The End. 🛻🔚

Those were the words I uttered as packed up my truck from camp.

Slowly in the cold, deciding if I really wanted to call it quits or brave another cold snowy night with foot plus of snow expected by morning. I could have done another night, but it would have been so cold and I felt like it was time to put a close on this chapter of life.

It’s rare in life when you know you have come to an end. Most of the time you see it coming, but in you are in denial until it hits you. Planned retirements are exception, rarely the rule. Maybe it’s because too often we put off the inevitable, we sit in denial. There have been too many times I’ve talked to dying people, and told them hope to see you soon.

I wanted to retire Big Red in a controlled fashion, as I didn’t want to have something like a lifter fail or transmission give out on a back road in Madison County or the Adirondacks. Or worse yet – rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia or Michigan. Something catestrophic, and then be forced to figure out how to salvage as much of my equipment, clothing and gear and get it home. And in the end, it seems like there will be retirement in a controlled fashion – December 31, 2025.

People say it’s just a now rusted out, literally falling apart truck. Get over it, move on. Throw away, buy new. It’s the American way. At one way, I get it. It would be a mistake to confuse the truck with the mountains, the rural landscape, the hills and hollows. Still Big Red meant a lot to me, even if it just was another physical thing.

Red wasn’t just a lot of money, he was a lot of experiences. I never had internet at home, so virtually all my remote work for a year and a half was done working from the cab of Red. I camped over 365 nights in him by my estimate of the past 14 1/2 years, as I know I did more then 26 nights on average each year. Especially in 2020, when I did 63 nights and every year since has been 30-35 nights camping in wilderness. Years earlier, it was probably over 30 nights a year.

So it literally was a year of my life I spent camping in Red. I saw many parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Vermont in that truck. The Green Mountains, the Alleghenies, the Hills of West VIrigina. The wilds of Allegany and Cattaragus County, NY – and west to Chautaqua County and Erie, Penna. Watched the solar eclipse from Presque Isle Penna.