American Trekker Begins His Trek

It's a slow process. After being ensconced in a place for 8 or 9 years it's not so easy to just pick up and leave. But that was how long I lived in Long Beach where I raised my twin daughters in a crummy little apartment near the Cal State Long Beach campus. At least we had a convenient Target, Trader Joe's, and CVS pharmacy across the street. Oh yeah a Bank of America branch and a MacDonald's were convenient too, but they weren't used nearly as often.

The problem with Long Beach as it is with most communities is that there have grown up a large number of rules that members of society must now live by that make certain things impossible. You can't even put up a tent anymore in your own backyard in some places without some busybody neighbor complaining to the city and the city ticketing you for not getting a permit. In my case preparing my RV for travel was problematic because the only place I could park it was on the street. I did have it in storage at two locations at different times but that is worst of all because the battery goes dead and there's no way to wash it, no power, and they don't usually let you work on your vehicles at those places anyway. So I tried best I could to keep it clean and charged up by keeping it reasonably close to me on the street, parked so as to not be inconvenient to my neighbors. But in a creepy place like southern California, inevitably some neighbors are not going to be very neighborly and what happens is one or two control freaks make life miserable for everybody. I would find nasty notes on my RV once in a while, inevitably written in a script that looked like the author barely made it through fifth grade. "Why don't you park this eyesore somewhere else" kind of ugly screeds, totally uncaring where that somewhere else might be and oblivious to the fact that street parking is open to the public to park just about anything they want. No, SoCal is like that, just plain creepy and filled with busybodies who can't just mind their own frigging business and leave everyone else the fuck alone. So part of my delay was just in dealing with keeping ahead of the parking tickets that a few of my creepy neighbors instigated by calling the city to complain.

Worse though was the lack of power. I could pull up in the alleyway behind my apartment but of course whenever I did that, traffic suddenly increased and I would have to move to get out of somebody's way at least every ten minutes. Unplug, move 20 feet, let them move their frigging car, move back, plug back in. Argh. So I didn't do that a lot, only for real necessities.

FINALLY though I escaped Long Beach, the Armpit of the Universe, and found a place north of L.A. in Encino, where from I am writing this opening post of this blog. I intend to document my travels as soon as I actually do get to travel. First the RV needs paint and some interior cabinet work, and a little bit of work on the steering, then I can start roaming seriously, even though the projects will never be all done. I want to put a rear camera or two on it, maybe a satellite modem, lots of things over time. I've got some nice LED taillights and front turn signals for it that I bought on eBay for example, I'm always upgrading the thing. Here in Encino I can park it in the driveway where I live so it is plugged into power and I can work on it easily, plus I finally have all my tools and supplies in one place, hooray! So at least for now, Encino is home and when I'm traveling it can be "home base".

Every journey starts with some sort of motivational desire, so it's fair to say mine started years ago. But now my daughters are off at college, I already telecommute so I can essentially work from anywhere, I have escaped the horrible, ugly, dirty and despicable Long Beach, and I am ready for serious preparation. Soon I will be singing about the wheels on the bus going round and round.