Good news for those who are only interested in Airstream travels … we will resume our Airstream explorations sometime next week, with a three month voyage down the east coast and then westward back toward Arizona.

I have re-settled in Vermont, joining Eleanor and Emma in the Airstream, currently parked in my parents’ driveway along the shores of Lake Champlain.  The Airstream seems to have survived its very wet summer fairly well, with only a dozen or so major spider webs strung along the wheels, hitch, and roof vents. It rarely sits in one place so long.  I am sure there will be some maintenance items before we can head out again, but hopefully nothing worse than greasing the hitch and adding air to the tires.

Likewise, the Mercedes has survived.  You might think that was a no-brainer, but I was receiving regular reports that made me a little nervous.  The car’s parking space is drastically humid, with daily bird overflights that result in frequent acidic attacks on the paint.  But Eleanor has tried to clean up the messes promptly, and I will forgive her for letting Emma eat Cheez-Its in the back seat.  The car had its 30,000 mile service last week, which shows how much we’ve been using it.  It is only 16 months old. We’ll need a new set of tires, and possibly brakes, before we get back to home base in November.

Coming from Arizona, where hot “summer” weather will continue well into October, to Vermont where summer is already winding down, is quite an adjustment.  Everyone is grabbing the last moments of beautiful weather and outdoor activity here.  Last night a gang of friends showed up to race the Hobie Cats on the lake, but the wind was light and it turned into more of a leisurely sail.

Eleanor and I invited our friends Guy & Katie to come over as well, and we watched the Hobies depart while we had grilled dinner on the deck.  Due to their slow speeds, there was plenty of time to eat dinner and hop in the Boston Whaler to intercept them as they came back across the broad section of Lake Champlain (about 3 miles).  There wasn’t a lot of white-water action, but it was a good night to enjoy the blue-green view of Lake Champlain and the Green Mountains as the sun set.

In the picture above, you can see Steve and Carolyn puttering along with the distinctive shape of Camel’s Hump in the background.  Camel’s Hump is a regular summer climb most years, about 4,000 feet in elevation.  There’s some wreckage from a WW II era plane crash near the summit, and spectacular views.  I may see if I can recruit someone to do that hike this weekend.

I hustled at work last week so that this week would be relatively easy.   This is just past the peak of summer in Vermont, and in some ways it is the very best time of year.  The bugs are signing out for the season, the humidity is gone, temperatures are in the 70s most days, thunderstorms are less frequent, the lake is perfect for any activity, and the sunset is still late enough for a quick boat ride after dinner.  This is the season of county fairs and chicken suppers.  There’s still fresh corn on the cob to be had, the gardens are still producing, and ripe apples are just around the corner.

In late August, the frantic rush-rush of summer is over.   Vermonters have done their bike rides, scenic walks, farmer’s markets, historic house tours, swimming, boating, fishing, and dinners out on the patio.  Late summer comes with a feeling of satisfaction, if you’ve played it right.  Anything after this point is bonus time.  You can get becalmed on the lake at sunset, and it doesn’t seem like any big deal to have to paddle the last few hundred yards back to port.

This is probably the last really quiet week we’ll have for a while.  The travel plan calls for numerous stops in September and October.  We’ll be on the move every few days.  I can see half a dozen visits just between Cape Cod and New Jersey, and we’ve got about ten stops planned in Florida during October.  This next week will be about getting mentally re-charged and prepared for an extended trip, and it looks like I’ve timed my return perfectly, because it looks like the perfect week to do it.

While paused in Tucson as Temporary Bachelor Man, I recently had a birthday come and go with minimal associated excitement.  This was the plan; we’d have a small party when I got back to Vermont with Temporary Bachelorette Woman and her trusty sidekick.  So I didn’t think much about my birthday until today, when I received the most incredible hand-made birthday card in the mail.

Our friend Lou W (a sweet lady who, along with her husband Larry have hosted us several times at their home in Ohio) makes cards for every occasion.  She has an incredible home office which is stuffed with every sort of rubber stamp, paper, ribbon, glue, lace, stencil, and paper punch that you can imagine.  All of this is neatly organized for efficient card-making whenever the occasion should arise.  Emma, being a “crafty” sort of kid, likes to go down into the basement office and make things under Lou’s direction.

Lou’s card for my birthday was so special I felt it deserved public recognition, so here it is:

ABOVE:  As received.  Note the ribbon at the bottom.  Pull this, and the top illustration flips backward to reveal …

“Keep on rolling”.  Pull again on the ribbon and it becomes …

… a hand drawn illustration of a little trailer parked in the sun.  Pull again on the ribbon, and you find …

… encouragement?  Recognition?  Perhaps both! And the arrow directs you to continue the Road Trip by opening the card at last.

Inside, signatures of Lou & Larry, their daughter Loren and soon-to-be son-in-law Mike, and some surprise bonuses!  I had directed our friends Bert & Janie Gildart to Lou & Larry’s home for the finest courtesy parking in Ohio, and they arrived to find “Artist@Large” Michael Depraida courtesy parking as well.  You can see their signatures as well.  All are wonderful friends we made while traveling in our Airstream.

We’ll see you all soon.  I know we’re going to intersect with the Gildarts in late September, in Virginia, and we’ll see Michael at the next Alumapalooza if we don’t run into him earlier while out west this winter.

Finally, on the very back, Lou’s personal stamp and a bit of advice.  Lou, you didn’t have to tell me!  This one’s a keeper.  Thanks to you, and everyone else, for a really special birthday card. Now it feels like my birthday.

On Sunday night I was out photographing neon again, when an enormous set of thunderstorms rumbled through over the Rincon and Santa Catalina mountains.  I grabbed my last picture (Mama Louisa’s Italian Restaurant on Craycroft), and headed home to get some photos.

I’ve been waiting all summer for a really good lightning storm to show up.  The year-round residents promised me a light show like I’ve never seen before, if I would only stay through the monsoon season.  This year has been a bit of a bust so far, but Sunday night made up for it.  There were hundreds of lightning strikes visible from our neighborhood in a couple of hours.

I’ve never photographed lightning before, so I played around a little and shot several hundred images.  (About 80 of them can be viewed on my Flickr site.)  Conditions were perfect where I was standing: no rain, no wind, and a clear sky with great views to the storms.

My technique was fairly simple.  To maximize my chances of catching a lightning bolt, I used the super-wide angle lens (Tamron 10-24 mm) set to 10 mm.  This allowed me to capture a large swath of sky.  I mounted the camera on the tripod, set the ISO to 100, and manually fixed the focus at infinity.   Rather than choose a pre-set exposure, I let the camera choose but I dialed in three to four stops of underexposure to make the lightning bolts show up.  I have no idea if this is similar to the technique used by professionals, since I just made it up, but it worked well.

The real trick of lightning photos seems to be patience.  It’s basically a matter of aiming the tripod where you think the bolts are most prevalent, and pushing the shutter over and over again.  If the storm cooperates, you can frame up a nice image in advance, using foreground objects to set the scene.  But storms don’t cooperate with anyone, so you have to stick with it until that lucky confluence of preparation and timing occurs.  My exposures ran about 5 seconds.  If there was a strike in that time, I’d get it.  But most of the time the lightning was obscured by clouds, which resulted in a well-lit sky but not a visible bolt.

If you try this, get ready to hit that Delete key a lot later. Most of the shots I took were duds.  Don’t pause to edit on the camera — just keep shooting.  If you stop to delete photos from the camera, you’ll miss that great lightning burst, guaranteed.  This means a big memory card is also an asset, to store hundreds of photos.

This is the sort of storm that Eleanor and I were watching a few weeks ago when we were tent camping up in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest.  We were fortunate that storm never reached us.  (We would have been much safer in the Airstream, thanks to the protective aluminum shell and the “skin effect“.)  Watching the fury of these summer lightning bolts on Sunday, I was grateful that I was safely near home, and not in a tent.  The monsoon may have been mild for Tucson most of this summer, but one night like this demonstrates just how fierce it can be — and what fun it can be if you happen to be standing in the right spot for a view.

My friend Bill says that Tucson is famous for Sonoran Hot Dogs.  And here I am, alone again in Tucson with a week left before I am reunited with my family, never having tasted one of these artery-clogging specialties.  What’s a Temporary Bachelor Man to do?

Of course there’s only one response to that. On Saturday I recruited my neighbor Mike to be wingman as I crossed the threshold to this medically-cautioned treat, plunging headlong into a sea of mayo, mustard, and jalapeno sauce.  We piled into the old Mercedes diesel and clattered our way across to 12th Street on Tucson’s south side, where the two undisputed champions of Sonora hot dogs can be found:  El Guero Canelo, and BK Carne Asada & Hot Dogs.

El Guero Canelo’s name refers to the founder, “the blonde Mexican guy.”  I have no idea what BK stands for, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the owner’s initials.  Both of these restaurants have opened other locations in Tucson, but both keep their original 12th Street locations as well, almost directly across the street from each other.  The hot dog business must be good.

BK was our first stop.  An open-air restaurant, it features a tall, happy (and apparently suicidal) hot dog welcoming you to come and eat it.  Perhaps this hot dog is smiling because it knows that real Sonoran dogs are smothered in ingredients.  Nobody’s going to eat that naked thing.  It’s almost perverted to think of a hot dog so undressed when you are expecting the rich, fat taste of one wrapped in bacon and buried beneath beans, onions (grilled and fresh), tomatoes, mayo, mustard, and jalapeno.

We decided that the BK dogs would be best with a “Mexican” Coke (meaning, in the original style green glass curved bottle that you hardly ever see in the USA anymore). A bottled soda tacks $1.75 onto your tab, but even still the meal of a Sonoran dog plus a Coke comes to less than $5.

The Sonoran dog, whether it comes from BK or El Guero Canelo, is a minor work of art. The sauces are decoratively zippered across the top, providing fair warning to those who attempt to eat them.  As with the Double-Double with extra sauce at In’n'Out Burger, you WILL need a napkin.  And possibly an angioplasty.

Being old guys, Mike and I both anticipated this glorious pig-out and ate lightly for the previous day.  We were hoping to earn cholesterol credits (at least in our minds) that would offset the highly unbalanced (but delicious) meal of a hot dog wrapped in bacon and doused in mayonnaise.  I think the only way we could have really earned these would be to have jogged all the way across Tucson, but being 104 degrees today, we weren’t even considering that.

The BK dog had a definite jalapeno bite to it.  Three bites later, however, and my taste buds were so busy struggling with the unaccustomed “full fat” flavor that I stopped noticing the jalapeno.  No doubt my tongue was also coated by then, protecting it from the sharpest of the spice.

Five or six bites later, it was gone.  My brain said, “MORE!” even though these things are surprisingly filling.  I was ready to call it a day after my first Sonoran dog, but Mike insisted on pressing onward.  We had come all this way for a hot dog trial and we weren’t going to shy away from the challenge now.  So we fired up the Mercedes again and drove all of 300 feet to El Guero Canelo for Round Two.  (Exercise was definitely not part of the plan.)

Like the competition across the street, El Guero Canelo on 12th Street is an open-air place with a roof for shade. I like the extremely casual atmosphere of the place.  It’s somewhere between a street vendor and sidewalk cafe, on the ambience scale.   If you want a Sonoran dog, you can get one at dozens of locations in Tucson, but still plenty of people from all over Tucson come down to 12th Street to eat at one of these two restaurants.

For the second dog, I switched from Coke to Jarritos orange soda, and found there’s absolutely no impact on the dog-eating experience.  A Sonoran dog will overcome anything.

I did like the El Guero Canelo touch of a roasted pepper on the side.  But overall, I couldn’t decide whether I like BK or El Guero better.

They say we are hard-wired to love fats and sugars, as a survival instinct.   If so, it will always be hard to resist the lure of a Sonoran dog and a sweet soda.  Eat it, and not only do other tastes fade away, but soon you can’t even remember what was bothering you earlier.  You float gently on a raft of lipids, and your biggest challenge in life seems to be chasing those baked beans that rolled away.  It’s a bit of escapism in a bun.

I think that in a year or two I’ll have earned enough dietary credits to have another Sonoran dog.  I wouldn’t recommend them as part of a regular diet, any more than I’d recommend the dreamy chocolate cake that Eleanor left in the freezer, but as a treat they are pretty special.  It may well be, as Bill implied, that eating a Sonoran dog is an essential part of the Tucson experience.  I may start recommending them to people who visit — or at least, those who don’t already have heart conditions.

One of the fun parts about being Editor of a magazine is that I get to meet all kinds of interesting writers.  One of the writers to recently join the Airstream Life team is Becky Blanton, a very interesting person.  Becky is a middle-aged single woman and accomplished writer with several awards to her credit, who just happened to become homeless late in life.  She has since turned circumstances around again, so that now she is able to live as she pleases, but she chooses to continue as a “homeless” person while she writes for Airstream Life and many other publications.

Becky recently raised the question in a provocative blog entry over at Change.org:  When she travels and lives out of her rickety old van, is she “homeless” or is she a “full-timer”?   She makes the point that homelessness is an attitude, not a condition, because it is not defined by “living in a van” but rather by choices and status.

This resonated with me because we spent two years “full-timing” in our Airstream with no home or apartment to come back to.  The Airstream was our home.  We often told people that we were “homeless by choice.”  It was less expensive to live in the Airstream than the house we previously owned, but we didn’t move to the Airstream because it was cheap.  We wanted to improve our lives.  Along the way, we tried to help people understand that having or not having a house is irrelevant, and could even be a detrimental factor, to having a good life.

Homelessness is descriptor that defines nothing.  You can be living in a trailer or van and having the dream adventure of your life, or you can be down-and-out and addicted, or anywhere in between.  Quality of life is a factor that, barring mental or physical illness, is within our control. After selling our house in Vermont and going on the road in 2005, I realized that I regarded myself as more successful and happier than I had ever been before. Eleanor and I traded the trappings of success for freedom.  My startup business, Airstream Life magazine, was not able to pay me a salary for years.  Our living quarters encompassed a measly 240 square feet — for three people.  So why was I so much happier?  As we said many times along the way, “We are paid in lifestyle.”

Coming back to a house, it was obvious that we could easily get caught in any number of house ownership traps again, so we did what we could to avoid it.  We bought a small, moderately priced house that could be left empty for months at a time, should we choose to go traveling again.  We refused to get into the trap of buying furnishings and other stuff to make it into “house beautiful.”  (Our living room is still so empty it looks like a zen garden.)  We have fought hard against accumulating “stuff,” especially stuff that doesn’t fit into the Airstream, on the theory that if we can go six months without missing it, we don’t really need it.

Even now, it’s still unclear which is our primary home: the house or the Airstream?  But it’s just academic.  A stripped-down life on the road brought us back to the things that were really important to us, and now we have a better perspective on the choices that lie ahead.   Homelessness — or at least the positive mental attitude about having more with less — can be a factor to improve one’s life, under the right circumstances.  Whether you live in a Malibu beach home, or a van down by the river, the bottom line is, “Are you happy?”