Epilog

Our arrival awakened Lois from a sound nap and we all had a leisurely dinner and, as usual, talked, talked, talked. We gave her some first hand reports on parts of our trip while she told us all about what was happening with her family and the music and dance groups she runs. I also made my formal debut as the absolute worst player in a recorder quartet while we were there. They said I played well considering that I'd really only played recorder a few weeks, and Lois and Carol were kind enough to collect songs and fingering exercises for me so that I could improve for the next time we played together. It seemed, therefore, that my "career" in instrumental music was truly launched.

While we were there we helped Lois catalogued a little over 100 decorative plates that Merlin had invested in during the 1980s and put the information on a spreadsheet so that she could hopefully find buyers for them. I became enamored of 3 Disney plates with Mickey Mouse, Pinocchio, and Cinderella on them, so we took those home with us to Virginia.

During our visit Lois also drove us past the settlement of an old Mormon splinter group just outside of Burlington. James Strang tried to establish himself as a worthy successor to Joseph Smith by finding bronze tablets with divine instructions that only he could read, just like Smith had done earlier. For a while it worked and he certainly had the local Mormon community convinced, but things petered our after he was murdered, a fate he also shared with Smith. In any case Brigham Young won the battle for control of the church and led the Mormons out to Utah where we had just seen the resulting empire. I briefly wondered what would have happened if Strang had won the battle for succession, but I suppose that's anyone's guess.

The three of us also visited a "Tall Ships" event at the Kenosha city harbor about 20 miles to the east. The reconstructed "Bounty" from the movie starring Marlon Brando was there as well as a reconstruction of Commodore Perry's flagship "Niagara" from the War of 1812 and a beautiful two-masted sailing schooner from Port Huron, Michigan. The "Niagara" ship was sponsored by a museum, and they had a set of folding plaques outside the ship that clearly showed the influence of trained historians. The context of the War of 1812 as well as a nutshell summary of the Battle of Lake Erie were laid out in a series of about 10 plaques. Some of it I knew, but I was not aware that 1/3 of the U.S. sailors were sick and that the British had been on half rations for several weeks. It was, as they succinctly put it, a case of the "hungry coming out to fight the sick." The outcome of the battle was also a very near run thing, as far as I could tell, since Perry's first flagship was blasted into a floating wreck by the British, leaving them with 2 larger ships to just the Niagara on the U.S. side. Perry transferred his flag to the Niagara and the 2 large British ships became entangled while wearing ship, always a tricky maneuver with square rigged vessels, making them little more than floating targets for the Niagara. After casualties that were hideously high by modern standards, they surrendered and Perry sent his famous message, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours." back to headquarters. The final plaques also explained that the U.S. and Canada finally stopped invading each other after that war, a fact that makes me particularly happy as I am half Canadian and crossing our unguarded common border is tedious enough even without armed hostilities!

After we spent Thursday morning installing a path of wood chips around the dome, we whipped back along the toll roads from Wisconsin to Virginia, leaving the trailer parked cozily on the trailer pad down in front of the house, ready for our next trip (see Wanderung 7).

After a tedious but thankfully uneventful day and a half of driving we arrived back in Virginia Friday afternoon in time to weed and pick the blackberries that had been ripening in our absence. We were also in time to see the recital for Laurie's studio the following evening, which was 3 hours of hearing talented, trained vocalists sing a really varied set of great songs. It was a great end to a great trip. So, you might well ask, what did we learn from all this wandering? As to the Big Picture, the U. S. of A. is really huge and trying to see substantial parts of it takes months if not years. We were gone over 9 weeks, but still we really did not have the time to see each area as thoroughly as we wanted to. That may seem funny to folks with the standard 2 or 3 week vacation limits of many American jobs, but I cannot begin to tell you how many museums, historic sites, and other points of interest we passed by because we had no time. I particularly felt badly about missing the Museum of the Plains Indian tribes in Montana and cultural centers for different tribes that we often saw when passing through reservation lands. The Native American cultures we learned about on this journey, from the Mandans to the Clatsops, were really quite distinct adaptations to different ways of life, and I would like to learn more about the variety of native cultures, how they evolved in different environments, and where they are currently headed.

We also learned that the inter-mountain basin between the Rockies and the coastal mountains was mostly desert or land that would be desert if enterprising farmers did not invest heavily in irrigating their crops. Patience and Jake assured us that a person can become accustomed to the beauty of the arid vastness of the desert regions, but Monika and I still preferred woodland vistas. We enjoyed the coastal mountain ranges with their huge, towering conifers and the Rocky Mountains with the quite different mix of trees on the western and eastern slopes. We would really like to go back to Glacier National Park and spend a lot more time seeing the eastern slopes of the Continental Divide. In fact, we laid out a return route from our planned trip to Alaska next year that would take us back through the eastern side of the park. We would also like to stop again in the Theodore Roosevelt National Park and camp in the northern unit of it for a while. Maybe next time we will have time to finally catch that musical production in Medora that everyone was recommending as well as taking the drive out to the site of Teddy Roosevelt's old Elkhorn ranch. I personally would like to ride my bike on that Mah Dah Hey trail, but Monika would have to feel comfortable with that as well before we would attempt it. Our only experience so far in riding through the woods was not, shall we say, a resounding success even though we both survived unscathed, so we will have to be more skilled and confident to take on the Badlands bicycle trails.

But another part of the Big Picture was how lucky we were to be able to travel the way we do. To put it bluntly, much of the country is by our standards quite poor. That is, of course, poor by comparison to the American middle class standard of living, roughly equivalent to western European living standards, and not according to third world standards, but it is poverty nonetheless. I subjectively evaluated this poverty by two major factors of the areas we visited: the cars people are driving and the housing they live in. In our area of Virginia people drive relatively modern automobiles and live mostly in detached homes, townhouses, or condominiums. Apartments are rare and trailer courts almost unheard of. In contrast, the folks in most of the areas we visited were driving an older mix of automobiles, including some rusted out, dented, smoke spewing clunkers that reminded me of my old cars, and a large segment of the available housing was trailer courts.

I lived in a 10 x 44 foot trailer for five years while in graduate school, and that form of housing is almost invariably cheaper, sometimes a LOT cheaper, than regular real estate. Similarly, driving an old clunker is by far the cheapest way to get around, but most folks will upgrade to a better car and better housing if they have the wherewithal to do so. Although it is possible that some of the folks I saw were wasting significant parts of their income on state-licensed alcohol or gambling, to me it was clear that most of these folks simply did not have the wherewithal to begin with. In that vein, let me just add that the morality of a state supporting addictions to enhance revenues seems, to me at least, utterly reprehensible. I am quite curious how the politicians supporting "family values" in these states (including Virginia) can in all conscience condone state alcohol sales, lotteries, and gambling casinos, which have the obvious potential to destroy lives and families. My heart particularly went out to the migrant workers camps because they clearly were the poorest of the poor. I've spent many months living in a tent, and although the tents housing the seasonal pickers in eastern Washington looked decent, they would be too hot in the summer, too cold in the fall, and leaking whenever it rained. It's certainly no place to raise a family and the children I saw there were starting out with a couple of big strikes against them. Is this the best our country can do for these people? I think it was FDR that said our country should be judged on how we treat the poorest and least powerful people, and by that yardstick I'd say we still have a way to go.

More personally, we were using this journey to test out our entire trailer rig, so part of what we learned was how well the things we brought with worked out, and what we should remember to bring with next time. The fluorescent lights I had installed in the trailer worked well and decreased the number of 12 volt light bulbs that burned out during the trip; of course, the fact that it was summer and light until 9 or 10 in the evening helped a lot too! The new storage area under the dinette seat that I had opened up worked just fine for canned goods and held enough to last the entire trip. The wooden cutting board over the stove, the nesting stainless steel pots with removable handles, and the shoe caddy that Judson and Sarah had given us for Christmas all worked great. Everything else in the trailer worked exactly as it should have except, of course, for the hitch jack that failed and the tire that blew out. When Terry was visiting and we were all three eating, we each sat in the dinette area but pulled the table out so that he could sit on the couch and eat on the table. I wanted to make an insert leaf for the end of the table table so that people could also sit on the couch and eat, so I took careful measurements before we left the trailer in Wisconsin. Having that extension for the table would allow us to feed four or five, in a pinch, if they were sufficiently small people, liked each other a lot, and were all right handed!

As for our new toys on this trip, the bicycles worked out very well and we definitely decided to travel with them again. The "Mutt and Jeff" inflatable boat worked OK when we tried it on Flathead Lake, but we definitely needed another set of oars and life preservers before trying it out on white water or in a bigger lake. We packed it back to Virginia with the thought of buying extra oars, life preservers, and cushions, and then trying it out in the Potomac at Leesylvania State Park. I thought we still needed a shaking out period with the boat similar to what we did with the bicycles during the first part of this trip. However, it is more difficult to do that with the boat because there are fewer opportunities to put it in the water. In particular, on this trip we found many great Volksmarches, several nice Volksbikes, but no Volksboats!

The small computer worked great for keeping the journal up to date and was also OK as an electronic book. But since we read a lot together in the evening and that only seems to be possible with real paper books due to our joint page turning system (see Wanderung 4), the utility of the electronic book was for me somewhat limited. Still, I did read all of Kipling's "Kim" and over 40 chapters of Twain's "Roughing It", so curling up with the computer and reading a book is definitely feasible. The 6-7 hour battery capacity of Baby helped a lot in that I could perch it on my stomach and not have to worry about a cord or anything while reading in the evening. Speaking of evening activities, the dulcimer and recorder were a real joy to play every week or so and we certainly planned to pack them along in the future. The art set I used only once, and I was not sure whether I could get "over the hump" on learning to paint during our trips. However, some things just do not photograph correctly and I really wanted to be able to paint them as I see them, but that is another skill at least as demanding as learning to play a musical instrument.

Our list of things to bring next time included a backpack and small cooler for snacks or lunches while hiking, a bicycle pack like we bought a while back in Germany (see Wanderung 2), a disposable waterproof camera for rafting trips, and a bigger set of acrylic paints plus canvases for doing some serious painting. For non-electric camping sites we decided we would need a small 12 volt DC to 120 volt AC inverter to power the computers and AA battery charger, plus a 12 volt DC fan to help cool the trailer when we lacked air conditioning in hot weather and possibly a solar cell array putting out 12 volts DC for charging the battery. For changing tires on the trailer I decided I should make sure to bring a proper lug wrench and a 2-ton hydraulic jack to be better equipped for tire failures. I also thought about building or buying small aluminum boxes to mount on the rear bumper for storing items like sewage connectors, elbows, and the like. I think it is critically important to keep any implement connected with the dumping of raw sewage completely away from any possible contact with the fresh water input hoses, so an external bumper storage would be perfect.

As to costs, the first big cost was time; the entire trip was a little over 10,000 miles, which was a tremendous amount of driving. I think it's very important to minimize driving, particularly the stressful driving with the trailer, wherever possible. Without the trailer the truck had its normal 18 mpg, but mileage while towing the trailer was of course much worse. Mileage towing the trailer varied from 9-10 with headwinds to 13-14 with tailwinds and fluctuated between 11 and 12 miles per gallon on stretches where the wind was calm and we had a level road. We typically maintained a steady 60-mph while towing the trailer unless steep grades or strong headwinds made that impossible. It appeared to me that the presence of headwinds was a far more important factor on the gas mileage than crawling up and down the mountains, and I must admit that surprised me. I found the kick down point for the automatic transmission corresponded roughly to a rate of climb of 70 feet per second at 60 miles per hour, so we used the "rate of climb" field on the GPS to warn of us an impending transmission downshifts. If we had sufficient warning we would click off the cruise control and drive manually the rest of the way up the hill, thus avoiding the big downshift and high revving of the engine that would occur if the cruise control were left in charge. It would be nice to be able to program the parameters of the cruise control so that it would first try high throttle settings in the current gear before doing a big downshift to the next lower gear. That should be a simple matter of changing a couple of parameters in the car's computer, but I don't know of any automatic transmission and cruise control system that will let you do that. Detroit, are you listening?

Our average costs per week were $124 for food, $128 for lodging, $150 for gasoline, $75 for entertainment, $45 for miscellaneous, for a total of $522 per week. That works out to a little over $2,000 per month, which may be a lot of money or not so much depending on your viewpoint. There were weekly variations, of course, and those showed curious linkages among these expense categories. With less driving, for example, the weekly gasoline cost was reduced, but we then spent more on entertainment activities.

To judge these costs fairly, however, we thought we should consider the typical basic monthly costs of just living at home and doing our normal round of activities. Again there are curious tradeoffs involved in these lengthy road trips compared to a more sedentary existence. Of course, as you might expect, we drove more miles per week on the trip and paid more for lodging than we typically would have at home, but that's a no-brainer. More interestingly, we found our purchasing habits were shifting. For example, we tended to buy a lot less when we were traveling in the trailer than when we were at home because storage space was so limited. We were both acutely aware that we didn't have any spare room for storing "stuff", and that dampened our enthusiasm for acquiring knickknacks. We were still acquiring books at a steady rate, but you must realize that is an addiction that is really hard to break. I was unsuccessful in shifting totally over to electronic books in the same way we had earlier shifted over to electronic photography. Speaking of which, the electronic pictures were ideal in that sense because they were a great memento of the trip but involved no storage space over and above the laptop computer that we would probably have been bringing along anyway. After all, a laptop is faster than writing longhand and still smaller and lighter than a typewriter!

As to food, we used 10 pounds of pancake batter but only used a little of the dried potato flakes and dried milk powder we brought with. Our dinner meals became quite minimal, usually sandwiches, out of deference to my acid reflux disease, and for many if not most lunchtime meals we were eating out, so there was just less call to use the dried potatoes. We didn't use much dried milk because we found that we still prefer the taste of fresh milk and therefore we only resorted to the dried milk when fresh milk hit $4 a gallon or so. The honey we brought with lasted the entire trip, but we ran short of maple syrup and had to buy more at the Costco in Boise. That's where we also re-supplied with 24 bottles of water and 36 bottles of Gatorade, which amounts lasted us almost exactly a month both on the way out and on the way back.

When we left home we had brought 5 jars of homemade jam, thinking that would be enough. Well, it seemed plenty at the outset of the trip, but we used all of those and ran short already in the middle of the trip in Portland where we fortunately found the plums and blackberries to make a small batch of "plublack" jam. Basically, we seemed to use one and a half to two 8-ounce jars of jam per week, which was much more than I had anticipated, partly because we started using jam on pancakes to give some variety to the pancake breakfasts. When we arrived back home, the first thing we did was pick a couple of pints of blackberries and make a batch of low sugar seedless blackberry jam. For future trips I planned to take a box of 12 jars of jam plus pectin and canning lids (depending on the season, you can't always find those in stores). That way on our longer summer trips we could make supplementary batches of jam with whatever local fruit or berry is ripe at the moment. So the lessons learned on this trip definitely ranged from the rather trivial and mundane shifts in our daily lifestyle to the awe-inspiring grandeur of the northwestern United States. If you can ever manage to make a trip out that way, we hope that you will enjoy it as much as we did.