Travelin' light

Most people don't quite get it. Or they sort of do, but after the initial intrigue and you tell them we didn't shower for seven days, they tend to back off a bit.

We piled a bunch of camping gear in the back of Stacey's Pathfinder and just took off. One night we camped in the backcountry of a national park, another night we stayed at a sanctioned campsite by the Colorado River, and all the other nights we just found places along the side of the road. We'd look for a dirt road that headed into the desert, and just drive down it.

One morning I was taking down the tent, looked up, and saw two Japanese tourists walking through our tent site. I guess they saw the car parked along the road and figured there was something there to look at, because before I had the tent down two RVs pulled up, too. Trust me, there was nothing there but the same canyon rim they had been following for miles, and kind of a dirty, grouchy camper.

When you pare your life down to the bare essentials, things can open up for you. When I got back to work, I listened to this woman go on about how she was without power for a couple of hours. You couldn't live your life, she said. She wanted to play music...couldn't do that. Wanted to use the microwave...couldn't do that. Sue and I basically lived on rice, beans, and tuna. And gorp. We ate twice in restaurants, but other than that it was camp food. Stacey and Toby lived a little higher off the hog so we scrounged a bit off them, but it was still pretty sparse. Of course there was lots of beer and wine; it was a road trip after all.

The reason I love living like that is the same reason I like to backpack. No one is going to do anything for you. You have to do it yourself. It forces you to really think about what's important, from corkscrews to books. And just like Appalachian Trail through-hikers who all start out with a lot of gear and quickly start to shed it on the trail, you end up coming back with less than you started, and in this consumer-oriented world, that's a good thing. It's a different thing, anyway.

And more and more I'm shedding things in my life. Finding out that I really didn't need this or that, even this person or that person, because it or they just weren't right for my life and I had been carrying them around for quite awhile.

Lighten the load. Travel light.