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Beauty is subjective though. Maybe you don't see the beauty in the Travco, maybe you see a petroleum guzzling ecological disaster on wheels, air conditioning or no. Fair enough, though I would strongly suggest looking into one's own energy before passing judgment on another[^2].

[^2]: You can calculate your rough carbon footprint over at tk, though do consider the backstory -- the average house [weighs 500,000 pounds](http://old.seattletimes.com/html/asktheexpert/2002122968_homehay19.html), much of it wood that had to be clear cut and hauled around. I don't know the footprint of building a Travco, but I do know it only weighs about 5000 pounds. Then there's a coal we don't have to burn to generate electricity... Check out Bob's rather lengthy post on this topic over at [CheapRVLiving.com](http://www.cheaprvliving.com/blog/proof-that-off-grid-vandwelling-is-greener-than-housedwelling/).

I don't know precisely how to articulate it, but I can say this,

Partly through tangible things, like research on Travco design, parts, engines, maintenance and so on, but just as much through intangible things like simple wonder at the way objects maintain their existence across time.





and in the case of the 8 track I don't really understand it -- but I understand what it's like. 



Digital devices actively discourage this with threats of voiding your warranty, or, in the case of Apple and other, making it deliberately difficult to disassemble thanks to bizarre screws and fasteners that require expensive, specialized tools.

Pre-digital things tend to be the opposite, often encouraging you to descstruct them by providing detaild schematic (early Apple computers did this as well). 



This means that the value over time of digital devices is necessarily always falling unless you maintain your device in near mint condition. Mechanical devices on the other hand are purely market driven -- if something proved over time to be a reliable, useful device there's probably a market out there for it. Even if it's an antiquated 8-track player.



At perhaps the simplest level remembering is reconstructing the past in the present. 

There is something terrible about time. Something truly horrifying about time lapse photography, imagine your life displayed in a time lapse film. I'm sure someone over at Flickr is doing it right now. One picture a day every day, same background, same arms length pose, put them together and slap them in a movie and you'd have the first film that might truly qualify as frightening.





At some length my friend and I stopped collecting minutes and said goodbye. I wandered over to my truck and poked my fingers in a puddle to see if it was gasoline. It wasn't which was even more puzzling. Eventually I discovered that there was in fact gas leaking, as it turned out the fuel line had ruptured and the gas was slowly leaking out and running in a thin rivult through the stones and into the grass.

After switching to the empty auxillary tank and deciding that that was problem for tomorrow I spent a little longer staring up at the sky in some vain attempt to spot the comet asldkfj, which is passing by at the moment.









We're usually trying to escape time. It's a constant reminder of its own scarcity. No one wants that. 

The trick we use to ignore its passage on the average day is that it moves just slow enough that we don't notice it except in large chunks. Yesterday is largely indistinguishable from today, last week not that different than this one, months even blur sometimes, it's not until we get to years that we start to think of big changes, real differences, but by then time appears fairly abstract.

Maybe time is not part of memory. Time is the space between memories, it lives in the shadows, runs down between and fills the cracks. When we pick up the 8 track or step into the ancient stone cottage or start up the classic RV the value of the experience 


[^2]: A purely accidental revelation: "A young researcher for Corning Glass named Dale Kleist was trying to weld together two glass blocks to make a vacuum-tight seal when a jet of compressed air inadvertently hit a stream of molten glass. The resulting spray of fine glass fibers turned out to be what researchers had been trying to make for years." [Source](http://www.goodoldboat.com/reader_services/articles/birthoffiberglass.php)



Most people ask this the way you might ask what someone does for a living, as a conversation starter. Or ender, depending.

Some people genuinely what to know though, which always catches me off guard. There's the answer everyone expects: you can drive here from Athens in 7 hours. But according the guestbook at the house where we stay some people that bike down here from Atlanta. That takes a few days. You could also take the river, I'd guess that would have you looking at a couple weeks. 

We drive, but we have three kids. It takes more like 10 hours. If you don't rush it. And there's no need to rush it. We're traveling after all, which I take to mean, more or less, wandering aimlessly, or close to aimlessly, and slowly.

Not to sound like a fortune cookie, but there's nowhere to go really. No matter how fast you go you'll still end up right here. 

On one hand the idea of "here" has become a kind of testimony to how western culture can turn eastern philosophy into meaningless platitudes. On the other hand I think there's also a profound truth there about the nature of existence.



There are a thousand forking paths of connection between you and I and we can choose any of them to get to each other. Birds might be one. The sea might be another. There are so many paths, so many thread to follow it's impossible to even concieve of them all, let alone follow them in any detail, with any passion. 


"I have also learned that if I let myself pursue a subject in travel, it helps inform me about the other subjects of travel.  When I began traveling fourteen years ago, I spent a lot of time alone in the desert, and being in my mid-twenties, I knew very little about the world.  But by wandering alone, some things started to interest me: what is that cactus?  What kind of beetle is that?  " http://www.notesfromtheroad.com/dryworld/bahia-palace_06.html  "The subjects chose me over time, but in each case, the subject that you pursue to discover in travel informs you of bigger themes in travel.  An example is watching the birds here above the Marrakech cityscape.  People who identify birds while they travel are often surprised that the habit causes them to soak in much bigger themes about the world: watching birds inadvertently educates the birding traveler on subjects like geography, habitat and ecology, and in a way that is much more profound than studying the same subjects in textbooks.  By watching birds while traveling, I have learned that the habit of visually scanning horizons, skies, trees and cliff ledges, I have come to literally see differently; almost as if I have created a heightened sense of the three-dimensions of my surroundings.  In this way, birding has made me more aware of urban spaces.  If I have started to gain an interest in urban architecture, I have to say the birds did it."


I don't want to make my daughters do anything, I just want to point them toward things and let them pick up the threads that interest them, pull on them, see where they lead. That's how I see parenting, not unlike being a travel guide, you point in the directions you know, maybe they go that way, maybe they choose another.