Cosmo and I settled in at our spot in Prior Flats, just about 90 miles south of Casper, WY. There are only two other campers here and both are leaving today or tomorrow. I’m fine with that. Our spot has both full sun almost all day long which is not the best for keeping cool, but it sure keeps our solar system charged, and a huge “back yard” affording us lots of privacy in back of the van. There were more private spots, but they were all under a canopy of aspens, so I opted for electricity over privacy. Besides, with only two other campers in the entire campground, privacy really was not an issue.
I’ve spent a lot of time outside this week. It’s in the upper 80’s to low 90’s and not very pleasant to sit in the van during the day. Cosmo and I went out under the aspens and it was quite pleasant (except for bugs sometimes) most of the day. Cosmo looked for squirrels in the trees and I listened to one of my audible books. We walked about 3 or 4 times a day. The area was too beautiful not to get up out of our spot and explore a bit.
One night three motorcycles pulled in. When Cosmo and I went for our evening walk, we met them at a campsite on the other side of our loop. They were three men, all with PhD’s in something pertaining to zoology. One worked for the government, doing something with fish. They were all very nice, gave Cosmo jerky and I really enjoyed our chat. I visited them again the next morning. They all meet up at least once a year and go on a major motorcycle adventure. They were on such an adventure this week and left shortly after I talked to them to continue their ride. I enjoyed my brief time chatting with them.
As nice as my surroundings are, I am in techno hell this week. My laptop continues to give me major angst. Weeks ago I spilled water on the keyboard. I found a work around by getting a remote Wi-Fi Keyboard. That worked fine for a while, and then the laptop keyboard started acting up and over-riding the remote keyboard, typing a long string of bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb’s whenever I tried typing anything. I finally pulled the “B” key completely off the laptop and that seemed to end the laptop from typing without my permission. (or WITH my permission for that matter). All was well, if a bit awkward. Then, last night, it would not recognize the charger. My laptop was going dead with no way to charge it. I have a Surface Laptop, so the screen detaches to become a tablet. I detached it and hooked the charger up to the charging cord. It would charge. Yay! BUT… everything I wanted/needed to work on was contained in the keyboard section, so my new “tablet” could not access anything. I could still get on the internet, and I could use some of my programs, but I could not access any files, including this one. And the tablet works much differently than the laptop does when attached to the keyboard, so I feel like I’m living in an alternate technical universe.
My website, several weeks ago, was hacked and malware was placed on it. I contacted the company that hosts my website and they agreed to fix it, remove the malicious code and restore it back to normal for a fee of $299. After much negotiating, they wouldn’t budge, so I paid the ransom. The site came back up in minutes, but with two pages not working correctly. I’ve been in an ongoing battle with them ever since. I contacted them again the next morning by chat, and someone obviously from India, spent 2 hours trying to make the repairs. Nothing he did worked. He asked if he could change my blog page and I told him he could do anything that would repair my website. He made changes that caused most of the pages, including two years of blog posts to disappear. He said he could restore it for $25. I refused. I asked to talk to a supervisor and he put me on hold for 10 minutes and came back and said none were available. He said he would escalate it up to the admin level and someone would get back to me within 24 hours. My website just gets worse and worse, going from not quite right to totally non-functional. My laptop seems to be doing the same thing. I have gone from being George Jetson to being Fred Flintstone overnight. It caused me great stress, but there seems nothing I can do to fix it. So I made some Chinese noodles with broccoli and Brussel sprouts, and sat outside and enjoyed lunch.
It has been in the lower 90’s most days. I guess the entire country is in a heatwave. I’ve been nearly 8000 feet up and it is often windy. The airflow makes the van much more tolerable. The two big rigs that were with me for most of my stay left this. The three motorcycle guys also left soon afterwards. I was totally alone in the campsite. So peaceful, but also very surreal to be the only one in a campsite with about 25 spots. I could see the main “road” coming in from the highway, about 10 miles away. Several times a day I spot a truck coming or going from one of the neighboring ranches.
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On what I thought would be my last day before leaving Prior Flats, I decided to have one of my mini-showers. I put my 2-liter bottle of water out in the sun to warm. By early afternoon, it was quite hot. There were still no other humans in the campground, or for miles around as best as I could tell. I tied up my hair on top of my head, moved to the grass behind the van and put my mini shower head on the bottle of water. I took off my gym shorts and stood in the full sun and showered. I had a half bar of homemade patchouli soap I had bought when I was in Long Beach, CA. The scent blended well with the towering pines and aspens surrounding me. As I finished up and put my gym shorts back on, I saw a couple motorcycles stopping at the turn-off to the campground. I wondered if they were coming to camp here and if not, why had they stopped. The answer soon became obvious as one more, and then another motorcycle pulled up and stopped. They were waiting for the rest of their group. In total, about a dozen motorcycles straggled in, all parking at the beginning of the turn-off to Prior Flats, which was about a mile from the actual campground. I wondered if they would come camp here. I wondered if I WANTED them to come camp here. It might have been nice to have some company over on the other loop, to check in with, to chat with and then to come back to my remote spot alone. On the other hand, there were about a dozen or more of them and one of me. If they decided to come to the campground, it might be a bit overwhelming. They stayed at the turnoff to the road leading to the campground for about half an hour. They were too far away for me to tell what they were doing. Then they left. They continued on the road they came in on, past the campground road, and on to whatever lies beyond. I was once again totally alone.
That night, my friend Angie called me. I’d worked with Angie at a photo lab in Los Angeles in the early ‘80’s and we’ve remained friends ever since. She has always been the creative type and knowing I was at my wit’s end, she called to see if she could help with my website issues. I’ll spare you the gory details, but she did way more than help. She spent close to 2 hours on the phone with me, talking me through the WordPress program, changing themes, deleting things that could be causing problems, adjusting settings. I would have been delighted if she just got my blog back for me. After all, that is the main purpose of the website: to keep an up to date blog of my travels for family, friends and even strangers I meet on the road to see where I am, and what’s going on in my life. But Angie went far beyond that. She talked me through getting the website back to its original form. For weeks it had gone from being completely down, to displaying a warning that it was a known phishing site trying to scam those who visited, to pages (including every one of my hundreds of blog posts) going missing, to random pages showing up with code being displayed making the entire site unreadable. But, it’s back, no thanks to the hosting company who I’d spent hours on the phone and in “live chat” trying to obtain even a modicum of help. So thank you Angie. You have lifted a HUGE burden from my shoulders.
I’m still struggling with my broken laptop, but for the time being, have managed to find a work-around that is far from ideal, but is keeping me able to answer e-mails and, type this missive.
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After a week at Prior Flats, I moved again, heading about 2 hours west. I went to a BLM campsite. It has a pit toilet, and 5 designated campsites, each with a firepit and a picnic table, much like the last BLM land I was on. It is adjacent to a river, though I am not sure which one.
My internet is sporadic, and when it’s working it doesn’t seem to have enough juice to pull up maps. It’s a nice river; not too wide, not too deep, but also not too cold, so Cosmo and I got in and cooled off and I took my swim trunks off and took a bath while I was in. We were the only ones in the whole camp, and I couldn’t see any people when I looked up and down the river. Later in the day, a van pulled in. They circled the campground twice before deciding on a spot at the opposite end from me. It looked like a family with young kids, though from such a distance it was hard to tell. By evening walk time, the campground was full, meaning all 5 sites were occupied. “Full” hardly seems accurate, because the campground is quite large and the sites are spaced far apart. I’m at the east end, separated even more than most of the other sites. As we walked, I couldn’t help but marvel at the different kinds of people I encountered. The family I mentioned above were in an old van; not a camper van with a high top, just a van used for transporting their many kids. The one I assumed to be the father was much older than I initially thought, but probably only in his late 30’s or early 40’s. The mother was carrying a baby, too young to walk yet. There were at least 4 other kids, the oldest in his late teens. By dress and mannerisms, I’d guess them to be a home schooling family, probably some extreme religious sect. There was also a family in a “Cruise America” rental Class C RV. Normally, I judge these types as “wannabe Van Lifers” but I spoke to the woman a little bit and this was a way their family could take a vacation, see some National Parks, and get away from the city. She was extremely nice and engaging. Further around the loop was a new van, with logos and websites and Facebook link printed on the side letting everyone know they were “Influencers.” He was flying his drone around the campground and she was running amok with her GoPro. These are the kind of people who introduced me to van life on YouTube a couple years ago, so I shouldn’t be too harsh on them, but I’ve come to realize that most of the people traveling and trying to make a living on their YouTube videos are complete phonies. They don’t really interact with other campers, except in a condescending way. They have a celebrity air about them, as if they were Ryan Reynolds, or Meryl Streep. Wordlessly, they make it clear that us “Lesser People” are lucky to have such celebrities in our midst. They come into camp late, run roughshod over the landscape and other people’s sites taking video (often doing several “takes” to be sure they can edit the footage into anything they want it to be later on, and are gone early in the morning. I used to be enamored by them when I’d meet them in a campsite or on BLM land. Now I just find them annoying.
It cooled off nicely at night and Cosmo and I went to bed right after dark. I slept better than I’ve slept in weeks, and I’ve been sleeping pretty good for many months now. Maybe it’s the altitude? Maybe the extreme quiet at night? Maybe just the fresh mountain air and the amount of walking I do during the day? Whatever it is, I’m always grateful for a good night’s sleep. On our way in yesterday, I stopped in a tiny town for gas, water and groceries. The grocery store had one other customer besides me and she was yacking it up with the clerk in the meat aisle. The shelves were low enough that you could see the entire store from any point. It was just a notch above gas-station-convenience-store, and the prices were even higher than every other grocery store I’ve been to in the past month, but they had enough of what I needed so that I could stock up enough for my next place and probably have enough food to last me a week or more. I got fresh strawberries and made a smoothie, and some more broccoli. Broccoli lasts long in the fridge, and can be added into almost anything, making me feel less guilty about eating pasta and some cheese concoction I make up, if it is speckled with lots of broccoli florets. I also got staples like canned beans, brown rice, and even found a can of vegetarian chili. Some homemade peanut butter cookies rounded out my menu.
By morning, everyone was packing up and leaving. That was fine by me. I like being alone by the river. It appears that I’m the only one staying more than a night. Most come in at sunset and move on to their next destination shortly after sunrise. So far, our days are spent alone, alternating between our picnic table (Cosmo under it in the shade) and the river. It has been hot, so the river offers welcome relief from the heat, and it is warm enough that I can wash up in it every afternoon.
Lessons from the Road: There was one day this week that I came close to losing the last vestiges of my grip on reality. My laptop was not working, my website was gone. I couldn’t log into my website because some helpful technician had inadvertently changed or deleted my password. I called tech support and they wanted me to get on my computer so they could guide me through the process of fixing things. My computer was not working enough for me to do so. I was despondent. I decided to take a break and make lunch. My propane stove would not come on. After a moment of panic I realized that I’d inadvertently turned off the coach battery (that keeps my solenoid open so that the propane will flow) instead of turning off my water pump. When I turned it back on, all was well with the stove, but I had to re-light the pilot on my propane fridge, and realized the temperature was high and food could be about to spoil. I turned my solar power from DC to AC, ran the fridge on solar power for a bit to get the temp down and then re-lit and got it running again on propane. I think the whole process of everything going sideways, combined with being totally alone in a massive campground was just too much for me to process at that moment. The temperature outside was 95, the temperature inside the van was much higher, and so Cosmo and I sat outside in the shade. I just felt like one of those TV shows where people are left out in the wilderness with nothing and had to figure out how to survive. Of course, I had way more than nothing. I still had a stove, fridge, microwave, fans, showers—both indoor and outdoor, and even an air conditioning unit that I could run if I started my onboard generator. I think it was just the perception of being alone with so many things going wrong all at once that washed over me in a way that was too much to bear. And I thought, for the briefest moment, about “going back home.” Of course, there is no “back home.” I sold my building and traded that home for this one. Would I trade back if I could? Not a chance. I thought about how it would have felt to be magically transported back to my old building in DE. I thought of having a huge bathtub with endless hot water at my disposal. I thought of being able to bake something in an oven. I thought of sitting on the sofa watching a large flat screen TV. I have fond memories of those things, but absolutely zero desire to go back to them. So I cooked some Chinese noodles, with General Tsao’s sauce and sauteed broccoli, Brussels sprouts and mushrooms and went outside to my picnic table and looked over the vast prairie and enjoyed my meal, and where I was, both geographically and at this point in my life.
It has occurred to me that my new “job” is to fight entropy. Each day, something needs to be repaired, or at least maintained. This week it is primarily electronic stuff. My laptop continues to deteriorate, and I continue to find ways to work around the current problems. I’m nearing the end of makeshift solutions. I have a “Surface” laptop which has a detachable screen that can be used like a tablet or iPad. My keyboard no longer works, so I bought a Bluetooth keyboard. That worked fine when the screen was still attached to the keyboard. The “keyboard” also has more or bigger batteries, all the storage of files, USB ports, etc. The “tablet” can get online, but can’t access any of my files which are located in the keyboard section. I was able to attach the screen to the keyboard for weeks, but now the keyboard section wont charge, so it is going dead. Once it does, I won’t be able to access anything from there again. I’m doing e-mails from my phone, at least when I have internet. I’m in Wyoming and unless you are in a town, they mostly don’t have internet. Hell, unless you are in a town, they don’t even have gasoline! I had to drive quite a bit out of my way to get gas one morning, and when I got there, the pump wouldn’t work. I drove to the next town and there was a “card station.” Just a tiny shed of a building. No one working. One credit card terminal. You put your card in, tell it which pump and what grade. The first two cards I tried to use wouldn’t work, because they required a PIN, which I don’t have. They are credit cards, not debit cards. The third card finally worked. It took me the better part of an hour to get gas.
My website issues have kept me occupied (and not in a good way) for much of he week. I’m so relieved to have it back up and working better than before. It’s much nicer if I do say so myself. And if I ever get my computer up and running correctly, I’ll make even more changes.
My GoPro also stopped working this week. The battery got stuck, and when it was dead and I tried to pull it out, the little tab that you grab to pull it (HORRIBLE design flaw) broke off and the dead battery seemed permanently stuck in it. I pried it out, and the battery erupted. No big deal (or so I thought) as I have 4 batteries so at any given time 3 can be recharging. I replaced it with another battery. Everything was fine. When it went dead (the batteries seem to last for about 15 minutes of shooting video) the tab broke off that one as well. I did some exploring and found a tiny charging port on the side of the camera, behind a door. I opened it up, charged the battery and when it was fully charged again, it will work, but the back screen won’t come on anymore. So I have no idea what I’m shooting or what mode I’m in. It is heading toward the dumpster in the very near future to keep my laptop company
All this seems to be pointing me toward moving away from electronic stuff. My life is easy when all my gadgets are intact. When they are not, it makes my life very difficult.