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+Every year for the past couple of years, when September rolls around we start getting ready to hit the road, packing away the paddle boards, washing the bus, and burning through the last of the firewood. Sometime around the middle of the month we [say goodbye to friends](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2022/09/goodbye-big-waters) and [head for the plains](https://luxagraf.net/jrnl/2023/09/ready-to-start). 
+
+The drive out of the trees always feels good to me, the long vistas of the midwest are like drawing a breath after being under water. It's some small recapitulation of humanity's movement out of the forest, on to the prairie. As William Least Heat Moon points out in PrairyErth, it was leaving the trees that made us human. In some way we are all children of the prairie and plain.
+
+This year we did none of those things. This year we stayed put. We stayed in the trees. Evolutionary recapitulation be damned. We watched the chlorophyll fade from the world, leaving behind impossibly yellow birch and iridescent orange sugar maples, brilliant against the unchanging pines overhead, swirling colors of leaves littering the green carpet of moss below, until the forest in the morning was like walking inside a stained glass window. 
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-09_144228_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4021" class="picwide" />
+
+This year we left the paddle boards out and enjoyed one of the warmest, driest autumns anyone in these parts can remember. It wasn't until early October that the evenings took on a chill enough to keep us on the shoreline, and the mornings turned a softer purple as the sun swung south.
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-09-01_173218_around-washburn.jpg" id="image-4027" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/DSC00969.jpg" id="image-4028" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-12_071116_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4017" class="picwide" />
+
+The familiar turned foreign. Gaps in understand were filled in. Paths we've walked daily became new and golden. 
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-11_095400_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4023" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-12_080159_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4025" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-10_085525_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4022" class="picwide" />
+
+When I was younger, living in southern California, I had to go and find Autumn. I would try every year to make the long drive up 395 to the Sierra foothills, where a smattering of aspens and cottonwood trees that grow in the washes would turn various shades of amber and apricot.
+
+<img src="images/2024/sierras-fall-colors-1995.jpg" id="image-4029" class="picwide" />
+
+There are no mountains like that here, but this area beats the Sierra foothills for fall colors, and that's part of why we're here -- to see new things. We move around to explore the world, discovering what we do not know and getting to know it in some fashion. This manifests in all sorts of things, from the mundane (I can give you street by street directions around a surprising number of places) to the more profound experiences and friendships we've formed around the world.
+
+Sometimes it also means not moving. There are certain things that must be experienced first hand. Can you really know Georgia if you haven't spent a summer there without air conditioning? Can you really know Charleston if you haven't been there for a hurricane? Can you really know New England without passing a fall? Can you really know northern Wisconsin without spending the winter?
+
+You cannot.
+
+You also cannot pass a northern Wisconsin winter in an RV. Or at least it isn't much fun. I know someone who did it and he suggested we rent a cabin. So we did. Like most in the area, the campground where we spend our summers closes October 15 (which last year saw the first snow storm, this year it was 55 and sunny). 
+
+This year we said goodbye to our fellow travelers and friends, and drove the bus over to the cabin, unloaded the very least amount of stuff we could, and moved it to the storage area where it will spend the winter.
+
+Not much changed really. We're still in the woods. We still have to fill propane. We still have to dump the holding tank system. There's a few extra feet of counter space, a bedroom with a door, just one though, the other is a loft, open to the rest of the house, not unlike the back of the bus. We're on a property that's roughly the size of Memorial Park. The paths have changed, but they look much the same. The trees look about the same and the sunrise hasn't changed much either.
+
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-16_103021_yellow-cabin.jpg" id="image-4026" class="picwide" />
+<img src="images/2024/2024-10-12_070645_memorial-park-oct.jpg" id="image-4024" class="picwide" />
+
+We'll be here until the campground opens again next spring. We'll be here watching the world change, waiting on the snow, and getting to know a northern Wisconsin winter.
diff --git a/jrnl/2024-10-23_end-of-the-road.txt b/jrnl/2024-10-23_end-of-the-road.txt
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+For a long time I had the idea that I would write a book about this trip and call it The End of the Road. 
+
+It was a vague idea, I didn't take it to seriously, but it seems to me we are, culturally at a kind of end of the road as a place of adventure. I has the idea that if you start with the road when it was a trail (Journals of Lewis and Clark), to when it was dirt road (Laura Ingalls Wilder all the way through to the Air Conditioned Nightmare), to when the highways appeared highway (London, Kerouac), to avoiding the highway, back to the two lane (Blue Highways, et al), and then finally I could close it out with a tale of life on the road being so easy you can bring your wife and kids. The end of the road.
+
+I never wrote the book. I never will. I realized I am too American to write such a book. The kind of sweeping generalizations I've sketched out sound good if you don't bother to think about them at all. When you scratch the surface though, you start to think, wait a minute, this doesn't sound right to me. This is does no square with my experience.
+
+I was watching an old episode of Anthony Bourdain's television show the other day in which he goes the high desert of California to hang out with the musician Josh Homme. In it Homme says something I thought was perhaps the most road-worthy thing I've heard: "Here we are at the end of the road... which, it turns out, isn't a bad place, it's just where they stopped building road."
+
+This prosaic statement feels apropos for our own end of the road moment. A few weeks ago we packed the bus away and have no plans to travel in it again. We bought and have been building out a school bus, which will replace the Travco for us. The bus finally got too small, it was time for something else and we all felt it.
+
+The end of the road for the Travco isn't a bad place, it's just where we stopped living in it. (No, I don't know what we're going to do with it, most likely we'll sell it. I have no time frame for that, but if you're interested, email me.)
+
+We left the bus with hardly anything. The clothes we needed for the winter. Cast iron skillets. Kitchen knives. Pillows. Camera. Notebooks. It was kind of a larger scale version of that thing they tell you to do to see if you should get rid of your stuff: put it in a box and seal it up and if you haven't opened it in six months you don't need it. We left almost everything in the bus and as we've needed it, we've gone to get it, but honestly we haven't needed much.
+
+We had originally planned to leave here this fall in the school bus, which I have been working to build out as a comfortable home since we bought it back in April. Unfortunately Lyme disease derailed that plan a little, which is part of the reason we rented the cabin (the other being that we wanted to experience a Wisconsin winter).
+
+We settled into the cabin pretty easily. The kids took the upstairs loft area for themselves, there's a big open area below and then a bedroom and bathroom down the hall. In that sense it's very similar to the bus, mostly one big open space.
+
+These cabins are quite popular in the summer, but relatively few people come around in the fall. The first weekend we moved in there were some people in the other cabins around us, but that traffic tapered off quickly and we pretty much have the place to ourselves. We have the same lake access and slightly better views of Long island and the tip of Madeline Island rather than Ashland.
+
+It's very quiet here. I can hear the road sometimes when I'm around the cabin, but down by the lake there's nothing but the lapping of water on the shore. The dog and I go down to lake shore and watch the sunrise in the mornings. Although sunrise is quickly receding to later and later in the morning. Soon we will be walking to the lake shore in the dark if we keep getting up at 6AM.