a car, so instead of most of a weekend with easy and flexible transportation, we had 24 hours in Serenity. It was much fun nonetheless, but mostly revolved around food. And washing dishes. And then more food. And more washing dishes. The effort of washing dishes is much more noticeable when you’re carrying the water from a faucet several campsites away.

Anyway, Saturday night was grilled asparagus with lime, and sous vide steak, followed by spice cake with pecans. Sunday: blueberries, bananas, and chocolate granola; spicy sweet potato hash with poached eggs; arugula and mixed greens salad with cold shrimp, pea pods, radishes, cucumbers, avocado, and a spicy chili-garlic salad dressing.

The sous vide steak was good, but maybe not as good as I expected it to be — perhaps a fault of the cook, I will definitely try again. The asparagus was great; the hash was yum; and the spicy salad dressing was delicious. I’m going to make an appetizer of a radish slice, topped with a thin slice of avocado, a cold shrimp, and a drizzle of chili garlic sauce, because those bites of salad were so very, very good. And I do wonder why the world doesn’t contain more spicy salad dressings? It really worked so well with all the cold crunchy things, i.e. the pea pods and radishes and shrimp.

Anyway, due to said circumstances, I wound up giving E a ride to her hotel around 6 Sunday evening. Of course, moving Serenity means packing up and because the rain had been on and off, but it was temporarily dry, I decided to pack everything up rather than risk it getting wet again. But then on the drive I realized that I was headed 35 minutes west of the campground. Did it really make sense to go east again, to spend the night at Caesar Creek? My plan had been to leave early this morning, starting at 8 or so, and drive as long as I could last. Destination, the Badlands of South Dakota, 18 hours away.

I worried at the thought for most of the drive, then while E went into Target to pick up some stuff she needed, I consulted my map. And after I dropped her off at her hotel, I started driving.

Last night — the second-to-last night of Year One in Serenity, I slept at a Flying J gas station in Indiana, adding one more state to my total — 19 states, 74 places, and 3 parking lots.

Tonight — the very last night of Year One in Serenity, I will either be sleeping in Minnesota or South Dakota, adding another state to the total. I suspect it’s going to be in Minnesota, because instead of driving, I’m sitting in a highway rest stop on the Wisconsin – Minnesota border, writing a blog post. It would take me 4.5 hours or so to get across Minnesota, I think, and given that I started driving at 5, I think I’m probably not going to make it that far. My goal, though, is to get the total driving time to Mount Rushmore to be under 6 hours. And I’m not quite sure, but I think it might be perfectly do-able. Which would mean tomorrow, on the actual anniversary of the day I closed on my house and started driving north, I’ll finally be at one of the destinations I was aiming for. And it only took a year!

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The Mississippi River, as seen from Minnesota

Sous vide spicy sockeye salmon

I was texting a friend recently, making plans to meet up with her in August to go camping together, and she wrote, “I can practice my cast iron pot campfire skills.”

I responded, “Or we can use my perfectly good propane stove. Or my microwave.”

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Or my InstaPot.[image error]

Or, now, my new favorite toy, my sous vide precision cooker.[image error]

And yes, I do think it’s a little crazy that I live in a van and carry more cooking devices than outlets to power them. (Not literally true, by the way, Serenity has plenty of outlets!) But more cooking devices than surface areas to put them, maybe? Certainly more kitchen stuff than room to store it all: over the past year, the kitchen and pantry have gradually crept from the obvious space — the compartments over the stove and the drawers under the microwave — to take up almost the entire wall of compartments on the driver’s side, plus some room under the bed, plus some room in the space over the cab, plus some floor space, too.

No regrets, though. Last night’s dinner was a spicy wild sockeye salmon over brown rice with a salad of arugula, avocado, fresh peas, radish, and cucumber with balsamic.

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Not the greatest picture, but it was dark and rainy, so the light wasn’t great.

The salmon was sous vide cooked at 115 for 30 minutes, which felt a little underdone to me, but tasted incredible. When I was done, I used the warm water from the sous vide pan — completely clean, since the food was cooked in a ziplock bag — to wash the dishes. This morning (and last night, too) there was no smell of fish in the van, despite the fact that rain meant that I’d had to keep the van closed up during the night. YAY!

The recipe I read from the Anova app (where I got the timing and temp) said not to use acidic or chunky ingredients, because they would damage the shape and texture of the fish. I read that and promptly ignored it, putting about a tablespoon of chili garlic sauce into the bag with the fish. It was not as pretty as it might have been if I’d gone with the suggested dill, but wow, it tasted great. Sous vide cooking is supposed to infuse the food with flavor and yeah, it works.

The salmon was on sale at CostCo, which means I’ll be having lots more opportunities to practice my sous vide cooking skills this week, but that’s not a problem. I’m writing this at 9:20 AM and already looking forward to my lunch leftovers. And fortunately, salmon is thin enough to easily fit into Serenity’s freezer.

I do look at that picture and think, “you’re eating sockeye salmon and arugula, no wonder your grocery budget is out of control.” But the salmon cost about $3.50/serving, the arugula probably .50, the other ingredients in total maybe $1.50/serving, which all adds up to a cheaper meal than a Chipotle burrito or a Big Mac meal at McDonald’s. (I had to google the latter — it’s been so long!)

In other news, I’m in Ohio. It’s rainy. I’m starting to wonder if life in Florida and California has just really skewed my perceptions of how often it’s supposed to rain. Maybe the rest of the world really does have rain every day? Campgrounds in PA and OH don’t seem to include water hook-ups with their electric sites — maybe that’s because they think you can just stick a bucket outside and have it fill up overnight? But the grass is very green and pretty, and it’s so hot that the rain feels nice.

Lesson learned this morning, though: if you’re enjoying walking in the rain with the hood of your jacket down, perhaps roll the hood up or tuck it inside the coat to prevent it from filling with water? I wouldn’t call it an unpleasant surprise, exactly, but when I decided I’d had enough of the rain on my head and pulled my hood up, I splashed myself with all the water that had filled the hood while it was down. Ha.

Last night I reread everything I’d written on Grace so far and decided it was all an incoherent mess. Before I threw the whole thing away, though, I decided that maybe I was just tired. Reread it this morning and yep, I was just tired. Whew. For a lot of reasons, what I should really be doing right now is finding myself a place to sit and write without any distractions at all — no family or friends to visit, no beaches to roam, no interesting meals to cook. Actually, “a lot of reasons” boils down to “finances.”

But I’m not going to. The aforementioned friend is a single parent with a real job, and limited time. I’ve got a chance to go camping with her and I’m going to take it. Which means I’m about to embark on an epic cross-country drive to get to Seattle by early August. I might be making poor life choices. But when I run out of savings, maybe I can find a job as a cook. Although if I did that, I suppose I’d have to care about whether the salmon looked as pretty as it would with dill…

Serenity’s First Year in Numbers

In 18 states and two territories (one American and one British), I stayed in 73 different places:

25 state parks

13 driveways

12 Thousand Trails campgrounds

4 independent campgrounds

4 Passport America campgrounds

2 KOA campgrounds

2 Army Corps of Engineers campgrounds

2 parking lots

2 hotels

2 houses

1 Lower Colorado River Authority Park

1 USDA Forest Service campground

1 county park

1 Harvest Hosts site

… and one sailboat

I definitely got my money’s worth from my Thousand Trails membership. I think my total spent is currently about $550 for about 80 days, so roughly $7/night. But I’m not going to be renewing it when it expires next year: those campgrounds seem like good places for families with small kids and people who are looking for stable bases for extended periods, but that’s not how I want to travel or live.

My KOA membership was not worth the money. Again, great for families with kids and I definitely enjoyed my really nice showers at the KOA in Bellefonte, PA, but I don’t need the amenities they offer and even with the reduced membership rate, they were some of the most expensive places I stayed.

My one night at a Harvest Host site was lovely and I remember it fondly. But I don’t tend to want to drop in to places for a single night. If that changes in the future, I might think about trying out Harvest Hosts again, but for the moment, I’ll let that membership lapse.

Passport America costs around $45/year and I bought a three-year membership, so I’ve got plenty of time for it to pay off. In fact, the park at which I’m currently staying is both a state park and a Passport America park, and I saved $14 on an upcoming night’s stay because of my PA membership, so yay. But I’ve got a pretty long way to go before that membership pays for itself and two of the parks on the PA list were among my least favorite of the places I’ve stayed so I don’t seek out the PA parks. I should check out more of them, though, because it’s a nice discount when the park is okay.

Generally speaking, the only worthwhile memberships for me were the state parks. I’ve got a Texas State Park pass and a Georgia State Park pass and they were very much worth the money, might even be more so, since I’ve got months left on both. Live and learn, right?

I can’t believe I haven’t stayed in a single national park — what kind of camper am I??? — but they’re typically more restrictive about dogs than state parks, and I’ve really quite enjoyed discovering the state parks. Still, that might be a goal for Year Two.

KOA Bellefonte, PA

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I am not going to start posting pictures of bathrooms, but the KOA I’m staying at has the nicest bathrooms of any campground I have ever seen. Better even than a lot of hotels I’ve stayed at. Each bathroom is an individual room, not a stall, with good water pressure and plenty of hot water. And they’re gender neutral, which makes so much sense to me. In fact, now that I’m writing about it, I sort of want to go take another shower, just to take advantage.

If I had kids with me, I’d also want to take advantage of the pool, the water play area, the playground, the in-ground trampoline-like thing, the sandbox, the mineral mining play station, and maybe even the volleyball court.

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The colorful posts in the background spray water during the day.

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You buy a bag of dirt at the camp store and then filter it using the gold mining pans and water. No promise of gold, but the dirt contains colorful rocks and fossils.

Since I have no kids with me… well, if there were less expensive campground options that were equally close to my aunt and uncle’s place, I’d probably go for one of them. But this is a very nice campground, and I have a great campsite. If I had a big vehicle, I’d be annoyed by how un-level my site is — it’s got a fair amount of slope — but it works fine for Serenity. And it’s tucked into a nice, private back corner, so dark that last night while I was falling asleep, I was counting stars (lots of them) and watching fireflies.

Bald Eagle State Park

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Sunrise over the lake

I spent one night at Bald Eagle State Park, and I would happily have stayed there longer. Good walks, good sites, and a great feel to it. It feels very Californian of me to say that it just had good energy, but it did. The campground was almost full, but it didn’t feel crowded, it felt happy. I could smell the smoke from people’s campfires at dawn, because people were really camping there. It wasn’t a parking lot, it was a vacation.

I did very little there: rolled in around 3PM on a day hot enough that I needed to run the AC for the dogs, so I took a couple nice low-energy walks in late afternoon and evening, then a longer walk at dawn the next morning, worked on Grace, then headed out by 10AM to visit my aunt and uncle.

My aunt and I had a nice day wandering around State College, visiting the ArtsFest and the BookFest and the arboretum. (Best part: the arboretum, it’s the perfect time of year to admire plants, and I should have taken more pictures!) I’ll be here in their driveway for a couple of days, with ambitious plans to bake granola, see how my Amazon Prime Day toy[image error] works, and keep working on Grace. And, of course, have fun spending time with relatives I don’t see nearly often enough!