Monday, May 9, 2011 - Clarinda IA

Power & Light, Hastings NE, May 8, 2011

Oh shit...

This has been an interesting day. Clarinda IA and Nodaway Valley Park is not where I expected to be spending the night. Some days even the vaguest of plans go awry.

Some time early in the sweltering hot humid afternoon I pulled off the road for a pee break and to refill my water cup. Funny smell in the bathroom - guess the airflow has reversed for some reason. It happens. Ah well.

I pull back onto the road and hear a funny scraping noise, look in the mirror and see a scrape in the dirt and a small dust cloud where I left the verge.

Back to the verge I go.

Yikes! - the leading edge of the black water tank dropped and is dragging on the ground. This ain't gonna be fun - as luck would have it that black tank is darned near full. That's about 20 gallons and a hundred and fifty pounds of stuff now vastly complicating this little problem.

Stay tuned

I have long had an uncanny way of getting out of tight spots on the road - I have many many such stories from my long distance motorcycling days - now there's another to add to the growing list of RVing tight spot stories.

Night camp

Site 9 - Nodaway Valley Park, Clarinda IA

Verizon cell phone and EVDO service - slow extended service
Locate Nodaway Valley Park on my Night Camps map
Check the weather here

Over Fifty

Some of this has been painful for me, but it's all been wildly instructive. And it convinced me that nearly every person over fifty should try to find a time to sit down and engage in the same exercise, even if you never intend to publish anything. You need to think about what really meant something to you. Who did you really love. Who really made you what you are. What the seminal events did. And also it's an incredible discipline. Because I found it shocking to me what I remember and what I don't. It's shocking to me what I can remember factually and how hard it is for me to be absolutely sure about how I felt at the time. You know, how did I feel when I was 16? I don't really know.

Bill Clinton, on writing his memoir, in an interview with James Fallows, the Atlantic Monthly

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