A Living Magazine - Day 288 - Homecoming - Chester to Bensley

I woke and made this video...

Pack up was easy and I made my way back down the hill and onto the highway...

Fewer of these roadside crosses than in the west, but still too many.

This was an interesting place. It is a high end apartment complex,

made to have each unit look different from the others. 

Poor kitty. Probably hit three days earlier. The car dealership where it lay apparently

had no interest in removing the body from the middle of the busy entrance. Nice. 

After about 8 miles I came near to South Richmond. There are several small communities around this area. I decided to seek out the local library just to the west of Bensley, walking by this defense supply center...

I reached the side street that led through Bensley to the library...

Dundas Road.

Before getting to the library, I stopped at McDonald's to get online and have a bite. They had AC outlets at every table--a nice surprise. The Wi-Fi connection was fast as well. I ended up staying there for the whole afternoon. I found this humorous...

This guy had a unique view of being "towed," while sitting in his

broken down truck a top the wrecker as it drove to the shop.

Without warning, at about 5:00 p.m., the clear blue sky gave way to an invading army of rough gray clouds. I quickly checked intellicast.com and found that we were due for a drenching rain in about a half hour. Then I checked out Google Earth for an emergency patch of green nearby. I found one located behind the post office, just across the street and to the east of the Food Lion. Rushing to sign off the net, I wrapped the laptop in a plastic bag and stuffed it into it's pocket in the pack, then headed out under the gathering gloom.

I hadn't eaten much at the restaurant, so I took a chance and stopped by the Food Lion for an sub and a new Gatorade. At the check out the young man at the register commented that I must be traveling the world by backpack. I told him he wasn't far off, and explained my project. He said he'd always wanted to do the same thing and had talked about it with one of his friends. I encouraged him to do it. I intimated that I thought I might have waited too late in life, and wished I had done this when I was his age. I paid, gave him a business card, and scooted out the door.

While I shoehorned the sandwich into the top of the pack, threw out my old empty Gatorade bottle from the sleeping bag pocket and replaced it with the new one, the guy who had been behind me in line came out and asked, "How do you do it? The road travel around the country, I mean?"

I explained that I have a tent and mostly sleep off roadsides. I told him that I make money only off of donations, and because I publish the free blog describing every single day, I receive just enough to survive--even get a hotel room every now and then. I was careful to explain that my reporting had to do with average Americans and street level life, as opposed to celebrities, politicians and the regular media soup. I also told him that people told me they got into the routine of coming home from work and reading the daily account. It was a way for them to relax and be taken away from where they lived for some light adventure.

He looked very interested and I gave him a business card. He said that he'd often thought about doing something very similar. As he turned to walk away, I let him know that this was a life made possible by producing something (in my case a blog), and that it would be very difficult to cover the same amount of territory - not to mention surviving - without some form of income. I think he got the idea.

The rain had started by the time I reached the eastern corner of the parking lot. It was a steep bank down to a level spot among the ivy covered ground. There was a lot of trash, including some major items like mattresses, shopping carts, bags of clothes, numerous crushed cardboard boxes, etc. So I moved along the edge of the parking lot a bit and then half-slid down the bank. I passed within view of the post office's back parking lot, but soon found a path through a bunch of leaf-covered trees, to near the edge of the highway (Route 150).

I assembled the tent in short order, while the rain mercifully let up a bit. Then I put my standard tarps on top...

The tent's orange rain fly was not wet enough to allow the other tarps to adhere and they kept sliding off. Gusts of wind also blew up and peeled the tarps off each time I'd replace them. The idea suddenly occurred to me (after all this time) to reorient the green tarp as a diamond that it might better fit the shape of the tent, with the corners over the front and back, and each staked side. This worked fairly well...

With the tent covered completely, as the rain began again in earnest, I crawled in. The ground was quite rough, with dead sticks, and vines running under the tent floor. I just didn't have the time to excavate the area properly, so I dealt with it all night. The wind continued to blow the tarp off, and I had to get up several times to place it back on. A second thought came to me. I would buy paper binders the next day to use as clips to hold the tarp to the tent poles.

Surprisingly, I checked for a Wi-Fi signal and got a strong Xfinity connection! I have no idea if it was from the post office or the shopping center, but it worked.

I talked to some friends for a while at Facebook, then retired to watch a movie at the pirate site I'd discovered a few years ago (genvideos.com). It is a bit sketchy, with all kinds of Jerry Springer-like popup ads, but if you are patient enough to close each one as you search for a movie, the streaming works pretty well.

I was just distant enough from whatever router supplied the signal that a slight movement of the laptop would repeatedly delay the movie for a few moments at a time. After about half of the film was over, the signal became continuous. It was Air--a strange post apocalyptic, sci-fi kind of thing. Wasn't too bad for a two star flick--suspenseful enough to keep my attention, but not overly substantive. It had simple dialogue, and reasonably good acting. I just liked it, because I was able to entertain myself for the evening. I fell asleep when it ended and after shewing two white spiders out of the tent.