also from the road

I appreciate very much the commentary that Che-wei has provided about the sprawl he has encountered, and I offer simply an idea that I could only have been inspired to on the road. For one, I love living nomadically and it has surpassed my expectations in many ways, yet the expense of it is evasive of most of my peers and contemporaries. So the challenge I have placed upon myself is to devise a self-sustaining lifestyle based on the comforts of technology I have encountered along the way, either in theory or in person. Walmart, for example is the perfect building block for such an existence. You arrive with your home, and immediately you have access to groceries, clothing, media, auto repair and supplies, seemingly everything you could possibly need to get through to the next day. One thing that's missing is access to the back-and-forth stream of information we currently know as the internet, which would ultimately provide a means for providing services, even locally, and receiving compensation in return that could be used at an everything-stop that we typically associate Walmart with. One company, that seems to provide everything to RV'ers that Walmart does not, is Flying J's, which is actually more geared to truckers. Flying J's offers free water and dump stations, wi-fi access as well as general internet access, showers, laundry machines, restaurants, telephones, restrooms, 'general merchandise' and the next best thing to a post office, all under the same roof. It's true, combining Walmart and Flying J's would make for a more transient, unkempt crowd, but it would provide just the type of network that a nomadic, 'working' person would need. Which brings me to my next point, that this everything-store could exist primarily off this new sub-class, that it would be policy for every RV'er, every travelling work-from-home businessman/inventor/artist, every trucker/familyman/ebay-enthusiast would willingly give a small amount of their time and effort into the sustaining of these nodes of commerce/culture/freespace to the point that they existed entirely on volunteerism, simliar to a co-op, but remarkably on different volunteers on a day-to-day basis. So I've personally undertaken the task of designing this system of transient units and accomodating nodes of contemporary sustainable nomadic living in the hopes that I might be able to live in such a way at some point in my life, hopefully before the ever-receding promise of retirement, ideally as a 'professional', possibly raising a family through home-schooling, travelling with a tribe of roving units, able to survive as just one, always happy to contribute and provide for the stable communities I encounter, and always travelling, which is the best part of this trip with Che-wei and Jeanee: going different places, getting to know different people, learning all kinds of things about history, humans, myself, the land, the wild... For me, travelling is the way to go.