If all goes well, which often does not happen, I will be on the road on Monday. Not to the Donner Party Trail, but on the trail with Donner. The plan is to take perhaps five 4-day journeys to campgrounds within a day's drive of DC. I will start with the Shenandoah Valley, where I shall return to my roots, literally and figuratively. The plan is to be away from Monday to Thursday on each of these trips, and return to DC for three days to resupply, continue my physical theraphy, take Donner swimming for his own theraphy. And, frankly, I want to see if I still have both the passion and stamina for these journeys. But the Monday-to-Thursday window is somewhat symbolic given that Monday and Thursday in German are Montag and Donnerstag, and so this trip will allow to reminisce about all my dogs from Montag to Donner, bookends to Sonntag and Kessie, and Leben and Erde in between. Forty-nine years this week I have spent with those six magnificent days.
The logistic planning and preparation is not much different than that for my usual planned long road journeys, except that I have to cut down the 12- page To Take list to one page. What I want to avoid is having to spend four hours loading the Defender before I leave and then another four unloading when I return, since I will only have three days at home.
One thing I will have to acclimate myself to on these trips is how to spend my days. Usually, I stay in a campsite only overnight, and then move on the next day to some distant venue. My road trips are not for rest and relaxation. Perhaps I will take one book with me each time with the hope that I can complete them. I think I will start off with Precipice, a new book about the risk facing Earth. And if the word has not yet gotten out, we are indeed standing at a precipice on some many fronts these days. The two questions we all should be asking ourselves are, first, what should we do to prepare if these risks materialize, and, second, what role can we play to avert them?
One of the tasks that I was hoping to get done before I left for any trip this year was to set up my new iMac computer and then download all of my music and cherished photos onto my new iPad. The problem is, my Dell-Microsoft computer started to go on the blink a few months ago and I have not had a chance to set up my new iMac. (By the way, after 40 years, I have finally abandoned Microsoft. I am sick and tired of losing an hour a day waiting for Microsoft this or Microsoft that to respond to simple commands.) But not one to five up so easily, I got online to the Apple iTunes store and purchased copies of what I call my On the Road music. I also was able to send my favorite photos from my desktop to myself, and then opened them on my iPad and save them so I could call them up without the internet. There's a solution for every problem. worth solving.
Every trip I take I usually add one new improvement. The improvement this year is a low-rise (4") cot. Those who followed OTR-8 will recall that I brought along a standard height (12") cot on that trip, only to find out 1000 miles later that it didn't fit in my tent. Although the usable space for a cot in the tent is 85 inches, and the cots are 76 inches long, that would work for a cot that was one inch high since the tent walls slope inward. So, without pulling out my old geometry books, or taking the time to set up the tent now and try out the new cot, I am hoping that it will fit. If not, it's back to the ground for me. My cot is 30 inches wide and Donner's 29, so the two should fit perfectly in the 59-width shown on the below diagram of the tent, below. The good news is that the weather will be such that I will be able to have some of the cot hanging out into the vestibule.
If there is one goal I have for this trip it will be to visit the site where I spread Montag's ashes in 1990 along Jeremey's Run Trail. Although I will not be able to make the 5-mile trek to get to that site, there is an overlook from the road, so will I park the Defender at the Overlook, and then let my mind wander down the valley and back across those 14 wonderful years I spent with that magnificent dog, starting back 49 years ago.
ED
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