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
Sweet, Rich Hickory Milk
Hickory was another favorite. Rambling through the Southeast in the 1770s, the naturalist William Bartram observed Creek families storing a hundred bushels of hickory nuts at a time. "They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid" to make a thick milk, "as sweet as fresh cream, an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially hominy and corncakes." Years ago a friend and I were served hickory milk in rural Georgia by an eccentric backwoods artist named St. EOM who claimed Creek descent. Despite the unsanitary presentation, the milk was ambrosial - fragrantly nutty, delightfully heavy on the tongue, unlike anything I had encountered before.