Land Cruising

Mariner's Wharf, Elizabeth City
N 36 17.922 W 076 13.097

Last night we took advantage of a strong public WIFI courtesy of Elizabeth City. We got on youtube.com and watched the two main TV events of the year that seeminly everybody on the planet has seen except us.

First, we watched the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics. Wow was that fun to watch. We were amazed at the creativity in the artistry and by the use of technology. That was surely a great show.

Second, we watched Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican convention. Wow again. She was great. We had heard before watching that the teleprompters had failed in the middle of her speech and how she just kept on without missing a beat. Even knowing that in advance the event was very hard to detect when watching.

On another subject, two of our cruising friends are Stephan and Lori from the vessel Twin Spirits. Those two have been cruising for a long longer than we have. However, they expressed a desire to cruise the rest of the country -- the part you can't get to by boat. This summer, Stephan and Lori managed to sell their boat, and to buy an RV. Right now they are up in Massachusetts fixing the RV up. We hope to see them in Vero this winter.

So what is the difference between cruising on a boat and cruising in an RV? Well, the most obvious difference is fuel costs. Depending on how many miles one drives, fuel costs for an RV could be ruinous.

The really big difference I suspect is the kind of scnery one sees. As I've said many times in this blog, the boaters get to see the thin veneer of the coastline and inland waterways of this country. Very often, the waters and the veneer look wonderful and pristine, yet just behind the veneer is a lot of ugliness. With an RV, one cruises the interior spaces -- sans the veneer. On the other hand, there us much grandeur and much open space remainng in America. If we manage to meet Stephan and Lori after they did RV cruising for a few years, I'll ask them to compare their boating and RV experiences for us. In the meantime, I just think of them as having gone over to the dark side.

One aspect of RV and boat cruising that seems alike is the competition between the right to anchor (or park) wherever we want to verus the pressure from governemnt to regulate everything. Right now, down in Florida, there is a newfound legislative assault on the right to anchor. In the RV world, I know that RVers are often forced into trailer parks or so-called camp grounds that appear to be extremely crowded and unattractive. The competing interests on both sides sound similar.