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Travel more … 🏕️

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I’ve decided if I am not going to buy a house right away — and my dreams of building a cabin are probably best to wait until retirement — I am going to focus more on travel in next few years. While I won’t say it will be spare no expense, I should also not be worried about pinching every penny or shaving every mile off trips.

People say I was nuts when I was Coney Island and wasn’t willing to pay $7 for an authentic Nathan’s Hot Dog from the beach. Maye I should have just gone for it, as who knows if I will ever be in Coney Island again. It’s great to save and invest in your future, I do think I should also have a bit of fun and not missing out on some great adventure along the way due to a $5 admission fee, when you’re 500 miles away from home.

If I am dreaming of moving out west, then I really should plan trips out west. Maybe next summer, especially if I end up replacing Big Red with something a bit more fuel efficent. Or gasp! Taking a plane and renting a car. I don’t want to go to tourist traps, I want open country, probably places that are relatively inexpensive and interesting to visit.   

Riding in during the summer swelter 😰

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Buying and eating a lot of frozen fruit these past few days. I guess enjoy the heat while it’s going to last, probably going to be cold and who knows, maybe rainy next weekend, but it does not matter as I don’t have any news to report on the truck cap despite the lack of call from Ruth’s.

I thought about driving in today, so I could go to the park to lay in hammock by the river and later Walmart after work, 🛒 but I have meetings downtown, so it probably makes more sense to bike it in. Going to be ungodly riding up the State Street Hill this afternoon, but the office downtown is air conditioned and maybe they’ll have freee ice cream sandwiches 🍦 in the freezer or so I tell myself. Delusions from the heat? See what you need is Better Help! Don’t use the term “extreme mental illness” to describe the fed chair, you’ll be bombarded by Better Help! advertisements every where you go in a scene only reminiscent of Good Neighbor Sam.

I went to Five Rivers 🐸 to beat the heat last night, after shopping and coming home for a quick dinner 🍽️. It didn’t seem that hot with the breeze riding home, 🚵‍♂️ but after getting out of the fairly well air conditioned Hannaford it felt hot, especially in my very non-air conditioned apartment. It did around 8:55 PM start to cool down by the time I rode home from Five Rivers, but still fairly warm when I got home, so I stuffed a bunch of frozen blueberries in my mouth, had more chilled cider vinegar water, and sat out back in the bed of my truck.

I don’t know, I really don’t. 🚜 Tomorrow is the Gas Up, I am thinking of going and then maybe staying overnight in a hammock in the wilderness somewhere. The Mine Kill Pool is open this weekend so that might be fun for cooling off. 🏊‍♂️ Or I could bring the tube along and go for a swim. Or maybe I’ll just hang out closer to home. Money is surprisingly tight after my credit card bill went though, 💰 I guess I didn’t realize some of the truck related expenses where on this month’s bill, and it’s good in the sense that the truck cap wasn’t delivered this weekend because I wouldn’t have had the money to pay for it despite transferring funds to do just that.

Well if the truck cap is delivered next week, I’ll have a three day weekend to work on it, 🔋 assuming that I don’t get tied up with work stuff that is going on. It looks like next weekend will be cold and maybe rainy, so it wouldn’t have been a good week to get out of town for Juneteenth. My best hope is getting out for that last week of June, maybe I’ll take off two days so I have extra time to enjoy the Potholers or maybe Schoharie to check out Bromley Mountain, the Catskill Scenic Trail and John Burroughs Historic Site with the SuperDuty. I don’t know,  🤷🏻‍♂️ it all depends on when the truck 🚛 cap is delivered if that ever happens. Maybe I’m just inpatient but also the money for it is no longer earning interest, which isn’t much but still annoying. I thought it would come in last week, then this week. They promised 4-5 weeks, and now we are at week 9. ARE kind of sucks. While people are emailing ✉️ pictures of all kinds of cool campers you can mount on a SuperDuty rather then a boring old fiberglass cap. I just get tired of walking past that second solar panel and the relay box sitting on my table downstairs ready to install once I get the cap.

Been working on those money posts 💵 for the blog, namely those posts that I know bring in a lot of search traffic or likely to bring it and therefore ad revenue. One of the things I’ve been exploring more and more is the use of the state’s ArcGIS REST/Service endpoints, especially the parcels service, as I think property tax data, along with things like school district lines are something that can bring in a lot of traffic. 🧑‍💻 Plus more stuff about hiking, camping, and trails, 🥾 as that’s another source of revenue. I want to finish up strong as my blog hosting bill is due in September, though over time, it is making me money, even if hosting just gets more and more expensive each time I renew. I don’t want to get overly commercial or like Facebook, but that ad revenue does help cover costs.

Map: Severence Hill Trail
Map: Gilman Lake

Trying to figure out this Michigan Trip

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I am continuing to study my options to get to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I don’t want to have to go through customs, so I plan to drive down through Ohio into Michigan and then head north, but it’s an issue of figuring out how far I can actually drive in a day, how to avoid cities and traffic, and make for a pleasurable trip.

I was originally thinking I would on the first day drive out to Chautauqa County and stay in one of the state forests there and then the next day drive out to the National Forests in mid-state Michigan and from there go up to the Upper Peninsula. That makes the trip reasonable days and time wise but that’s a lot of driving to do on the second day, especially with Cleveland, Toledo, and Ann Arbor or Grand Rapids impossible to miss while driving through them on the interstates. And that means traffic crap. Not the quiet rural highways and interstates I prefer. Probably 9 or 10 hours of driving, when you figure fuel, pee and other breaks.

I don’t know if I am up to that kind of driving. The alternative is another stop along the way, another overnight, but that’s more time wasted on the trip. Time that I can’t spend in great woods of Northern Michigan. And I really hate motels and hotels, and developed campgrounds aren’t that much better in my mind. And with something like 10 weeks until the trip, quickly expiring, I don’t really have a good plan. Maybe the Finger Lakes look to be an easy default choice once again. I don’t have a state parks pass this year, but whatever, I have a mountain bike, and there is no fee for cyclists. But I still want to get up to Michigan.

I dropped the old bike tire in one of city park trash bins the other day on the way to work 🗑️

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I will burn a lot of things that greenies don’t like but a tire would stink to high hell even in the wilderness. Don’t need to make excessive stink or black smoke or draw attention to myself for sure even if it is late at night. This was the tire who sidewall eventually burst when the cord failed and had to be replace after many months of wobble and all of the track wore off the tire. Got two years out of the tire, but the bike is used for commuting nearly all year around, and it’s 20 plus miles a day, depending how many side trips I make.

Soon enough that old bike tire will be crushed with the junk mail, aluminum cans, food scraps and general other garbage and hauled to the giant mound in Albany Pine Bush, as it reaches it’s final ascent after more then a half century of city garbage dumping, only slowed slightly in mid-1980s to the mid-1990s when the state had their burn plant in Sheridan Hollow. The one that dumped soot, heavy metals and all kinds of noxious chemicals over the colored and poor, unfortunate enough to live near the state’s steam plant that for a while burned shredded garbage – everything from old television sets and eight track players soldered with lead to moldy sandwiches and chicken bones – diverted from the landfill. But I wasn’t going to burn it.

I am more then a bit jealous of all the off-gridders, homesteaders and farmers who can honestly say they make a trip to the dump maybe once or twice a year. They don’t buy a lot of trash, and most of it that they do buy and use up – at least packaging wise – goes up in smoke. Having a burn barrel and land with nobody nearby, means you really are not dependent on urban trash services. Most packaging these days is paper or plastic, and burns up to basically nothing. I know – there have been many years – I’ve gone basically a year with only going to the transfer station once to get rid of cans and glass. Though I still accumulate a lot of broken, unburanble crap. But that’s true of homesteads everywhere.

Often I think about all the things I’ve sent up in smoke over the years. Both the beauty of the flames and the occasional noxious smell when there is incomplete combustion or something particularly noxious goes up into smoke. But it’s always so satisfying to look at those old garbage bags before, stuff full of packaging and other crap I never want to see before, and waking up he next morning, and being nothing left except a few random pieces of metal, glass, or ceramic I fish out of the fire pit. Often recyclable scraps of metal, I save and eventually toss in the recycling dumpster at the transfer station or my parent bin. I do think about the toxic chemicals produced, are interested in chemistry, though I’m not worried about a bit of smoke in wilderness. I certainly pick up enough of other people’s liter, leaving things better then I when I got there.

Maybe the most responsible, sustainable solution is the people with the large farms, ranches, and homesteads who live the low-consumption lifestyle, compost, burn, and have a trash pit that takes the residual waste from burning – the metals and glass that have no scrap value. No dump trips off the land. Taking personal responsibility.

Map: Empire State Topography
Map: Empire State Color Relief