Tag: camping

The Eclipse of 2024 in Ohio: When immortality is observed in all its magnificance

I’ve seen eclipses before, but this one in 2024 was different, especially since it was close to where I live in Liberty Township, Ohio.  The totality band was going to be very nearby, so once we received a decent weather report and had the exact path agreed upon by analysis, we found a good RV campsite in Rossburg, Ohio, to set up a base and make a real thing of it.  My crew is very interested in those things, and it certainly made a difference that all three of my grandchildren are inclined toward intelligent things. Even at age seven, one of them is showing a Thomas Edison level of genius, so we wanted to make this a unique experience for them.  Plus, getting out the campers after a hard winter was a chance to stretch our legs a bit.  For an eclipse, the event was scheduled to occur between 1 and 5 PM on April 8th, with the totality of darkness happening around 3:07 PM.  So rather than wait in some parking lot for that specific event, we took our homes on the road and were very relaxed.  So relaxed that we stayed at that campsite for a good part of the week.  It was also my birthday on the 9th so we made quite a thing of it.  We got up on the morning of the 8th, ready for a front-row seat of a great celestial anomaly.  We didn’t have to get up and go anywhere to observe it, so already that was a good thing.  We had a nice breakfast at our campsite, the kids played fervently, and the adults had some raw downtime to talk in ways there was never time for, so we had a very nice experience. 

It was worth it; by the time the moon had blocked the sun 100%, there was a nice halo ring around the celestial bodies that blocked out most of the light from the sun, and the stars came out.  On all horizons, it looked like a sunset for about 50 miles in every direction.  But directly over our heads, it was essentially night.  I put a video up with speed advanced to see that narrow 4-minute period where day became night, and we had two sunsets on the same day.  That particular part of the world is indeed in God’s country. Our campsite was in a flat open area with no trees close, and our campers were essentially pointed in the direction of the whole event as if it were a giant IMAX screen put there for our entertainment.  For a last-minute campsite, the one in Rossburg was fantastic.  It had a couple of lakes with fish and a beach for the kids to play in, which was quite nice.  And for four minutes of totality, everyone could geek out on science and optimally enjoy the eclipse.  All my kids would be lucky to ever see an eclipse like that again in their lives, and we were happy to have the chance to share it together.  Life has so many moving pieces, and getting so many people together to do something like this is hard.  And the celestial show did not let us down.  Even I found the whole thing to be a bit of a miracle and a sensational opportunity to study science in the field and contemplate larger concepts.  The little kids, my grandchildren, were overwhelmed with the spectacle, which is what we wanted for them, and it was obvious that interests were sparked in them at that moment that would last a lifetime.

During the totality, I couldn’t help but think of Tecumseh when he famously predicted an eclipse and an earthquake along the New Madrid Faultline by St. Lewis.  I also thought of all the conspiracy theories that had led up to the eclipse as people tried to make sense of such a meaningful event to human minds.  For instance, why were their ten towns named after the Biblical Nineveh along the path of the totality in North America?  Did many of the Masons who organized these towns initially know this eclipse would happen mathematically, and they set fate to play host to some celestial significance rooted in ancient astrological belief systems?  What role did this particular eclipse play in Jewish rituals, and how planned were they for this event in 2024?  And what results were produced by the particle collider at CERN, which was supposed to have gone off at that exact moment of the totality band in America?  All that was playing in my mind as we watched the eclipse unfold.  Yet, for me, it looked purely like a regional thing.  We had gone to that location because at home, even though home wasn’t very far away compared to other places that we’ve gone, the whole experience was a regional one.  Obviously, celestial observers witnessing events discussed in the Bible would only be important to those experiencing even the most dramatic events.  Most people in the world wouldn’t even notice that there was an eclipse at all.  The sun would dim a bit, and if you didn’t have special glasses to look at it, you would not see the moon passing in front of it.  And wouldn’t even know what was happening, if anything at all. 

The world did not end, and after that event, I continued to think about how humans bring meaning to natural occurrences to attempt to understand the cosmic significance.  As creatures of nature, we tend to do that, where nature happens, and people may observe it, but the importance may not have any significance other than three celestial bodies interacting with each other, the sun, the moon, and the earth relative to their positions.  Suppose anybody hung around long enough over billions of years. In that case, our Milky Way galaxy will collide with a neighboring galaxy, and there will be all kinds of disruptive, likely destructive, celestial events on a grand, epic scale.  This eclipse was a regional thing that had harmless consequences and reminded all the humans watching it, that there was a lot more to existence that they needed to understand.  And that they attempted to bring meaning to the passage of the moon in front of the sun in very specific places in North America was an interesting observation of relativity, but not much else.  But humans have minds, and they think and observe. So many stories came to their minds saying that they were doing what nature intended them to do, to take nature and make meaningful the occurrences in a way that shapes necessity in interesting ways.  The ability to think was the most miraculous event that day, to see a celestial event and to bring human meaning to it as a greater cosmic significance.  We certainly enjoyed it; we wanted all the kids to have something important to think about and see as gloriously as possible.  And to create memories that would last for years, even longer.  There would be more eclipses, not in that part of the world, but they would happen.  But they would never occur under that collection of circumstances ever again, where meaning was created by the minds observing it.  And what is born of that meaning is better than nature for its own sake and is the stuff that makes immortality such a grand word.

Rich Hoffman

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Getting Away into Natural Bridge, Kentucky: The ultimate kind of Rebellion, Kindness, and Defiance

April is my birthday month and is always a positive benchmark for me. It’s always been my favorite month with all the life that returns from a long winter, and I always use the month as my own gauge into successes that need to be celebrated and things that need to be improved. But as a treat to myself, I wanted to go on a camping trip to Natural Bridge with as many of my family who could go and get off the grid for a few days in a place I grew up enjoying. My grandparents were from that region of Slade, Kentucky; during prohibition, my grandpa and his family ran moonshine, which I respect. I view moonshine differently than drug dealing for several reasons, even though I dislike intoxication of any kind all the time. I like to see independent and free people pushing back against a tyrannical government, and during prohibition, the government was out of control and deserved to have pushback, and that my grandfather and his father certainly did. Currently, we have a very dangerous government that is way beyond acceptable tyrannical tolerance, so for my birthday, I wanted to revisit a state park from my youth nicely nestled in the foothill mountains of the Appalachians and recharge. Over the last few years, my favorite mode of travel has been RV camping, so I wanted to take ours and live out of it for a few days, which is precisely what we did, and it was a wonderful experience. One of my sons-in-law brought their own camper, so we had a nice little family get-together down in the hills of Natural Bridge, Kentucky, and get away from the government for a bit.

Slade, Kentucky, where the Natural Bridge State Park and the world-famous Red River Gorge are located, is unusual because they have a particular hostility toward big government. Many census takers have found it impossible to do their job because the local residents simply don’t like government. So when you want to get away from big government and deal with people in a traditional Christian background setting in the Bible Belt, there aren’t many places in the world better. I’ve been to Natural Bridge a lot over my life, especially as a little kid. It’s been about ten years since my last visit. It’s not that it’s hard to get to; it’s very close to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live. But my schedule has been busy; since my last visit, I have traveled around the world a few times, been to many countries, and experienced unique cultures. My opinion about the Slade, Kentucky region isn’t for lack of knowing anything else. But instead, it’s because I’ve seen a lot of other places that I appreciate that one of the best travel destinations there is, in my opinion, one that I knew well from my youth, was literally in my own backyard. It was a lucky experience to have, out of all the places in the world I could have gone, to have such a relationship with literally one of the best places there is. Our camping trip was wonderful, we had a nice campsite nestled in the hills, and we lived off the bare minimums and were able to let the world go for a bit, which was the present I wanted to give myself this year for a well-deserved birthday.

My wife and I started RV camping during Covid, and we will likely never do anything else again. I like hauling around my hotel room, bathroom, and refrigerator. It makes traveling so much better to step away from the grid as much as possible. I have a TV in my RV that we can stop and have a snack to take a break from driving and relax. Camper traveling with an RV has been a great experience, so doing that kind of camping at Natural Bridge brought together parts of the world that are favorites. It was all a gratifying experience. A lot of my family was able to come along, so it was nice to be around them and celebrate life while stepping away from the world of problems that traditionally come from government interference in our lives. Living out of a camper for a week in April of 2023 was enormously rewarding and recharged my spirit considerably. As a family, we had a good trip, and we were all grateful to have it. 

My wife and I had an interesting experience, a few actually, but one that reminded us just how good the world is without government in it. And people still live and get along without the stupid government imposing themselves into our lives. People left alone by government tend to do the right things without having a parental authoritarian in the form of government looming over our shoulders. For example, we went into town for some ingredients for smores and other snacks. And one of the items we needed was more firewood. So we were going to pick some up from a gas station down by the Mountain Parkway with a nice store. But the nice clerk there was a mountain woman from Appalachia, of course, and she told us that the wood that the gas station was selling was too expensive and you didn’t get very much. So she told us to go down the road around 400 yards to a tire mechanic with a little shed behind a Subway restaurant. He was selling a whole-wheel barrel of firewood for ten bucks. So we went down there to see him, and he loaded us up with firewood for our campsite. He had a rough mountain man accent; I would have needed subtitles to understand what he said. But we paid him the ten dollars, and he gave me a very large wheel barrel of wood to load into the back of our hatchback.

We couldn’t understand each other, but we quickly became good friends. That region is famous for many campfires, so he has many customers for his little enterprise due to the many campers who come to climb the world-famous Red River Gorge. It’s kind of a hippie culture, the rock climbers. More libertarian than anything. We probably wouldn’t agree on presidential picks or even drug usage. But we all do share a love of independence. Many of them come and camp with four people in a one-person dome tent with hundreds of others who can barely rub two dimes together in their pockets. And I find them refreshing, especially at Miguel’s Pizza, where they hang out. I’ve had pizza from everywhere, and the pizza they have at Miguel’s is a real treat. It was wonderful to pick some of it up and take it back to our campsite, where I had my reading chair set up next to the fire as all the kids played and enjoyed each other, and I had a stack of books to read well into the night as the sun set outlining the mountain tops and the dark sky stars made themselves obvious. It was a nice place to be, and it was certainly a great birthday present for me. No matter how much money you throw at recreation, it never gets better than that. 

Rich Hoffman

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We Bought an RV: Finding Trump’s “Silent Majority” where government isn’t

Its always been a thing for me, mobile living. For as long as I can remember, which is well back to 1 and 2 years of age, I have been attracted to the idea of a home on wheels. But life is what it is, and until recently, it just didn’t fit my lifestyle. I’ve either been too busy, or it was just not financially practical to even think about getting an RV. I’ve been all over the world and stayed in some of the very best hotels that anybody has ever made and that has left me hungry to see more of my own country, especially after the terrible way that Democrats have treated it during the 2020 elections. Presently, I don’t know if I ever want to travel out of the country again and yearn to see all the great things that are in America that I haven’t yet seen. And for many of those opportunities I now have grandchildren that I want to give those opportunities to so that has had me thinking of buying an RV for a while now. First on my mind was to save up and get a large Class A, which is more the way I like to live. The trailer RVs just didn’t have the kind of space inside that I expect. So that put the project off for a few years, until my wife and I recently went to Disney World.

That trip was a bit of a scouting trip and after doing the hotel experience there we quickly figured out that if we ever want to bring our larger family along, that the hotels just weren’t the way to go, it was not only too expensive, but getting food and a decent place to sleep just wasn’t’ practical. The hotels in Disney were just too busy for a large family and we came back from that trip looking for options. It was fun for the two of us, but coordinating a large family just wasn’t good for that kind of travel. Then a few months later Covid-19 came along. Regardless of the political motive the government mandated masks and rules of the house at a hotel were suddenly extremely unattractive so that opened my mind up to buying a smaller RV now and using it to get to some of the harder to reach places in the country, places that the larger Class As had a hard time getting to. But for my lifestyle, I need an office where I can work and communicate professionally, so I had to solve that problem as well.

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A new office space. #rv #life #family

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I went through a similar process about a decade ago when I bought a big cruiser motorcycle and started riding it all over the country packing a tent on the back and camping wherever I felt like when I got tired. It was a good way to see things and I enjoyed it and learned a lot about the motorcycle culture and what kind of Americans they really were. A few years ago while I was off to a very important meeting and couldn’t be late, I was hit by another driver and it totaled my beautiful motorcycle which disappointed me greatly. (I still made it to my meeting even with a broken wrist and a lot of blood on my clothes by the way) And I haven’t yet replaced that motorcycle but now my life is a lot more complicated. My family is a lot bigger and you can’t pack all of them on a motorcycle and ride around. So that drove me to return to that camping life again, but this time with air conditioning, refrigerators and all the comforts of home without the heat of humid nights and no way to lock up a tent. As my wife and I started shopping for RVs we quickly found out where all those silent majority Trump people were hiding. They were camping and buying RVs. And much to my surprise, I learned some new things about people in this process, and I found a much stronger heartbeat to America than I thought was possible.

The RV we ended up getting was perfect for us, the floorplan was great. It had all the big room of the Class A I wanted in the kitchen and dining area, but it was small enough to get down the sharpest switchback roads and most remote campsites. And it sleeps 8, which is something I personally need with my crew. We bought it at the end of May and much to my surprise, there was an all summer long backorder because a lot of people were thinking the same thing I was, they were tired of the overregulation of hotel travel and government mandates and they wanted free of them. So this year has been a record sales year for the RV market and I certainly understand it. We were going to buy one anyway but the timing of all the Covid nonsense certainly sealed the deal for us. I want to be off the grid, I want to see my country, but I don’t want to do it by a lot of stupid rules. I want the fewest burdens possible and I want to share all that with my family. With all that said, the people at Couch’s RV Nation in Trenton were great. I enjoyed working with them and I found more Trump supporters in this process than even I thought were out there. I was amazed at how many actually, not a statistic they are publishing on the news.

What I learned this summer as Covid-19 was used politically to ruin peoples lives and try to keep them from enjoying life was that people did what they always do, what I do especially, they find a way around the problem and that will destroy much of the travel industry as a result—due to government intrusion. But RV sales are way up, travel money will still be spent, just not where it traditionally was and that is the lesson that government should reach as a result of 2020. While much of the world is still shut down I was able to go to Wal-Mart and buy a very unique 30 amp converter because the free market still operates in spite of government efforts, and my life will go on without the government regulated structure of hotels, restaurants or even amusement parks. There are a lot of other things to do, and people are finding their way to them. People will go where the government isn’t, which is the story of the suburbs isn’t it? Protesters trying to attack Trump voters are trying to move out into the suburbs because people are just leaving the cities, and they are finding that the world is a lot bigger than Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. And that’s where you find the Trump voters, in RVs, in boats, at shooting ranges, rodeos—wherever the stench of progressive socialists aren’t. And that experience has calmed my mind down a lot about the nature of human beings. I have met some really good people in our RV buying experience and can see clearly that life on the road will be much of the same, which gives me a lot of optimism for the future.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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