It has an outdoorsy, bicycle and pedestrian-friendly culture like an Oregon city that got lost. Its altitude, 7000 feet, is almost high enough for summer. This is only my second time here. I should come here every year. Think how close it is to winter quarters! Why haven't I?
Maybe I've been suckered into the "Freedom of the Open Road" syndrome of full time RVers: that nervous affliction that drives them relentlessly onward, even if what they are looking for is right under their nose. Insatiable searching is a lot more expensive than it used to be. Maybe $4 gasoline is just the cold shower that we odometer-drunks need.
The boondocking here is superb from so many points of view, like the proximity to town and the viewscape of open "parks" in the ponderosa forest. On every walk we look up at San Francisco peaks, the highest mountains of Arizona.
Two years ago there was a strange summer here. The previous winter had been so dry that a historic fire season was expected in the summer. It was such a relief when the monsoons started the last couple days of June! And then it rained every day for the next two months. The dirt roads were soup. It was a big part of the daily lives of the campers here just to stay unstuck.
And now look at those dry, smooth, dirt roads! Pure beauty in the eyes of a mountain biker and his dogs. But it makes you appreciate what it was like to live on a farm just a couple generations ago--and most people were farmers then--before there were graveled roads. What a change that made in people's lives! And we think we live in an era of exciting change just because a new gadget has come out.
Any form of backwoods camping gives a person opportunities to think about things like this. When "camping" on a concrete pad in an RV resort, with all the vaunted "amenities," you can only see the watered-down history of a TV show or plod through the dry dust of a history book. We boondockers can actually experience history by living it.
That is one of the best reasons for boondocking. Mainstream RV culture, like the travel industry as a whole, glorifies travel through space, locations and geography.
I wonder if RV wannabees see through that silliness. Do they really believe that they can be eye-candy junkies 365 days per year, year after year? For the price of a half a tank of gasoline you can buy a coffee table book produced by professional photographers and then stay home.
But when travel results in some kind of experience that changes your point of view or helps you travel through time...ahh, then it is worth it.
