Friday, March 7th, 2025
I have just about arrived at my last week camped in the desert near Quartzsite, Arizona. My next week will be busy, cleaning off the dust of winter, and preparing truck and trailer for my spring travels. I’ll be hitching up the trailer, stationary since the last week of October, and moving south to a 1 week stay along the Colorado River. There I will be close to the city of Yuma where I can stock up on needed supplies and take care of maintenance tasks before slowly heading east along Interstate 8 towards Tucson and on into New Mexico. After a few weeks, when I hit Interstate 25, I will hang a left and travel north to Colorado and my younger son’s home. I am excited to start moving and seeing some new sights.
My long winter stay in the desert southwest will be ending. It has become tiresome. All winter I glanced often at my Garmin watch, not to see the time, but to check on the day of the week. Time is irrelevant, as the short winter days are marked by the sunrise, which shines in the windows, both waking me and warming the inside of the trailer. In late afternoon, the sunset glows red over the Dome Rock Mountains. The sun disappears, making its nightly visit to the bars and clubs of Los Angeles. Every day melts into the next. Not much changes, other than the occasional visit to the laundromat or grocery store. You quickly lose track of the day of the week. When a friend or relative calls, you wonder whether for them, it is a workday or weekend. Here, it is just a day.
The days become so monotonous and predictable, that you can actually notice trends in your thinking. A slight change in your diet affects your mood. Sometimes you are energetic and look forward to daily walks. Other times the walks become a chore. You start to justify and create reasons to take a day off. Other times you experience slight depressions as you fail to keep your mind busy, losing barriers you created to keep out troublesome thoughts.
Social Media can be a main source of daily entertainment. But once in a while, you read an article or see a video that triggers a question. When you search for an answer, an algorithm will kick in and flood your feed with dozens of posts, stories and videos on that same subject. The stories pull you in. The next thing you know, you are no longer seeing the daily news, and friend or random posts. Everything is a story or video about the same subject. It slowly eats away at your thinking. What was a slight depression, starts to cripple your mind like a bad habit or addictive drug. My trusty Garmin starts graphing an increase in stress and reduction in quality sleep. It can take several days of searches on topics like, “best trout streams in Colorado”, “camping in New Mexico”, or “DOGE and Elon Musk” to retrain the software to go back to more benign topics.
You have to do something to break out of the monotony and quit thinking about the past or fears of the future. But living for the day is not an easy thing when you don’t even remember what day it is.
Solo traveling is definitely not a thing I would recommend to everyone. Spring, summer, and fall can be adventurous and full of activity. You are constantly packing and unpacking. You carefully plan your next move, keeping track of grocery stores, laundromats, dump stations, campgrounds and sources of water. In late fall, you start to look forward to slowing down and remaining in one spot. It is a welcome change. But that welcome feeling disappears quickly. You survive by planning a trip at the holidays and what route you will take for the next travelling season. You arrange Amazon drops of things like new fishing tackle, replacement equipment, and clothing. And, you think about gear you have that has gone unused. What can I get rid of to save weight or storage space? Can I re-organize space to accommodate an inflatable paddle board or a foldable e-Bike.
Last night I woke up around 3:45 a.m. to a very strong and odd odor. It seemed like a mixture of ozone and something warm, almost like I left a burner lit on the stove, or a wire was melting. I knew that scent, but in my sleepy state, I could not immediately place it. It seemed really strong. I got up and checked around the trailer. Nothing was out of order. And then the scent was joined by a sound that became an instant clue, raindrops on the roof. I was smelling a light rain, perhaps strengthened by the washing away of the dust that coated everything. It was unlike the scent you get in the Midwest, that of rain mixing with rich dark earth and the odor of escaping earthworms. Here it was dust running off the roof of the trailer and nearby truck. It was rain mixing with gravel, rock, and sand that had not been moist for almost a year.
It had sprinkled a couple of times this winter, but never enough to make anything wet. Drops barely hit the ground before evaporating. Last night there was a light rain for most of the night. It was a grocery day, so I was up at 6 a.m. to shower and drive into Quartzsite for breakfast at the cafe. In the dim light of pre-dawn, I could see puddles everywhere as I rolled slowly over to the highway. The washes had an inch or so of water running downslope. I actually turned on windshield wipers for the first time in over 4 months. In a couple of days, the color green will reappear in the world. Hearing raindrops, smelling the wetness of the ground, and now seeing puddles of water and green foliage brings a nice surprise to the start my last week here. I should have known it would happen, as two days ago, I got out the Windex and cleaned the windows of my truck. That seems to work every time.
Being alone is powerful. It makes you realize that you need yourself.
Starting All Over 