Yesterday was cold and windy with rain off and on. I put my portable solar panels under the van during a brief morning shower and never got them back out. Woke up this morning at 4% battery, 3% after I made my coffee. Much too low. There should be some sun today and we're driving tomorrow. I should scrape by.
All my neighbors disappeared yesterday. Alone most of the day, then a couple people rolled up and camped at distant spots in the late afternoon. I made a fire around 6pm and sat with the view. I can't say enough about how much I love a campfire. Even when I was living a conventional life I loved a fire. Now I have them often and it's always a highlight. Better than watching TV. Better than the news. I like to call it the ancient television.
Yesterday I built a system to post short form videos to four channels at once: Instagram, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and a Facebook page. The idea is to batch create them, schedule them out, and go do something else. The thought of posting daily sounds awful to me, but this I think I can do. I was originally only going to do Instagram, then realized that once the video is made I may as well spread it around. The video creation is the hard part. Blasting it out can be automated.
Sometimes I feel burdened by all this infrastructure. But that burden is front loaded. Overall I have less of it than I used to. The Roads journal on Substack is running. The website has a system. Short form video is the next baby step, and it's the step most likely to put my creative output in front of new eyeballs.
This is a challenging stage. I've invested a lot of time and energy, it's costing me money, and I don't yet have an audience, which is what's required for all these things I love to become sustainable. I can understand how a lot of people never get beyond this point. There's a wall of silence. A few people express their appreciation here and there. I want my efforts to provide value. But mainly I just have to find a way to keep doing this, because I feel I'm now doing all the things I was born to do.
Shannon is supposed to arrive back at camp late this afternoon. Tomorrow we pack up and roll out. About three hours to Page, Arizona for supplies at Walmart, then four hours to Durango, with a possible stop at Mesa Verde on the way. I spent several months in Durango during a year off from college and never once visited Mesa Verde. This is the time. I also don't think I've ever stood on the Four Corners spot. I intend to. Then it's on to the Colorado summer adventure.
I transferred the last pound of ground beef from the freezer to the fridge last night. We timed our departure just right. I'll be finishing my last bite as we pull into resupply. It's been since May 1, so 26 nights and 27 days. What did I learn? Most of my supplies I estimated would last a month were actually more in the 20-day range. I need about 10 more gallons of water next time. I'll probably get four 2.5-gallon collapsible jugs that are easier to stash. More vegetables. Minor tweaks will make a difference.
The big internal debate lately has been about YouTube channels: consolidate everything into one, or separate into buckets by content type. One thing that has always frustrated me about the way my brain works is that I'm constantly creating new projects, new names, new buckets. The people who have a single bucket and spend their time filling it seem to have a tremendous advantage. I've observed this for a long time and debated it endlessly. But I think I've finally arrived somewhere with it. This is not a bug. This is a feature. I'm going to lean into it.