Here’s a rusting machinery lot. While this photo is taken northeast of Denver tomorrow, it shows the decline of a lot of the small towns I’ve seen, and will see going back through the prairies. I expect to average 450 miles per day on the road, a good time by sidecar, but pushing things a bit. Spurring me along is the first hints of cold weather, a sure signal for me to skedaddle.
I’m packed and ready, good-bye Colorado by tomorrow morning. I’ve got more stuff than I arrived with, such as a car jack, a trunk of books, and an acoustic guitar. Two routes are planned depending on if it gets too cold in Nebraska. I dislike Illinois and Indiana, to me they are cookie-cutter states that get in the way and must be driven across in a day if possible. My alternate route cuts south through Kansas and Oklahoma, which gets me below the frost line this time of year.
“Ship of Gold” begins to pick up around page 172, but there are still many flashbacks to 1857 when the vessel sank. Part of the slow reading is you can’t skim anywhere because the book is so full of detail. Everything eventually ties together provided you have an excellent memory for those details. I missed something about a silver cup and going back to find that one sentence is not an option. I figure the author, in 1985, saw the cup in a museum with a story that three shipwrecked men from another boat found it floating by and used it to collect rainwater.
Since he knew where the three men were rescued, he calculated backwards that the cup must have drifted from where the “Central America” went down while everybody else was looking for it at the captain’s last known bearings. But in 1857, the captain could not have taken that bearing during a storm. So everybody else was looking in the wrong spot—his last known location before the hurricane. I really like this book. (Later, I guessed wrong about the silver cup but the cup is an excellent illustration of how the plot progresses.)
Another aspect that appeals to me is how they managed to keep the salvage a secret. The book itself delves into how anyone asking a few questions could have put the pieces together. Somebody orders 8,000 feet of cable that works on 110 volts. That eliminates Europe and Asia, leaving the two American coasts, and which one is likely to have treasure at that depth? They were saved, it seems, by the discovery of the Titanic the earlier the same year. Everyone assumed they were after artifacts.
It’s also good-bye to Marion, now divorced and I can’t be around to help. We are jealously independent in both our separate ways which can kind of stump people who see us together. She won’t accept help, I won’t offer it. She watches TV, I don’t. I go out every day, she goes out twice a month. She spoils the dog, I don’t think it right to keep large animals in a city. She is equally nice to everybody, I am super nice to a few people and ignore the rest. She thinks single is the result of being too fussy about women, I say divorce is the result of not being fussy enough. There are lots of plateaus we would never agree on, but those are lines that don’t get crossed.
As I return, I’m also laying the plans for a permanent return to Colorado, or at least make this my home base. I’m still not keen on cold weather. This means attention to finances and I have to laugh at the pitiful advice appearing in the media. Worn out strategies of 401(k) investing in stocks that are likely to plunge, or renting out a room in your house for 20 years. Isn’t privacy from roomies the reason you took out the mortgage?
I read record numbers of 55+ types are now planning on working until they are 70, which only a fool would call a plan. But those credit bills have to be paid, right Neil and Shirley? If it makes you feel any better, everybody like you is in the same boat. What? No, not me. I’m not like you. At all. I don’t buy things with borrowed money, for starters. Credit is what gets the lower class to think and pretend they are middle class, and it worked for forty years. Sort of. I can’t imagine waking up every morning knowing I was $300,000 in debt. You call that living?
In yet another amazing coincidence, several investment planning companies are using a phrase already familiar to anyone who has read this blog on March 3, 2004. That is where you’ll find my original wording of “practice retirement”. Three months after my heart attack. Finding things in the blog is difficult again, as the search engines regularly make changes that favor search optimization schemes, then swing back when they once again realize that is not such a good idea.
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