Musings

As with anything in life, a road trip involves many layers. There’s the adventure of hitting the road and rediscovering the country. There’s also a host of other angles, and these will be handled through tabs at the top of the home page, such as “AutoP and Nav”. Today I add another tab: “Musings”. Ever wonder what’s going on in the writer’s mind during the adventure? Sometimes I will share those thoughts in this section. Check it out if such things tweak your curiosity.

Sailing
Some years ago I sailed my 37 ft sailboat from California to Hawaii. In the planning stage I considered all the free time that I’d have on a 2-3 week sail, and I stocked the boat with all sorts of books to read. How many were completed during the crossing? Not a one. I failed to realize that the cruise itself would suck up my time. There was the night when a half-dozen porpoises arrived with the speed of torpedoes and spent the better part of an hour playing in our bow wave. There was the fishing for mahi mahi, the preparations of gear for foul weather, and the evening get-togethers of crew to watch the sunsets. There was the pure joy of steering through a moonlit night of swell patterns when our 6 knots looked more like 30 knots.

I now realize that a road trip is similar to a sailing voyage in important ways. The road trip itself is significant challenge and entertainment, and finding the time to do external work or even keep the blog up to date is difficult sometimes. For camping days, there’s the time to set up camp and tear it down. And so one must realize that a day on the road provides less free time for such pursuits than one might imagine.

The sailing analogy goes further, though. My good friend Russ told of living on a sailboat and how every item must have a home and stay there, lest the lack of space become problematic. Now the vessel I call home for the next couple of months is a Tesla and everything must live in a very specific spot where it can be recovered without much of a hide-and-seek game. Besides grouping items into logical bunches (dog items, tools, clothing, etc.) I found it necessary to take into account how frequently certain items get used. Thus my toothbrush, vitamins, sunscreen, and other daily-use items now reside in an easy to access location. Storage space in a Tesla or a boat is artificially restricted if the items are perfect rectangular in shape, and so all my stuff is packed in soft-sided containers. I find stuff-sacks from REI to be excellent for organizing items. Finally, more than a month into the journey, I’ve discovered that certain items take up lots of space and never get used. Thus, they’re about to be mailed home, making daily activities much easier.