Ringing in the New Year in Slab City, California
First and foremost, happy New Year to all of you and happy 6 months of full-time RVing to me!
I’m finally back in the blog-o-sphere. It’s been a while, but I’ve finally taken enough of a break from the computer that I feel up to updating this old thing.
I spent just about five weeks in South Lake Tahoe (which a part of me misses very much. Good people, good food, and fantastic nature, what more could a girl want?). Just before Christmas, I migrated south through Nevada and am now in Slab City for a short spell. This is an off-grid community/campsite. It is an interesting, unique community that the documentaries do not adequately portray.
I am fortunate to be camping at the site of some full-time Slabbers who run the junkyard, which is apparently the oldest campsite at the Slabs (or so I'm told). Many here are snowbirds, and a few tough individuals stay here year-round; these awesome folks are the latter. Also, I haven't really had to worry about safety with a pack of 11 junkyard dogs around! This is a particularly interesting find in the junkyard (points if you can figure out why... hint: I have no idea what a bionol capacitor does):
There’s so much to write on my experience here that I will hold off on relaying my experience until I’ve spent some time here. In short, it's basically hippies meets the wild west (with some less-preferable tweakers mucking about). I imagine this is what Burning Man would be like if it were year-round and not quite so pretentious.
On an unrelated note, the more I travel in my RV, the more I realize that my heart is in the west. I don’t mean the California coast or the big shiny cities (like Las Vegas). I mean the deserts and the mountains. There’s something pretty amazing about being able to go from civilization to the middle of nowhere in nature in just a few minutes and the wide open spaces you just don’t get on the east coast. I will always be proud to be a northeasterner, but I don’t know if I could ever willingly choose to live back east again…