Jen Lepp

Trip Complete. Bucket List Lines Accomplished:

• Climbed a Mountain
• Climbed a Mountain in a 4x4
• Got to see (and touch) a Rally Fighter and tour Local Motors
• Straddled the Continental Divide
• Saw a Joshua Tree

Cannot wait for next vacation.

Want to achieve your goals? Don’t tell anybody.

I spent the past four days at Garner State Park. I had no Internet, no cellular phone. No television. No radio. I had books, the Frio River, the hawks that circled the cabin looking for dinner (and there were a lot of hawks), and my family.

If anything had happened outside of the park, I didn’t know it. I spent four days reading, watching the birds, and listening to the wind - did you know that you can hear the wind talk before it moves the trees? You can hear it coming toward you before you see any evidence of it.

My first day back, I felt rejuvenated, refreshed, relaxed, and at peace with the world. I felt recharged from spending time just watching my loved ones and sitting and being silent. I felt connected to everyone and everything while being unplugged.

My first day back I watched the bombing in Boston.

…

This is a different kind of silence and connection.

I love the places we get to go with this truck.

Lonnie jokingly suggested that we take our footage from our day at Hidden Falls (Marble Falls, TX) and speed it up so that he looked like he was driving in a rally car race, so I did it for fun. This is us puttering around Valley Road and the park roads at 8x, but it does give some idea of the size and scope of the park if anyone is wondering just how large it is.

James River Road Water Crossing at dusk. (Mason County, Texas, GPS 30.34.20N  99.19.24W  elevation 1475, Google Maps: http://goo.gl/maps/fxChL)

Water was only about a foot deep, but it was a pretty wide crossing, and it was our first, so it was really cool.

I have a ball? Awesome.

I just found this Tumblr, and I think I’m in love.

• Me: I don't think we're going to go on vacation this year.
• Husband: Maybe not.
• Me: I'm not sure I could enjoy myself anyway, if the pets were sick when we were away.
• Husband: I know.
• Me: It doesn't drive you crazy that I'm this attached to these cats?
• Husband: No. Doesn't drive me crazy.
• Me: That's why I married you. My crazy doesn't drive you crazy.
• Husband: Your crazy is about caring about life. That's only crazy because not enough people do it.
• Me: I think I'm keeping you.

So, this is how I do vacations:

I request PTO, and get it approved. I start planning and making reservations. I call the pet sitter. I create a Smarty Pig to hide the money. Then I start getting frustrated when everything doesn’t come together. Then I realize that work is likely going to pile up that week. Then, I cancel the PTO request.

Then, I don’t go. I realized I needed to change this, and find some way to make myself not cancel everything and throw up my hands. I needed to find some way to force myself to take a break - vacations are important, and with my only child growing up, I didn’t think that he would be all that interested in family vacations for too much longer.

So, I thought… timeshares!

OK, financially, they make no sense as you buy in for the right to essentially pay what you would for a cheaper hotel and just get more room and a big bill. Makes no sense - unless you get them for free.

The market that became so saturated in the 80’s now has lots of folks wanting to get out of the maintenance fees and, in many cases, the maintenance fees are less than what you would pay for a comparably sized apartment-like hotel room and come with a kitchen. Folks with timeshares giving them away for closing costs and transfer fees - and in some cases paying closing costs and transfer fees just to dump them.

So, I decided I was going to pick one up. We do love Vegas, and so I looked through all timeshare properties - I figured if I owned a week, I would go, so I set about to get educated and figure out which ones weren’t worth it, even free. 

I have fallen in love with The Jockey Club. See it? Down there? Look hard. 

I found an article on The Jockey Club and I think the passage:

Officially, both sides of the weird Cosmo-Jockey Club relationship are all smiles. Theoretically, the Jockey Club is a sort of crazy-uncle-in-the-attic to hip, lush Cosmo — attached by a set of elevators hidden in a nook of the casino to which even many Cosmo employees have difficulty providing directions.

Sold me. There’s something so defiant and out of place about The Jockey Club (even though it was there first) that I find charming. Reviews show people either love it, or hate it. I absolutely love it.

So, we’ll see if I can pick up a 2 bedroom lockout for nothing.

If I do, maybe this year, I will actually go on vacation.

Being in a rural area (Liberty Hill, TX), broadband is a pain. It’s expensive, and a pain. And it doesn’t work an awful lot of the time.

We have a primary WISP Connection from ANF Internet that is supposed to be at least 5 MBPS, which we pay $80/m for. It’s not:

Because the WISP above can be unreliable, we have a backup DSL internet connection from Century Link - we pay $93 for a phone and internet package (the phone being used to make 1 call every three months because the kiddo’s pacemaker has to call in to the mothership and can only do so through an analog line) and are supposed to have 1.5 Mb/s (we cannot get any faster where we are). 

We don’t get that, either.

Within the past few weeks, Verizon 4G Has expanded out here to the sticks, and we tested out the 4G connection on our phone. It was, considering what we had been dealing with, amazing.

We decided to look at Verizon HomeFusion, a home 4G broadband access plan. The prices, while not saving us any money, weren’t horrific:

Well, unless you were actually already a Verizon customer with a Share Everything Plan. If you were a Verizon Customer, that 30GB plan would cost you a hell of a lot more:

According to Verizon’s site, if I walked in off the street with no Verizon phones and did not have the Share Everything Plan, they would charge me $120 for 30 Gigabytes per month. Because I already am a Verizon customer and have the Share Everything Plan, I get to pay $225 for that same amount of data, as well as an additional $20 a month for their HomeFusion doohickey on the side of my house.

Are you serious, Verizon?

So glad to see the company rewarding loyalty by making an already premium service even more expensive for folks that choose to have other services with them.

Interesting article hypothesizing they don’t really want anyone to sign up for this because it’s a smokescreen: 

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401196,00.asp

As one of the rural people that article is talking about, I believe it.

It’s a New Year and with it comes a fresh opportunity to shape our world.

So this is my wish, a wish for me as much as it is a wish for you: in the world to come, let us be brave – let us walk into the dark without fear, and step into the unknown with smiles on our faces, even if we’re faking them.

And whatever happens to us, whatever we make, whatever we learn, let us take joy in it. We can find joy in the world if it’s joy we’re looking for, we can take joy in the act of creation.

So that is my wish for you, and for me. Bravery and joy.

Before I die…

I want to become comfortable with what I have, right where I am.

Since the world didn’t end, I now can’t wait for this.