The Elephant Graveyard

New cupboard that holds our printer and iPod music system at the front of our rig.

I've been working on a motor home project to improve the way the front interior of our motor home works. We decided to mount our TV on the side wall of the rig and that left a big hole at the front. Solution: Let's build a bookcase-cupboard up there.

I found an old desk at an auction that I purchased for $3. It provided me with makings of a nice wood-grained interior bookcase after I sawed it down to size. I was not so lucky with the finding a solution with the doors. I got some help from a carpenter camper who had access to his father-in-law's table saw. But my plywood doors looked cheap and plain.

When we moved up the road 70 miles, however, I went onto the Internet and found an RV salvage place was nearby. We drove over there and the greaseball guy behind the counter said he charged $2 per person to go into the yard to look for stuff. I said I would go on my own and he relented and allowed Jo to accompany me at no extra charge. We wandered through this unbelievable elephant graveyard of motor homes. Many of them were burned out (a sobering sight). Some were old and completely gutted. The transmissions, storage tanks, windshields, skylights and other parts had been stripped, leaving the carcass bare. But we came upon one with cabinets still intact.

We carried along a tape measure since there was little wiggle room for the size of the doors. Two doors met our requirements within a quarter inch. Now we had to find a screwdriver to allow us to remove them from the rig. Jo found a Philips head screwdriver lying in the debris and we knew it was our lucky day. We brought them back to the shop and haggled the price down with Mr. Greaseball.

When we got back home, they fit the bill perfectly. A little coating of Liquid Gold brought the wood back to life and we now are in business with a nicely enclosed front area for our books, the computer printer and our iPod music system.

The Bird Whisperer

Great Horned Owl, perched in Wauchula, FL, at sunset, with the moon rising full.

The park ranger knelt on the sand, under the trees in the darkness. She turned on a tape recorder and the click-click-click and then a screech cried out into the woods. There was silence. She played it again. Still silence. Played it one more time and we heard a response call from the woods around us. In another minute, three Eastern Screech Owls swooped among the trees over our heads. Now they answered almost immediately when the tape cried out.

Ranger Stephanie was beside herself with delight over the success of her expedition. She had invited the campers in Little Manatee River State Park to come with her to “Call out the owls” – as she called it. Before we wandered in the woods, the ranger showed a slide presentation about the owls that lived in Florida. She talked about the Great Horned Owl, the biggest predator in the park. She said she would not try to call him out that evening. If she did, no other owl would come for the Great Horned Owl will kill an Eastern Screech Owl.

Late last year, while Jo and I were living in Wauchula, in the center of the state, we had three Great Horned Owls in our resort. I’d even, in a great stroke of luck, been able to photograph one as he sat on a telephone pole with a full moon rising behind his body. The setting sun cast him in a golden light with this enormous disk of the moon rising in the east.

Ranger Stephanie had arranged a visit from an animal rescue operator from Bradenton Beach. He brought out the Eastern Screech Owl, tiny, along with the Great Horned Owl and then he produced the Barn Owl, with its flat, heart-shaped face.  He explained their range and what they are likely to eat. The Great Horned Owl is powerful enough to pick up a cat and carry it off for dinner, he said. The Screech is a little thing. He demonstrated how the Barn Owl uses its flat face as a dish. He has ears, one higher than the other, that are so sensitive that he can hunt prey even when he cannot see the prey. He told us this had been demonstrated by blind-folding a Barn Owl. He still was able to locate and kill his food.

Jo and I were so intrigued by this mini-adventure that, the next night, as dusk drew close to us at our campground site, I brought out our iPad, with its Audubon book about the birds. The beauty of the electronic version of the book is that you can click on a bird’s sound. I clicked on the Eastern Screech Owl and its chatter spread out across the area.  After three plays, I was attacked by a Red Cardinal that swooped down on me, angry about the sound it was hearing. He (for he was flaming crimson) sat on the roof of our motor home and, when I played the owl’s voice again, it sent him into another swooping frenzy.

I switched over to the voice of the Red Cardinal and that brought a female Cardinal out of the woods to perch in a nearby branch and survey the marketplace. Now the male Cardinal was in a bit of a pickle. He had competition that he couldn’t actually see. So he returned to the branch, near the female, to chatter with her about not bothering with the unknown, unseen, competition.

We’ve tried this since then, and we always seem to be able to call out the birds in the evening. Now I’ve decided to call myself the Bird Whisperer!

And Now, We Begin in Print

So many folks wrote me kind words after I alerted them to the fact that my first book, Now, We Begin, was available as an eBook. After the congratulations, many said they would like to read the book as a printed version. Well, friends, your wish is my command!

 I went back to the drawing board, for a printed version is a completely different kettle of fish.

Both ePublishing and Print Publishing have their up and downsides. eBooks require you to become a whiz at formatting and knowing all about hyperlinks and such stuff. Print publishing requires you to design the book in a completely different way. You need to become an expert at software like InDesign. All of it is a brain stretcher for old geezers.

But I set about learning (or re-learning, really) how to create a physical book that could be printed on paper with ink. That task came to fruition with the New Year!

After going through a series of frustrating rejections of my file from my online publisher because my design did not fit the parameters that I'd set up, I figured my way through the maze and was rewarded with an email from CreateSpace (my publisher) telling me I'd jumped over all the hurdles and my book now was up and available for sale at

https://www.createspace.com/3728363

In another 5-10 days, the book will appear on Amazon.com. Then, it spreads to Amazon in the UK, Germany, France, Italy and some other countries. The printed book is different in many ways from the eBook. The cover, for one thing, had to be changed because the picture of me perched on a sand dune in the Namib desert was simply too low a resolution for print purposes.

So I rummaged through my thousands of pictures, looking for something that would permit high resolution printing. That took me all the way to my favorite country in all the world: Bhutan. In addition, I was able to design many more pictures into the body of the book. Thanks for all the feedback - and for all the sales. It makes my day...and, maybe, my year.

Now, We Begin

You're looking at the cover of my first book - published today!
It's been 18 years in the process of being born. And it has been a harrowing couple of weeks in working out the coding for electronic publishing. But it seems to be up and running at last.

This book had its genesis back in 1992 when I lost my job as publisher of the weekly papers I ran in Connecticut and New York. I thought the end had come. I was 52 at the time and it was simply impossible for a 52-year-old guy to find a job back then (sound familiar today?)

I set up my own two businesses creating a design company and getting my captain's license so I could charter out our 45-foot sailing ketch on Long Island Sound. Both of these business did pretty well. But I found I still longed to be immersed in journalism. So I applied for a fellowship to wander the world and become a mentor and journalism trainer. I got that. And that changed everything.

The book describes some of the adventures and cultural shock of that journey. It takes you to Namibia in southwest Africa, then to Cambodia and Vietnam. It also transports you to the roof of the world, Bhutan, as well as India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, even Borneo where I sat down to eat with former head-hunters whose shrunken skulls hung above me in the longhouse where we ate.

You can visit Amazon.com by pasting in

http://www.amazon.com/Now-We-Begin-ebook/dp/B006NYDO00/ref=ntt_at_ep_dpt_1

or go to Smashwords.com by pasting in this link:

www.smashwords.com/books/view/113915

And you can sample the book or even purchase it if it takes your fancy. There are many pictures in the book.

I hope you’ll take time to check it out. It’s a real-life adventure story.

I encourage you to tell your own family and friends about it.

In addition, take a moment to write a review of the book on Smashwords or Amazon.

It also is possible for you to Gift the book to a friend at the Amazon site. In the coming two weeks, Now, We Begin will appear at iBooks (Apple’s site), as well as Barnes&Noble’s Nook site and on Sony’s site. In addition, I am working on creating a printed version of the book which won’t come out until next year.

It's time to WORK!

Surrounded by palm trees, we've set up house under the clear blue October sky in Wauchula, Florida.

We are at work. Yes. We landed our rig in Wauchula, slightly west of the center of Florida and 50 miles east of the city of Bradenton. We have set up shop as Workampers at the SKP Resort (SKP stands for Escapees, get it!) Jo works in the office for a day and a half on the weekends, checking in travelers, sorting mail, etc. I work Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. My job description is a pot-potpourri of doing a little electrical work (rebuilding circuit-breakers and plugs for the various sites), lawn mowing with a giant machine, pool water testing and helping incoming campers back their rigs onto the lots.

I work for the president of the co-op, a decent, mild-mannered fellow who hails from Michigan. Jo works for the office manager whom she replaces on the weekends.

We receive a small stipend for our work. But the best part is we get our site at no cost, along with free electricity and free laundromat.

This is a little village of 126 home sites. Some of the homes are mobile homes that don't more. Others are rigs like our's. A handful are ancient Greyhound buses from the '50s and '60s that have been converted to homes. I met up with the owner of one, his name is Swede, when I pulled the handle off my weed-whacker machine while struggling to get the motor to start. Swede was puttering in the workshop when I brought it in for fixing and he drove with me to his lot and rummaged in the basement of his 1956 Greyhound bus. He still drives the bus down from the north each year, although he says it's getting harder to do this as he and the bus get up in years. He eventually came up with a temporary solution to the weed-whacker by tying the pull-string onto a nail and then taping the nail to the plastic handle.

Down the road, next to the office, there's a couple who have a pair of skis screwed to the wall of their mobile home. He spends his day in the glassed-in Florida room keeping a checklist of who comes and goes. Why does he do this? No one seems to know. He just likes keeping tabs on everyone. He doesn't give the notes to anyone. Just sits there all day long, noting who comes in and who goes out of the resort.

Over in the back area of the park, we have two Sand-hill Cranes who commute in each autumn and spend the winter here. Last year, they gave birth to two chicks so it's going to be interesting to see whether they return from the north with their chicks this year. No sign of them yet.

We have three great-horned owls that hang out on the power poles and swoop silently in the night to capture their prey.

As one of our first projects in our new location, I have redesigned the front area of our rig, under the dash. We eliminated our old cathode tube TV a couple of years back, but found the new LCD TV, while thin and elegant, was thin on sound. So I installed a new sound system under the set, adding awesome bass and increased volume. The cats were thrilled by opening the hole behind the TV set and they took the opportunity to explore this great cavity before it was filled in with my new sound system.

A Navigator for the Ages

Captain James Cook has insinuated himself into my consciousness during the past two years. While we wandered in Alaska, his name popped up in Anchorage and the coast south of that city. Cook Inlet, Turnagain Arm, and a dozen other names up in that remote part of the world highlighted the influence of Cook's voyages.

Then, we went to the end of the eastern part of the North American continent and Capt. Cook made his presence felt many times. He mapped the entire coast of Newfoundland and created charts that were so accurate they were used until just recently.

All of this created a hunger in me for more information about Cook. I remember learning about this great navigator back in school. It it was fairly scimpy in details. The easiest way was to visit Amazon.com and search for Cook biographies. There are a handful and I chose one by a rather stuffy Englishman, Richard Hough, who did a pretty thorough job.

Cook was born in Yorkshire, in the north of England. His father came from Scotland but crossed the border when he married. James took up the seafaring life aboard a coal-carrying boat that ranged up and down the east coast of England. He was essentially self-taught and he realized he wanted more than to be a coast wanderer.

Britain ruled the seas back then so he naturally joined the Royal Navy. It didn't take him long to make a mark with the Admiralty and the First Sea Lord ordered his captain to knock off the French in Quebec and Nova Scotia. That's where Cook began to latch on to the idea of charting the coast as well as the St. Laurence River. His charts are spectacularly detailed and accurate.

When he returned home, he took a wife, got her pregnant in time to be ordered off to sea in the HMS Endeavour for a circumnavigation of the world, via Cape Horn, Tahiti, New Zealand. He was ordered to find the southern continent which everyone thought was out there. He failed in finding Antarctica because there was just too much ice for him to push farther south than 70 degrees to find the mysterious land. But he discovered and charted the eastern edge of Australia. This voyage took more than two years and he kept his men free of the dreaded scurvy by requiring them to eat sauerkraut (vitamin C), along with fresh fruit as soon as he touched land like Tahiti or New Zealand.

The natives were a fairly tough bunch, of course, prone to eating their own. But the ladies were able and willing to meet the needs of the seamen when they, far from home, sought the favors of the chicks.
The girls had been infected by earlier French visitors to Tahiti, however, and the boys picked up a fair amount of the STDs of the time. Cook had had the ship's surgeon check all the men before they landed to be sure they would not infect the women. So there is an ironic justice there as the Brits moved in on the locals.

Cook returned home a hero, impregnated his wife again and the Admiralty sent him off on a much larger expedition. This one required that he chart the Pacific coast of North America after pushing as far south in the Pacific in yet another attempt to locate the southern continent. On his way to the land north of California, he happened to discover the Hawaiian Islands. He enjoyed those islands before moving north and east to chart the mainland all the way to the Bering Sea. He had hoped to find a passage that would either allow the ships to sail east across the top of North America, or west across the north of Russia. Can't get here from there, of course. But he surely kept trying.

Aboard the ship on this voyage was William Bligh, who was a master mariner in the sense that he often was used by Cook to locate channels and passages with a small sailboat where his large ship did not dare attempt to enter.

Bligh was a tough case even then and was pretty brutal with his crew – a sign of things to come when he returned years later as captain of the HMS Bounty.

On this third voyage, Cook seems to have gone through a fair large personality change. It is possible the endless thieving on the part of the natives throughout the Pacific ground him down (they were always stealing parts of the ship, hatchets, compasses, clothing. But it seems more likely there was a mental change caused by some vitamin shortage.

His temper flared too often, he turned to flogging which he had steered clear off in his earlier voyages. Anyway, when the Hawaiian natives stole some valuable material from his ship, he ordered them shot and when they swam out of range, he determined to take a party ashore and hold their king hostage.

It all ended badly when some of the Hawaiians (who generally seemed to believe he was the god Orono) decided to attack him. They hacked him to pieces on the rocky beach and then took his various parts and distributed them among the different villages and tribes.

It's a great, great story that does not end happily, obviously. His men negotiated with the king to retrieve as much of Cook as was possible and they gave him a decent burial at sea. Then they sailed their ships back to England – arriving four years after setting out.

Mrs. Cook had produced another kid in the meantime and lived on for more than 40 years.

His impact on cartography as well as discovery is for the ages.

High Drama on the Mountain

Ian: Well, folks, we just survived a bit of drama that I never have experienced before.

Fiona: You're right, bro. We were driving from Virginia to North Carolina, according to the big folks. We were climbing up from the Shenandoah Valley to the Blue Ridge Parkway that runs down the spine of the mountains.

Ian: And I was sitting on the dash of the motor home, with my feet up on the windshield. I like to drive this way because I get support. Just as we reached 3,000 feet, there was a flashing sign. As you probably know, I can't read. But the parental units began chattering and I could feel the tension in the air.

Fiona: The sign, they said, warned of thick fog for the next 7.5 miles. As we came over the summit, there it was like a huge wet blanket. At first, visibility was about 100 yards ahead. It was downhill all the way now, so Robert geared down. We were traveling at around 55 miles an hour but that was too fast. He braked time after time.

Ian: Now, the visibility was down to 25 yards, maybe less. It didn't worry me because I have complete faith in the parental units to get us to our destination. But I could feel the tension. I might even say it was as thick as the fog. Robert had his lights on, of course, but he was quite whiny about the number of cars in front who had no tail-lights and they would come and go in the thick fog. They would be visible when they applied their brakes. But they would disappear again the moment the driver took his foot off the brake.

Fiona: Scary stuff this. The miles slid by and the fog stayed thick as a woolen blanket. We came down more than six miles and were around 1,300 feet before the blanket began to lift. You could feel the tension lift in our home as things began to clear. When we passed the tiny town of Bottom on Interstate 77 the fog had cleared and all our spirits had returned with the usual comfortable driving.

Ian: We all discussed the drama (well, we just listened) and the consensus was there should have been signs to ask drivers to click on their flashing lights which would have helped cars and the trucks and RVs that followed them down the mountain.