One has to do serious thinking when considering the mobile lifestyle. I have been. A new neighbor has a smaller Winnebago RV in their driveway. Its a Viva model.
Neighbor has this
Other neighbor has this
These are basic Class C RVs, built on a serious van chassis with a big V8 or V10 engine, usually gasoline but sometimes Diesel power. These are the kind you get stuck behind on mountain roads and never pull over because they don't use their rearview mirrors? Yeah, those. The kind that Top Gear hates passionately.
So how would you live in one?
You have to detach yourself from STUFF, including furniture and bookshelves. I did that. My marriage was cluttered with her stuff, and it was a bad experience. It put me off of Materialism. Any stuff you have, that you don't use daily, needs to go into storage, which you pay for every month. And you have to come back there to trade stuff out for the season. Most RVers also own a home, which they pay taxes on.
You have to admit that staying in one place is only of value if you can guarantee yourself a better life, regardless of economic drama caused by natural disasters or political enemies.
You are alone, or a serious couple that can share space and don't find bumping into each other unpleasant, ever. I'm alone, so this works for me.
You have to be willing to live in a small space when the weather is bad, and clean it religiously. Or be outside as much as possible so the small space is just where you sleep. If you don't like the outdoors, the tiny space of an RV or trailer will drive you crazy.
You have to be willing to spend roughly 1/3 the cost of a house buying your RV, or buy one for half that and spend many thousands fixing it up again. And deal with the troubles of a used RV (engine, stuff breaking, unanticipated repairs)
Be willing to limit your cooking options... or eat out at restaurants a lot. This one I can't do in an RV (not one I can afford). I have been hunting for an RV that trades spare beds for a proper kitchen so I can cook properly. Those don't seem to exist.
But the good news is there's lots of trailers that do have better kitchens, both 5th wheels and travel trailers (standard hitch). Airsteam has a "Cloud" 20 or 23 footer that would suit me pretty well for around $70K new.
19 Foot, 4500 pounds
20 Foot, 5000 pounds
23 foot, 6000 pounds
Replace the couch with a writing desk and computer, possibly, and I'd be okay with that. Tow it with a Ford F-150 4x4 with the tow package and Class 4 hitch I'd be okay with that. And both are still less than half a house costs. Less than a third of a house around here.
You still have to pay to park it, or deal with water issues if you boondock it, but it would still work. I will want streaming internet, probably via satellite dish internet service on the roof. I expect to get good at pointing that after getting into a site. At $100/month that's a pricey service, but cellphone companies charge more. I will see what other options exist which are good enough for streaming broadband video. This also brings up the display and my computer and games console, assuming I bother with that. Also for writing.
Then there's the issues of repair tools, locked away and out of anyone's sticky fingers. And the gun locker, for a twelve gauge, one of my rifles, and a handgun. I wonder if I should think about some kind of tank swap system I can use to deal with the black water and the clean water tank? More and more, I can see the point of a light crane on the back of the truck, for lifting stuff out of the bed. One with lockable controls. No Jeremy Clarkson James May tent incidents.
I need to see what solar panel options exist which will still look nice on the roof of an Airstream. And a hot-water sump and heating loop off the panels. Maybe. Might not be necessary. There is a lot to know, when you consider the full-time RV life. Its better than being trapped in a dying city with an underwater mortgage. I am pretty sure about that.
As you see, this is a classy looking trailer, and not too big.
Bathroom at the rear, bed at the front, kitchen in the middle. Dining table can be used for food prep. Assuming I can swap in a bigger fridge and hang the TV/Monitor on the door with my computer above it and the wireless mouse and keyboard on the table for use writing or watching movies... that would work. This one also has a 39 gallon fresh water tank. I could live in that, year round.
The biggest reason that California is suffering economic depression is not the drought. That's hurt agriculture and tourism, but not our other kinds of manufacturing. Not our design companies. What's hurting business is that you can't downgrade from a big car payment and a long commute from an affordable house to a paying job in the city. Houses are too expensive there, and the cities in California, other than Sacramento, are too expensive or dangerous. Stockton is filled with a race war between Mexicans and Blacks and the daily murders fill my evening news. I wouldn't even consider working there. Neither would anyone sane. That leaves Sacramento as the only city in California with a local water supply and jobs. It even has a port, and local food supply. Sacramento makes sense, even if its miserable in the summer heat. But you can't tell LA fools or SF Bay nitwits that you're removing their water subsidy which pays 80% of their water bill based on the rest of the state's taxes. This can't go on forever. Eventually the tap will turn off and then those cities will empty because $1000 a month (per home!) for water, the actual current cost, is too much to pay. So don't buy a house in the Bay Area or LA. Eventually the musical chairs leaves someone seeing that bubble burst, and that day will come. Pumping the water isn't free. They use oil to power the pumps. And oil isn't free, and most of the state banned fracking so we won't get more locally until that ban is reversed. If there's a nuclear war in the Middle East, over Iran's nukes, the price of oil will shoot up due to supply cuts and that's a big hello to $200 oil. We had $147/bbl oil once. Remember that? So $200 is easy. At 3 times the current price, what do you think your water bill would be in LA, when you're paying $200/month for water now? That's $600/month, even with the subsidy. Can you justify finding another $400 from your wages when all the plants and gardens are dead and the LA freeways are packed and you are spending 3x more on gasoline as well? Is your 100 mile per day commute worth that job? Would you do better somewhere else, with cheaper houses? Yes you would. I advise people living in those places to sell their homes, now that the market is up and they can make a profit, and find somewhere sane to live, with a short commute and local water supply. No more leveraged stupidity.
Paying jobs need to get out of the cities. They need to get off the coast and into the Valley, where the water is cheap, or up North where it rains twice a week during the summer and every day the rest of the year. Californians need to live in places where an affordable house is CLOSE to work, close enough to bicycle there, or failing that, ride a scooter at 100 mpg. If I were a librarian I would totally buy a scooter for my daily commute. Even in the summer heat, a scooter is a real hoot.
A short commute is a hell of a lot cheaper on a scooter than a big 12 mpg SUV, which people use for their commutes from Tracy or Stockton to the Bay Area because the traffic makes them nervous, and their response is a fake armored car, an SUV. Those don't stop bullets, but they look like they do, and for ignorant people who use emotion to make their important decisions, this is the result.
Even downgrading to a bubble car doesn't help much because you still end up with 30 mpg (instead of 40-50 mpg thanks to "stress driving" and "stop and go") and a case of abject terror from the hooning SUVs through Altamont Pass, which I can tell you is NOT FUN. It isn't any safer in an SUV because the pass is up the side of a mountain and some of the wrecks... go OVER the edge, on fire, falling 400 feet, screaming all the way down. That's NOT just in movies. That's a frequent death on that pass. They have daily crashes on that pass, and a half million people go through there daily. Imagine those half million people had 12 mile commutes to jobs just down the road in the Valley? That's a HUGE amount of fuel saved. How much are they currently using?
If those vehicles (taken as a group) average 20 mpg, times half a million vehicles, times 150 miles a day (approximate average), that means that commute is taking 7.5 gallons per vehicle (average), or 3.75 million gallons of fuel per DAY. Think about how much of California's working poor is spending on fuel whose profits fund ISIS murderers in the Middle East. That's what your fuel money actually does, after all. So the higher your fuel economy, the fewer murders you pay for. It doesn't matter that you don't want to pay for murders, its just what happens when you buy gasoline. Try to remember that when you push down the throttle to pass the old lady on the mountain road.
My irritation comes from the fact that currently 2-stroke vehicles are illegal on California roads. The lightest and cheapest scooters, made in factories in China, can't be ridden on California roads. The really cheap ones retail for about $500. That's a couple car payments. And they get 90 mpg or so. You still have to add the 2-stroke oil every time you fill up, but on a short commute that's around once a month, and most scooters have a half gallon gas tank. So you ride for the cost of 20 oz. cola from a vending machine. Consider just how much money you save. Of course, without a job to pay your rent, that does you no good.
Sure, you could spend tens of thousands buying a Prius, which is slightly better fuel economy than a bubble car that costs half as much, though the Prius lets you use the commuter lane into San Jose and many other crowded cities. Or you can add hours to your commute and ride public transit, which most people I've met say is awful, and frequently both expensive AND dangerous.
A Nissan Leaf doesn't have the range to go 150 miles a day. Even half that, and a recharge while you work, is not going to happen. Most California businesses won't provide recharge, and even those who have the recharge posts weren't required to have them actually work. They're just meant for looks!
If you are poor you can't afford $90K for a Tesla S which has the battery range to make the round trip and recharge overnight. There are a few of those in this town. The red one tailgated me Saturday. What people can afford is a scooter for the price of about 6 tanks of gas. A scooter still uses fuel, but it gets 100 mpg. That's better than double the economy of a Prius, and you can buy a dozen for the price of a Prius. Of course, the Prius can carry you in summer clothes and traffic at freeway speed, though at freeway speed, a Prius is more like a 35 mpg car.
Poor people can check their tire pressure, remove spare seats out of the car as long as they're driving solo, since the seats are often heavy and less weight reduces demand on the engine, reducing the amount of fuel used. They can wax the car and reduce drag. And they can drive in the slow lane, since most drag is a direct result of speed, although a steady speed also reduces the need for acceleration, which uses more fuel. There's an entire type of driving called Hypermiling.
All of these strategies are expensive or uncomfortable. The only real solution is to give up the coastal cities, move to the water supply, and bring your businesses with you. And if you're moving, you may as well move to wherever there's water. It doesn't have to be Sacramento. There's half empty towns up and down the Sacramento Valley, with cheap houses and cheaper water. Bring your workers, buy the houses, renovate them, revitalize. The grocery stores and services will follow. They build based on population numbers. And once your population is on flat ground towns in the Sacramento Valley, 100 mpg scooters for $500 each and 10 minute commutes means you are saving 3.6 million gallons of fuel per day. Oh, and the Nissan Leaf makes sense again. Some might even legalize golf cart lanes or paved bike trails, since those work on the flatland too. Davis is proof of that, but Roseville also.
Emptying LA is expensive but necessary. Same with the Bay Area. Its NOT a coincidence that the wine industry is mostly in the north, where they have completely separate and cheap gravity fed water supply, off the Russian and Napa rivers. I know this will resolve itself, with a lot of pain and outrage and rioting and arson, but I can only hope that my warning, now, will tell people who care enough to read, to get out of LA and get out of the Bay Area. They are doomed! And its all because of the costs of pumping water.
There's a joke in Discworld based on a truth of cartography, a job I enjoyed when I did it a dozen years ago. "A town with a name as if the map maker had gotten embarrassed at the blank space". This is actually true. There are considerable ghost towns and intersections, many with no houses or buildings at all, which get names on maps because there used to be something there, once, and its a blank spot on the map and the cartographer makes the name bigger than it deserves to be. My buddy "That Guy(tm)" once discovered a planned gas stop at one of these towns was merely a ghost intersection in the middle of nowhere and got the joyful exasperation of gently motoring to the next real town. Always check for services when vacation planning. A mere name may just be a ghost town.
Lake Tecopa Playa Near Death Valley
Another quirk of cartography is in the Great Basin, all dry lakes are shown full at their maximum extent, regardless of how empty they normally are. Most dry lakes in the Great Basin, which is the area east of the Sierras and west of the Rockies, north of Los Angeles and the Colorado River and East of the Cascades and Seattle, that huge desert in rain shadow, most of that is dry lakes a few crucial rivers running through them, or worse running into the basin and dying on a salt pan. The lakes displayed are usually a few inches deep. At maximum a foot deep. These are places that once had quite a few migratory birds like ducks, but also pelicans and flamingoes. I personally found a dead and mummified flamingo in the desert near Death Valley. Geese used to pass through there, back when there was more summer rain, like you get from hurricanes off of western Mexico. We're getting that weather this summer, btw. Its still hot as hell, but the clouds drifting up into Nevada are raining and thundering on the other side of the Sierras, and putting rain on those dry lake beds.
When the climate changes back to glacial cycle, the lakes will refill. Lake Lahontan, with its enormous extent and hundreds of miles of shoreline and coves is ideal for fishing vacations and boat rentals and a railroad that serves the tourists with stops at the various villages and resorts will be one of the finest in the world. And civilized! Just look at all that shoreline. That lake covers a fourth of the state. And Bonneville is another fourth.
Adding water sources to the Great Basin which can evaporate drastically changes them. The mountains block coastal moisture, forcing the clouds up and up and when the air comes down the east side, it comes down dry and hot from Adiabatic Heating Effect. The entire Great Basin is basically a Banana Belt 300 miles wide thanks to prevailing West winds and the Sierras and Cascades. You change that with South Winds and thunderstorms from Hurricanes. Suddenly the new moisture makes almost daily thunderclouds, lightning, and rain, and its drastically changed that climate back to what it was like during the ice age, or closer anyway. I would love to see us import water and refill Lake Lahontan and the other Pleistocene lakes of Nevada, like Lake Bonneville. I would totally go bass fishing there, or shoot geese and eat them with orange sauce or BBQ. I've never had smoked goose.
The big lake in central California is Kern Lake. That WILL refill because the farms put over its sediments fail thanks to a trick of limestone and water in arid environments. It turns out that the limestone hardens when flooded and turns into concrete, called Caliche. Its feet thick and even punching holes through it only works a short time, since the sediment flows back into the holes and plugs it again. This means the fields won't drain. Plants mostly require good drainage. I suppose you could grow rice there, but they already feed the world with the big rice farms around Marysville, far to the north. In any case, the above map shows you all those wonderful lakes, some of them deep. Death Valley used to be 600 feet deep and was called Lake Manly. Owens Lake was bigger. Hell, I remember seeing it in a wet year, a few inches deep but full from side to side. LA fixed that up, draining it again and sending the salt water to LA residents. There's a city that needs to empty, or pay for a desalination plant or ten. The Great Basin drastically changes with water supplies. There are way more trees, grass, and the sage isn't natural. That got imported accidentally and pretty much took over. It is supposed to be Tallgrass Prairie. I've seen examples. Same as the stuff outside Chicago and across the Great Plains.
Notice how tall tallgrass is? The entire state of Nevada was a mix of this, cottonwoods, juniper trees, wild flowers, cypress, and bristlecone pine forests. Not sagebrush with cottonwoods along the creeks and junipers on the shaded sides of the mountains. It was very different. The lakes and the storms that filled them where the difference. I hope to see those lakes refill in my lifetime. I would like that a lot.
I just suffered through two hours of "Guardians of the Galaxy" and that was truly awful. Wow. It was so bad, even those Highlander movies after the only highlander movie that there can be because if you saw the ending, you knew it was over. There can be only ONE, remember? Guardians of the Galaxy was like that. It reminded me of a better funded Ewe Boll. Top notch special effects won't fix really terrible acting, especially when they keep glancing at the director to see if he liked this take or not. Wow. Terrible. If you have been fortunate enough to miss this film and someone offers it to you for free? Turn them down.
This studio Ghibli animation tells the story of an engineer who designed the Zero fighter in Japan, before WW2. He loved planes, and Hayao Miyazaki drew this, and painted its backgrounds with actual watercolors on mylar cells at his strange studio covered in vines in a rural part of Tokyo (and Tokyo is huge so that's possible), recorded in a recent documentary. I wanted to hear it in Japanese, since the main character is played by the guy who created Evangelion, but the DVD is encoded weirdly and it wouldn't play. The english voice acting is very good, at least, and between Skywalker Sound and Disney they created a nice soundtrack. The weird aspect of this movie is it is distinctly Japanese.
It is a love story about an aeronautical engineer and his plane, and there's a girl who he cares about too. The characters are all the typical ones we see again and again by Miyazaki. He doesn't bother to draw new ones. Its kind of his trademark. There's a fair amount of digital snow and digital sakura blossoms, but the rest is hand drawn and very pretty. It is a visual feast, but the adult topics of job obsession, marriage, illness in a partner, these aren't things that would interest a child. It is an engineer's story, and it is only of value to engineers and their wives. So I suspect a lot of people who saw this movie in the theatre outside Japan were kind of baffled by it. Its still pretty, but its topic is baffling for most audiences.
So it turns out that Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) was a real guy. Not a tall tale. He was not, however, intelligent. If you plant the seeds of an apple, what you get is a sour apple, not a sweet one. Apples evolved in Kazahkstan, on the west slope of the Himalayas. Their DNA is all over the place. Sweetness is a recent and rare mutation, so apple orchards are filled with trees cloned from the branches that make sweet apples. All sweet apples come from these mutant clones. All of them. The seeds in an apple are different, and only produce sour apples. These are largely useless, so Johnny Appleseed covered the Midwest and West with sour apple trees because he was a numpty.
So what did the settlers do with sour apples? They made hooch. You can put those apples in water barrels and they ferment. In the winter, you remove the ice that forms on the surface, and the fermented juice concentrates. You end up with Applejack, which is strong alcoholic drink.
Westerners drank applejack because there's not much to do once you finish the day's tasks, and in dry country, there aren't many of those. Until folks dug wells in the Ogalalla Aquifer, the great plains were pretty useless. Once they had wells, they had terrific crops. Then the aquifer went dry and the wells did too and their farms died. It was fossil water. Left over from the ice age. Not being refilled. (It should be).
So they drank applejack and beat their wives, enough of them did, that women got fed up and went after their abusive husbands with the copper stick used for laundry. And they got together and formed the Salvation Army, and created Dry Towns, and then Dry Counties, where nobody was allowed to drink and everybody was too pious, spied on their neighbors, and murders were committed out of envy instead of booze. The primary problem was poor economic opportunities in places crippled by frequent drought. This is not a new thing, after all.
So the women got together and got the vote, and the first thing they voted to do? Ban alcohol. Prohibition. People don't LIKE to be told what to do. They everybody drank to spite the mean old crones, and organized smuggling suddenly got a LOT of money to bring in hooch from Canada. If yo want to know what that stuff tasted like, Canadian Mist and other brands of "Blended Canadian Whiskey" are good examples. The guys smuggling this organized to the point that they expanded the Mafia families out of their prior immigrant hellholes in New York, Chicago, Boston, and Eastern craptowns into the Midwest and western towns. They found that the demand for smuggled booze was enough to enrich them and when prohibition ended their ranks and sophistication had grown into all sorts of unpleasant markets.
So women voted to increase crime. It wasn't on purpose, but that was the unintended consequence. And that is the connection between Johnny Appleseed, women's rights, and the mafia.
Its summer, and we have the heat. Today will be a scorcher. There's a big wildfire burning over near Markleeville, which is south of Lake Tahoe on the east side of the Sierras. Its a biker hangout, consisting mostly of taverns at a junction of some otherwise steep and twisty roads. It is not heavily forested. The Eastern Sierra are dry, so the trees are typically further apart. So the fire is likely sagebrush rather than trees. I like it because the sage and other plants smell good and its ideal territory for trout. A good region for fishing. So far I haven't gotten more than a trace of smoke in the air, mostly a slight orange in the afternoon light. When it finally gets here we might see huge clouds obscuring houses. That happened last year from the King Fire smoke. We'll see.
I just finished reading an article (which I reposted on my blog) written by an ecology professor fed up with loons destroying the efforts of genuine ecologists by insisting its the end of the world and they need your money to tell you how screwed you are and attend really good parties and enjoy a jet set lifestyle. Real ecologists study what is there, without bias, and sometimes recommend solutions to restore habitat so the interesting creatures have somewhere to live. The article points out most of the habitat loss already happened and the worst problems have already been fixed. That we've already turned a corner and things are getting better. And how reality is bad for "business" if your business is flying around the world to eco-resorts, banging slutty hippy chicks, and demanding money for research on how we're all "doomed!". He's saying that the con artists have ruined the science. Yes, that is what happens. All the people laid off from the USGS had a comfy life studying rocks. They had to find some new way to live and the collapse of geologist wages in 1994 made them desperate. Thus we get Warmist cults and Doomers. So really, this is Bill Clinton's fault. The corruption of ecology is his legacy.
My classes continue. I need to put more work into the internet searching classes but I'm doing well so far. I'm overlapping my research subjects with my interests, as recommended by the professors, so I'm getting pretty thorough information, something they appreciate. I have an exam in the computer class to do today. Looks easy enough.
Due to the heat, I walk early, since even the early morning sun is scorching hot. I do classwork after that, shut into my room and closing up the house before it hits 80'F inside. I bought pairs of shorts so I'm properly dressed for the weather. Shorts in my home town were tricky. The summer fog would freeze you until around 10:30 or 11 AM, then shorts make sense after that, until around 4-5 PM, at which point the ocean breeze would bring more fog again and temps would plummet once more. We carried jackets year round. I hope to be able to post my findings here once I've gotten stuff more organized. My post on pulling trailers with a passenger car has been viewed 20,000 times. Same with the one on RVs. It seems there's a lot of interest in that. Housing prices are inflating again, as more Baby Boomers bail out of their lives in the Bay Area and move up here to retire. There are still no real jobs here, outside of the medical ones caring for the dying retired people. There are so many ghost towns. I suppose retirement villages like this will be the last of them, other than actual gas stations along the interstates, and even those only make sense if there's a population to serve. Otherwise, trains are more fuel efficient than trucks. They're much slower and more complicated to schedule, however. If they ever got efficient, Walmart would use them.
After some thought I can honestly say I am looking forward to seeing San Andreas. The trailers made me laugh and laugh. I can't see it in a theater because laughing for 90 minutes straight is just plain rude, and that was my response to The Day After Tomorrow, Volcano (tar = lava because... cracks in the ground!), Deep Impact, Armageddon, and Dante's Peak. I didn't bother seeing that Mayan Apocalypse one because I'd literally cracked a rib in a coughing fit and it was healing. Yes that's possible. And it hurts. Some of those movies only existed because some nerdy researcher had showed off some speculative science with CGI from the university supercomputer to get a grant, and Hollywood bought the rights, which is also not how science works.
The problem with movies built around university CGI showing off some speculative science that might have happened is low information voters then vote for blowhards who fund con men that pretend to be scientists that then insist on genocidal political policies that sound good to other maniacs, mostly for access to "research grants" and getting into hippy chicks panties. That's how bad science works. It is a scam. If you remove the funding, the con men go somewhere else. Real science happens without funding, often by volunteers recording data while doing something else. We don't get films about a SLOW ice age returning because it doesn't look good in a 90 minute film. Instead we get demonic space hurricanes that freeze fuel lines. Dumb.
It could have been a good and interesting film about the creeping ice age, but no, that sort of story isn't easy to direct like this schlock. Summer blockbuster movies often suck. They are a loud way to spend $15 for a movie ticket one afternoon. Arguably healthier than drinking $15 worth of booze in the same time period, but that's like comparing apples to qumquats.
As you see, this is a classy looking trailer, and not too big.
As you see, this is a classy looking trailer, and not too big.
