We hit plus 12 today. I keep writing “June” instead of “January” on my letters!
We’re going down to minus 8 on Wednesday, then creeping back up. Minus 8 is still balmy for January!
This is my fourth winter on the road and my fourth winter that the locals tell me “This isn’t an average winter for us.” At least, I finally lucked out with the abnormality being positive!
Next week won’t be any less trying than this one has been, but at least I’ve got two days to recuperate before the next battle!
I promise to share this whole story in the spring, once it has reached some sort of conclusion. I am learning a lot about being a leader, maintaining respect while being disliked, and living with yourself when you have to make impossible decisions.
In happier news, I had another appointment with my doctor this week and he’s fairly certain he has nailed down what has been ailing me! It wasn’t easy getting him to listen to me (I’m now firmly convinced that all but three Canadian doctors have no business being in medicine since they don’t actually want to practice medicine), but he finally came to a conclusion that makes sense. If he’s right, that I am simply suffering from sleep apnea, I will rejoice! I’m waiting for the sleep clinic to call me to get the ball rolling on getting a firm diagnosis and treatment plan. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get this wrapped up by April because I’m ready to get out of here. The road’s siren call is very loud these days. 🙂
I am shocked by just how homesick and tired of this apartment I am. Living in a single room that isn’t my home is getting more and more intolerable. I am fed up with the loud refrigerator, hearing people come up the stairs, knowing that people in the hallway know what I’m listening to, and having to traipse up three flights of stairs with my groceries. All that said, I’m impressed that I’ve lasted this long before cracking. 😀
The weather is supposed to be warm on Sunday, so I aim to spend the afternoon puttering in Miranda and using my new jigsaw! There’s a home store literally across the street, so I just may find the motivation to knock a few items off my to-do list.
This morning, a careless swipe of the elbow sent my French press to the floor where it shattered into a million pieces. I’ve never taken any special care with it. When traveling in the RV, it just goes into the sink and rolls around in there.
One of the most common misconceptions about RV living is that it doesn’t allow for anything fragile. Well, I use fine china, ceramic, porcelain, and glass in my RV kitchen and I have never had anything break as a direct result of living and traveling in an RV. I don’t do anything special in storage either. My dishes get stacked in the cupboards just the way they did in my fixed home. I just don’t see a need to put padding between the pieces. The only concession I make for my mobile lifestyle is that I use shelf liner to keep the items from sliding around.
So, my French press was gone this morning and I hadn’t even had a cup of coffee yet. I let coffee brew in one cup, poured it carefully into another to leave as many grinds as possible behind, rinsed out the cup with the grinds, and then repeated the procedure thrice. It worked and the coffee was delicious, but that was tedious! Needless to say, a new French press was in order!
I had gotten my French press at the Winners in Thunder Bay back in the fall of ’08. Since then, I have casually looked at the selection of French presses available, thinking that I might want to upgrade to a bigger model since mine only makes a single mug of coffee. I’ve discovered that the small size is actually pretty rare. So when I went to Walmart this evening and saw that they had only the larger style (4 to 6 cups, which is actually two or maybe three mugs) and it was competitively priced at $20 I decided it wasn’t worth my effort to shop around. The bigger one isn’t going to be as easy to sneak into an overnight bag, but it’ll be nice to only have to heat water once on the weekend when I usually have two cups of coffee.
The loss of my little French press is irksome in that I had its use down to a science, knowing exactly how much coffee and water to add and how long to steep. I’m hoping that my proportions will stay the same and that the size of the vessel won’t matter for those days when I just want one cup.
I can’t wait to get back to my RV and its cushioned vinyl flooring!
I am so excited to finally be entering 2012, what with all the doomsday prophecies about the year! Personally, I think that if anything major happens this year, it would mean a new world order and the end of life as we know it, not the end of life on earth. For all we know, it could be something great. I mean, the Vulcans could land and unite mankind. 😀
All joking aside, this year definitely does not have a clean ending to it. The messiness of the last few weeks will continue into the new year and will most likely not be resolved by the the time I leave. What I thought would be a chapter of my Lethbridge winter is slowly unfolding into a full-blown book! But, no, I am not writing that much about it! 🙂
I half halfway through my Lethbridge winter and I trust the next three months will fly by, too. I am working on my itinerary and schedule for the last few days of March and the first few days of April as there will be a lot of things to do to get Miranda road ready again and across the U.S. border. Departure excitement is starting to mount. 🙂
This is my first weekend in ages with no transcription assignment in sight. I have a few projects I need to attend to, like getting started on my taxes, but today I’m just taking it easy. I’m recovering from another fantastic Gary deep-fried turkey dinner last night. That man really knows what to do with a bird!
This weekend, I was finally able to read Destination Truth: Memoirs of a Monster Hunter, a travel memoir/behind the scenes account by Destination Truth host Josh Gates. I expected a fluff collection of memories from filming his show and was astounded to find myself laughing and crying in turn, amused by his uncanny ability to find the hilarious in the most mundane situation and touched by his insights on life, travel, and adventure.
It was his final thoughts on the concept of home that have prompted this post. He writes:
Travel does not exist without home. They are inseparably married. If we never return to the place we started, we would just be wandering, lost.
As a perpetual traveler I’m not sure I agree with that, but, then again, I’m like a hermit crab in that my home goes with me everywhere! I certainly do not feel like I am wandering aimlessly nor do I feel that I need to return to a certain place (other than my bed in Miranda!). While he and I travelers, we are of a different sort. As I wrote in a previous post, we wanders are of two types. I think he is the kind that travels the world looking for something (Bigfoot, mostly) while I am the kind for whom travel is an answer unto itself.
But we are kindred spirits, as evidenced by these words that convey my thoughts in a more eloquent way than I could ever formulate:
I read books by other career travelers and discern a sort of conflict that’s familiar to me now. It’s a melancholy felt by all professional pilgrims that simmers just beneath the joy of never having to conform. To live in motion is to always be caught between worlds, a liminal existence. I slow down just long enough to fall in love with a place, yet never long enough to feel like I belong.
Indeed. And as these winter days begin to grow longer and I continue to enjoy my unexpectedly long stay in southern Alberta, a mere three months from now will find me back on the road. This stop has been longer than expected, but no roots have grown, and soon Lethbridge will fade to being another place on the map where I hung my shingle for a time. I will leave behind wonderful friends who will surely draw me back, but by then the town I have grown to know will have changed and no longer be familiar.
What I have learned in three and a half years of travel is that once you really commit to the road, truly give it your heart and soul and turn your back on settled life, you really can’t ‘go home again.’ You have moved in a different direction than those you left behind and each day finds you further apart. This is the difference between travel being a vacation and travel being a lifestyle. With the former, you eventually return to your routine. With the latter, travel itself is the only constant.
Even if you have never watched Destination Truth, I still recommend Memoirs of a Monster Hunter to the armchair traveler who doesn’t take this world too seriously and also to anyone interested in cryptids like Bigfoot and the Jersey Devil.
Josh’s writing flows naturally from sentimental gushing at the wonders of this world to crude descriptions of circumstances that would break a lesser man. From the summit of Kilimanjaro to the radioactive ruins of Pripyat, the haunted forest of Romania to the dark waters of Vietnam, Memoirs of a Monster Hunter is a book well worth reading, and more than once. I look forward to the further adventures of Team Truth when the show comes back with new episodes in January.