TRAVELINGWITHTOOLS

I’ve been on the road since 2015, and only a few times since then have I been able to spend Thanksgiving with family. That’s one of the impacts of becoming a nomad; it isn’t easy to leave your home somewhere in the desert and fly north for a week. But it’s also related to the fact that I’ve always been comfortable being alone. Since I left Rhode Island in 1989, for my first road trip across America, plenty of holidays have passed where I celebrated by myself. I’ve most often lived on the other side of the country, until my Mom moved west to Reno in 2007.

I remember one event in my early days back in California, somewhere between 1999 and 2003. It must have been the first time I bought a turkey to cook for myself and I wasn’t aware that they took days to thaw. So, being the creative problem-solver that I am, I cooked it in the microwave. (This was before you could ask Auntie Google for help). It wasn’t the finest bird in the end, but it didn’t kill me!

My first year on the road with the Fun Mover in 2015 found me in Florida for Thanksgiving. I stayed at Middleton’s Fish Camp on Blue Cypress Lake, about 20 miles inland from Vero Beach on the Atlantic central coast. It was a weird place, “REAL Florida” they advertise. Black water, alligators, flocks of hovering vultures… and I didn’t catch any fish, or snap a photo of my Thanksgiving meal.

In 2016, I had gone to work in Colorado for the summer and in the fall, Mom took me with her on a trip to Africa. We came back to Reno just in time for turkey day, and we must have had dinner with the family out at Spanish Springs, but I don’t have any pictures. I was tying flies for Pyramid Lake earlier that day at Mom’s, for opening day.

In 2017, I was working in Colorado for the summer again and in October I headed back to California to do a Bugatti project for my old shop in Corte Madera. I left the motorhome at Golden Gate Trailer Park and took a rental car over the mountain to Reno for the holiday.

In 2018, I took a long break from work and spent the whole summer and early fall in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. I went to Arizona that October and found a nice spot on BLM land by the Colorado River in Ehrenberg.

For most of 2019, I was in Reno to finish my Austin Healey project for sale, as Mom was selling the house and the garage space that the Bugeye lived in. No pics to be found from that holiday.

In 2020 I went back to Colorado to finish the big Talbot Lago project that I’d started there in 2016, as the new crankshaft and the bearing work was finally completed after two years of waiting. I wanted to be done and gone by election day, as it was shaping up to be a disaster and I didn’t want to be anywhere around people. Funny now, to think of that time frame. My customer in Fort Collins was fully on the Trump Train, and the job started before the 2016 election. He had a MAGA sticker on the back of his Lamborghini Countach and wore his red cap around the shop all of that Summer. The project finally finished concurrent to the end of Trump’s term, thank God. I also blew a really great opportunity that Fall over politics. It’s sometimes tough being a progressive that works on million dollar cars, though almost everyone at Phil Reilly & Co was far to the left.

On November 4, I split for New Mexico, arriving just in time for a huge Covid surge and a lock-down. I spent that Thanksgiving at Casey’s RV Park, in the little town of Socorro. I had been boondocking in a spot just off the interstate that was generally OK, but it creeped me out on some days. Weird people visited and did weird things… somebody dumped a dead horse at the end of the road one night. I paid for the luxury of full hookups for Thanksgiving week and found a different spot afterwards.

The next Fall found me in southern Nevada, bumming around the Lake Mead area. Las Vegas is a cesspit, and the whole shoreline of Mead around Government Wash is covered with garbage. I don’t have much nice to say about it, but the spot I picked for Thanksgiving near the Valley of Fire state park wasn’t bad.

In 2022 I spent most of the year in Petaluma, CA and I finally got infected with Covid, just in time for the holiday. So I stayed home alone and made a traditionally overboard meal for one.

This year, I’m back in New Mexico and finally figured out what a thousand other nomads have learned. You can bounce from state park to state park every two weeks and have power and water for only $4 a day! (Not including the $255 annual camping pass and reservation fees). There quite a variety of people down here, from the saddest looking guy living out of an old Chevy Suburban with his dog, to hipsters in hundred thousand dollar Mercedes Sprinter vans with Starlink receivers on the roof.

Speaking of, I refuse to give a single dollar to increasingly insane Elon Musk, so I’m stuck with Verizon for now, and this spot at Percha Dam state park has terribly slow data, even though I’m close to the cell tower and have great signal. It was much better up the road at Caballo state park. But I scoped out the pockets of water in the non-flowing Rio Grande next to the campground here, and there are huge mobs of carp milling about in clear water. I may have some first class sight-fishing in store for Thanksgiving this year, which would be a nice way to end my time off. Back to work very soon…

Have a wonderful holiday!