Flight of the Honey Badger

The Wheel Bearing Chronicles, Part III

2015-11-19T01:00:00.000-05:00

After Dinosaur, I headed back over to the Point of the Mountain to kill a few days before I headed south to the Santa Cruz Flats Race, and I was happy to be able to boondock on the South Side instead of staying at the RV park. It was just as windy over at the South Side, but at least I wasn't parked right on the edge of a cliff, so it felt a little safer.

I was even able to get a flight at the North Side - my first and only North Side flight. I was still nervous launching into so much traffic, but I had Pat and Cory backing me up and checking for traffic and there were only a couple of gliders in sight when I actually did launch. I got a nice little flight - although I can't remember how long it was, I was up for a while and made several passes along the lower ridge. I never did bench up, but I was proud of myself for hanging in the crowded airspace as long as I did. After I landed, I looked up and realized there had to be 40 or 50 gliders in the air - yikes! Had I realized just how many there were, I probably wouldn't have launched. Most of them were way above me and therefore not an issue at all, so I'm glad I was blissfully ignorant in this case.

On Tuesday, September 8th, I left POM and began driving south - I wanted to stop in Phoenix and see my cousin Monica on my way down to Casa Grande for the Santa Cruz Flats Race. I was a bit nervous, still reeling from what I now refer to as my "Navajo experience", and would have preferred to drive in a caravan with others but I knew that no one else planned to leave as early or drive as slowly and over multiple days the way I did. I considered routing through Vegas in order to avoid driving through the reservation, but decided that idea was a bit ridiculous. So, after spending all of Tuesday morning attempting to find a grease cap that would stay on my wheel hub, I eventually just headed out and hoped for the best.

Tuesday was uneventful, but Wednesday morning as I filled up my gas tank before hitting the road, some guy did point out that one of the trailer's grease caps was missing. I told him I knew that and thank you. I did know that one was missing, I just didn't know what the hell I could do about it. I had gone through a handful of grease caps and felt like an idiot just slapping another one in there when I knew it would be gone in a few miles. I thanked him and got on the road. I probably made it a couple of hours before I heard a loud bang and knew that one of my tires had blown out.

Well, yes, one of my tires was flat, and that wheel bearing was shot as well. This time I was, thankfully, NOT on a reservation. So already I felt ahead of the game. I had just enough cell service to call Good Sam, which I did immediately. I felt confident I was handling things properly this time. Several cars passed me but no one stopped, and I was actually quite grateful to be left alone while I talked to Good Sam and then waited. I decided to get the tire off, figuring that would speed things along just a bit, and it wasn't like I had anything else to do at the moment. As I removed the tire, I looked into the wheel hub and thought I saw a flame. Holy shit. I knew those things could get hot and there was a chance it could catch fire, so I ran around to the other side of the trailer, went inside and grabbed the fire extinguisher. I gave the hub a good spray with the fire extinguisher and then stood staring at the wheel in shock, imagining the the entire trailer with most of my worldly possessions going up in flames. Jesus fucking Christ. I just got really lucky.

Good Sam sent a mobile mechanic to do the repair on the roadside and get me on my way. This sounded like a good idea at the time, but I was about an hour north of Kanab, UT, so it was almost 2 hours before he arrived. He got to work right away, but soon found out that he didn't have the right parts and he had to go back to the shop in Kanab. I opted to wait where I was. A couple more hours later, he returned with bad news. The problem was not that he didn't have the right parts - it was that the wheel hub was so old and deformed that no parts would fit. He would have to put the wheel back together so I could drive the trailer to Kanab, and they would replace the hub at the shop there. OK, fine.

The mechanic followed me to MD Auto in Kanab, and then I made a break for some food. By the time I got back to the auto shop, it was dusk and they were just finishing up. More bad news, though - they weren't able to find a replacement hub that would fit. The axle manufacturer is out of business, so I would have to take the trailer to a shop in a city and either hope they could find replacement hubs or just replace both axles altogether. They did replace all 4 sets of bearings though, and they taped up a couple of the grease caps. The others seemed to be on there pretty good, so they were not taped. By the time I had settled up (for what may as well have been a million dollars - 6 hours of labor), it was fully dark. The owner of the shop asked me where I was headed that night, and I told him I wasn't sure. I asked him if he thought I could make it to Page and whether I could get there without going through a reservation. He said I could definitely make it there, but that it was on a reservation. In that case, I told him, I would be staying in town and leaving in the morning. He recommended a nearby RV park managed by "a nice Dutch couple" and we swapped scary reservation stories. From him I learned that there is a lot of gang activity on the reservation, and his Navajo friend has admonished him against driving through the reservation at night. None of this has made me any more comfortable with the idea of setting foot on the reservation ever again.

The next morning, I set out bright and early with plans of having dinner with Monica that evening. I knew I would be holding my breath the entire time I was on the reservation, and I also knew there was no guarantee the grease caps would hold through that drive. About 50 miles into the drive, I checked the grease caps and the same troublemaker was already gone. I had an extra grease cap in the car, so I slammed that into the hub. I checked again after another 50 miles, and the grease cap was gone. I happened to have one last Bearing Buddy in the car, so I jammed it in and continued driving. After another few miles, I stopped for gas on the reservation, and the Bearing Buddy was gone. Fuck me. I didn't know what to do. I was out of parts, but I knew I couldn't leave that wheel without a grease cap. In the middle of nowhere on the reservation, I doubted I would be able to find another cap within 100 miles, and I also knew that it wouldn't stay in there anyway. I just needed to cover it up so that the grease would be unable to spray out as I was driving. I had a roll of Gorilla Tape in the truck, and I decided to MacGyver up a grease cap out of Gorilla Tape. I figured the worst that could happen would be that it would blow off as I drove, which would be no worse than the metal grease caps disappearing.

200 miles later, the Gorilla Tape was still holding strong. I was dumbfounded. All the time and money I had spent, running in and out of auto parts stores, and all this time all I'd needed was Gorilla Tape?!?! WTF?!?!

Just call me "MacGyver"

I made it to Phoenix without any further issues and brought the trailer straight to an RV repair shop. I left it there overnight, hoping they would find replacement hubs, but knowing that I might just have to pony up for new axles. Then I went and had a nice dinner with Monica at 32 Shea. The next day, I got my hair did while I waited for news of the trailer.

The repair shop was not able to find any replacement hubs or replacement axles. They thought they could have someone locally fabricate new axles for a few hundred bucks each, which would come complete with brand new hubs...but they would need to remove the axles from the trailer and bring them to the fabricator. So this would have to wait until after the Santa Cruz Flats Race, since I needed to stay in the trailer during the comp. The guys put everything back together and replaced any missing grease caps. This time I only had an hour's drive, but when I got to Casa Grande I was missing two grease caps. Out came the Gorilla Tape once again - honey badger don't need no stinking grease caps!

Dinosaur!

2015-11-17T19:20:00.000-05:00

Dinosaur, Colorado is in the Northwest corner of the state, right across the Utah border. The name comes from its proximity to Dinosaur National Monument, which is so named for the mass quantities of dinosaur remains found in the area. It's pretty remote - the nearest Walmart is about 45 minutes from town, and town is about 45 minutes from the location of the hang gliding launch. Yes, I now measure civilization by how far from Walmart we are. Read into that what you will.

To get to the hang gliding launch you actually drive through a good portion of the monument itself. It's high desert, and there is no "civilization" in this area, but there is a LOT of wildlife. Everyone had a hard time driving through without hitting any bunnies (the poor things were all over the road, jumping out in front of us at all times) and we saw many deer and birds as well...I saw a fox one night. The launch itself is actually 4 launches along a cliff face at about 8,000 feet above sea level. There are two designated LZs, but they both kind of suck in their own ways, and it's an hour & a half turnaround just to take a sledder - the name of the game at Dinosaur is going XC.

View from one of the launches at Dinosaur

Most of the pilots and crew camped out up top on launch, but my water pump still wasn't working so I checked into the ghost town - I mean RV park - in town. Again, this place was pretty cheap and came with full hookups, but there were definitely tumbleweeds blowing through, mostly unimpeded by any structures. I hooked up and went to registration, where I met up with a bunch of people I hadn't seen in months and received the first of many guilt trips for not camping out on launch. I also gathered a couple of people who were theoretically willing to help me change out my water pump, but in hang gliding terms it's not always easy to translate willingness into doingness...especially at a competition where everyone is on a tight schedule every day.

Although I had gotten a couple of foot launches at Point of the Mountain, I still wasn't what I considered to be current and confident, and Dinosaur itself was pretty intimidating to me, so I definitely wanted a practice flight in smooth air before the competition started. I made the mistake of asking Terry how late in the morning the conditions were likely to be conducive to such a thing, and I could see his energy towards me change immediately. He was now nervous about me, and the only thing I could do to change his mind was participate in the launch clinic with Ryan Voight. Terry would not even discuss conditions with me; he made certain I talked to Ryan and set up a time for him to critique my launch. This was fine with me, as long as I wasn't going to be forced into a peanut gallery situation. I tend not to get as much out of a clinic as I do out of one on one instruction because I get distracted by so many different viewpoints, I'm not able to think through every single one of them, and I end up frustrated and not retaining very much.

Saturday morning, I drove up to launch, caught up with several more people I hadn't seen in a while, and set up my glider. There was a small issue with the sail, which Zac helped me fix, and then I got suited up. I had assumed that there would be others flying, since the day before there were several people involved in Ryan's clinic. However, today there was only one paraglider pilot who flew long before I even suited up. Hence, a crowd formed as soon as I started towards launch. This, of course, compounded my nerves. To add to my crowd-related anxiety, as I walked up to launch, someone reached in and touched my hang strap. I put the glider down and yelled, "What?!" I couldn't believe someone would reach into my control frame as I was suited up and walking the glider to launch. It felt disrespectful at a minimum - and since I didn't know who this person was or what the hell they were doing, it felt dangerous. Turned out to be GW, who thought I had forgotten my secondary hang strap. It would have been very dangerous to launch with only one hang strap. Luckily, my primary and secondary hang straps are sown together, so that there is only one streamlined strap to hook into. All was fine with my glider.

At this point, I took a moment to collect myself and crouched in the control frame of my glider, taking some deep breaths. I looked out towards the launch and decided I wanted confirmation from Ryan that the exact spot where I intended to initiate my launch run made sense to him. I called him over, told him I was getting more nervous as the crowd grew and asked him my question. He showed me where he thought I should start, which did coincide with my own thoughts, so that was good. I still hesitated, though, and he did a pretty good job of reminding me that this was just another launch and I already knew how to do it, so I should just do what I knew how to do. Unfortunately, he did also tell me that I needed to show Terry I knew what I was doing, because he was a bit nervous about me. That didn't help, although I do believe he meant well. However, Ryan did something that I will always love him for, and that was getting rid of the crowd. He told them all to go check out the food truck or something, and before I knew it, we were left with Ryan, Majo (who had agreed to drive for me) and her sister Roxy. This, I could handle. I picked up the glider and had a nice, smooth launch. I hit a few bumps on the way, but no strong lift, and my mindset was to take a sledder, so I continued out to the LZ. I also knew that I didn't like the look of the closest LZ, the Snake Pit (really a pit, with a road directly down the middle) so I really wanted to make sure I made it to the Corrals LZ and didn't want to risk losing any altitude searching for thermals I might not hook. I made it to the Corrals with about 700 feet of altitude, plenty of time to check out the wind direction and set up an approach, and had a decent landing. Not perfect, but safe and sound.

As I broke down my glider, a couple of locals and some newly arrived pilots stopped by to ask directions or check out the LZ, and I had just finished packing up when Majo arrived. On the way back, we were talking and missed our turn, but found this incredible view instead:

When we got back up top, a bunch of people made a point of complimenting my launch, which was a relief. According to Ryan I had slightly popped the nose, so that gave me something to work on. When I saw Terry later he said he hadn't seen my launch, but heard that it was good. His entire demeanor towards me had changed once again. I also got to talking to Tip back on launch, and he was thinking about entering the competition but hadn't yet signed up. Well, I was thinking that I really didn't want to compete, but I had signed up many months earlier and paid a much lower fee than the onsite fee. I offered Tip my entry, and after changing his mind a few dozen times he finally ponied up. While on the emotional roller coaster of Tip's decision, I had decided for myself that I was going to drop out either way, but it sure was nice to get my money back. I find competitions to be stressful, and I didn't want to be stressed out - I just wanted to enjoy myself.

As the comp unfolded, I became more and more glad to have made the decision to drop out. The weather was pretty crazy. The first few days, there were several thunderstorms visible from launch by the time the launch window opened. Some were on or near course, while others weren't. But you still had to launch with those storms in view, which did nothing to make me more comfortable flying this site. And unlike aIerotow comps, if you sunk out you would be done for the day and you'd still have to wait for your driver to pick you up and bring you back up. A bunch of people ended up with stories of landing in gust fronts or in backcountry, and Cory has some great video of a little hail storm he experienced one day after landing & packing up. He had just packed up his glider and run into a nearby barn when it started hailing - in the video it looks like snow. It was a cool experience to be there, but I'm glad I didn't have to make decisions about whether to fly in those conditions. The last few days of the comp were blown out or rained out, so there were only 3 valid competition days out of 7.

Even though I wasn't flying, I had a great time with old and new friends. I played badminton for the first time in years, which brought back great memories of my time on the varsity badminton team during my senior year of high school (really). I went exploring, both along the rim and down in the canyon. And I got someone to help me change out my water pump! As it happens, I think the problem was with the placement of the intake hose - it was preventing me from getting the tank full. I thought it was full because it wouldn't take in any water, but really it was empty. In any case, by Wednesday I had moved my trailer up top to a site with a beautiful view right on the edge of the cliff. It was way off level, but my next door neighbor Fred sacrificed some time and a couple of pieces of firewood to help me level it out.


The view from my front door

My dream home, down in the canyon

Adrian at the Whispering Cave in Echo Park

Steamboat Rock

Either the Green or the Yampa River

Adrian out past the end of the Harpers Corner Trail

Me out past the end of the Harpers Corner Trail

AND...WE GOT TO TOUCH REAL DINOSAUR BONES!! The Quarry Exhibit Hall at Dinosaur National Monument is worth a trip, if only for this reason. It's a real excavation site, which has yielded a number of skeletons now on display at various museums around the world. At some point they stopped excavating and built a glass enclosure, which now serves as an exhibit hall where you can see actual fossils still in the sediment...and in a few places, you can actually touch the fossils. These are real, ancient bones, not replicas. Where else can you touch actual dinosaur bones? Pretty damn cool, in my book.

Point of the Mountain, or "Damn Paragliders!"

2015-11-16T15:49:00.001-05:00

I would have loved to have hung out in Moab for a while longer - I didn't get to explore Canyonlands National Park, and there are so many other outdoor activities, but I wanted to make sure I had a full week at Point of the Mountain (POM) before I moved on to Dinosaur, CO.

As I drove up towards Salt Lake City on Friday August 21st, two things hit me all at once: 1) I had once again managed to hit rush hour traffic precisely at 5 pm (a special talent of mine ever since I started towing the trailer) and 2) I was extremely tired, more so than I felt I should be. #1 was easily fixed by pulling over and waiting until rush hour had passed. #2 was harder to pin down, but when I thought I about it I realized I had been going pretty much non-stop since last weekend, which had ended up being pretty traumatic. I also realized that I hadn't yet told the story to anyone close to me. I wasn't keeping it a secret on purpose, I had just been busy and hadn't touched base with anyone that week. That's not out of the ordinary for me, but given my experience on the Navajo reservation I was in need of a sympathetic ear. I called my cousin Donna and told her the story, after which I went into Walmart to pick up a few things. As I walked around Walmart, I felt really tired and sleepy - even more so than I had already. I realized that I had been carrying around a lot of tension all week, and it was finally being released. I still had a long way to go to fully let go of what happened, but I had started the process and I felt good about that.

Since my water pump still wasn't working, I had booked a reservation at the RV park in Draper, which put me about 10 minutes from the North Side of Point of the Mountain and 20 from the South Side. This place's strong point is its proximity to the flight parks, but it's about 100 feet from the interstate so there's a lot of street noise...wouldn't recommend it if you can manage staying at the South Side with no hookups. Nonetheless, with full hookups I'm able to run a fan overnight - that combined with the ear plugs allowed me to get a decent night's rest. I hooked up the trailer and then went up to check out the North Side, where my old friend Alex met up with me around sunset. We had a nice catch up and he got to be the 2nd person who heard the full story of my Navajo experience. It was great to have someone to commiserate with in person.

The next couple of days I didn't get much flying in. I did meet up with Pat and we got to hang out a bunch, which was awesome. He and Dave Beardsley each spent some time with me working on ground handling in the high (but mostly smooth) winds at the South Side of POM. I would show up at the South Side in the morning and the North Side in the afternoon, as instructed. However, since I'm not such a confident foot launch pilot I was looking for just the right conditions for my first foot launches there, and those perfect conditions are hard to come by. Since I wasn't confident in my ground handling, I wanted to wait until the winds died down a bit. But as soon as the winds did die down, the paragliders would launch...now I had the right wind conditions, but a whole bunch of traffic. This traffic flies more slowly than I do, and leaves a wake to fly through. I'm already somewhat nervous any time I'm flying near a mountain - I'm just so used to flying in the flats that it throws me off to know that I'm close to the ground. POM is a place where you generally spend most of your time pretty low to the ground, even during a soaring flight...so the combination of proximity to the ground and proximity to other gliders while in flight, further combined with the stress of making sure I launched into a clear "lane", made for a perfect storm of nerves and psyching myself out on launch. I would then wait until the paragliders cleared out, but by then it was either too thermic (North Side AM) or cross/no wind/catabatic (South Side PM). Neither of those options were on my list of preferred launch conditions.

I did manage to get a couple of flights off the South Side before I left. I had a buddy on my nose just in case I needed help with ground handling, but also to help me check for air traffic. I would then launch and do my best to stay in the lift band without getting too close to other gliders or to the ground...I'd last a few minutes, or several passes, before my overly cautious mindset got me pushed out of the lift band and I'd land in the LZ at the bottom. I was so happy with those 10- and 12-minute flights!

Sometime around the middle of that week, Lauren and Glenn showed up in their borrowed RV en route to Dinosaur, and four of us (me, Pat, Lauren & Glenn) went up to Inspiration Point. When we arrived, we found six or seven paragliders packing up as the wind was very decidedly cross. It was nice to get to at least see a new site, though, and quite a beautiful view.

As a consolation prize, we were treated to a nice rainbow :)

On Friday I packed up and headed out to Dinosaur, CO, where I was registered to compete in the 2015 Dinosaur Hang Gliding Competition....but not before I was treated to this lovely view as I did some chores around my RV site. I asked for captions, and the winning entry is below.


Despite centuries of service, Santa's retirement package left much to be desired.		-Cory Barnwell

Zion, Bryce, and Arches

2015-11-11T15:55:00.001-05:00

Each of these three national parks could easily support a week of exploring, but I only had one week in which to drop in on each one of these on my way to the Point of the Mountain. It continues to amaze me how much beautiful terrain is concentrated in the state of Utah - each of these places is incredibly beautiful and I feel grateful that they've been preserved as national parks instead of being developed into suburbs.

When I finally got to the RV park just east of the entrance to Zion, the woman at the desk exclaimed relief that I'd finally made it. I didn't go into the story, but I admitted that it had been quite an experience. She made quick work of checking me in and even made it clear that she felt bad about putting me in a back-in site, "because she knew how she would feel in that situation". Once she heard I'd been living in the trailer for a couple of months at that point, she calmed down quite a bit. The best thing I can say for this place is that it's just a few miles from the east entrance to Zion - not much in the way of amenities, including almost no cell service and no wifi on the side of the street where the actual campsites are. The location is also not as convenient as one might think, because in order to get to the Zion Visitor's Center and the shuttle that takes you to most of the hiking trails and the "must see" parts of the park, you have to drive several miles along switchbacks and through a tunnel that was built in the 1920's. This makes it a real procedure to drive through with an RV, since traffic has to be stopped and can only flow in one direction at a time in order to allow oversized vehicles to move through. All services are also on the west side of the park, so grocery shopping, etc required me to drive all the way through the park. But, I hadn't been in any state to do much research before I got there, so the price was pretty cheap and I just booked it. Overall it wasn't bad, but I might not stay there again.

Zion itself was just as cool as everyone had told me. I stayed two nights, which really meant I had one full day of exploring. The Narrows sounded so cool and I would still really love to do it, but it also sounded a bit dangerous as most of the way you are actually hiking in the river - there is no trail, per se...and I just wasn't up to the risk at that point. So, I chose to hike to Angel's Landing, which is one of the iconic viewpoints that you'll see when most people post pics. This was pretty tough, mostly because I am not a morning person and by the time I hit the trail it was solidly midday. Very little shade and midsummer desert temperatures combined with a high-ish altitude made this pretty rough. But I made it. There is a point at which most people stop and rest - it's a lookout of sorts, with a big rock with partial shade. I stopped here and watched as people began the climb up, and debated for some time whether to do it or not. I was tired, but was I really too tired to not get to the top? I love getting to the tops of things. And the hike up to that point, while not easy, had been kind of boring. It's a smooth packed-dirt trail that feels almost paved, with a lot of switchbacks and not a lot of viewpoints. So I finally got off my ass and started climbing up. To say I'm glad I did would be a gross understatement. This was one of the coolest hikes I've ever done. The scenery at the top was just a bonus - I was using my entire body to pull myself up and over and around boulders (there are chains to grab onto at the hardest parts), walking along ridges with steep dropoffs on both sides, and just generally having an incredible time. I stopped a bunch of times to catch my breath but always kept going and was rewarded with an incredible view at the top. Honestly, climbing back down was just as much fun as going up.

Zion is also where I discovered the Polygamy Porter. Everyone talks about "Utah beer" as this weak, horrible beer, but these guys know their way around a porter. I drank this stuff for the next month or so as I hung out in and around Utah. I also did a little research - the line on Utah beer is that it can't be more than 3.2% alcohol, which sounds very low. However, that is 3.2% by WEIGHT (ABW). The entire rest of the world measures alcohol content by VOLUME (ABV). 3.2% ABW equates to 4.0% ABV. Still not strong by any measure, but more in line with, say, a light beer. This ends your beer lesson for today.

I left Zion on Tuesday morning, 8/18 and debated whether to stop at Bryce Canyon National Park or not. I was running out of time if I wanted to get a full week at Point of the Mountain, but I had heard great things about Bryce. And since it's basically in the middle of nowhere, I figured that if I didn't do it then I might never do it. So I did.

I got to the RV park in the middle of the afternoon and went searching for a new sewer hose. While at Zion, I had discovered that my hose had tiny little pinprick holes in it, which just let little tiny streams of water through. This didn't worry me when I was draining the grey water tank - that's just shower & sink water and might smell, but generally is not toxic. However, this is disastrous when emptying the black water tank. I didn't need to drain that tank just yet, but as with people, when you gotta go you gotta go...so I didn't want to be stuck with a full tank and no hose. However, I really wanted to just replace the one I already had, which connected to my trailer and the sewer donut really easily and cleanly...and apparently Bryce, UT is not the place to be picky. So I walked away from the super helpful chick at the local hardware store and went exploring. I still had a bit of daylight left, so I hopped on the shuttle into the park, got off at the furthest point and started walking back. But not before I took a couple of pics from the end.

Bryce is my favorite national park to date. I love the rock formations, and this is where I learned how they're formed - freeze and thaw. During the day, water gets into cracks in the sandstone. At night, the water freezes and expands, widening the cracks. The next day, the water melts and drains, but more water gets in to the now bigger cracks. This water freezes and expands the cracks further, melts the next day, and the cycle repeats until the cracks are big enough to break off a piece of the rock. In this way, all of the rock formations at Bryce are constantly changing. Maybe that's why I like them so much, because I can relate so well. Change is the only constant. And they are beautiful as they are changing - even more so because they are changing. We don't know when or how Thor's hammer will fall to the canyon floor, so we have to appreciate it while it's here. And who knows what it will look like afterwards? It might be something even more beautiful.

Thor's hammer

Saw this adorable couple on my way out

I was also really happy when I realized that the Grand Staircase - Escalante National Monument is something you drive through, rather than go to. I didn't have time for another full stop, but I was quite happy to drive though it, stopping to take pictures.

Next up - Arches National Park. I pulled into the RV park just North of Moab, started cranking up the jack on the front of the trailer so I could unhook it from the car, and it fell. Just fell. It was completely broken, in that it is designed to lift things and it would no longer do so. I didn’t know how I was going to get the damn thing unhooked. I went back into the office, felt a cry coming on and went straight into the bathroom. Got myself under control, went back out and asked for some help. The old guy managing the place and his young nephew helped me get unhooked using a long crowbar and some wooden boards. We balanced the trailer on the rinky dink jack that came with the car so that I could at least move the car, and they gave me a couple of ideas of places I might be able to buy a new jack. Thankfully, this time it was actually a simple repair, although I had to wait till the next morning for the stores to open. I did have to go back and return the first jack I bought – I had thought it would be best to go with the heavier duty version, but it was too big to fit through the little hole on my trailer. Once I had the right size, it was just a matter of unscrewing 3 bolts. Simple, right?

Wrong. These bolts were painted on – I’m pretty sure they were the original bolts from 1987. Took me forever to get them moving. Eventually I was able to get two of them off, but the third one was completely stripped. Once again, one of the maintenance guys came to my rescue. He ground it down and then popped it through with a chisel. The frame ended up just slightly mangled, but I was able to screw in the 3 new bolts on the new jack and I was back in business. And I still had plenty of daylight left to head over to Arches.

It was pretty overcast, so the pics may not be incredibly jaw-dropping, but the experience was extremely cool. I especially liked the walk to Sand Dune Arch. It's all sand, like walking on a beach, and the arch itself is completely hidden until you get right to it. There were also countless arches in process of erosion - you can clearly see how they're formed.

Sand Dune Arch

Friday morning, after one last breakfast in Moab at the Jailhouse Cafe (excellent bacon), I headed out to Point of the Mountain.

Monument Valley and the Navajo Nation

2015-09-08T10:00:00.000-04:00

Some of you may have heard me say that I had decided I'd rather have experiences than things. Well, this was definitely an experience. I lock my trailer door every night and every time I change clothes, take a shower, etc., but I've never been so immensely grateful for the deadbolt before. It all ended up working out, but not before I'd been thoroughly scared. I do talk about fear a lot, and I have a lot of fears, but it's pretty rare that I fear for my physical safety and it always shakes me to the core.

I left my campsite at Sand Island outside of Bluff, UT on the morning of Friday, August 13th headed for Zion National Park. I had decided not to stop at Monument Valley because it was a bit expensive for my taste at that point in time, but I knew that I would get to see some of it by just driving past & through it so I was cool with that. I was up and on the road earlier than usual because of a scheduled phone call for work that ended up not happening, so it was only about 9:30/10am when I passed through Mexican Hat, UT (so named for the rock formation that looks like a sombrero) and continued down the road toward Monument Valley. I was chugging along up a hill when a dude in a sedan passed me. I thought nothing of it, as people are always passing me now that I've wised up to the gas mileage game and refuse to go any faster than 65...and I get pretty slow going up hills as well. But this guy started waving out the window, and I soon realized that he was waving to get my attention. I checked to see if my blinker was on or something, but no. He kept waving at me so finally I pulled over to the side of the road behind him. When I got out of the car, he was pointing toward my trailer, and when I looked back I saw smoke. Another wheel bearing had blown, this time on the rear driver's side of the trailer. It was literally smoking hot.

I had just crossed into the Navajo reservation and there are no big cities less than an hour away. I asked the guy where I could get this fixed around here, and he said his son was a mechanic so he would go ask him if he could help me out. I figured that would be better than getting a tow truck, so I hung out. Pretty soon, Shane, Lori and Winston pulled up in a pickup truck and said they thought they could help me out. We started jacking up the trailer and taking off the tire, and as we did that a bunch of other people trickled in and out. Shane also mentioned that they had run out of beer (remember, it was about 10am at this point). I didn't have any beer, but I had plenty of wine, and I was happy to sacrifice some in the name of getting my problem fixed. Names were flying at me left and right and I could hardly tell one person and pickup from another. I now know that JJ was one of those people and the only one who was legitimately skilled and sober enough to actually get the job done. He said he had the parts, but he was actually on the clock at the moment and he would have to come back after work. He figured I'd be on my way at some point that evening.

In the meantime, Shane and Lori offered to take me down into Monument Valley ("MV" as they call it) and show me around. Because they're Navajo they can get in for free, and they just asked that I put some gas in their car. We locked up my truck and trailer and stopped at Shane's house in Halcheeta to pick up his wife, Pearl, who would be our designated driver, and their youngest daughter, baby Leah. At the gas station, I handed over $40, most of which went for gas...but they also bought a 30-pack of beer, which they polished off in a couple of hours. These guys (and girls) were some of the most serious drinkers I'd encountered in quite a while, and it did make me uncomfortable, but I rationalized my feelings by reminding myself that I was getting a free tour of MV, a free horseback ride through MV, and a super cheap fix for the trailer. And I'd be on my way that evening, so it was no big deal. I can deal with almost anything temporarily.

They did take me down to MV and we sailed right through the entrance gate. All four of these guys were tripping over themselves to give me a proper tour, pointing out the monuments and telling me their names, showing me where their family members live, etc. When we got to the horseback riding place, I didn't realize it but they let the guys think that I was at least part native in order to get me a free ride. Pearl's brother Kurdell got me on a horse and adjusted the stirrups, and Marlon took me out after giving me a few basics. It was a short ride but really nice talking to Marlon, and he made sure to get some pics of me on the horse with monuments in the background.

The rest of the crew just hung out in the car waiting for me while I went on the ride, and when I got back Lori was asleep in the backseat. When she woke up she started asking to be dropped off at home, which irritated Pearl, who insisted that they had more to show me. At some point, Shane must have caressed Lori's arm, which prompted the first show of drama I'd seen. Shane and Pearl had a very loud and completely unproductive conversation, as Shane was completely wasted. Soon after this, Pearl started drinking. Since the beer in Utah is only allowed to be 3.2% ABV max, it takes several to get a buzz. However, I certainly didn't realize how much she was drinking.She ended up having a six-pack before we got to Lori's house and turned around for their house again. This was about the time that Pearl started freaking out because there was a Sheriff hanging out in town, and apparently their car wasn't registered. OK, I thought, but we just have to make it back to my car, the guys will fix the wheel bearing, and then I'll be on my way. It's not like I wasn't having any fun, I just wasn't into day drinking and these guys were super into it. At some point, Lori told me I'd have to pull the trailer over to Shane & Pearl's house (just a mile or two from the pull-out off the main road where I'd initially pulled over), because it wouldn't be fixed until tomorrow. I didn't understand why or when they'd even spoken to anyone to find that out, but at this point they were all so drunk I didn't want to push it. I knew I'd get nowhere, and I didn't want to antagonize my only way of getting back to my car. Plus, now it was late on a Friday and I knew that I didn't have any other good options for getting the trailer fixed. I figured I could limp the trailer over to their house and that would be better than sleeping on the side of the highway.

Well, we didn't immediately go and pick up my trailer. We drove by it on the way to get more beer (remember, they had demolished the thirty pack they'd bought at noon) and determined that no one had messed with it. Then we went back to Shane & Pearl's, had a beer (they had several), Pearl got some meat out to defrost and Winston and I went for a quick hike to the top of a nearby bluff. I have to stop here and say that this is one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. The houses are very simple, and in MV itself there is no electricity or running water (Halcheeta has both), but the backdrop is incredible. Stunning is one word to describe it, but it stops short of doing this place justice. I was thrilled to have been shown around by my new group of Navajo friends, and knew that none of it would have happened if I hadn't had that blowout, and if Shane's dad hadn't flagged me down to stop me. I felt that everything happened for a reason and I was going with it.

When Winston and I got back from our walk, Shane was passed out, and I knew he was the one I needed to help me get the trailer over to the house, so I just hung out for a few hours. I drank more than I normally would have, influenced by the super heavy drinking going on around me. I never got drunk, but I knew I wouldn't feel good the next day. At some point after dark, Kurdell and Marlon showed up again and I was happy to see those guys. Marlon had mentioned that he didn't drink very much, and he was a much better conversationalist than the glonnies ("glonny" is Navajo for "someone who drinks too much") I'd been hanging out with, all of whom were in varying stages of lucidity but none of whom were anywhere near sober. This made me uncomfortable, of course, but I didn't know where else to go and I knew I was welcome to stay with them, so I did. It was starting to wear on me, though. I have very little patience for alcoholism after a lifetime with an alcoholic father and brother, and it brings me down to see people who don't take care of themselves.

At some point, Shane woke up and we did get my trailer limped over to the house. I figured I could go to bed pretty soon, but then another 5 or 6 people curious to meet their new bilagáana (Navajo for "white person") friend. It had to be 11pm by this time and it had already been a long day, but now I had all these people talking to me at once, competing for my attention and asking me questions. They also decided I needed a Navajo name - they didn't like "honey badger" as none of them had seen the video so they didn't get the reference. They settled on Dahetihhe, which means "hummingbird". In the midst of all this, somehow I ended up stuck in the kitchen babysitting Leah while Shane & Pearl had a big fight outside. I resented being handed the baby, but with both parents so out of it I couldn't just hand her back. The poor kid was so exhausted, but as we were in the kitchen and most of the party was outside she kept hearing her parents' voices and looking around for them. She just couldn't relax, especially not in the arms of a stranger. Eventually Winston came in and I handed her over, thinking at least she'd have someone familiar and maybe she'd be able to relax & go to sleep. Soon after we got the baby to sleep, the rest of the party moved on to someplace else and I went to bed.

I couldn't have been laying down for more than half an hour when I was awoken by pounding on my door. It was Shane, asking me if I had any wine. I told him I didn't and that I was sleeping. He commented on the nice big bed I had and asked if he could "chill with me". At this point I was standing in the doorway and he was leaning in. I was doing my best to block the doorway and make it clear that he was not invited in. I told him no, he could not chill with me, and that I had been sleeping and he woke me up. I told him I needed to go back to bed and he needed to go inside. He eventually closed my door and left. I locked the door again, turned out the lights, and went to sleep. At 2:14 am I was awoken by more pounding on my door. This time it was Winston. I asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted to hang out. I told him to go away. He couldn't believe I wasn't going to let him in. I said, "No! Let you in, for what? I'm sleeping." He said he wouldn't let me sleep until I let him, I told him that was "pretty fucked up", and he decided he had just been kidding and he went away. I pulled my mask back on, put my earplugs back in, and dozed off again. Couldn't have been more than ten minutes later that there was more pounding on my door. This time it was Shane. This was where I got scared. He was alternately pounding and turning the doorknob and saying "It's Shane. Let me in. It's Shane. Jen, let me in." He couldn't remember my name and had been calling me Jen occasionally all day, even though all of us kept reminding him of my real name. I was asking him what he wanted but he just kept pounding, trying the doorknob, and saying, on a loop, "It's Shane. Let me in. It's Shane. Jen, let me in. It's Shane." Finally, I yelled loudly, "SHANE!" This got his attention. "What?" I yelled just as loudly, "PLEASE GO AWAY." He said, "OK," and left.

I was relieved that he had gone away but now I was scared. I didn't know for sure what he wanted, but he was a big dude, and I was a woman alone in a trailer. And it was the middle of the night. One can imagine several possibilities, none of which were desirable to me, and I wasn't at all sure that he was gone for good. I couldn't relax. My heart was pounding, and the meditation and breathing exercises were just barely taking the edge off. I thought about what weapons I had available - basically just some kitchen knives, but they were in the drawer right next to my bed. I thought about just taking off right then, but I didn't know how far I'd get or where I could even go. And I figured they'd find me - I'm pretty conspicuous with the red pickup, hang glider, and travel trailer. Plus, I still thought they'd fix my damn trailer in the morning once they sobered up. So I stayed put. I kept my earplugs out and my mask, off, and I woke up and froze every time I heard a sound...this was often as people let their dogs roam freely and there are other animals around as well, but I managed to cobble together 45 minutes here, an hour there.

By the morning I was just as exhausted and really wishing I had someone to call to come save me. I thought about what I would tell anyone else who called me in this situation, and I would tell them to get out of there. I had been able to limp the trailer in there, so I should be able to limp the trailer out of there. I had heard Shane leave the house around 8am (who knows how he's able to stand up at that hour after all that drinking) and the house was pretty quiet, although I was pretty sure the rest of the family was still home. I hung out in the front seat of the car for an hour or so, looking up the distance to Mexican Hat on Google maps, knowing that if anyone caught me (that was how I thought of it at that point, like they were going to catch me doing something offensive in preparing to take off) I could just say I was charging my phone...which I was.

Eventually I figured it was quiet enough that I could make it out without a confrontation, and it was less than 3 miles into town...just a couple of miles till I'd be off the reservation. I knew that they all went to the gas station in Mexican Hat for beer, though, so I wanted to at least get past that point so I'd be less likely to run into them while I waited for the tow truck. I limped into town and past the gas station and pulled in at the only RV park in town, Valle's. I went in and Jesse came out and said "Hello". I felt like such a prejudiced asshole for being so happy to see that he was white and not Navajo. My voice kept cracking as I told him I needed to call a tow truck and I was just hoping that I could wait there for it. He was compassionate and kind and got me a glass of water and gave me a pack of cookies as he figured I probably hadn't eaten yet. I told him the story and he knew those guys and knew how much of a drinker Shane was, as he said Shane came in there every morning, hungover and looking for more beer. I called Good Sam for a tow, and when they said they couldn't get me a tow until Monday, he pulled out the phone book and started reading off numbers of the local guys for me to call. While we were waiting for Good Sam to call back, sure enough, Shane and Kurdell walked in. Shane said he thought I'd be at Zion by now. I resisted the urge to ask him how the fuck he thought I could possibly have done that since he hadn't actually fixed my trailer, and told him the truth. I said, "Honestly, you were banging on my trailer last night and you made me really uncomfortable." He said, "I'm sorry", really quick like someone who was used to apologizing but didn't really grasp what he had done. I said, "You did it twice." He said, "Oh really?" Kurdell looked at me and said, "Yeah - tell the truth." I said, "Yeah, that is the truth," looked at Shane and said, "You scared me." They left after paying for a...you guessed it...30-pack of beer. Kurdell shook me hand and told me it was nice meeting me and that I'm pretty cool. I told him, "Likewise."

We weren't able to get in touch with any of the family members of the local towing & auto shop, so Jesse suggested I pull around back and take a nap while he continued trying to get in touch with the local guy ("local" being Blanding, UT, about an hour away). I paid for a site so that I could plug in and turn on the AC, and he gave me bathroom keys so I could shower. I had completely forgotten about showering! He made sure to tell me I didn't stink, he just figured I might like to take one. And I showed him the dirt ring around my ankle and laughed.

After a shower and a two-hour nap, I felt a little better and extremely hungry, so I went back up to the office/snack bar for some food. Jesse let me know that one of the guys had called back and said he'd be out the next day to tow me. I figured that was cool as it was still better than Monday, so I got some lunch and then went over to the gas station for some drinks & snacks, planning to hole up in the AC and watch movies for the rest of the day. Sure enough, as I was leaving the convenience store I ran into Lori and her son. I told her I was going to just get a tow truck and her face fell, but she said it was nice meeting me, I returned the sentiment, and I was on my way back to the RV park. However, when I got back to the RV park there was a big white pickup I sort of recognized and it followed me to my site. I thought aloud, "Oh Fuck! What now?!", got out and saw JJ standing there. He told me had entirely meant to fix the wheel bearing yesterday, but he didn't "like that guy"...he meant Shane. He hadn't known where to find me and didn't want to contact Shane, and he had other jobs to do so he just figured it had either gotten fixed or I'd gotten a tow truck. He offered to still do the job and said he was pretty sure he had the parts, but if he didn't, he was willing to take an hour ride with me to Cortez, CO to buy the right parts. I was extremely tired, and although I felt guilty about it, I was unable to trust the Navajo at that point. He said he'd go see if he had the parts at his house, though, and I figured that was fine. While he was gone, I cleared my head and evaluated my gut feeling about him. Shane had always made me a little uncomfortable but I'd brushed those feelings aside. JJ, on the other hand, seemed completely above board. For one thing, he was sober, and for another, he disliked Shane. That could have just been coincidence, but to me at that moment it gave him credibility. JJ came back a little over an hour later with the right parts and got to work. He also didn't mind me sitting with him and explained what he was doing as he went along. We soon figured out that some of the parts we needed to reuse had been left behind, so we went together back to the pullout where I'd originally pulled over. We found a spring and one lug nut, but none of the other parts - in particular, we needed to find the nut & washer that held the wheel bearings one. He took me to his house, where he took those parts off of his own trailer, and also showed me the eight or ten classic trucks he was in the process of restoring. When he's done he's going to have an entire fleet of beautiful automobiles. And I think he will get it done - he works seven days a week, building a dam up in Blanding and then working construction and maintenance on weekends, and doing side jobs like mine in his spare time. JJ is a solid guy and I'm glad to have met him.

By the time we were finished getting the tire back on the trailer, it was around 7pm, so I decided to just wait until the morning to head out. I had a 5 - 6 hour drive to Zion ahead of me and I didn't want to tempt fate by driving alone through remote territory on the reservation late at night. JJ didn't know what to charge me, so I threw some money at him and hoped it was fair. I went back into Bluff to what I knew was the best restaurant for many miles, Comb Ridge Bistro, had a nice dinner including a salad and the State Pen Porter I first discovered in Albuquerque. I got out of there before 10am and pretty much held my breath until I got to Kayenta, about 40 miles south of Monument Valley. Still on the reservation, but far enough away from the source of my discomfort that I was able to relax again. Stopped for a nice lunch in Page, AZ and took a couple of hours to get my thoughts down. I still needed to write up Big Spring and the few days afterwards in New Mexico and Utah, and I was dying to get to Zion...but it was important to me to get these thoughts down while they were fresh in my mind.

I'm still processing everything that happened. I know there are a lot of lessons to be learned here and I'm pretty sure I haven't realized all of them yet. For one thing, though, I need to call the tow truck first thing. If I'd done that on Friday I probably could have been on my way some time that afternoon and I wouldn't have lost more than a few hours. As it was, trusting a bunch of strangers wound up costing me two days. The other important thing to note is that Shane made me uncomfortable from the beginning, and several things that happened throughout the day increased my discomfort. JJ said he almost said something to me at the time, but then didn't. I can see how he was in a tough position - he would have started a confrontation with his stepsister's husband and I was a stranger he'd probably never see again. He'd been perfectly willing to help me but had other things to worry about as well. So I should have trusted my gut, which was telling me I should probably call a tow truck. Instead, I listened to my wallet, which was telling me to accept the free tour and the promise of a cheap fix for the trailer. I also learned what all the parts of the wheel are and what they're supposed to look like. And now I know that my wheel looked absolutely terrible and there was no way I would have made it much further driving on that thing - metal had been grinding on metal, all the grease was gone and some of the parts had melted together. I'll be religious from now on about checking all my wheels for any heat each time I stop, and I'll be more likely to listen to my intuition about new people.

Valley of the Gods & Natural Bridges

2015-09-07T13:33:00.000-04:00

After the Big Spring competition ended, I started making my way towards the Point of the Mountain in Utah. Point of the Mountain is a bit of a mecca for hang glider and paraglider pilots, with two ridge-soarable ridges – the South Side, generally flown in the morning, and the North Side, generally flown in the evening. There are also mountain site nearby. I wanted to get a bunch of foot launch practice before the Dinosaur competition at the beginning of September. Along the way, I planned to hit Utah’s six national parks.

After the somewhat ghetto RV park in Big Spring, I was ready to get back to more natural surroundings. I couldn’t find any great options on freecampsites.net, but NM has some nice state parks and you can book RV sites online, so I set myself up to a night each at Lake Sumner and Bluewater Lake state parks. Both parks were very cool and somewhat deserted, just the way I like them. It was a bit stormy at Lake Sumner, but nothing as bad as my Hurricane Bill experience in Sanger, TX.

At Bluewater Lake State Park, I had booked a back-in site since that was the only option. I thought it would be no big deal - a bit of a pain in the ass for just one night, but totally doable. However, the campsite map was not exactly topographical and when I arrived I found out that the site I had booked was at the end of the road, almost parallel with the road with no real room to pull forward, and up a steep hill with a drop-off at a retaining wall. Needless to say, it took me several tries to back in to this one with no one to help guide me. I eventually succeeded, but not before I put a nice-sized dent in the trailer. Nothing that affects its usability, though.

And what a lovely view from my campsite once I did finally get the trailer in there. This would be a great place to spend a couple of nights, but for one night the hassle wasn't really worth it.

From here I set course for Bluff, UT, figuring I'd spend a night or two there and see Monument Valley before heading west for Zion National Park. Since my route was going to take me so close to the Four Corners Monument, I decided to stop and check that out. How often can you literally be standing in 4 states at once? It was really just a plaque on the ground and a 20-minute line to take a $5 photo, but at least I've checked it off the list.

The town of Bluff consists of one gas station, three or 4 restaurants and a couple of RV parks & lodges. The RV park was really just a gravel parking lot, but I just needed to dump my tanks and refill my freshwater tank so I wasn't bothered. It's nice to be able to plug in and watch a movie on the DVD player anyway. I had a bit of daylight left, so I hopped in the car and went to check out Goosenecks State Park - this is a park based at the goosenecks of the San Juan River. What a beautiful place!

The next night I decided to go boondocking over at Sand Island, which is a Bureau of Land Management site on the San Juan river. I found a pretty easy back-in site right on the river and went exploring.

I drove through the Valley of the Gods a bit and then headed for Natural Bridges National Monument. Neither of these had been on my list but they both sounded really cool, and they did not disappoint.

Valley of the Gods is similar to Monument Valley - there are a number of "monuments", which are rock formations formed through erosion.

Natural Bridges was the sleeper hit of the month. I had never even heard of it until I got to Bluff and saw the road signs pointing in that direction, and I'm so glad I decided to check it out. There are three natural bridges at the monument and a network of hiking trails that will take you underneath each bridge. The best experience I had was hiking one of the trails. When I got to the bottom of the canyon, I couldn't immediately tell which way I was supposed to go (couldn't even see the bridge), and once I figured it out parts of the trail were pretty overgrown, but I kept going and eventually ended up on a mostly-dried riverbed underneath the bridge. I had the place to myself, and was having fun testing out echoes. I was just about to turn and leave when I heard "Hello" - I damn near had a heart attack, but it was just a ranger who had come down to take some pictures for the Visitor's Center. He pointed out some pictographs that I had totally missed, and when I exclaimed how cool the place was, he told me that the coolest thing down there was actually under a tree, up an embankment and around the corner. There I found a hidden archaeological site with some artifacts and a bunch of petroglyphs (pecked into the stone) and pictographs (painted on the surface of the stone). I never would have found this by myself.

After Natural Bridges I drove back through the town of Blanding so I could get some groceries and then headed back to my awesome campsite at Sand Island. I loved it - it was so peaceful and I had the river pretty much to myself. Unfortunately, this was also the night when my water pump stopped pumping water. I tried refilling the tank but I had just filled it, and water came spilling back out, so I just figured this was the next thing on my 1987 trailer I would have to replace. This did mean that I would be stuck at RV parks until I could replace the water pump - as long as I'm hooked up to "city water" (as those in the RV world call it) everything works fine - but without that connection I can't wash dishes, shower or even wash my face. Those are deal breakers for me. The next morning I would head out for Zion National Park.

Big Spring, TX

2015-09-06T18:59:00.004-04:00

I had ordered a new sail for my Sport 2 back in April at Quest, but it hadn’t come in by the time I left and so it had been sitting around Quest for a month and a half. Spinner and I decided that Big Spring was the best option for getting it installed, and I got in touch with Zac Majors, who said he thought he could do it before flying on Saturday, the practice day.

I pulled into the Texas RV Park of Big Spring around 5 in the afternoon on Friday and got hooked up in one of the biggest campsites I’ve had. It had to be over 100 feet long and 20 feet wide…wasn’t particularly level, though, so I spent a bit of time leveling out the trailer since I was going to be there for 9 days. Then I went to find Russell so we could agree on the final price. Luckily it was a fairly easy conversation and we were able to meet in the middle and shake on it. Now to find Zac. We messaged a bit that night, but I knew I’d see him the next day so I didn’t stress about it. I told him exactly where in the hangar my glider and all the parts were and went to bed. Well, little did I know that my phone had somehow turned off the automatic updating of the date & time, so I was still on Mountain time, while Big Spring is on Central time. I strolled into registration at 11:15am, or so I thought, only to find out it was actually 12:15pm and registration was closed till the afternoon. Ugh. Thankfully, Belinda took pity on me and got me registered. I figured at this point the sail installation was just not going to happen and I’d fly the comp with my old sail unless we got a rest day. Zac, on the other hand, thought it would be no problem to knock it out before the launch window from 1 – 2pm, especially since Wolfi had volunteered to help him. They got right to work and occasionally some of the peanut gallery stopped by to help hold the glider up, etc. It soon became apparent that the job was not going to be finished in time for the launch window, though. One thing I learned is that, when you order a new sail, it doesn’t come with all of the cords and bungees you’ll need in order to actually use that sail. So we spent some time foraging for parts on the old sail and around the hangar. We were done around 3:15 and there was supposed to have been a later launch window, but the weather changed and there were thunderstorms all around us, so none of us got to fly on the practice day. I was disappointed about that because I really wasn’t current and I’d been looking forward to a practice flight or two. And my glider still had to be test flown before I could fly it at all. There was some discussion about the best person to test fly my glider, since both Zac and Wolfi are much heavier than I am and they’d be less likely to feel any issues.

I talked to Wolfi about test flying the glider in the morning, and he figured he could do it right after the task committee meeting, either before or during the main pilots’ meeting. But the task committee meeting went long for the first day, and lasted almost halfway through the pilots’ meeting. I made a beeline for Wolfi after the meeting, after getting stopped by one of the locals who asked me if the guys ever told me this wasn’t a woman’s sport. I told him they didn’t dare, and he shouldn’t either.

Wolfi told me that Zac was going to do the test flight, so I waited for Zac. Several people came up to Zac after the meeting asking dumb questions, and I waited and stared Zac down while he answered them. Finally, the crowd dispersed and I asked Zac what his deal was. He thought about it, and slowly said, “Um…I guess…I’ll just do it…right now.” I said, “Yes, please! Because I’d love to get a flight in myself.” I ran outside to make sure we had a tug pilot and saw Armand already flying the tug pulling up a tandem, so I figured we’d have no problem. Wolfi and I got the glider ready, found Cory’s harness, put it back because it was too heavy, got Wolfi’s harness, found a golf cart so we didn’t have to carry all that stuff to the launch line, and then looked around for Zac. Zac finally materialized, quickly went up and looped my glider just to “set the sail”, came down and adjusted a slight right turn before I went up. The only issue was that Zac had pro-towed, and I use a 3-point bridle. I quickly found out that the tow point was way too far forward. Bobby Bailey was towing me and, although I had absolutely no bar pressure (meaning I was neither pulling in nor pushing out), I was extremely low. Since my glider had always towed beautifully with no pressure, I never considered pushing out to gain altitude – all the instruction we receive tells us never to push out on tow. I ended up in the prop wash, just getting hammered by all the turbulence, and I released. I don’t think we made it to 1,000 feet. Bobby later told me we were doing about 43mph at that time – normal towing speed for my glider should be in the low 30s. So I adjusted the tow point and got another test flight right before the launch window opened. Better this time, but still not perfect, so I adjusted it again before I flew my official competition flight of the day. The third tow of the day was pretty close to perfect, and although I spent a bit of time searching around after I released, I soon found a booming thermal that got me pretty high and I set out on course. I decided to stay close to main roads, and ended up west of course line, eventually just searching all the way to the ground. I didn’t get very far that day, but since there were thunderstorms on course line, the task ended up being cancelled. That and the fact that one of my competitors had technical issues and was unable to submit a tracklog allowed me to make second place for the day.

Day 2 I decided not to fly because I was pretty beat from my 3 flights the previous day. I was out of shape and not current, and it’s pretty freaking stinking hot in Texas. And humid. And quite windy. And we had to walk our gliders a fair distance to get to the launch line. By the time I made it out to the launch line, most days I didn’t care if I flew or not. Apparently there were some sketchy launches that 2^nd day, so that on the morning of the 3^rd day I got the “safety prize” for not flying the previous day. I did fly the next two days, but didn’t immediately get high and sort of gave up. Again, I was apathetic to whether I flew the course or not, and my dear friend Tracy was in town so not flying just meant more quality time hanging out with her. Not flying did also mean that I was faced with constant questions from pilots, drivers, girlfriends, etc. regarding why I wasn’t flying, and a great deal of concern for my happiness when I didn’t fly. I got the nickname “Honey Badger” because I’m “pretty bad ass” and I “don’t give a shit” (watch the video here if you’re not getting the jokes: https://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg) and because I flew my ass off that winter I lived at Quest. I tend to associate the name, and I think others do as well, with doing badass stuff…like selling all my stuff to go live in a trailer and travel. But sometimes I think it’s more honey badger-like to just do what feels right to me, even though it may be the opposite of what people expect me to do or think I should do or just plain want me to do. I know there are those who are just so excited to see a woman competing that they have big dreams for me, but I have realized that those aren’t my dreams. I find competitions to be stressful and highly regimented, and they require me to live on someone else’s schedule. It just so happens that one of the things I LOVE about my life right now is that I’m not on anyone else’s schedule, and I can do what feels right to me at all times. So I’m done with competing. I’d much rather just fly for fun and when I feel like it, so that’s what I’m going to do.

Even though I ended up not flying the tasks most days, I still had a great time in Big Spring. I got to hang out with Tracy and Jonny Thompson every day, and that alone was worth the trip. But I also got the offer of a lifetime from Bobby Bailey, co-inventor of the Dragonfly ultralight aircraft, which is the plane we use to aerotow our hang gliders. The afternoon of the fourth day, Bobby called me over and said he’d heard I’d been looking for time in the Dragonfly. I had just asked Jonny for a ride the other day but he wasn’t able to do it at the time. Well, Bobby wanted to know if I wanted to learn to fly it. I said YES, but I didn’t know when I would ever pursue it. Well, Bobby was planning to offer me a deal on lessons. Oh, wow, well I’ll be out west for at least the next few months. Well, this deal lasts for as long as it takes for us to get to 10 hours of instruction.

Well, when the legend who invented the aircraft you’ve been thinking about learning to fly offers you lessons at a great price out of the blue, you take that deal. So I got in two and a half hours of instruction over two days in Big Spring. After the first hour Bobby commented that I was doing better than average, as he usually stops after half an hour with new students, and we went on to do a full hour & a half on the first lesson. It was awesome! He made me fly along real close to the ground, kind of fast, and it was so much fun. I had a little trouble learning to slip, but after Bobby explained it in a different way it clicked and I couldn’t get enough of slipping along. On the 2^nd day I handled most of the takeoffs after the first one, where I let the nose get way too high. By the second takeoff Bobby was hands off and I was in control the entire time. What a feeling. He still handled most of the landings, but that was fine with me just getting to observe. There’s a LOT to think about on landing and I admit to being a bit intimidated by landings.

Bobby also made a point to talk to me about the possibility of becoming a tug pilot, and how that would allow me to get more into the lifestyle and potentially avoid getting a real job again. Those wheels were already turning in my head. In order to tow hang gliders for a living I’ll need to get my private pilot’s license, which is a big outlay of cash…so I’m not pulling the trigger on that one just yet. I am leaning heavily towards doing it though :)

Bobby & me - what you can't see are the 2 pillows + pedal extensions I had to use in order to fly the plane :)

Everybody gets a prize!

Got to hang with two of my favorite people for a week

Boondocking!

2015-08-04T10:00:00.000-04:00

Tom Galvin was out of town when I got to Pagosa Springs, but I found a great private little campsite off of Buckles Lake Road south of town and had my first two nights of official boondocking. It felt so awesome to finally be doing something I had been wanting to do since before I started out on the road. I had thought that I'd have all that stuff figured out before I got on the road, but I spent so much of my time at Quest getting other things in order that it just never happened. And since I didn't want to sit around forever until I was 100% ready (I didn't really think I'd ever be 100% ready) I just decided I'd figure that stuff out on the road. Well, getting sick with bronchitis really slowed my research efforts to a standstill. So it was really awesome to run into someone who not only knew how all that stuff worked, but was willing to spend the time to show me. I'm pretty sure he thought I was a complete idiot, but in this case it was true, so no hard feelings. It was such a wonderful feeling to be in the middle of the woods with no neighbors and actual nature all around me. I was a little worried that I'd have some kind of wildlife encounter, but I never did. And I loved sitting on my front step and staring at the moon through the trees.

One last look at the view from the Villa Grove launch

Storms all around but not raining on me

Now, I will admit that I had my doubts about boondocking. I was afraid I would get stuck on some narrow dirt road with no room to turn the trailer around and I'd be totally screwed. I was afraid that I wouldn't be able to get the fridge working, or that the water pump wouldn't cooperate and I'd be left without a shower.

So, on my way to finding this awesome, private, FREE campground I almost turned off at a couple of different RV parks. There were at least two that I aborted because I didn't like the look of them - too crowded, not enough trees, too close to the highway. The third was call "Last Resort" and it must have hit my emotions - it was late and dark and I was tired - so I turned down an unlit dirt road toward this place. Well, I never found it because the only sign actually looked like the entrance to a private house and I didn't want to make the mistake of barging into someone's driveway with the trailer and then have to back it up in the dark. So I turned around on the dirt road. It was wider than normal at this point since it was a 3-way intersection, but still not big enough for me to turn around without backing up. Since I didn't have an audience I just went for it. And I jackknifed. Just a little. I heard a noise as if I'd hit something metal behind the trailer but I didn't see a signpost or anything. I had a brief moment of panic, but I calmed myself down and eventually figured it out and got the hell out of there.

Even though that experience sucked, it made me a little less scared about traveling into the woods on some old dirt road looking for a campsite, and once I found Buckles Lake Road I drove the whole 7 miles, checking out every single campsite to make sure I got the best one. Maybe I was a little hypoxic as well as tired.

Anyway, I found a great campsite - big and circular so I could pull around and not have to back up at all. But when I went to unhitch, I noticed that the little rod & clamp that holds the propane tanks onto the tongue was out of place. Instead of holding the propane tanks securely in place, it was laying between them as if someone had gently placed it there. This is not normal. This happened when I jackknifed. Holy fuck. How do I fix this?? I can't travel again without securing those tanks. I got myself settled, got the fridge turned on and went to bed.

Looking up from my seat on the front step of my trailer

Monday morning, after a great night's sleep, I went into town for breakfast and to do some work, and started looking for an RV parts dealer. The closest one was in Durango, about an hour away, and they had the part I needed. So, after breakfast I hopped in the car and went to explore Durango for the day. Not what I'd planned, but I wanted to see Durango anyway. I got the part and went up to the Animus Overlook and did a quick little hike there - nothing much, but at 9,000 feet I was still not fully acclimated so I didn't want to push it too hard. It should also be noted that the hour drive took about 2 hours, thanks to Colorado's road work initiative...every single road trip I took in Colorado took about 30% longer than it was "supposed to" thanks to road work that included single-lane roads and periodic road closures. It's so great that they're taking care of their roads, but the delays were killing me. At least when I got "home" I was able to take a hot shower.

View from Animus Overlook

Tuesday morning I got up, went for breakfast and another little hike to Opal Lake. This was a very pretty hike but a bit crowded for my taste. There were climbs, multiple creek crossings, meadows full of wildflowers, and looming mountains as a backdrop for the lake itself...but on my way back I had to wait for scaredy-cats to cross the logs over the creeks...slowed me down a bit. Then I got back to the trailer, repaired the propane tank holding tray, hitched up, and headed south towards Santa Fe. This was a relatively short drive and I had plenty of time to make dinner and get the trailer cleaned up.

Opal Lake

Wednesday morning in Santa Fe was rainy and cold, so I was pretty unmotivated to get out and sight-see. Luckily, I had plenty of groceries to make my own breakfast and was able to just hang out in my little home and get some work done. Later on I ran some errands, ate some barbacoa tacos and drove through Old Town Santa Fe. Very cute but I wasn't feeling inspired to get out and walk around. I guess I just needed a lazy day, so I watched a couple of movies and relaxed for the night.

Thursday the 30th I drove from Santa Fe to Roswell, NM. Roswell is the town where a UFO supposedly crashed in 1947 and the military covered it up. It's pretty interesting to read accounts from both sides - the UFO Museum downtown has signed affidavits from both civilians and military personnel that talk about the shrapnel and the "non-human" men they found. According to the military, the wreckage was just a weather balloon...interesting that they'd be so concerned about a weather balloon that they'd confiscate all the pieces immediately. And the little men were supposedly crash test dummies from parachute testing that was carried out in 1957. Yeah. The UFO crash was in 1947, but the military's explanation is that people just got their dates mixed up? Hmmm..

Thursday night I stayed at Bottomless Lakes State Park outside of Roswell. Not boondocking, as this is a bona fide campground with electric & water hookups, but much cheaper and much prettier than an RV park. And bigger sites, so some semblance of privacy - no one staring in my front door while they eat their dinner. Not a bad place to stay for my last night before I head to Big Spring, Texas, a town that's known for its 5 prisons and for the annual hang gliding competition in which I'll be participating.

Interesting sharing of space in Roswell

Maybe 100 yards from my campsite?

I backed it in all by myself :)

Colorado (Quite Possibly the Love of My Life)

2015-08-02T23:08:00.000-04:00

I had originally planned to go to Yellowstone after leaving Missoula, but as I called around to RV parks I found that they were pretty full. I thought about staying in a crowded RV park and going to a crowded national park and decided that was not the kind of experience I wanted to have, so I postponed Yellowstone and decided to go visit the crew in Villa Grove, whom I'd met last summer at Colorado Fly Week 2015. Rich Jesuroga had invited me to bunk at his place, and I'd recently had some pretty good luck taking people up on those offers.

I drove from Missoula to Idaho Falls on Saturday the 18th, stopping at Big Hole National Battlefield. Big Hole is the site of one of our infamous massacres of Native Americans. When we decided to confine them to the reservations, some of them resisted and ran. The military chased them to this place where they thought they'd be safe, and wound up killing a bunch of them and forcing the rest to Canada. It's a beautiful place, and without the signs telling the story, you'd never know such an awful thing had happened there. I think Rinker Buck sums it up well in his book The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey:

In the cemetery quiet of these places, all the clangor and hell of actual history - the smell of manure where horses were bedded, earth scorched from fire pits or cannonball explosions, the stench from bayonets ripping flesh - has been sanitized away. While preserving history, we remove it. There's nothing wrong with this, of course, and I'd rather see a beautifully maintained battlefield than a Wal-Mart parking lot.

In Idaho Falls I stayed at a county park with RV hookups. This was pretty cool - there were only a handful of other RVs there and it was pretty quiet...and since it was an actual park, as opposed to an RV park, there was a much higher ratio of park to RV than I'd become used to. Sunday morning I had my biggest driving day yet - about 500 miles. According to Google Maps that would have been a 7.5 hour drive, BUT I hadn't towed the trailer in so long that I forgot how much slower than the speed limit I have to go...so it took me all damn day. I did manage to squeeze in a very quick stop at Lava Hot Springs, though, which felt so good I almost didn't get back on the road. However, once I saw the large group of children checking in at the front desk I felt a renewed motivation to get going.

I found this wording interesting, as if they all just suddenly decided to live on the reservation

The next couple of nights were spent in Steamboat Springs at the KOA there - chosen for its proximity. Not my favorite campground - as is common for KOAs, it was just a few feet from the main road. Although it was also right on the river, the sites were arranged in such a way that every pair of RVs face each other. This meant that my neighbors, a woman and 3 kids, looked in my front door while they ate every meal. Pretty uncomfortable, especially since one of my favorite things about Colorado is buying pot legally and then smoking it. There was plenty for me to do away from the campground, though, even though it rained for a decent portion of my time there. I got a nice little hike in, which totally kicked my ass thanks to the altitude and the fact that my hiking shoes were tearing up my feet again. I definitely ate well in Steamboat - had a lovely brunch, including a damn fine Bloody Mary at Creekside Cafe & Grill. I even took myself out for a nice steak dinner at Mahogany Ridge Brewery & Grill.

Tuesday morning I got back on the road, headed for Rich's house in Salida. He had even arranged a place for me to leave my trailer not to far from his place, in case I needed to get in and out of it while I was staying with him. And folks, my good luck continued...Rich's place was beautiful, but the best part about it was that every room in the house had breathtaking views of the mountains to the west. I couldn't get over it, but Rich and his wife Susan just kept telling me to wait until I saw it in the morning.

No flying happened on Wednesday, so I took a road trip to Crested Butte, and thanks to Rich's advice I kept going North past Mt Crested Butte on a dirt road to the little town of Gothic. This place was so cool. It's part town, part environmental research facility. I didn't get too much info because the visitor center was closed by the time I got up there, but I did get to see some beautiful wildflowers and an amazing full double rainbow.

Wednesday morning we were up and out of the house by 9:30 and headed for Villa Grove. This place was just as beautiful as I remembered - possibly more so because they've had so much rain this season that the valley is much greener than usual. The wildflowers are spectacular this year and they provide a beautiful contrast to the normal sagey green. I ended up not flying because it was pretty gusty and I wound up tiring myself out just holding the glider waiting for a good cycle. The altitude is a killer - launch is just under 10,000 feet, and the valley floor is at 8,000. It's a workout just hanging out up there, let alone setting up a glider, suiting up, walking to launch and then controlling the glider in gusts. Rich and I decided to head to the training hill the next day to get me a confidence flight or two before I went up to Villa again.

Well, Friday was a bit cloudy and there was rain around us (although notably not in Salida) but we headed out to the training hill anyway, west of Saguache. I had my vario back in working order, which seemed like a good omen. We never even made it there, though, because it was raining in the vicinity. We turned around to head for Villa and check out the scene out there and pick up Rich's glider, which he'd left on launch the day before. When we stopped in Saguache for gas, I found this little gem while I was waiting in line for the bathroom. You can't make this shit up.

On Saturday I decided to just go hiking, figuring that would be more enjoyable than hanging around on launch all day hemming and hawing about whether I was going to fly. I had a nice little hike and then towed my trailer down to Villa - Tiffany & Larry were having a party for Tiffany's birthday so I parked in their backyard. No hookups, but what a view. And there's a bathroom nearby so not too primitive. And Scot Huber and Mike Chevalier regaled me with tales of sledders off of Whale (Scot's first sledder in probably 20 years) and no flying at all from Villa, so I didn't feel bad at all for missing out.

The view from my bed Saturday night

Sunday morning, Scot and I spent some time figuring out my self-contained systems...getting the 12-volt stuff to work off actual 12-volt power (new battery solved that one!), getting the fridge to work off propane (again - new battery to the rescue) and making sure the water pump worked. In exchange for Scot's expertise I gave him a ride up the mountain, where he had his second sledder in 20 years (!) and then I skipped town again and headed for Pagosa Springs.

Missoula

2015-08-01T17:27:00.000-04:00

As soon as I stepped out of the Missoula airport late on the night of Monday, July 13th, I noticed the difference in air quality. The air smelled...good. It was such a change from what I'd become accustomed to in NY, without even realizing that I had be come accustomed. Matt's dad Craig picked me up, we went to meet his wife Barbara at her job and then went on a pilgrimage to find eggs past midnight in and around Missoula, MT. They gave me the basement in their huge house and I passed out.

Tuesday morning, I was up at 8 for breakfast prepared by Craig, using the eggs we finally found at a gas station the night before, with Barbara fresh off her overnight shift. After breakfast I worked for a while and then set about finding a flying contact. A bunch of people tried to give me contacts...when Joel mentioned that one of his guys owned a brewery I jumped on it. Stopped by the brewery, had a beer & some food & inquired as to the whereabouts of the owner. Had a nice chat with Paul and decided to possibly check out Sentinel that evening & possibly fly Tarkio on Wednesday.

Since Sentinel is a H-4 site due a restricted LZ, and I'm a H-3, it was not in the cards for me to fly there on this trip. However, Mt. Sentinel is also a popular hike for Missoulians - there's a steep zigzag path up to a giant concrete "M" and then another trail up to Hellgate Ridge and, eventually, the summit of Mt. Sentinel. I was itching to get hiking, so I went over to the "M" trail - it's pretty freaking steep but it rewards you with great views of both the city and the mountains across and down the valley. I made it about a half mile from the top, but I had a monster blister forming on my left heel and I was already out of water, so I turned around and went back down - what a quadbuster! My legs were sore for days - it felt awesome.

View from the M

On Wednesday morning Paul texted to say that it would be an evening flight, if at all. I spent the better part of the morning fiddling with my vario, which refused to start even after replacing the batteries with both alkaline batteries and new rechargeables. I was pretty nervous about flying a new site and foot launching, so the last thing I needed was to have to fly without a vario. But alas, a call to Steve Kroop at Flytec (the manufacturer's US dealer) confirmed that I would have to ship the vario to Florida for service. Luckily, Paul had a spare to lend me. What a guy!

Wednesday afternoon I met Paul, Josh & Paul at Paul's house in downtown Missoula. We loaded up two hang gliders & two paragliders and set out for Tarkio, about an hour west of Missoula. What a beautiful site (and sight). Incredible view. Basically a cliff launch. Both Paul & Josh gave me some pointers on the launch and where to find lift, and after inhaling a Kind Bar I suited up. I got a few blips on the vario, but felt I wasn't sure which way to turn to stay in the lift, so I tried all three areas where the guys told me they normally find lift. I wasn't able to get established in anything, so I headed out to the LZ for a nice landing. I looked up in time to see Paul launch, and continued breaking down my glider. Not long later, I saw Paul's glider over the LZ, coming in to land near me. I told him he didn't have to land just to make me feel better, but he insisted he didn't...which, of course, made me feel much better. We hung out for a while watching Josh tow his paragliding student Paul with a scooter tow system, and in the meantime, Bill and his wife (the owners of both the launch and the LZ) came by and we had a lovely time chatting with them. I felt very comfortable and peaceful in that valley.

The launch at Tarkio

Thursday the 16th I worked for a couple of hours and then I needed to get out of the house. Craig and Barbara had just gotten back from a motorcycle ride into Idaho to Lochsa Lodge, and Craig thought I'd really enjoy taking the same ride (in my car, of course). Since this was not the first time I'd been told about the beauty of US 12, I figured I had to check it out. Well, I was not disappointed - the road not only parallels the Lochsa River but runs right along its banks for a while. I had a delicious salad at the Lochsa Lodge and turned around, stopping at a couple of places I had skipped on the way out, including a cedar grove and a nice meditation spot on the riverbank.

I had planned to be moving on by Friday-ish, but a favorable weather report for Friday had led me to extend my trip. Well, wouldn't you know it, but Friday morning Paul wrote to say the weather looked like crap for flying, both Friday and Saturday. I had already promised to feed the dog for Craig & Barbara, so I stuck around till Saturday noon, mostly just working, doing laundry and getting myself re-packed into the trailer for the next phase...Colorado. Quite possibly the love of my life.

Maybe You Can Go Home Again

2015-07-19T00:35:00.001-04:00

It was hard to leave Glacier, but somehow I managed to get myself and the trailer down to Missoula on the morning of Thursday, July 2nd. I was pretty happy to be driving past Flathead Lake again. When I drove past the lake on the way up to Glacier, I was afraid I was going to roll both truck and trailer into the lake because I was having so much trouble keeping my eyes on the road.

In yet another example of how awesome people can be, my buddy Matt spoke up and mentioned that his parents live outside of Missoula. Being good people, they were happy to give me a place to crash, as well as a place to leave all my stuff while I flew back to NY - all while they continue about a couple of the busiest lives I've encountered recently. Craig & Barbara were out of town on the 2nd, but I drove to their house and dropped my stuff, and then I was driven to the airport by a friend of theirs. All this was arranged by two people I had yet to meet, who knew very little about me except that I was their son's hang gliding buddy.

Thursday was a full day of travel - I left Columbia Falls, MT around 7:30am MST to drive to Missoula, spent some time hanging around MSO since my initial flight was delayed, miraculously not only made the connection in Chicago but had time to eat dinner, and landed at Newark a little after 11pm EST.

Outdoor bar at MSO - I've definitely waited out delays in worse places

Spent the night in a hotel in Newark, and spent Friday traveling up to Hang Glide New England in New Braintree, MA. This was a day full of logistics. First, I Ubered to the NJ Transit station to hop a train to Penn Station. Ended up on an Amtrak train, where I narrowly escaped paying an extra $68 instead of the $5 NJT fare. Fun times. Then, I took 2 subway lines uptown & across to the east side to Grand Central to get the train up to Bridgeport, CT. My cousin, Donna, met me at Grand Central to drop off a tent/air mattress/etc so I'd have a place to sleep for the weekend. My "hang gliding husband" Big Mike met me at the Bridgeport station, and after a quick stop at his house to pick up his stuff and my glider, plus another stop at one of the more well-stocked beer & wine emporiums I've had the pleasure of visiting, we were off to MA.

We arrived at Hang Glide New England just in time to see a bunch of the usual suspects breaking down their gliders. Nick Caci offered to let me fly his glider since it was already set up, but by that time I was pretty beat from all the travel, so we just set up camp, ran a couple of errands and inhaled some Mexican food. The next day was pretty rainy and cold, so we drove to Sturbridge to see a movie (Ted 2 - super crass but very funny) and eat and drink some more. Donna met up with us just in time for the movie and hung out for the rest of the weekend.

Per Mike, "This is what happens when you give a honey badger some beer"

Sunday was a beautiful day. We met some new people and caught up with a bunch of old friends. I was the second one to launch and I got a great flight. However, I was flying my Falcon, which I hadn't flown in over 3 years, and I was borrowing a vario because mine was dead. Even though it's theoretically an "easy" glider to fly, the Falcon has no glide to speak of, so I was extremely conscious of the drift I was experiencing as I thermaled up - and what a beautifully thermalling glider it is, I must add. Basically thermalled itself. I was also a bit nervous about the landing, but I had a great landing - probably could have stuck it, but I was ready to run, so I took a couple of steps and the glider settled right onto my shoulders. Before I had unhooked my harness, I was met by Gary, who wanted some pictures for his portfolio, and I had the special treat of seeing Marilyn, whom I almost never get to see even though I run into Rhett every few months. Overall, it was a great weekend - it was so awesome to see everyone, and I can't thank Mike and Donna enough for carting me around and making it all happen.

Donna and I drove home to her place in Copiague, Long Island, in a relaxed and happy state, and took it easy on Monday, just catching up on work, so that we'd have our energy for Tuesday. On the morning of Tuesday, the 7th, Donna and I drove out to Yaphank to pick up my favorite (and coincidentally, only) niece Julieanna and took her to Adventureland. This is a tiny little amusement park with 2 roller coasters - and I'm using the term "roller coaster" very loosely. However, Julieanna isn't bothered by the lack of roller coasters because she...won't...go...on...them. This revelation shook me to the core. I had to question whether we're really related. By the end of the day I was pretty impressed, though - in the morning she didn't want to go on any water rides OR into the haunted house, but by the end of the day she was dragging me into the haunted house and asking if we could "get more wet". I'll give her a pass on the roller coasters...this time. The highlight (or lowlight?) of this day, however, was yet to come. We happened upon a live musical performance, where we got to see Lil' Dawg performing live. We were mesmerized, the same way you're unable to look away from a train wreck. I feel I would be remiss if I didn't share this experience. This child has his own mascot.

https://youtu.be/bwX-NhYMUKo

Julieanna is still trying to comprehend how in the world Lil' Dawg managed to land this gig

Wednesday was another work day, but I did manage to grab dinner with my mom on Long Island. Thursday was a huge day - super busy and filled with so many of my favorite NY things and people. Donna drove me to the train early in the morning so I could get my hair did by the only person I trust (one of my longest relationships at 17 years so far). Then I skipped over to Manhattan for one of THE best bagels at Ess-a-Bagel (seriously, no other bagel comes close). Got my nails did for the wedding on Saturday, then over to Sala for bacon wrapped dates, sangria & girl talk with my friend Aimee. Walked home in the rain, stopping at a natural foods store for some hard-to-find-outside-of-big-city items like kombucha & ghee, and ended the day relaxing in style at my friend Vanessa's place even though she was out of town. I was so tired and happy at the end of that day.

Super red this time

Friday I mainly ran errands, worked, and caught up on the blog, since I had another full day ahead of me on Saturday. First, I did another version of the NJ-NYC-LI journey utilizing various trains + Uber, checked in at the Holiday Inn in Plainview and prettied myself up for the wedding of my good friends Natalie & Brian. (I have to give another shout-out to Big Mike and his wife for clueing me into Rent the Runway - I really didn't have any desire to purchase a new dress, but I also didn't want to wear the same one I've worn to every other function in recent history. I got an awesome dress for a discount-store price, and shipping both ways was quick & easy. I'd recommend it.) Headed over to the wedding, where I caught up with a slew of other people I'd missed for too long. The wedding was beautiful - Brian's sister officiated, Nat's friend Steven broke down in the middle of singing Unchained Melody, the two moms lit the unity candle to join their families...it was great. The reception was super fun - there was a good selection of beer and a carefully curated playlist for the DJ. And so many of those in attendance are like family to me, it was just wonderful to spend time with them again.

The happy couple

Donna picked me up on Sunday and we actually went to the beach.

It was quite the pilgrimage to actually get to the beach, but we did it!

I hadn't been to the beach in too long to remember, so it was pretty cool, even though I picked a spot next to some kids who ended up shattering a beer bottle just inches from my leg...once we moved further up the beach, it was quite relaxing. Monday morning I had to do laundry, but we managed to squeeze in a trip to the dock by the bay, and yes we sat on the dock of the bay...but really there were no ships rolling in. It was a really nice peaceful place to meditate, though. And then Donna dropped me off at the train again to start my trip back to Missoula.

I have a special talent for locating "offices" with the perfect combination of beer and wifi

I landed after 11pm MST in Missoula, and Matt's dad was there to pick me up at the airport and bring me home to set me up in my own guest suite in the basement of their beautiful house in a valley in Florence, MT with mountain views from both front and back. I mean, it's all right, if you like that kind of...gorgeous, naturally beautiful kind of place. And I happen to LOVE that kind of gorgeous, naturally beautiful kind of place.

As great a time as I had at home and as much as it warmed my heart and soothed my soul to catch up with everyone on the East coast, I notice that I feel more at home in the West. I was exhausted when I landed in Missoula, but as soon as I stepped outside of the airport, I felt like I could breathe more easily. The air smelled so good - it's one of those things that you don't realize you're missing until you experience it again.

Devils Tower & Glacier

2015-07-14T19:06:00.001-04:00

The morning of Saturday, June 27th, I woke up still pretty sick. My voice was still unrecognizable, but I'd had my first night of actual sleep in almost a week, so I felt strong enough to drive a couple of hours. I figured I could always pull over and rest if I needed to, but Devils Tower (due to an uncorrected clerical error, there is officially no apostrophe in the name) in Wyoming sounded really cool and I thought it was doable, even in my weakened state...and I had to leave the campsite I'd had for the past couple of days no matter what, so I figured I may as well move on. I'd had enough of South Dakota.

I am so glad that campsite was booked. The drive went really well, and I was excited to see the Wyoming landscape. It's so energizing for me to be in such beautiful places.

You can see the Devils Tower from pretty far away - I guess that's why the aliens chose it :)

I decided to stay at the Devils Tower KOA because it was right at the base of the monument, and the other options were all a solid 30 - 40 minutes away. Since I was sick, I didn't want to deal with a commute. This turned out to be my favorite campground so far. I could see the Devils Tower itself directly from my campsite, and since the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind was filmed onsite, the campground actually shows the movie every night!

That's the Devil's Tower, in between the trailer & the car

I thought about taking a nap - I felt that the responsible thing to do would be to take a nap. Or to get some work done, since I'd been slacking all week due to the brain fog & coughing fits. So, I went up to the gate and bought an annual Interagency Pass, which gets me into any National Park/Monument/etc that charges an entrance fee for the next year. One of the smartest things I've done so far. And then I drove up the hill and spent the afternoon walking the 1.3 mile trail that circles the base of Devils Tower. The place is so cool - it rises, almost vertically, 867 feet from its base (the summit is 1,267 feet above the valley). Usually, there would be climbers all over it, but no climbing is allowed during the month of June because of the significance of the Tower as a sacred site to many native groups. I found the energy of the place to be very positive and I was in awe of this crazy structure. It's made up of a bunch of hexagonal columns, formed by cracks caused by the cooling & shrinking of the rock.

I was somewhat amazed that I made it all the way around the base. I was pretty tired by the end, but once I passed the halfway point (very thoughtfully marked) I was obviously locked in. I did take a quick nap, but I was excited to watch the movie in the place where it was filmed, so I headed over. I made it about halfway through the movie when the coughing got the better of me, so I ended up watching the end of the movie on my phone. Still a very cool evening, and far better than I would have had if I had stayed where I was instead of pushing forward.

Watching Close Encounters with the actual Devils Tower in the background

So peaceful

The next couple of days were devoted to getting to Glacier National Park. By this time, I had a plane ticket to NY booked for Thursday July 2nd out of Missoula, so now I had a schedule to keep. I had a feeling that I'd end up skipping Glacier if I didn't get up there before I went home, and I really didn't want to skip Glacier. I liked the RV park in Billings, which had mountain views and a nature walk down to the river...the one in Missoula was not so nice since it was right in the city and really felt like an actual trailer park in the city. But the drive was absolutely gorgeous and I was loving life again.

Flathead Lake

I checked into a campground...didn't love this one, either, once I found out that no showers are allowed after 10pm and the laundry room closed at 8pm. This meant that I really had to be careful about how late I stayed at the park. And it wasn't even fully dark by 10pm, so I found these rules to be completely ridiculous. Another lesson learned.

Glacier was incredible, although I would have much preferred to be hiking instead of driving. I drove the entire Going to the Sun Road, which is just a slew of breathtaking
scenery. I was also able to explore a bit of Many Glacier. The weather on the Eastern side of the park was kind of crappy - overcast with a low cloud base, so that many of the peaks were enshrouded. Still very beautiful, but harder to get those "wow" pics.

After two days of exploring via car, I had to get myself packed up for the trip back to NY, so I made sure to get out of the park by 8pm (still nowhere near dark) and back to the campground to find and pack everything I would need to go flying, attend a wedding, and just hang out and catch up with all my peeps.

The next morning I drove down past Flathead Lake again, past Missoula to leave my rig in Florence, MT and hop on a flight back to Newark, NJ.

Sick as a Dog

2015-07-10T21:05:00.000-04:00

Sunday the 21st was kind of a strange day. I found out that a friend had passed away in a hang gliding accident. Bertrand was such a bright spirit, and I struggle to understand why it always seems to be those bright spirits that are taken from our lives so early. I've known Bertrand and Sami for a few years now, and I seemed to bump into them everywhere I went. They traveled more than I did, and we had a lot of friends in common. Bertrand could always be counted on to be upbeat and positive, pour you a glass of wine and cook you one of the best burgers you'd ever had. He was full of life and love, and I always admired that about him. He will be sorely missed.

So, that Sunday I had a lot of information to process. I woke up in Chadron, NE in a deserted trailer park - there were plenty of trailers but no people, except for one guy who happened to be next door to me and seemed a bit lonely. It was pretty windy, and I debated whether I'd leave...my next-door neighbor certainly tried to convince me to stay by listing all the local sights I'd be "missing" if I left.

My first real-life tumbleweed

But I thought about it, and I really wanted to get to Mt. Rushmore. I was only 2 hours & 15 minutes away, and this was the first major goal I'd set for a trip with very few stated goals. I thought about what Bertrand would think I should do, and I felt that he would want me to seize the day and get whatever I could out of it. I also figured that, if the winds really were too high, I could always stop and wait it out...but at least I would have made some progress. So, I pushed on and I got to drive through some really beautiful country. I stopped in Custer, SD for lunch and found Bitter Esters Brewhouse, which not only brews its own beer but makes its own sausage. After some friendly service and good food/beer, I was still in a daze. I continued on and stumbled upon Wind Cave National Park, which I was literally driving through before I realized it even existed. It was a beautiful landscape, though, and cool to see bison roaming freely.

I didn't go into the actual Wind Cave - the only way to go in there was to join a guided tour, and I just wasn't in any shape to be socializing with strangers. So, I pushed on again towards my base in Wall, SD, near Badlands National Park. I opted not to drivge past Mt. Rushmore at the time because it was getting late and it would have made my drive significantly longer. I figured I'd hit it later in the week. At that point, I just wanted to set up camp and relax. I checked into the campground, checked out Wall Drug (super famous but basically just a really big gift shop), went grocery shopping, drank a couple of beers, caught up with another friend who was processing the news about Bertrand and went to bed.

The next day, I was still in a bit of a funk and I wasn't feeling great physically - sort of foggy, combined with coughing and congestion. I really needed to check out the Badlands though - I was in dire need of some outdoor time and physical activity. So I took a drive through the park, which is pretty freaking awesome. And then I went on a quick hike - just enough to get my fix but I was able to turn around when I started feeling tired. It's this crazy beautiful landscape that makes you feel like you're walking on the moon. I rested for a while and then went back that evening for the sunset...and at the end of the day, even though I felt worse physically, I felt somewhat better spiritually. For me, getting outside really helps me to reset and recharge mentally & emotionally. It's my version of self-medicating.

I woke up the next day feeling terrible. I'd only had bronchitis once before, about a year & a half ago, but the coughing I was doing was giving me flashbacks. I had to drive into Rapid City, about 45 minutes away, to go to an Urgent Care Center, but not before I spent a good hour on the phone with Aetna to get them to process an exception since there were no in-network providers within 300 miles. They gave me a bunch of drugs and I figured it'd be another couple of days before I started feeling better. Like a good little girl, I laid low the next couple of days, streaming Netflix on my phone and watching DVDs when I got tired of looking at the tiny screen. It kind of sucked being alone and being in a strange place, far from most modern conveniences. The only food around that I could easily just pick up, without having to cook, was Dairy Queen. There were definitely a few tourist trap restaurants in town, but none of the reviews were compelling, and I just wanted some soup. Dairy Queen doesn't have soup, though, so I ate some iceburg lettuce - I didn't have much of an appetite anyway. Thursday morning, I still didn't feel any better, but I had an appointment in Rapid City to get my new awning installed and thought it would be cool to set up camp a bit closer to Mt Rushmore & the city for a couple of days, which is all I figured I'd need before I'd feel well enough to move on again.

I checked into a campground I really liked - this one was in the woods, so it actually felt like I was camping in nature instead of a parking lot (which is what a lot of RV parks feel like). I had an appointment for a massage that afternoon (my birthday present from Janice) so I figured I'd drop off the trailer and then go get massaged. But - I had neglected to ask about a pull-through site, so when I pulled up to my designated camp site I was disappointed to see that it was, indeed, a back-in site. This is not the end of the world, but I really hadn't practiced backing up the trailer very much, and my general strategy thus far had been to just avoid it whenever possible - which, I'd found, was pretty much all of the time. So this would be my first attempt to actually back into a campsite. Just to make things even more fun, this campsite was built on a hillside, so as I'm backing in, I've got a hill in front of me, sloping up from left to right. I've got a big tree directly behind the spot where the trailer needs to go...there's a picnic table to the right of the spot where the trailer needs to go...AND there's a steep dropoff directly to the left of where the trailer needs to go. And I'm still sick as a dog.

So, do I go back to the office and ask for a pull-though site? Hell no, I can handle this. I'm the mother-effing Honey Badger. I start by pulling forward, attempting to get the trailer reasonably straight. This isn't really possible due to the configuration of the place, so I start backing in...and jumping out of the car to check that what I think I see in the mirrors is really what I see, and I'm not actually about to throw the trailer over the side of a cliff. Back in the car, back up a bit more in the other direction, jump out and check. Back in the car, back up a bit more in the original direction, jump out and check. I do this a few times, and I'm just getting back in the car to pull forwards again and straighten it out a bit more, when a couple of the maintenance guys come by and offer to help. I tell them I'd love some help, and thank you very much. Within a few more minutes we've got the trailer in pretty much the perfect spot, and one of the guys is reiterating what I've heard from basically everyone who has ever towed a trailer - the smaller ones are harder to back up because they change direction super quickly. I tell him I'm sick, it's the first time I've ever had to back it up, and I'm sure I'll get the hang of it.

Now all I have to do is disconnect the trailer from the truck, and zip on over to the inn where I'm getting my massage. I disconnect the chains, pull the lighting cord out of the socket, and start raising the trailer. This will get the trailer's hitch high enough that I can just pull the car forward and go. Only the damn thing won't come off the hitch ball. I keep cranking it up, and it's pulling the truck higher and higher along with it. I jump on it, I shake it, the fucker won't budge. I let it back down and try jumping & shaking. Nothing. I am almost crying at this stage because I am literally sick and tired and I am this close to a relaxing massage, if I can just get the car separated from the trailer so I can drive to the inn. At some point I notice that the lock on the hitch is raised, but not completely. I raise it fully, start cranking up the trailer again, and hear the satisfying sound of metal on metal that means the hitch ball is separating from the coupler. Hall-freaking-llujah! I'm free! I feel like I just won a million dollars.

If I'd had the energy (and the place hadn't been like 15 miles away), I would have skipped over to my massage. But, I had a nice drive through the mountains and arrived at the completely adorable Summer Creek Inn & Spa a half hour early. Had a lovely cup of chamomile tea outside on the patio while I waited, and then had a relaxing massage even though I was coughing through most of it. Thanks Janice!

At this point, I had hardly slept that whole week. I was in a daze, and everything was harder for me than it needed to be because I was just so completely exhausted. I was getting maybe 40 minutes of uninterrupted sleep at any one time. I was really hoping that I'd get a decent sleep once I was so relaxed, but because the coughing always got worse when I laid down, I was doomed to repeat the same coughing fits that had kept me up the rest of the week. By Friday morning, I was so frustrated. I had been laying low, thinking that would help me recover, but not feeling any better and getting more and more bored by the minute. Mt. Rushmore had become a joke in my mind - I'd been in the area for 5 days and still hadn't seen the thing. I wasn't super excited about seeing Mt. Rushmore, but I felt like it was the kind of thing you should probably see at some point in your life, and since I had the time and was in the area, it needed to be on the list. I drove by Mt. Rushmore and took a couple of pics just so I could cross something off my list and feel like I was doing something. I didn't feel like it was worth paying $11 to park, so I just did the drive by and moved on.

Yup, there it is...

And then I went back to the Urgent Care Center and cried at another doctor that I was so frustrated. She gave me a Z-Pak and some cough syrup with codeine, and I exhaled. I went home, watched 3 more DVDs, and I actually slept that night. I got a couple hours at a time, maybe a total of 5 hours...which felt like a LOT of sleep compared to the none I'd been getting all week.

I was scheduled to check out the next morning, but thought one more day of true rest would be good for me. However, I would have had to move to another campsite. Since that means disconnecting power, water, and sewer, hitching up, unhitching, and reconnecting all of those things anyway, I decided to just move on. And boy, was I glad I made that decision. I'll tell you all about it in my next post :)

The Early Days on the Road

2015-06-28T17:52:00.000-04:00

The past couple of weeks have been pretty intense. I apologize for my absence from the blog - at first I was just busy with figuring out life on the road. Then I got sick, so for the past week I've been laying super low. But since my second visit to the doctor where I got the cough syrup with codeine, which is now allowing me to get some sleep, I'm feeling ready to begin piecing together how I got here. It's important to me, not only to update all my adoring fans, but also for me to take time to reflect. I get so busy just doing that I'm not always conscious of how I'm feeling...which is probably how I got sick in the first place.

I extended my stay in Texas due to the hefty gravitational pull I mentioned in my last post. I'm super happy with that choice - I made it because of how I felt about the place and the people, and I was rewarded with multiple days filled with fun and connections with new people. And this is where I experienced the first sign that Texas did not want me to leave.

On Saturday the 20th, I had no plans except to go watch a band play that night. I asked around about flying, but the weather wasn't great for it, and Tracy's son Dakota had invited me to go tubing with him, his brother/sister/cousin/various significant others. This sounded like a fun & relaxing way to spend the day, so I tagged along. I put my phone & clothes in my dry bag, which I'd intended to clip to the handle of my tube. But when someone suggested I just throw it in the cooler, that seemed much easier. We couldn't get the cooler closed with the bag sealed, so we left it open...which was fine right up until we had to get the cooler out of the river at the end. My dry bag became just a regular bag, all too happy to let the river in and let my phone go swimming.

As Dakota said, luckily I was in a small town and everyone has everyone else's number anyway. From my perspective, though, this just meant that I couldn't leave that small town. My phone is my means of contact with the outside world in so many ways - it's my means of navigation, my camera, my phone of course, my Facebook update system - basically, my phone is everything to me while I'm on the road. So Texas had conspired to create a situation where I was perfectly fine and well taken care of...as long as I stayed in Texas.

Well, I made it to see the band play with the use of good old fashioned directions WRITTEN ON A PIECE OF PAPER. I know - crazy right?! It actually worked! I had a lovely time being courted by all of Cistern, TX's most eligible bachelors and the bartender told me I should come back any time - she was having a grand old time observing all the activity. The next day I got to hang out with a new friend and make some more new ones, drinking some good beer & putting together some serious puzzles at the Cistern Schoolhouse. Well, OK I mostly watched the puzzles get put together.

I got the new phone on Monday but by the time I had everything installed and working it was too late to leave (nicely played, Texas) so I had one last night in town. As hard as it was, I did actually leave Schulenburg on Tuesday, June 16th. I'm so glad I got to stay there as long as I did, but as fun as it was, I was in a holding pattern and I was starting to really feel a need to make some progress toward my goals.

The first night on the road was pretty uneventful, but I woke up the next morning to a bunch of storms all around me. Although it wasn't currently raining where I was, I had driven through some rain on the way to Tracy's and it wasn't fun, so I decided to stay put in Sanger, TX for another night and move on in better weather. I still think this was the right decision, but that night was pretty scary. Hard to tell how scared I should have been vs. how much I was just plain freaking myself out because I was alone and inexperienced...but I was skeered. I hadn't really looked at the forecast, but around 11:15pm I did check it and saw that we were looking at 30mph winds, gusting to 50+. My little trailer was definitely a-rockin'. I didn't know what I should do - I tried to look at things logically and I figured, at the very least, I would not be able to sleep with the trailer rocking like that, so maybe I should get a hotel room. The closest hotel was about 12 miles away, though, and with 50mph winds I thought I proabably shouldn't be out driving. So I was back to square one, spending the night in the trailer. I looked around outside and saw that there were quite a few others spending the night where I was, so I told myself it must be safe. My next door neighbors had a fine time getting their awning in, but not until it got so loud that it scared the crap out of me - I was so relieved to finally realize it was their awning I was hearing and not just the angry storm! I passed the next couple of hours coloring in my coloring book (see pic), watching movies, meditating, basically anything I could think of to take my mind off the question of whether my trailer was going to topple over with me in it. And sometime after 130am I fell alseep, and woke up to what amounted to paradise for me. And life was good.

Best coloring book ever!

Paradise, relatively speaking

On Thursday 6/18 I high-tailed it out of Texas, and things were going great - for a few miles. I ended up taking a long lunch in Ardmore, OK while I waited for the roads to reopen. That's right, not road. Roads. Plural. Including the INTERSTATE. Apparently, Oklahoma was in cahoots with Texas and some boulders had fallen into the middle of the interstate, forcing it closed. Local news story. I'd thought, hey, no big deal, I'll take the US Route. A little slower but just generally more interesting anyway...but that US Route was closed due to recent flooding in the area. I literally could not get away from Texas. My TX friends reiterated that I was welcome to turn around and come back, but I persevered and in a couple hours I was back on the road. I was rewarded with this beautiful sunset:

#‎nofilter‬ somewhere in Oklahoma

That Friday I drove from OK to KS. Pretty boring drive, until I stopped for lunch at a rest stop. As I was walking back to the car from the restrooms I noticed one of the trailer's hub caps was missing...on closer inspection, so was the wheel bearing cap. Now, when I say lunch, I mean my lunch...which is a little later than normal people eat lunch because I don't like to wake up as early as normal people. So by the time I noticed this little issue, it was 330pm on a Friday, and I was about 20 miles North of Salina, KS...not exactly a metropolis but the last "city-ish" place I was going to see for the rest of that day. So after hurriedly texting a pic to my buddy Jim to confirm exactly how much of an emergency this was, I decided to turn around and plead with a local mechanic to help me out. Dan Peery of Peery's Auto ended up staying past closing on a Friday to fix me up and get me on the road. He replaced the bearing on that wheel and eyeballed the rest of them. In the meantime I got to meet some of the local cast of characters. All very nice guys who were astounded to see me traveling alone, and even more shocked to learn that I don't "pack a piece". This wound up being an interesting stop and I was just happy I didn't have to hang around town until Monday morning. So, back on my way I ended up in Wellington, KS for the night.

Something doesn't look quite right here...

But it's all going to be fine.

Neither Wellington, KS, nor Grand Island, NE were particularly memorable stops for me, but on Saturday 6/20 I got to drive through the Pine Ridge region of Nebraska, and I learned that Nebraska...is gorgeous! The plains were pretty boring - just miles of the same flat land, but the Pine Ridge region had hills and cliffs and lakes, and I was forced to leave the interstate and drive northward on US routes towards Mt Rushmore, so I got to pull over and take pictures whenever I wanted. It was awesome.

It was also on Saturday that I passed a sign for Carhenge in Alliance, NE. I wasn't sure exactly what that was, but it wasn't too far off the main road so I figured I owed it to myself to stop...especially since I hadn't stopped for the World's Largest Porch Swing or any other such attractions. It was pretty cool. Apparently this guy conceived the idea and his family helped build it for a family reunion. At first the town was against it, but once they realized it drew in a bunch of tourists with money to spend, they came around. It's a free attraction and worth the stop if you're passing through.

...and yet another sign from Texas

After checking out Carhenge, I drove another hour & a half north to spend the night in Chadron, NE. The following morning I would drive up into South Dakota to my base camp near the Badlands.

To be continued...

Don't Mess with Texas

2015-06-12T20:30:00.000-04:00

Hard to see here, but that's a complete rainbow surrounding the house and my trailer.

Texas hospitality has proven to have a strong gravitational force - at least for me. I had planned to leave this past Wednesday, but here I am sitting here at Ina's Kitchen in Schulenburg, Texas, eating chicken fried chicken (I couldn't resist any longer) and finally updating my blog. Tracy's entire family has basically adopted me by now, and I have to say they are a force to be reckoned with - in the best way possible.

Cool light fixture at Ina's

I arrived at Tracy & Chris's brand new house on the night of Tuesday, the 2nd, thoroughly exhausted and not wanting to drive again for a very long time. Tracy was exhausted from moving (this was only her 3rd night sleeping in the new place). So, of course we got up bright and early Wednesday morning to drive 2.5 hours and go hang gliding! Thankfully, Tracy was happy to do all the driving so that she could introduce me to boat towing, a method of launching hang gliders I had never tried before. I have it on good authority that Tracy is really good at boat towing, and I know she absolutely loves it. It combines hanging out on a boat on Lake Conroe with good friends and flying - what more could you want?

Tracy, ready for takeoff

Our day of boat towing was made possible by Gregg Ludwig, who owns the boat and runs the operation in his time off from being a big deal pilot at United. Gregg knew I was coming into town and he made sure to have Mark Moore on hand to give me a check out tandem. Both Gregg and Mark were truly awesome - patient and laid back, and super helpful, just wanting me to succeed and have a good time. I can't thank them enough because I LOVED boat towing!

It was such a nice day to be out on the water, making new friends and sharing something new with an old friend. After my tandem, Mark pronounced me "solid" so Tracy and I got to work setting up her Falcon. We waited for Mike Hoffman to finish a few solo tows and then Gregg got the Falcon set up at the back of the boat. I let Tracy go first so I could have one more demo, but then I was ready to get some air myself. My first solo tow was a little nerve-wracking at first, but once I released from the boat it was really smooth sailing. The air was pretty smooth, although there was an occasional thermal, but I found it pretty easy to stay behind the boat. Once the boat stopped and I felt the line go slack, I pulled the release on the tow rope and had a good look around. I was pretty damn high - I didn't have a vario so I have no idea how high I was, but it took a while to come down. In the meantime, Gregg retracted the tow line with the help of a little parachute, and also put up a flag to show me the wind direction for my landing. Meanwhile, Mike Hoffman shot a couple of videos.

I was a little nervous about the landing for a couple of reasons - 1) I usually land standing up, on my feet...on the water we land on pontoons attached to the basetube & keel, similar to wheel landings on the ground - and 2) with no vario and so much water stretching out beneath me it felt a bit difficult to judge my altitude. I figured out I could use the size of my shadow as a guide, and the bigger it got, the closer I was to the water and to landing. Thankfully, I had a really good landing, sliding in on the pontoons, and boy does the water feel refreshing on a hot day in Texas. We had time for one more flight, so I went up again - this time I was so relaxed I didn't immediately realize that the boat had stopped and it was time to release. By the time I released, the line had enough slack in it to allow the parachute on the tow rope to wrap itself around the left pontoon, which put me into a hard left turn. I had no option but to continue in that turn and keep my airspeed up so that the parachute would eventually fly off the pontoon...which it did, thankfully. That part was a bit scary, I have to admit, but I'll be super alert from now on and Gregg is modifying the setup to make that less likely to happen in the future. Overall, it was an awesome day and it felt incredibly good to be up in the air after so much time in the car.

As if that wasn't an exciting enough start to my time in Texas, Tracy and I enjoyed one rest day, complete with a family dinner where I made my now-almost-famous bacon/onion/garlic burgers, before getting in the car for yet another road trip. This time we were going to San Antonio to meet up with my friend Vanessa for Friday night, followed closely by Saturday night in Austin. It was a whirlwind weekend and it was so much fun. Food is very important to me and my friends, so we got a dinner recommendation for Friday night at Zinc in San Antonio. The food was pretty good, although the service was a bit slow, and since we were out on the patio we ended up feeling like we were at a nightclub when the DJ started playing next door. After a brief walk on the Riverwalk, we retired like the old ladies we are and watched a movie in the hotel room, during which all 3 of us passed out into food comas.

Saturday morning we were up at the crack of 11 to check out at noon and drive to Austin for the main event - at least it was for me. Three years ago I stopped in Austin for one night and I ate brunch at South Congress Cafe, where I tasted the heaven that is...Carrot Cake French Toast.

I'll just let that sink in for a moment. This is french toast made out of carrot cake, accompanied by a cream cheese pecan syrup. Seriously. And O. M. G. it was possibly even better than I remembered. Each of us wound up getting another order on our way out of town to take home to loved ones (or just gobble up on our own). Actually, all of the food and drinks at South Congress were delicious - I also had some short rib hash and one of the best bloody marys I've had. The rest of the day was mostly recovery from brunch, but we did manage to squeeze in a trip to the piercing shop for a new nose piercing for Tracy & a new ornament for Vanessa's existing nose piercing. (My nose remains intact.) Saturday night was a fun mix of bars down on Rainey street - amazing people watching down there. We saw more handlebar mustaches than I'd ever seen before - is this really the hot new trend?? - and even a mullet. How these people manage to keep a straight face when they see themselves in the mirror is beyond me. At any rate, we made a bunch of new (albeit young) friends and drank some good beer. We even found a beer hall that had kombucha on tap!

The next morning, Vanessa really was up at the crack of dawn to go wait on line for Franklin BBQ - I have to say, it was some of the best BBQ I've ever had but I'm really really really glad that Vanessa was the one who waited on line and not me. By the time we left, around 1pm, there was still a line all the way around the corner. And we're told that, if you want to order ahead, you'll need to do it 2 months in advance...and even that method sells out in 5 minutes. This is some serious BBQ, people.

Sheesh...I'm tired again just thinking about that weekend. We made a quick stop at the "Greetings from Austin" postcard mural, dropped V at the airport and made our way back to Schulenburg for some R&R. This past week started out in a much more healthy manner - decent sleep, cooking breakfast every morning before working a bit, and making sure to squeeze in some yoga or a walk with weights around the neighborhood...until Wednesday night, when we went to Sengelmann's to hear some live music. I wasn't expecting much, but the band was really good, and Tracy's family knows these guys so we got to hang out with some very interesting (and attractive) musicians into the wee hours. This meant that Thursday was a lost day for me, but it was absolutely worth the recovery time.

Today is mostly dedicated to prepping for getting back on the road - new wiper blades and new wider towing mirrors for the truck, stocking up on supplies, etc...but tomorrow there's more fun on the menu with some river tubing, beer pong, and some live music at a true TX country bar. I'm excited :)

I'll get back on the road Sunday or Monday and make the long trip to Mt Rushmore over several days. Stay tuned...

Today is the First Day of My Life

2015-05-31T21:31:00.003-04:00

It's really not, but it sure does feel that way. Today is the first day of towing my trailer all by myself.

I can't even really believe it's happening - it felt like it was taking me forEVER to get everything ready to leave. It took so long to find a car that could tow the trailer, and then I had to wait to register it, and I was away for a week right before I wanted to leave...so the past week has been a whirlwind of preparations and learning. I couldn't have done it in such a short amount of time without a LOT of help, and I can't thank Jim Prahl enough. From hooking me up with the right mechanic to replace the wheel bearings on the trailer, to building the front rack for my hang glider in no time flat, to giving me a place to sleep while said mechanic had my trailer overnight (my trailer's parts are apparently very rare and difficult to track down), and doing all of this willingly and while he was in the midst of his own preparations for leaving...it blows my mind what a generous person he is.

So, after brekky with Jim this morning (he had a bunch of bacon he had to cook before he left, and I'm generous enough to help him eat it) and finishing up the padding on my hang glider racks, I got the trailer ready to leave all by myself. I even backed up the truck to the hitch & hooked it up all by myself. And then I towed the mofo right out of Quest Air - all by myself. I know it's not brain surgery or anything, but it's pretty exciting for me.

The phrase at the top of this page is "courage is not the absence of fear". Anyone who thinks I'm not the least bit scared to be heading out on my own, towing a trailer, which I've never done before, with no real itinerary and no final destination...is insane. I'm terrified! There are so many things that possibly can and probably will go wrong at some point. And it's not easy being on the road all the time, let alone doing it by myself. It's constant researching and it means never just being able to roll out of bed in the morning and grab your favorite breakfast - because you have no idea where to find it. But it's also extremely exciting, and for various reasons I really really want to do it...one of which is that you never know what each day will bring (see the double-edge sword?). So I don't let the fear stop me.

So today around noon, even though I was so scared I could have easily let that fear paralyze me (and I could very easily have hung around Quest forever), I pulled on my big girl pants and I drove right out of there. And I'm proud of that. It energizes me to do new things, and even though I'm so exhausted right now I can barely see straight, I'm sitting here smiling when I think of what I've accomplished today. I'm living the kind of life I want to live, even though it's not as easy and even though it scares me sometimes. And I can't wait for tomorrow.

Doing It "Your Way"

2015-05-27T19:10:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I think I have the most adorable grandma ever. My birthday is on Friday, and today I received the following email from my Grandma (spelling/punctuation all hers):

yOU KNOW I PREFER PAPER OVER COMPUTER, BUT SINCE I HAVENT BEEN ABLE TO GET TO A CARD STRE IN MONTHS, I AM FORCED TO DO IT "YOUR WAY".

I DO WISH YOU A PERFECT DAY (AND A PERFECT LIFE IN A PERFECT WORLD )...a BEAUTIFUL SUNSET, A GREAT RIDE (HOW I ENVY THAT!), GOOD COMPANY AND A SOFT PILLOW. l LOVE YOU MY "CHELLE, AND PRAY FOR YOU EVERY DAY THAT YOU WILL FIND YOUR HEART'S DESIRE. ITIS EASY TO REMEMBER AS I SEE A LITTLEDUTCH WOODEN SHOE AND A CUP FROM THE OLD N'ORLEANS AND A ST THERESE MEDAL FROM SPAIN.

NOT AS GOOD AS SEEING YOUR SMILING FACE, BUT LOVELY REMINDERS OF YOU.

BE HAPPY, MY LOVE.

GRANDMA

As I told her when I called her to thank her, it's not easy - what I'm doing. It's really hard, and it can be isolating, so it's really nice to know that people are thinking of me. It makes me feel connected and that makes me happy. I don't have a place to put actual physical cards anyway - so the email version, or "my way", gives me what I need without forcing me to find a place for more stuff. Personally, I think that email was better than any card - I doubt she would have found one that said it any better than she did. And it proves my hypothesis that I need very few things in order to be happy.

All this comes as I'm in the middle of getting myself (and my things) ready to leave Quest and to start on the meat of my trip - pulling my trailer behind my new-to-me pickup truck. That's right, folks, I now drive a pickup truck. If anyone had told me a few years ago that I would be driving a pickup truck and living in a trailer I would have laughed my ass off. I resisted buying the pickup, but with all the energy I put into finding an SUV, I had to finally accept the fact that it just wasn't working out. It seems the universe is on board with me driving a pickup truck, but not so much with the SUV.

Similarly, I just yesterday had to let go of the idea that I would leave Quest in time to get to Tracy's house (an hour from Austin, TX) for my birthday. I had thought that it would be really cool to celebrate my birthday in Austin, but I had so many things to do before I could leave Quest, and I spent last week as a driver on the Flytec Race & Rally hang gliding competition. The Race & Rally is a really cool competition, but it's very exhausting because it moves every day, so you're in a different motel every night and you never know where you're going to be the next day. Not very conducive to getting shit done.

So I got back to Quest Saturday night, and although I sprung into action on Sunday to cross things off my list, the Memorial Day holiday threw a wrench into my plans - no registering the truck & trailer, no getting the trailer's wheel bearings and tires replaced, etc. And the rack I was going to have installed on the cab portion of the truck turned out to not fit properly, so now I'm waiting till Friday to get a beefier one installed.

Thankfully, I still have several friends around who'd love to celebrate with me, so in reality I may just end up having a better time here than I would in Austin. Because everything happens for a reason, and when you let go of preconcieved notions and just go with the flow, everything really starts to come together. Now all I need to do is remember that and make it a habit. Should be a piece of cake, right?

What Am I Doing With My Life?

2015-04-22T13:14:00.002-04:00

I've been at Quest for 3 weeks as of yesterday, but it sure doesn't feel like it. Time really flies.

My last full-time day at work was Tuesday, March 24th. On the 26th I watched as most of my possessions were loaded onto trucks to be donated or trashed, and then I closed my garage door one last time and hit the road in a car that barely had room for me to squeeze in. I took my time with the drive, partially because I knew I would be exhausted from packing & moving and partially because it was symbolic of this new chapter of my life. I would not be rushed. I would take each day as it came and do what felt right to me, not what I felt obligated to do.

I've attempted to explain to many people what I'm doing and why, and I know there are countless others who are confused. They want to know where I'm moving to, and what I'm going to do. When they find out I'll be traveling for a while, they want to know my itinerary. I've always been a planner - I'm very organized and I tend to plan things out well in advance. But right now, I am wholeheartedly opposed to having an itinerary.

There is a plan (I'm still not that free-spirited that I could survive without one) but it's a very - intentionally - loose one. I'll be at Quest until after the Race & Rally (a hang gliding competition ending on May 23rd) and then I'll head West. First stop will be at my friend Tracy's house near Austin, TX. Then I'll head up to Mt. Rushmore and the Badlands. From there I'll head West, in the general direction of Glacier National Park. I'll be at the Big Spring, TX hang gliding competition the first week of August and at the Dinosaur, CO competition the first week of September. In between I'll be exploring the Great American West, hiking, flying and dropping in on some friends & family. I have a long list of places I want to go and I'm just going to see how much I can get done before it gets too cold...Wyoming, Montana, Yellowstone, Glacier, Zion, Arches, Point of the Mountain, Telluride, Grand Tetons, etc, etc...

I want to make this last as long as I possibly can, and I know myself well enough to know that living out of my car would get old very quickly. So I'll be towing my travel trailer and living full-time in my RV. This way I get to have my own bed every night, my own bathroom and even a small kitchen. The kitchen is important to me because I've made such great progress these past few months since doing my Whole30 and switching to a mostly Paleo lifestyle (I even make my own kombucha now!) and one of my most important life goals is to keep myself healthy. It can be difficult to eat well while traveling, so being able to cook my own food will really help.

I am not independently wealthy. I know it's hard to believe, but I will still need a source of income. For the rest of this calendar year, I have a deal with my employer to work part-time remotely. This benefits both sides by buying each of us time to figure out our next move, while maintaining continuity in their business operations and making sure I know where my next meal is coming from. This won't be an option for everyone, and I worked very hard to get to a place where my employers were willing to consider this as an option for me. It's very simple, but not at all easy. None of us know what the future will bring or how well this will work out, but we're willing to give it our best shot.

To Blog or Not to Blog

2015-02-27T13:42:00.001-05:00

I've been thinking about starting a blog for quite a while now. The last time I "took a hiatus" (as I like to call it) from mainstream society, I did a bunch of traveling and hang gliding, and more than one person suggested I should maybe start a blog. A couple of people asked if I was planning to write a book about my experiences. At the time I felt like I had nothing to share with the world - at that point in time I considered my journey to be a very personal and private one, and I was uncomfortable sharing much of it with all but my closest friends.

The past 2+ years have been a time of exponential personal growth for me. I'm still very much a work in progress, but I have made great strides in my ability to trust myself and to take care of myself.

I'm not sure exactly where this will go, but as I'm embarking on another chapter in my self-discovery, I'm compelled to share more of it with the world. It always surprises me when people tell me that I'm inspirational - I tend to think of all my epiphanies as terribly obvious ideas that it took me forEVER to realize - but I do love to be able to help anybody. I have learned a lot through trial and error, and I know that sometimes it's not a new idea that hits home, but the exact wording someone uses can strike a chord and change the way we see things.

Major life changes have somehow come to be my "thing". Next up: I'm selling my house (which I just bought in May 2014) and most of my stuff, and I'm headed to live out of my travel trailer for a while. The very loose plan right now - drive down to Quest Air Hang Gliding in FL the first week of April. Hang out there till sometime in May, at which point I'll head out west for the summer. I have planned stops for specific dates in Jackson Hole, WY; Big Spring, TX; and Dinosaur, CO. Additionally, I'd like to see Mt. Rushmore, Glacier National Park, and Zion National Park - those dates are very much TBD at this point.

I'll be sharing my journeys, both physical and spiritual. Happy to have some company for as much or as little time as you can spare.