MartinsVentureWest: Last Leg of Two Month Trip - Back Home 2/22/19

Two-day trip from San Marcos to Blanco up 281 to Johnson City to Burnett to Lampasas to Hamilton to Hico to Stephenville (overnight) continue up 281 to I20 to Weatherford to Decatur to Gainesville to 82 to Sherman to Denison.

Again, we chose the backroads rather than the interstates. You will see two more courthouses. I am not sure why I like them, but I find them interesting, and likely as not, there will be a business district surrounding each one. In this day and time, those courthouse squares generally have gone through a period of degradation, and are now slowly rebuilding, unlike some of the smaller country towns, many of which continue to deteriorate. Which brings me to the similarities of Texas and South Carolina. Both were built on a rural lifestyle. Both have country towns which are dying because young people are going to cities to work. The country towns that are thriving generally have a university or some other economic engine that is not agricultural that supports the town. Which makes me apprehensive because I believe the basic values of our country are agrarian based, and which I do not have the time or energy to write about as the flight is about to end. Are we going to eventually be like China, with huge cities set among vast agricultural wastelands populated only by corporate farms? Where will our values come from then?

We noticed that in traveling the back-roads from Corpus up to a point about level with Dallas/Fort Worth, there was almost no roadside trash. It was incredibly litter-free. We wondered if it had to do with the signs that said, “Littering – Don’t Do It $2,000 Fine”. Are South Texans more proud and considerate than North Texans? I think I may be hypersensitive due to the embarrassment of our trashy South Carolina roadsides.

2/19/19 Reflection: Mary Jane and I are on the plane from Dallas to Tampa. We spent our last night at Eisenhower State Park just outside Denison. None of the full hookup sites were working and available, so everyone had to wait in line to dump their tanks before leaving. The analogy of getting rid of the “crap” hit me again. What if we were forced to deal with our stuff/juink/things every week, and get rid of what we did not need? What if we had the self-discipline to do that? I had so few cloths, they would all fit in a 1’ x 2’ x 2’ closet. I could deal with and make all decisions on cloths in five minutes or less by piling them on the bed, refolding, and putting back in the closet. Is that a luxury, or is 25 pairs of shoes a luxury? Am I my stuff? Who am I without my stuff? Are you really naked if you don’t own cloths? Remember the Bible story of Adam and Eve? They did not know they were naked until they disobeyed God. Or was their sin collecting stuff?

Final Comment: Received from friend after he read reflections on accumulating "stuff"

In wrapping up, I realize this trip has been something of a sabbatical. I have a lawyer friend whose firm allows a six-month sabbatical every seven years. Is that a luxury, or a necessity? This trip has been a sabbatical, in that I was separated from my daily duties, and forced to focus on a very specific goal of gathering and analyzing information. That separation gave me the opportunity to think about not only what I was doing, but what I was not doing. It allowed me to observe a totally different lifestyle, or a multitude of lifestyles that most of us classify as “camping” or “RVing”. The only real commonality among these lifestyles is limited space, limited stuff, and possible mobility. It also gave me the opportunity to spend two months, 7x24 with Mary Jane, which was a lot of fun. All of you reading this know that we have spent the last twenty years living more apart than together.

We again stored the travel trailer and Suburban in the warehouse. We enjoyed another meal with Oren, Tony and Jordan in the warehouse office and Oren took us to Dallas to the airport hotel. We will spend the rest of the week at a business conference in Clearwater, FL, and then ride to Beaufort with Jarrett and Sophie. We plan to go back to Texas after Mama’s memorial service in early May, and “take a vacation”. We will travel north through Oklahoma, to Kansas City, over to Indiana, and visit her brothers in Indiana and Tennessee. We are talking about a smaller trailer and a trip to Alaska in 2020. 2/22/19 8:30 PM We are back home in Beaufort!

I blogged my own experiment with building and living in a different space almost ten years ago at https://www.containercondo.blogspot.com You may or may not be interested.