April 22, 2026. A few more folks are rolling out this morning. We've had such a lovely camp this year. The core group really bonded. Some of these people, you just have no idea when or if you'll ever see them again. Maybe that's always true. It's just more pronounced when you're a nomad.
Last night there was a meteor shower, most intense between 2 and 4am. Six of us agreed to set alarms and meet up. Four showed. We walked a quarter mile to the darkest spot we could find and laid on yoga mats for about an hour. I counted nine shooting stars. Chilly, very dark, the sky bright with stars. Not quite as much action as we'd hoped for, but a good nighttime adventure with friends.
The impending move is setting in. Day after tomorrow I'll pack everything up and roll on. In this case probably just a few miles away. We had $400 of firewood delivered for this gathering and despite fires on almost every night we still have about half left. Yesterday I ran a morning fire, a daytime fire, and an evening fire three times the size of anything we'd done before. I love a campfire. I'll load as much wood as I can carry when I pack up.
I spent much of yesterday finishing the video of Ladybug's talk. A labor of love for a dear friend. It's for her channel, not mine. I'll link to it when it goes live.
I also made some progress on my music setup. I've been running sound for roughly half the evenings here, and the iteration has been useful. For the past year I've been running music off my iPad via Bluetooth to the PA, but Bluetooth gets inexplicably glitchy and that's unacceptable. Now I'm running off my backup MacBook Air with a cable. Battery lasts forever, easy to switch sources, and it's a natural step toward a more performance-oriented setup. Finding the right way to do this in the van has been a long slow process. Too big, then too small, now finding the middle.
So here's my inventory of this stay.
The social aspect went better than anticipated. We're a hodgepodge group of misfits and everybody is so different from everybody else. Over the past few years I've gotten genuinely better at harmonizing with people who are quite different from me. I'm glad to notice that.
I started writing these Roads entries here, and that's turned into something I want to keep doing.
I didn't exercise as much as usual, but I logged real time on the OneWheel, had some epic bike rides, got much better at OnX Offroad, and deepened my relationship with the new drone.
My video ambitions got derailed by two things. First, an iCloud situation where my Mac's drive filled completely with video files and I had nowhere to send them. I followed Claude and ChatGPT's suggestions and pushed everything up to iCloud, where it promptly got stuck for about a week, inaccessible on the computer but not yet in the cloud either. I sorted it out eventually and learned a lot. Second, the 5TB hard drive I ordered, along with two other packages, came back undeliverable. I'm still making do but I'm in urgent need of more storage. A few videos got edited. My Final Cut Pro skills are improving. It's taking up a lot of time and mental space but still feels worth it.
Everything else worked great. The freezer has been a genuine success. Supply estimates held up well. I measured everything this time so I can refine and repeat. I'd bring more gum next time. I ran out of xylitol gum. Someone brought me a jumbo bottle of Tapatio, which I love. I'd been buying the small size. Never again.
Costumes have turned out to be a real thing. I never would have predicted it but I should always be on the lookout for more. Same with small personal strings of fairy lights, the three-foot kind. Great to have on hand for people who show up to costume situations without any costume.
The 100-foot string of colored bulb lights I got a few weeks ago was a hit. Brought a lot of atmosphere to the camp. They tangle badly in storage though. I'm going to try winding them on my extension cord reel and see if that helps.
As wonderful as it's been, I'm ready for some quiet. I'll have another week in this area before moving on. The plan for summer is southwestern Colorado, the Silverton, Durango, Four Corners zone. I've never spent a summer there. I don't know where I'll camp or what I'll find. It's a big question mark. As usual, it will be an adventure.