January 25, 2009: This last scene is of the Mohave National Preserve which we passed in southern California before reaching Bishop. You can click the photo to enlarge. This is a location we would like to return to the next chance we get.

My feeling about this vacation is a good one. We learned again that we enjoy Arizona in the winter months. There is much to see and do in Arizona. We enjoy the KOFA Escapees RV park and have put our names on the wait list. So we currently have our names at three parks, Yuma and Benson, Arizona plus Sutherlin, Oregon. We don't expect to become lease holders (our names reaching the top of the list) for at least 8 years at any one of the parks. We don't wish to stay in one place long enough to justify the annual maintenance fee any time soon but may wish for a "home park" in eight years. We've also learned that the solitary desert camping is also very attractive to us. With a solar method of recharging batteries we can see ourselves spending 4 - 5 months each year camped in the desert.

I expect to retire at the end of June this year. If you have been following my countdown clock on the "What's New" page. You will notice it dropped 60 days today. That's because I expect the state of Oregon to be under tremendous financial pressure due to the poor economy and the colleges will have a large percentage of their budgets cut. The end of the fiscal year is June 30 so I have decided not to burden the college by asking them to continue my employment until the end of August, my original retirement plan. This is early retirement for me. I'll be 62 and don't want to begin drawing on social security and other pension accounts until I reach the age of 66. This means Gwen and I will workamp at least 6 months of the year and perhaps more. We will also be living very frugally in the Arizona, California and New Mexico deserts. I expect my "new job" while living in the deserts will be to get back to good physical conditioning with lots of bicycling and hiking. I'd also like to lose 20 lbs while getting into good condition. I also expect to stay mentally keen by reading and writing more especially on the Internet.

February 4, 2009: (additional thoughts) Another unexpected thing we learned while camped in Arizona is how little resources we really need to be happy in the desert. Once camped in the desert we began thinking of all the ways we could conserve water, waste and energy. We had about 85 gallons of fresh water. Our gray and black water holding tanks are 55 gallons each. In our previous experiences, the gray water holding tank was always the limitation lasting at the very most only 5 days. I wanted to maximize our ability to stay in the desert with a minimum of searching for dump stations and fresh water. At the end of two weeks we still had 1/3 of our fresh water and each of our holding tanks were less than half full. How did we do it? When we return to the desert next fall, I’ll get into detail of how we managed. We managed our energy by running the generator during the day to recharge the batteries and access the Internet. At night, when we want the quiet, we operated off the inverter. We quickly realized that a solar recharging system would eliminate the need for a generator to charge and give us quiet during the day too. It would take several years of saving the gas money plus wear on the generator to pay for a solar system. But if you figure we aren’t paying RV park rent, we could pay for the solar system in a year. Then all the rest of our years will be quiet and environmentally friendly. My point of this story is not the methods we used to save water, waste and energy but that we were very happy with a life style using probably 1/10th the amount of these resources we normally use … especially when we owned a stick-house. Guess what?; we were very happy with our sustainable lifestyle. More about this next fall too.

February 5, 2009: More on sustainability. Today was the National Teach-in on global warming. Before today I was not aware of the urgency to act now to slow the creation of greenhouse gases. The message is that we must slow/eliminate the use of fossil fuels. This means an attitude/lifestyle change from everything we have known. The consequences of the earth warming only a few degrees will be catastrophic to the human way of life as we know it. There is a movie at http://www.nationalteachin.org/ which will explain a call to action aimed at students. The movie flatly states that if you are 30 years of age or younger, it is that generation which will have to eliminate the use of fossil fuels or thousands of generations afterward will be affected. This is much sooner than I had expected the effects of warming to arrive. I also listened to one of the college science teachers explain the problem and consequences of no action. I think most of us are afraid those that warn of global warming are going to take away our way of life and/or our jobs. The movie does a good job of explaining where all the new jobs will be coming from. This day of national teach-in has caused me to think of ways I could reduce the fossil fuels I burn as well as ways to a greener way of living. Admittedly, I don't know how I will move my fifth wheel without burning fossil fuel but I believe I can reduce the amount of fossil fuel I use greatly as I proved above in my discussion of adding solar battery charging to my trailer. I also think consumers as a group can affect the actions of corporations by the way we spend our money. Finally, we better all take personal responsibility to act in greener ways or the earth as we know it won't be here for our grandchildren, yes, far sooner than I thought. Don't let those who say this is a "natural cycle", cause inaction, it's not a natural cycle. They have been able to measure the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere for thousands of years by drilling into ice in Greenland and elsewhere. Minor fluctuations were found but NOTHING like the increases since the industrial revolution began in 1850. The earth will survive but the life on it won't if we don't act more responsibly.