On the road at last
I finally made it out of the driveway and onto the road about 4:00 pm, at that point with the modest goal of spending my first night at the Wal-Mart parking lot in Oneonta NY. This trip will be my first real experience with using Wal-Mart and other parking lots as a way to keep my travel budget in modest territory. I'll write a review of my experiences after I get a few under my belt.
Getting it all together
It's amazing how long it can take to get everything in order for a six month trip, especially a winter one. In addition to the packing of the RV there is ones house to get settled in for a largely unattended winter where the threat of a power failure or furnace failure is all too real. Frozen and ruptured pipes, or the odd frozen and burst jar of whatever could make a real mess of things.
Night camp
Wal-Mart Parking Lot in Oneonta NY
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Oneonta NY
Wal-Mart Supercenter Store #2262, 5054 State Hwy 23, Oneonta, NY 13820 - (607) 431-9557
- Good level parking
- Verizon cell phone service- Very good signal
- Verizon EVDO Broadband service - Very good signal
- Locate this Walmart on my Night Camps map
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- Check the weather here
It was the Crickets
Now then: it isn't so much that one way of dying beats another, though that certainly is the case, but rather that when you KNOW the jig could be up any second or any decade -- it's the awareness that's important -- that just might make a difference. I'm like everybody else, I have these moments and then forget, lapsing back into "immortality." But there was a thing that happened in my back yard maybe 18 months before we split from Maryland that hit me as hard as seeing their president drop dead on stage must have hit those graduating seniors.
It was the crickets. I'd gone outside one warm fall evening to shut the garage door and suddenly realized I couldn't hear the crickets! No wait, I could, but only if I turned my head a certain way. Oh God, oh no: I had almost no high-frequency hearing in my right ear, or was it my left? That doesn't matter. The point is, a part of me had shut down permanently. No, it hadn't happened suddenly, but I had finally noticed, and that was hard to take. I'd never again hear crickets like I once had. Never! I walked back to the house in tears. All right, I'm sensitive. But I understood at once what all this meant.