Monday, November 19, 2007

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

Crayfish Chimney

Late one afternoon I sat upon my camera case beside the path where it wound through the darkest part of the woods, down near the pond, and watched a crayfish building his "chimney," the land entrance to his underwater tunnel. He had just started to work above the ground when I first arrived. He came up through the moist black earth, carrying a ball of it between his two enormous fighting claws. Using the claws as hands, he spread the soil around the hole to form the base of the chimney. He then backed down the hole and after several minutes came up with another armful.

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