09:42 – It was 46.5F (8C) when I took Colin out at 0530. I’d been awake since 0300, lying in bed thinking, and I finally decided just to get up.
Barbara left around 1400 yesterday. They’re making the drive in two days. They stopped for the night somewhere in Central Pennsylvania, and are heading for the Finger Lakes area as I write this. I pointed out that she was getting wimpier as she got older. Back in 2000, we drove from Winston straight through to Vermont, stopping only for food, gasoline, and bathroom breaks. That took only 19 hours.
After about the third motel with a No Vacancy sign, we stopped anyway and asked if they could suggest another local motel that had a free room. The guy told us that Vermont was full. We thought he was kidding, but he was serious. Every room in Vermont was booked.
He did have one suggestion, although he said we probably wouldn’t like it. There was one motel about 15 miles up the road that had one room available. We gave them our credit card number over the phone and drove up there. When we got to the office to check in, we found that they did have nightly rates but they also had hourly rates. I am not making this up. The bed was a gigantic vibrator and there was a full-size mirror over it, but we didn’t care. I think we were both asleep by the time our heads hit the pillows.
Email from Jen yesterday. She and David had started watching the Guildbrook Farm Youtube channel when I first mentioned it. She returned the favor by suggesting Appalachia’s Homestead with Patara.
Patara describes herself as an East Tennessee girl, and that’s where she and her husband founded their homestead. That’s not surprising. The parts of rural Appalachia that encompass western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and southwestern Virginia probably have as high or higher a percentage of preppers and homesteaders as anywhere in the country, including the so-called National Redoubt.
Like most such channels on Youtube, Patara’s has a lot of videos posted. She’s extremely enthusiastic, and talks very fast, particularly for a Southern Girl. She treats problems as things to be driven over and squashed flat. She runs day-to-day operations on their homestead, homeschools their kids, and takes care of her husband, who developed some severe medical problems a year or so ago. And she never lets anything get her down.
Like many people who have big, popular Youtube channels, she’s working on jumping ship because she’s tired of Youtube micro-managing what she is and isn’t allowed to talk about. That, and demonetizing her videos, apparently arbitrarily. She’ll leave what’s already on Youtube there indefinitely, and is even adding new videos, but she intends to change her focus to her new Patreon Channel. She started that channel one month ago tomorrow, and already has 332 patrons at $2/month each.