Just one more night!

We find ourselves in our familiar southwestern desert, greener than I expected, rain--good. This rich, beautiful landscape of mesquite bushes imitating short trees, sage brush, and creosote bushes with a backdrop of rugged rocky mountains is my home. I love it! Our trip is coming to an end. We decided

Another love of mine

What I like most about my Casita are those with whom I share it.
Okay, I stole the lead-in quote. It should be home, and not Casita.  And to make it worse, I  don't know who to give credit to, only that it fits. Our Casita crew (two of the 2-legged type and  two of the 4-legged variety, a big one and small one) is top notch. We've been on the road now for over 60 days. All of us have honed that Casita Dance down to pretty smooth set of transactions of avoidance, space and tasks. All in all, it's a great crew that brings laughter and smiles to the team.

But this note is about another Love of mine, Tara, our Casita. Oh come, I bet a lot of you out there

Birds of a Feather

I find it very curious the almost instant bond created by commonness. 

I can remember very clearly my first few hours of hours after arriving at Marine Corps boot camp. We had our heads shaved, we were relieved of our "civilian" clothing and handed boots, olive green pants and a yellow sweatshirt. In other words we had been stripped of our old identity (they were going to build us a brand new one, yeah sure!).  But standing there, everyone having the same dorky bald canary look, we talked and the first groups that

Palm Springs exploration

Kamala and I just got back from a two week "expedition" to the wilds of Palm Springs.

We had a couple of friends from El Paso, who we ride tandems with at times, meet us there. We rode bikes in the morning and saw movies at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, at night. I'd like to tell you that the experience sucked. That we had a major problem with the truck on the road and only made it because of my skill of using a paper clip to clean fuel jets in the injector system, or that we were victims of a bike jacking in broad daylight by a couple of heavily armed senior citizens. Or that I suffered food poisoning by eating in one of those trendy, overpriced restaurants. Or that a major cold front came through ruining our riding and stranding us in the trailer and we only survived by chewing on the leather soles of our shoes. I'd like to tell you some neat story like that 'cause it would sound so much more exciting than we the truth, which is we had a completely trouble free time, riding every day in absolutely beautiful weather, enjoying good company, eating delicious food and watching interesting movies each night.

Palm Springs is just over that little hump of mountains that seem to stop a lot of moisture from the coast from pushing into the area. It is in a desert! Shhhh, they don't know that. If you get out of town it's dry, dry, dry, probably a little more desert than home and in the summer they get up there in the 100 + teens. But in the town it's all green, green lawns, green golf courses (a lot of them) and all those gated communities have huge fountains of flowing water. The sidewalks, curb and median areas are like a flourishing garden of bougainvilleas, roses, carpets of pansies, poppies, and all kinds of multicolored fall flowers abound. There are orange trees, lemon trees, various other citrus trees,plush green grass and, of course, hundreds of tall, majesticdate palms. It is, indeed, a beautiful sight in which we indulged our senses even as we recognized the disgustingly opulent waste of natural resources in the name of the god of luxury. Okay, okay, call us hypocrites. We enjoyed the experience, slept well at night and never once were we motivated to paint a big sign about condemning the waste of resources as sinful (which, of course, it was, but we'll let Mother Nature hand out that punishment when they run out of water probably sooner than later.).

If I was to identify the low point of the whole experience it would have to be the movie, TRANSMISSION, an Hungarian film which envisioned a world without TV or Computer monitors.

This very, very, very slow movie left me with memories of In-Service meetings back at good ole EPISD. My bones ached; it was so bad. However, out of 9 movies only one terrible movie, and one that was bad because I couldn't understand the language (it was an English movie). All the rest were okay with about 3 good ones and 2 great ones: The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo and Bride Flight. Not bad. I had anticipated a bit of negativity rising up when I was informed that we would be standing in long lines, up to an hour, for each movie. But that Marine Corp training kicked in. I knew that one day all those hours standing in line in the Corp would one day pay off, and it did. Actually, what really made them bearable was that everyone was so damn friendly. There was a social tie that we "film festival aficionados" had in common so the conversation was lively. If you saw the same person at another movie, well, you were old friends.

Our tandem riding friends actually took a day off from riding because, as the stoker put it, "All these time tables and meeting dates are too much like a job." I didn't see it quite that way, but each day was full.

What have we been doing?

Traveling in tandem in a more traditional mode: a truck pulling our little '72 pop-up trailer (tandem packed--of course!).

After 3 days in Washington D.C. we feel the weight of seriousness and, dare I say, even piety, of all these somber memorials and institutions. We feel uniquely blessed (along with several thousand other people on any given day) to have been able to see it. I enjoyed it, I did, but 3 days was about all we could take. Obviously there were many more things to see and do, but we tasted the flavor of the whole thing.
Our first trip to Capitol Hill was by bicycle. We stayed at a National Park only about 12 miles from the Capitol Mall so the distance to the "sacred ground" was not too far (there and back and around-about 33 miles) While it was nice to see all those places that I've heard about and seen in the movies, it was the streets of D.C. that were memorial. First it was just the trying to figure out where we were and secondly, the adrenialine rush of riding in crazy traffic, but even more it was the smell and sights of the neighborhoods and streets that provided more of a "Wow" factor than all the big buildings and statues of dead people.
Sitting on a bench on the Capitol Mall, watching a really diverse segment of people walk by, I was once again struck by the how much humans LOVE symbols. From giant edifices, to names on walls, to uniforms, to pagents, we really love the "dressings" as much, maybe more, than we do the substance. I know that I must fall prey to the majestic lure of symbols myself, but a good portion of humanity seem to have their heads stuck so far up their ass that they never even really see the difference and that's got to make life simpler and grander for them. God bless America, apple pie, and Nike.
Kamala and I are also struck with how much more one sees from a bicycle seat than a car seat. We are moving too fast, most of our pictures are taken out the car window and, of course, the best shots are missed. Interstates, since we hit Lousiania have been huge corridores of trees which cut out most culture with the exception of large billboards every now and then. You may get there faster, but you sure as hell miss a lot. Therefore, while we do at time take to the freeway, most of our travels have been on back roads. That gives us a bit more of the cultural flavor, but America is experiencing the homoginazation of it's local culture by all the Walmarts, Pizza Huts, Wendy's, etc . . .

On an earlier note in the trip:

God's Will

The fickle finger of fate. Sometime during one's early years, providing one's intelligence is slightly above the amoeba level, each of us rubs into that nice little paradox of freewill and predetermination. Some people ask the right question of their learned elders, receive a convincing answer and tuck the question away and should it ever arise again they just parrot the correct answer and allow any built up stress that it might have caused to just dissipate. The key to this approach is just don't think about it. God Bless 'em. Most of us wrestle with it 'til we are completely frustrated, give up as a lost cause, an unanswerable question or, like I'm beginning to see, answer the question according to the situation and whatever makes you feel best. That being said, God chose our path across Texas. Yep! Well not all of it, but a lot of it. You see we (freewill) decided that the first leg of our little jaunt would be to Kermit to visit with Kamala's sister and family. So on to Kermit it was, but on the way we look out the window on our truck's windshield and read, backwards, of course, 08 - 11. This means that our safety sticker was due in November of last year. Now God or the Spirit of Texas takes over. We now know that we are doing something illegal and therefore it is only a matter of time before we get busted. Now, of course, if we had not noticed the expiration date we would be innocent and could drive all around this big state without getting caught like we did last Christmas. So now we are forced to stay in Kermit an extra day to get a safety sticker. We arrive at the inspection place early on a Monday morning, but he has run out of stickers and won't have any until the UPS man delivers them around noon. Unrelated factor in delay? I think not. It's God wanting us to stick around. Probably saving us from some great traffic disaster by keeping is off the highway for the morning. So feeling relieved for missing such a calamity we blow off the morning and return at 1 o'clock, but when he sees that we are from El Paso he informs us that we need to have an emissions check that can be obtained in only the higher populated counties of the state and the nearest one is El Paso, now 250 miles away.It's decision time. Do we proceed as outlaws to a big city, which we usually try to avoid, make a run for the Oklahoma-Texas border? We choose to alter our path from slanting south across Texas to going straight east for Dallas/Fort Worth. And since we didn't get stopped and we did see some purty scenery, we must have chosen right for God to smile on us like that. But there was still one more catch. When we got to Weatherford in the same county as Fort Worth we stopped at an inspection station and, "Yes, we do stickers, but No, we can't do yours because it's a 91 model and vehicles that old have to be set on one of those thingamyjigs that you set the tires on and speed up to 30 miles an hour." Well we felt bad but the old man, who must have been an angel in disguise, sent us to a place where the truck passed with flying colors. We got our sticker and we were now legal and had gone a long way off of our original route all due to God, a few angels, and our own freewill and an UPS man that I'm still not sure about.

Next attached is a notice on the washing machine that we saw while doing our clothes in a Laundromat in Mississippi. NO PUTTING PEOPLE IN THE MACHINE. Now that's just one more thing that is sucking the joy out of life. Actually I had not thought of stuffing some little person in one of those twirlly washing machines with the window until they told me I couldn't, but now I want to and I want to even more because I know that someone else must have beat me to it for them to have put the warning label on the machine.