theboondork's RV blog

Is there another mini-vacation in my future?

8/11/2022

Clicking the pics might show you the way it used to be.

Antique car hood ornament.

This heat is causing me to start thinking about taking another mini-vacation. But in this case it wouldn't be just a mini-vacation, it would also be a shakedown cruise, to see how the Lance is working, and also a look around the mountains to see if the crowds have thinned out some.

Talking to my daughter when I got back to Denver after my last mini-vacation and telling her about all the crowds I was facing, she postulated that for a lot of families that weekend I was in the mountains, was the last weekend before school starts and that may explain the hordes of people I was dealing with.

And since some Colorado schools start early next week, that got me thinking that if I took a mini-vacation for three or four nights starting next Monday maybe the crowds wouldn't be so bad, because most of the tourists have gone, and by then all the kids should be back in school so maybe I could spend some time in the high lonesome, when it's actually high and lonesome.

It won't be long now before Fall will be upon us and the mountains will be crawling with leaf peepers making the high country difficult to drive through and boondock in. So maybe I should get in another shakedown cruise before things get busy again.

I haven't made up my mind yet if that's the thing to do, but I would like to get out of this heat, and the mountains is the perfect place to do just that.

Theboondork

I can remember my grandmother living in South Georgia, wife of a sharecropper, washing clothes on the back porch with a washtub, washboard, and hand ringer just like this.

My mom was much better off, she had an electric washing machine similar to this. It had an electrical ringer, but you still had to feed the clothes into it by hand. It doesn't look fancy but it was 10 times better than the way my grandma washed clothes.

In the Colorado mountains this is the way you got around when it snowed. There was no four-wheel-drive, you hitched it up to a horse with four hoof drive.

6 Comments

Judith

8/11/2022 08:51:44 pm

Go!! Go tomorrow!
Ah yes. The fancy electric washing machine. I was told never ever to get near it. I believe there was some fear I would stupidly put my hand in the wringer.

Tom

8/11/2022 09:20:40 pm

Leaving tomorrow would be a good idea because it's supposed to be another hot one. But I've got packing to do which is going to require some time.

I'm looking forward to the day when I'm living in the Lance, and I have everything I need to live comfortably in it with me, so I can head up into the mountains without any packing at all, all I need is the desire.

I think getting your hand caught in the ringer was all too common, especially for a child helping out with the laundry... I think that's why to this day, I don't like to do laundry.

Tom

Linda

8/12/2022 01:24:58 pm

My mother had a similar washing machine and she used those tubs for rinsing. Fancy buttons tended to break when going through the wringer. We also bathed and played in those tubs.

8/12/2022 03:43:48 pm

Funny you should mention bathing in those wash tubs, somewhere I've got a picture of me, one or two years old, sitting in one of those wash tubs full of water.

Breaking a fancy button was not a problem for my grandmother because they didn't have any fancy buttons, just regular ones. And since she would cut the buttons off of worn out clothes, I can remember seeing a whole jar of old buttons in her house when we would go visit.

As a young woman she lived through the Great Depression when times were really tough, and her operative response to my question about why she had so many buttons was "waste not, want not."

Tom

8/12/2022 08:22:28 pm

Hey!! I've got a jar of buttons. You never know when you might need one.

8/12/2022 08:45:38 pm

And that's a good thing if you wear clothes that have buttons, but I've paired my wardrobe down to pocket T-shirts, and blue jeans. And if it's chilly outside I wear a light jacket that has zippers. Now there is technically a button on my jeans, but it's metal, riveted on, and I've never lost one in my life.

So in the interest of simplicity I decided to go totally button-less; just one less thing I have to worry about. And the stress just melted away when I realized I no longer had buttons that could fail me at the worst possible moment

Tom

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Is there another mini-vacation in my future?

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