A New Adventure Begins

 I went white-water rafting for the first time in early August 2021.  Including flying time, flight delays, airport layovers, and driving, it took about 18 hours door-to-door from South Beach to the Payette River Rafting Company in Idaho.  That journey was brutal.

 

The two-hour raft ride on the Payette River was delightful and exhilarating.  As we approached the end, floating through the gorge, the sky framed by steep rugged rock, I wasn’t ready to leave.  And I wasn’t looking forwar d to the hour and forty-minute drive back to Boise. 

 

That's me in the coral jacket on the left rear of the raft

 

 It had never crossed my mind to go white-water rafting.  The activity for our sibling weekend had been organized by my brother.  I enjoyed it so much that two hours wasn’t enough, and that short time on the Payette River made me think about all the things I hadn’t done, all the wild and beautiful places of America I hadn’t seen.

 

I noticed camper vans parked along the banks of the river, people in lawn chairs, nursing beers, starting barbecues or nibbling on sandwiches, their dogs sniffing nearby or at their feet.   

 

They get to stay here all weekend? I asked. 

Yup, said our rafting guide. 

How come? 

You just book a site.  If you have a reservation, you can stay.

One couple on our raft mentioned that they had an RV.  The wife was a traveling nurse; they moved from one location to the next, spending six to eight weeks at a time.   I don’t know if it was destiny or coincidence that a couple with an RV ended up on our raft, but I do know that when I got on that raft, I wouldn’t have gone camping if you had paid me, but before I got off, I decided that we should rent our apartment, pack up our things, and go on the road for a year to explore America. 

Marina had been trying to get me camping for years, and I had refused.  I need my long luxurious daily showers, and I like indoor plumbing and modern conveniences.  No roughing it for me.  So when I flew back to Miami and proposed this plan, she couldn’t believe it, and was all for it.  I started this blog on our cross-country move from Los Angeles to Miami Beach in 2013.   On that trip, Marina and I planted seeds for this journey today -- we talked about traveling around the country in an RV, and now nine years later, we were actually going to do it. 

We listed the apartment for rent in early September, bought an RV in early December, secured a tenant by the end of the year, moved out on January 27^th, and hit the road March 9^th.    That sentence encapsulates six months of uncertainty, inconvenience, packing up a three-bedroom condo, whittling down a lifetime of accumulation into necessities for the road, organizing work to operate from afar, stocking and preparing the RV, learning all about its mechanical, plumbing and electrical systems, selling the two vehicles that couldn’t be flat-towed behind the RV and buying a Jeep Wrangler that could, and finally, saying goodbye to family and friends.   Much of those six months was arduous, but we kept our goal firmly in mind, and that helped us get through it.  

Marina had suggested we rent an RV for a weekend to make sure this lifestyle was something I liked and could handle.   We rented a 28-foot Jayco motor home and stayed at an RV park off a busy road, motor homes and campers parked practically on top of each other at a nondescript site.  It rained all weekend.  There was nothing to do at the RV park, and we didn’t have a vehicle with us since we had left it where we picked up the rental.  Even so, I loved it.  I loved the feeling of waking up in the camper, the coziness of the dining booth, the outdoor grilling and eating.  I loved being away from the relentless routine of daily life, and I even got used to not having cell service all weekend.   Marina was satisfied that if I loved being in an awful RV park during bad weather with nothing to do, then I was ready to get on the road and see some truly beautiful places. 

We had already spent quite a bit of time hunting second-hand RVs, but we couldn’t find anything that satisfied us.  Everything was either too big, too small or too brown.  (I can’t understand the fascination with brown interiors in RVs.)   We had rented the 28-footer because that’s the size we thought we wanted, but by the end of the weekend, we decided that for full-time living, we needed a few feet more.   Marina had thoroughly researched the various RV manufacturers, and she had narrowed down our options to two brands for reliability and quality – Tiffin and Newmar. 

While sitting at the dining booth in our rental, we looked at the floor plans for those two brands, and eliminated the Tiffin because the TV was in an awkward location on the smaller models that we wanted.   We set our sights on the 31-foot Bay Star by Newmar, which had everything we needed in the right configuration. I lobbied hard for the 34-footer, which came with a washer and dryer, but Marina was concerned it was too big.   “What’s an extra three feet?” I argued.  But she would be the one driving so I had to defer to her judgment.   The Internet revealed that the exact model we wanted was sitting on a dealer’s lot not far from where we would return the rental.  In fact, it was literally on the way home.  We decided to go check out the floor plan in person to make sure it was what we wanted so we could then find a second-hand one.

We called ahead and made an appointment after dropping off the rental.  We had to wait a long time to see the salesman, and almost gave up, but since we had narrowed down our options to this model and this alone, and there was none other for at least 500 miles, we needed to see it.  

She was parked by herself in a lot, slides out, blue and gray paint bright even in the cloudy weather.  The salesman opened the door, and the minute we stepped inside, I fell in love.  The cabinets reminded me of a French farmhouse – a warm crème color with an oil-rubbed finish along the moulding.  The sofa, dinette booth and cab chairs in front were a soft gray.  All the lights were on in the coach and they created an inviting glow.  As the salesman walked us through, showing us the bedroom in the back and the bathroom, I knew this was The One.

The test drive went better than expected; Marina drove her smoothly through highway traffic.  Afterwards, we were in the coach for a long time.  I lost track.  He sat on the sofa, in no hurry to leave, discussing all the features, answering Marina’s questions.  I sat on the dinette booth, and all I could hear was a voice in my head saying, “We have to have it.  We have to have it.  We have to have it.”

 

Everything I knew about negotiating went out the window.  Not just because of the insistent inner child inside me who demanded that we not leave without it, but also because we were in a time of scarcity; houses, cars, RVs, all had crazy prices due to lack of availability from supply chain issues caused by Covid.  I managed to shave a little bit off the price and a point off the interest rate, and about three hours after we walked into the dealership, we had found our new home for the next year.  

We named her Duchess, and the new Jeep Wrangler to tow behind her was called Duke.  If you're on Instagram, you can see a video tour of her: part one and part two.   You can also follow our adventures in Duchess on our Instagram page.  

Duke and Duchess

A Study in Starch

Tirthan Valley, Day 3 (October 11, 2014)

The next day we drove to the village of Gushaini and then walked the 8 kilometer (5 mile) uphill trail to the entrance of Great Himalaya National Park.  We didn’t intend to do a 10-mile roundtrip walk in one day but we decided we’d go as far as we could.   We encountered quite a few villagers walking down the path.  It turns out that there are a fair few villages along the trail and many of the residents do the trail daily from their homes to the main village of Gushaini. The architecture is fairly consistent here: a rectangular two-level structure, with the bottom floor used for storage and the top floor being an enclosed veranda wrapping around the sleeping rooms. 

Villagers on the way down the hill

Trail to entrance of Great Himalayan National Park

View of the river from the trail

Local architecture of village home.  Notice corn drying on roof

Bird-spotting

View from the trail

About 2 miles up the trail

Poor tired donkeys carrying sand up the hill for construction

Marina kept marveling at the fact that all building materials are brought up the hill, mostly by poor tired little donkeys.  Gautam had told us that he had seen a villager drag a log that was about a foot in diameter and 17 feet long up the hill.  The mountain people were tough, he said, and we had seen that ourselves.  Women bent forward carried huge loads of grass on their backs.  I thought of the old woman we had seen at the Golden Temple who couldn’t stand up, whose back was bent forward forever, and who could only see the ground below her.  A lifetime of carrying heavy loads would have done this.  How many others were destined for this?  Arguably, even the poorest person in Europe is much better off financially than the poorest person in India.  Europe has a large social net to catch those less fortunate; here there’s very little social welfare.  How is it that some people have the good fortune to be born in Europe or America and others end up at the bottom rung of the social ladder in India or China?  Is it simply luck?  I don’t believe, as the Hindus do, that one’s current life is determined by the bad karma of a past life.  That’s too simplistic, too easy a way to dismiss the misfortunes of millions, and probably an explanation derived by powerful priests and kings to keep the man on the street from striving to improve his lot.  It’s fashionable in certain spiritual circles to believe that the soul chooses its life before being born, chooses its gender, parents, and many traumatic experiences.  I’m not sure if I believe that either.  It’s more empowering than the Hindu belief (or for that matter the Christian notion of original sin) but it still seems too easy an explanation to dismiss problematic and thorny situations, and still has an element of holding a person responsible for being born into a bad situation.  Maybe we need to find a reason other than pure chance for winning the lottery of life to relieve our own guilt.   How else to justify to ourselves how some of us got so lucky?      

These and other thoughts occupied me as we walked the trail.  We were expecting to see a lot of birds and butterflies, but apparently, in India, even the birds get a late start to the day, and we didn’t see many of them until later in the afternoon on our walk back.   We didn’t have a pedometer with us so we couldn’t tell exactly, but after my legs told me that we had done approximately 3 miles, mostly uphill, we stopped in the middle of the path, sat down on a shaded rock, and ate our packed lunch.  We humans sure do eat a lot of starch, probably because it’s cheap and easy.  In America, you can have potato starch with your wheat starch (burger with fries), and in India, you can have the same (potato vegetable with wheat tortilla).   As I write this, I’m on the plane, and in the airport as well as on the plane, every meal option is primarily a starch: sandwiches, pasta, rice and veg.  It’s no wonder so many of us have the shape of potatoes. 

 

After our starchy lunch, we headed back to the lodge and Marina tried her hand at fly-fishing again while I watched the evening soap opera of birds at the river through my binoculars.  They chased each other around, guarding territory, they took baths, they fed on insects.  Remarkable.  The naked and untrained eye has no idea of the high drama going on in nature all the time.  

A Magical Valley

Tirthan Valley, Day 1 (October 9, 2014)

I found this unspoiled secret valley while looking for a good stopping point between Manali and Shimla.  Google maps showed a place called Great Himalaya National Park, and a bit of research on the Internet led me to Tirthan Valley.

I had almost given up going because all I could find were home stays that looked too rustic and basic.  Indian standards of hygiene are, to put it bluntly, seriously lacking.  Even in really good hotels, we encountered carpets that weren’t vacuumed unless we asked them to, faucets with water spots from prior guests, and a general lack of attention to detail.  India may be a spiritual country, but it certainly didn’t invent the phrase, “Cleanliness is next to godliness,” and it doesn’t appear to believe that either. I think this is in large part due to the fact that men are now doing jobs traditionally done by women.  When was the last time you met a straight man who thought a carpet needed vacuuming?     

But I had my heart set on exploring this beautiful valley so I kept looking and emailing places until I stumbled on a place called TheHimalayan Trout House (HTH), which luckily had availability for two nights.  

From the Manali-Shimla highway, we turned off a dirt track and drove for many miles (sorry, kilometers) to reach the place.  For a good while, our driver stopped to ask people to make sure we were on the right track.  But we kept following the Tirthan river on the winding roads and passed several little villages until we arrived at HTH in the village of Nagini.

Main road through the Valley and the villages 

Wildflowers

Plowing the fields

Village of Nagini in Tirthan Valley

Tirthan River flowing thru the Valley and the villages

Sound of rushing water beats the sound of traffic!

The beautiful Tirthan River

The room was chilly but with a lovely veranda overlooking the river, and very artistically decorated.  I’d been queasy from the drive so we didn’t do much of anything that evening other than sit on the veranda and enjoy the sound of the river just outside our lodge rushing over the large rocks.  

Dinner was served in a communal area of wooden tables and stone benches with cushions, all encircling a fire.  This is where the magic began.  First we met Christopher, the co-owner of HTH with his wife Shefali.  A former schoolteacher, he regaled us with a few stories.  He explained that all the construction was done by him and the four men on staff (“except the fat cook”) when they didn’t have guests, including the woodwork, i.e., the dining tables, bathroom sink supports, and rustic cupboards.  The land itself was owned by relatives of the men working for him:  “They are my landlords,” he said.  “I’m not building this for my son.  He’ll probably want to do something else.”  Christopher spoke in a clear matter-of-fact way and I imagined him in front of a room of rapt students. 

Soon we met our fellow travelers at the next table, and we took instantly to a lovely family. The father was an Indian man with a voice I could have listened to all day.  Imagine the most genteel British accent you have ever heard and blend it with just the right amount of Indian to make it understandable, now add a soft-spoken baritone and a deep knowledge of everything from fishing and polo to art, architecture and ancient history.  Raja is well read, well traveled and unfailingly polite.  He let other people speak instead of interrupting them because he wasn’t interested simply in getting his point across.  He looks like a big bear of a man, imposing and regal, but he has the most gentle soul.   

He met his wife Masja, who is Dutch, in Delhi.  They have two children, a 13-year-old girl and a 16-year-old boy.  The young girl is charming, personable and wise beyond her years.   Both the children have been home-schooled by their parents, primarily using documentaries, and raised in the Summer Hill schooling philosophy out of Britain.  Over the course of the next few breakfasts and dinners, we exchanged ideas and stories with Raja and Masja, and looked forward to mealtimes.