Monday, November 19, 2007
< previous day | archives | next day >
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
Skepticism is Helpful
If you want to notice things that seem wrong, you'll find a degree of skepticism helpful. I take it as an axiom that we're only achieving 1% of what we could. This helps counteract the rule that gets beaten into our heads as children: that things are the way they are because that is how things have to be. For example, everyone I've talked to while writing this essay felt the same about English classes-- that the whole process seemed pointless. But none of us had the balls at the time to hypothesize that it was, in fact, all a mistake. We all thought there was just something we weren't getting.
The Age of the Essay, Paul Graham, September 2004