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Ground Report

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Sailboats, Weed Whacking And Health.

| Lifestyle, US

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This Segment Was Written Over A Few Days Time.

Wednesday was the last for weed whacking at the kiwi orchard.  I thought it would be quick and reasonably easy, but that was not the case.  It took as long to do the last four rows as it took to do eight rows the day before.  It appeared that two different people had done the weed whacking last time.  On one side of the center line of the orchard, the grass was tall but not matted up.  On the other side it was tall, matted and it looked like whoever had done the work before only skimmed the top of the weeds and didn’t do around the trunks or bottoms of the posts that are next to the trees and used to support them and the trellis.  Maybe it was coincidental, but I don’t believe so. 

There’s a good lesson in it that pertains to health.  If we just skim the top and go only for appearances, we’ll find that problems are going to follow in the future.  If we only treat the symptoms, in this case the weeds, and don’t bother to go deeper and get to the root(s), sooner or later we’ll have to deal with the problem.  When we do things that way, we’ll find it to be a lot more difficult than it would’ve been if we’d worked on it when it was minor. 

My next project at the farm was the tiller for the boat and the slats for the open gear storage area.  There was a lot of sideways play in the tiller head and it had to be built up with weld.  When that was done, I filed the weld down to fit the tiller.  Once the slats were put back in place for the gear storage, we were ready to start packing.  Celinda and I still had to go to Oroville so we could use the high-speed Internet connection at Scoops, the ice cream and sandwich parlor that had a wireless connection. 

I had some business e-mails in my website inbox, but couldn’t access them because cookies and java script has to be on the computer being used and our hosts’ computer didn’t have that capability.  We had to take our laptop like I did before, so I could put a message on the website for people to contact me through my other address.

Wednesday was the worst day for smoke since we’d been There.  You didn’t need a filter or special glasses to look at the sun.  Visibility was probably a quarter mile or less.  Fallon, NV had taken the prize for worst smoke up until today.  I hoped it would be clear and cooler once we got to the mountains.  The smoke traps the heat in, and it really didn’t cool off like it normally would there at night. 

We’d been scheduled to go to an organic farm in Willits, CA but changed our plans with the fire danger as high as it was.  While we were at the kiwi farm, Celinda started looking for other places and we were sure something would work out, even if we had to go to Oregon sooner than we’d planned, or maybe even go to Washington State, if that was what was in the cards.  With the good gas mileage we get with our Mileageman1 units on the car, the trip was costing about the same as it would if gas were 30% less than it was.

Thursday, after getting a few last minute things done on the boat, we went to Oroville and the ice cream parlor for a day on the Internet.  We got as much done on our smalltownswest.com website as we could, but still had a lot of text and pictures that need to be sorted through, edited and published.  While we were in Oroville, I mailed mileageman1 DVD of to various parts of the world.  With the bulk of business taken care of, maybe, we’d be able to get czught up after our upcoming weekend of sailing. 

The smoke from the fires was even worse in Oroville than it was in Palermo. We were definitely looking forward to our trip to the high Sierra in hopes of clean air, good wind and an enjoyable camping/sailing experience.

Our adventures during the summer wouldn’t have been possible without great house sitters and we really appreciated Jerry and Karen’s help.  We also wouldn’t have been able to do this without effectively lowering our cost of fuel. 

Friday, we were on the road.  Wade and Bettie Ann were trailering their boat with Celinda and me, trunk stuffed full and our back seat loaded to the tops of the front seats, trailing behind.  I’d lived and played in the area during high school and before moving to Oregon, but after fifty years everything looked new to me.

 

Filed under: Lifestyle, US
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About Larry Miller

I was born in Los Angeles in 1940. My father was a fighter pilot instructor during WWll and we moved from coast to coast, maybe that’s where I got the nomad in my blood. After graduating from high school in 1958 I joined the Marines. That lifestyle wasn’t for me and upon my discharge I went on with my life, and have never looked back. I worked briefly for a Caterpillar dealer in Riverside, CA before moving back to N. California where I was a welder and truck driver for a chemical company. Truck driving wasn’t my calling anymore than being in the Marines, and I went back to work for another Caterpillar dealer steam cleaning dirty tractor parts and welding. They sent me to schools, lots and lots of schools. I spent as much time going to trade schools as I did at work. I went from cleaning parts to apprentice field mechanic, to mechanic to the parts department to satellite store manager in less than two years. They wanted me to move to Sacramento and be a salesman: I moved to Oregon to learn to commune with nature. I went to work for another heavy equipment dealer and was later contacted by the World’s largest Lorraine Crane dealer and offered the position of purchasing agent and general parts manager. In 1967 I was offered a line of automotive parts and supplies and went into business for myself. My business revolved around eleven race cars that we maintained for others, driving race cars professionally and maintaining high end sports cars. I was a championship and regional champion driver. My business was the largest import parts and service, non dealer, in the state until I sold it in 1979. We went sailing in 79, first to Mexico and then Hawaii. I was an award winning Trans-Pacific sailor and sailor of the year, Hawaii, Island of Kauai. An opportunity presented itself in Hawaii during 1981 and I was back in business, importing Japanese auto body and hard parts. I also felt the pull to write and began freelancing for magazines and newspapers in 1982. My main focus in my articles is, and always has been, health, wellness and fitness. Most of us have heard the saying, “Time is all we have.” I disagree. Our health is all we have, because without our health, we have no time. I was a US Olympic team hopeful in racewalking and held all the records for the state of Hawaii. As a sponsored athlete in my forties, I finished first in nine marathons in a row in my division, qualified for the Ironman® and was the state USCF cycling champion five times in Hawaii and Oregon. Celinda and I were married in 1988 after a three year engagement. We sold our businesses and organic farm and sailed back to Oregon. After our sailboat boat was sold, we moved to Joseph, Oregon, two miles from the trailhead into the Eagle Cap Wilderness. We were caregivers for my mother the last ten years she was alive. We moved to New Mexico in 1995 because it was too cold for my mom in Oregon during the winters. Celinda designed, and I engineered and built our strawbale house. I began writing the weekly health column for a local newspaper in 1996, and still do. In 2000, I took the summer off to do a four month, 4000 mile, hike, bike and kayak odyssey. I’d been writing health, fitness and sports articles since 1982 and the journey produced a full-length, nonfiction, first person adventure book, Yol Bolsun, May There Be A Road, which can be bought from Amazon.com and others over the Internet. The summer of 2001 was spent hiking. kayaking, fishing and exploring the southwest. In 2002 Celinda and I spent the summer in Canada learning the hospitality business at a resort in preparation for doing promotion for the resort in the US. Most of 2003 was spent reestablishing the trees and landscape that had died during the stay in Canada. We had a house sitter and the house sitter had an ex-husband, and that’s a long story. In July of 2004 I did a solo kayak trip on the Snake River, taking pictures, writing articles and pencil sketching the journey. I hope to do another kayak adventure on the Snake River during the summer of 2008, on the section I missed in 2000 and 2004. In 2005, I returned to Canada to the resort where we’d spent 2002. I was supposed to be there for the month of June. I’d contacted people I’d met in 2002 and they came back to Canada to fish, hike and spend time at the resort, Echo Valley Ranch and Spa, while I was there. My one month became five and then it was off to Spain to do the El Camino de Santiago as a travel companion with one of the guests who’d returned to Canada in June. During the summer of 2006 a friend from Ireland, who I’d met in Spain the year before, came to visit in NM and we fished, hiked and explored the White Mountains of AZ. He’d never slept out in the wild in a tent before, and it was quite an experience, for both of us. My newspaper articles were put on the Internet beginning in 2002. I was asked to give public speaking engagements, photo and video presentations, on various subjects for the library in Deming, NM and continue to do so. In 2006 I videoed and produced a DVD for the Smithsonian Institute’s travel exhibit “Between Fences.” NMFILMS had a conference by invitation only, which I attended. While attending the conference, I realized that film making wasn’t what I wanted to do but I still wanted to use my sixteen years of experience and enjoyment of videoing and photography. During the winter of 2005, I discovered that no one on record had ever run from the Arizona border to the Texas border, a distance of 165 miles. During the spring and summer of 2006 I trained for the run and the run was completed in October, 2006. In late 2005, I began building and maintaining websites incorporating all the things I enjoyed about video, photography, travel and the out of doors. 2007 has been a summer of upgrading the home and property which resulted in a downgrading of my enthusiasm for being located in one place. If we don’t like what’s happening in our life, we need to change what we’re doing. Celinda and I are ready to pull up roots and move on. I guess I’ve come full circle. I’m ready to revert back to my childhood, and a nomadic lifestyle.

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