Monday, November 19, 2007
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Pilings, , Demopolis Lake AL, December 12, 2007
Slowly, slowly moving southward
I'm trying to keep a balance between quickly pushing south and taking my time to keep my expenses under control. It would be really easy to spend a hundred dollars a day or more on fuel alone. I can either drive long days and make camp later for long periods or do as I am doing now, and travel fewer miles per day. At this point I don't have enough experience to know which might prove the best approach. My traveling style in the past has involved long, hard days, covering lots of miles. Those trips were generally 4 to 6 weeks long and if I wanted to spend any time at all in the southwest I had to get a move on. This trip is a first for me. I have 6 months to cover the 7,000 or so miles I've budgeted for this trip. If I put half those miles on in the first month I'll be sitting somewhere for 4 months with no miles in the budget to even go into town for groceries. That would certainly lead my getting to too restless for my budget. We'll just have to see how this all plays out, but I have a fear of putting too many miles on and, at the high price of fuel, completely destroying my budget. Then again, isn't the whole idea of this adventure to slow down and smell the roses, as it were?
Night camp
Wal-Mart Supercenter in Clarksburg WV
Wal-Mart Supercenter Store #1544, 550 Emily Dr, Clarksburg, WV 26301 - (304) 622-1954
- Good level parking
- Verizon cell phone service- good signal
- Verizon EVDO Broadband service - none but 1x dialup speed is reasonable
- Locate this Walmart on my Night Camps map
- Find other Wal-Marts in the area
- Check the weather here
Five Trillion Spiders
Spiders begin their hunting with a few handicaps. They're often smaller and weaker than their prey, and they have no wings to give chase in the air. Some species extend their legs by hydraulic pressure, using the same liquid that carries oxygen from their lungs, so they have a hard time running and breathing at the same time. Even their poison may be no match for their victim's: a crab spider's bite is to a honeybee's sting as "an air-gun compared with an elephant rifle," John Crompton wrote. Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.
From Spider Woman by Burkhard Bilger, The New Yorker magazine, March 5, 2007, page 69