I fear my travelogue veered into a gear review. It’s an occupational hazard of someone who does activities that requires equipment to obsess about the materials rather than the act. Oh well, it’s my vacation and I can do whatever the hell I want. There are couple other pieces of equipment I want to mention but I’ll discuss them later.
Time to talk about the dusty boring generic town of Pumpjack.
Pumpjack is not the name of the actual town but the name is unimportant. What’s important is that I set my sights on the horizon and didn’t stop until the city of Guam (which isn’t called Guam) was well out of sight of my rearview mirror. I literally feel a weight lift from my shoulders whenever I leave the city. Whew!
I had a destination in mind but it’s not really about the destination is it? The weather was shitty and I didn’t feel like spending forever in the cab of my truck so, like I’m wont to do, I changed plans. My planned destination was a lake that’s reputed to be beautiful and (unfortunately) popular for recreation. I’d never been there. I picked it because it looked just far enough south that I could use it to get out of my cabin fever funk. But what the hell, I was way out on the prairie and Pumpjack supposedly had a State Park with a lake on it.
More importantly I was roaring into town by mid-afternoon. I swung off the highway into Pumpjack and the first thing I saw was concertina wire. There was a sign that said “prison nearby, do not pick up hitchhikers”. Now I don’t mind the idea of being warned that there’s a prison nearby and I also think picking up hitchhikers outside of the prison is a bad idea, but I found the sign disconcerting. It’s as if they’re not entirely sure the prisoners are inside the prison so they just said “fuck it, lock your doors and hope for the best”. Perhaps a sign that reads “we haven’t entirely got things under control” is a good symbol of our current age?
Ignoring the prison, and immediately getting lost in the maze of streets in the rather small town, I wandered until I found the town’s “Miracle Mile”. There, I pulled into a McDonald’s and jacked into Wi-Fi.
I may be slow but I can learn. I’d learned that there was no point in driving to a State Park without reservations. At McDonald’s I discovered that this particular State Park, unlike the handful near Guam, had plenty of available spaces. Maybe escaped prisoners should try camping instead of hitchhiking?
Mindful of the chilly weather I selected a campsite with electricity. Buried somewhere in my truck was a small electric heater and an extension cord. I’ve never had a tent with electric heat, but I was hoping to try. I’m currently too cheap to pony up for all the gear to do a “hot tent”. (A “hot tent” is when you heat your tent, usually with a tiny woodstove. This is common with elk hunters and other old school mountaineers but it’s uncommon for the rest of us.) I have a brand-new tent for this trip (I’ll discuss it later) but I was too cheap to buy the kind of tent that has a “stove jack” to accommodate a tiny woodstove. (Not to mention the expense of the stove.) Also, there are pros and cons to anything and I think a hot tent’s cons outweigh the pros for non-winter overlanding purposes. The “extension cord method” was a new experiment; I’ve never heard of anyone else doing such a thing.
I also have a mind to do some “lake-based recreation”. (I’ll get into that some other time but suffice to say my truck was bristling with oars and paddles and fishing poles and all sorts of stupid shit.) There were many campsites to choose from but I paid a bit more have a campsite right exactly on the lake.
Reservation accomplished!
Just as I was about to feel smug about things, I realized I’d paid a usurious $35 to reserve a 50’ pull through RV site that had everything but water and sewer hookups. Damn, that’s not cheap. Meh, shit happens. I thought about canceling a reservation and creating a more reasonable, cheaper one, but the thought of logging on and going through all that bullshit just to save a few bucks turned me off.
Also, it was getting near to sunset. The park was only a few miles out of town so I decided to zip out there, set up my tent, that I would come back and figure out where the hell Walmart was so I could buy some necessities. In particular, I had packed my coffee percolator but no coffee!
I blew out of town with the steering wheel in one hand and a Big Mac in the other…
$35 plus reservation fees? The extra 3rd party fees always strike a sour note with me…
I remember the days when National Parks and their campgrounds were primo…in quality and price, national forest camps where cheap & simple.
One trip I stayed at a campground in Olympic National Park and paid the National Park price, then some days later I stopped at a national forest campground. The forest campground cost me MORE than the National Park! It had vault toilets and a host selling firewood who worked for a 3rd party. The 3rd party’s cut was what drove the price of the forest camp over the park.
Welcome to the modern America!
What gets me is having to pay a registration fee in order to pay for a reservation.
Ya got me hooked, AC. I’m living an adventure vicariously. I’m inside, online, and no bugs. What’s not to like?
In this case I can’t remember if there was a separate “reservation fee” but there was no fee to create an account to reserve. (It was “free” but a PITA.) On site I discovered a separate “vehicle fee”. The vehicle fee thing is nothing new. I remember Parks charging for the campsite AND the car as a slimy activity even 20 years ago. As far as I can tell each State (or at least many of therm) has it’s own registration system. Of course the National Park Service has a different and far more annoying system which I REALLY hate. (it sucks!). For a guy who travels like me that means I’ll eventually have a dozen odd username/password sets and I’ll be perpetually harangued for forgetting them. Also, I’ve had a lot less “reservation” BS with wilderness in Canada; hat tip to our neighbors to the north for getting some things right.
Glad you like my travelogue. It was a new idea to post a trip story and I think it’s working out.
If you were still in your home state, I think I know roughly about where you were; I used to go way up into (state redacted) to do an onsite each year, & passed by that prison. I’ve seen the same signs.
Of course, I may be mistaken: in that state, I imagine y’all have lots of prisons. You certainly can use them.
I have seen “don’t pick up hitchiker” signs near prisons in three states. I suppose future jailbreaks will involve smuggled smartphones and Uber?
Also I wasn’t in my home state. I will neither confirm nor deny that I live in a State, or in North America, or on Earth.
I’m not sure who can use the most prisons but I’ve noticed the creation of inmates and the housing of them are almost geographically unrelated. For the serious security-level jails, city criminals appear to get warehoused in rural areas… the more rural the better it seems. This applies to the big scary jails and not the minimum security stuff. On the one hand I see the rural areas benefit from the jobs. On the other hand, criminals are just one more form of effluent that tends to be handled nowhere near its source.
We used to have a prison at Brushy Mountain, in Middle-of-nowhere, East Tennessee (James Earl Ray was one of its inmates). Not a lot of problems: if they did escape, they were likely to get shot if they messed with any hillbilly’s property.