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scalproie · 3 years ago

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sub zero! 5, 6, 10, 22 and/or 23!

First off im so sorry this took four (4) business days to answer anyway THANKS FOR LETTING ME TALK ABOUT BLORBO THE 2ND💙

5) On an average day, what can be found in your character’s pockets?

One item we know for sure he canonically carried was that little telescope in mk11, and he does have those little knives on his belt, which Im not sure actually have their use, so its headcanons from now on:

I think on an average day, Sub Zero may not even have pockets, or doesnt use them, cause hes the grandmaster of the Lin Kuei so if he needs something, it will brought to him, or taken away when he ask for it. Missions would be different, but still, hes not heavy on objects, cause having too much can put you off balance when you fight I imagine, so: save from those little knives he carry (just in case of... something I imagine?), he doesnt need any weapons because he can just materialize whatever he wants from ice in his hands... ice is his greatest multi-tool actually, it take care of almost everything his (old) assassin job required: target in sight? Make an ice dagger. Door locked? Freeze and punch the handle. Injured? Freeze the wound. I still think he would carry some minimal first aid kit for the latter, again just in case, but emphasis on the minimal: needle, wire, maybe bandages. Can also double as a sewing kit if he need to fix his clothes. Only thing ice cant do is making you see far so thats why he carry the telescope. He DOES strikes me as the kinda guy who get emotional over special items tho so maybe he would carry something he has an attachment to if its small and/or practical enough, maybe thats why he carry the knives.

6) Does your character have recurring themes in their dreams?

Canonically, the only times dreams are involved in Sub Zero's story is one in the mkx comics where he wakes up from a pretty vivid nightmare (that basically recap his story from him about to kill scorpion and then getting teleported and cyberized in mk9 all the way to him getting resurrected in mkx), and another one in a shared intro with Raiden in mk11 where they both had a strange dream about "a strange and unjust world with a dark knight and a caped wonder" (debunked by Cetrion in another intro where she tells Subz that it was no dream). Anyway the latter is just a cheeky lil nod to Injustice so its not to take too seriously. Other than that theres not much in canon concerning Sub Zero's dreams.

As for my personal thoughts, I dont think Sub Zero dream much in general honestly, for a variety of reasons. I think he has a very light, survival oriented, sleeping pattern, staying up as late as possible until exaustion get the better of him, and you dont really get dreams out of a rest like that. Then, (and especially nowadays), if he DOES dream it would most likely be unpleasant considering the amount of stress and trauma hes had in his life and naturally I dont think hes looking very forward to that so thatd be another reason to delay sleep, also nightmares are more question 7's thing.

But if he does get dreams sometimes, and should they have a reccuring theme, at the risk of giving the boring answer, its gotta be about ice and the general cold, cause of course the element of which he has the mastery of, which he uses to defend his life with, of which he has 5 puns at the ready at all time, and which is like, His Whole Thing, would bring him comfort. I think his most peaceful dreams would be accompagned with gentle snow falling in the background, whatever they are about. Probably his family. Or Tomas! They would also be very bright, cause yknow, reflective white snow and the likes (but then if hes unlucky itd turn into static snow and it ends into one of many themed nightmares whoops. Subz has a lot of things to process). Anyway to conclude I dont see Sub Zero as someone with particularly thrilling dreams packed with themes and symbolism, just having a full night feeling safe and free of nightmares based on or twisting memories would be enough.

10) Does your character feel more comfortable with more clothing, or with less clothing?

Sadly theres nothing in canon concerning this so lets just jump straight to headcanons

TAKE A WILD GUESS

in both timelines, mf left the shirt as soon as possible once the old lin kuei was no longer in the picture, tits out tuesday every day of the week from that point on, god bless. But more seriously I hc that Kuai has some funky cryomancer biology going on, so for him the world is hotter than for anyone else, which is kinda ironic considering his (old) job required him to be heavily dressed with hood and mask and everything. He would have ways to cool himself down with his own powers but that still would mean making an (tho barely noticable) effort to remain at a comfortable temperature, when you can do that by just taking your shirt off once youre free to do so cause nobody can tell you what to do anymore.

22) What does your character like in other people?

So like most things, theres no clear cut canon indication written somewhere so its interpretation time:

A lot of his intros are about this so OR COURSE he likes people with honor and integrity. He was raised in the Lin Kuei which we can safely guess was quite the strict place, so of course he would be used to rules and be comfortable when theres structure, but somehow he mostly took to heart the good aspects of it, so of course he would like people with strong morals and an equally strong sense of duty, and keeping true to oneself.

Also as seen in quite a few of his intros, he seems to admire good leadership, and not in a "people he want to follow" way but more like, fellow leaders yknow? Because I dont think becoming grandmaster himself has EVER been in his end goals before but he was duty bound to redeem the Lin Kuei as the last true one after the cyber initiative, so I imagine him being put in a leading position was not a natural transition for him, despite his found affinity for teaching as he would find later in his life, hence why he would "look up" for lack of better words, to other people with leadership status in his life, like jax, sonya, and perhaps hanzo.

This one would fit his Lin Kuei upbringing but of course he value strength in other people, "only the strongest join the Lin Kuei" didnt leave his mindset but now its aimed to protect first and foremost, yourself, your clan, and your realm.

He also seems surprisingly fine with ambition, he did say that "loyalty shouldnt stunt one's growth" and considering his history in the Lin Kuei (esp after the cyber initiative and what he thinks of it) itd make sense.

I also kinda got the vibe that hes fine with ambition but not in a competitive way, more in a "better oneself" way than seeking to be above others in one way or another (he was fine with Frost's ambition, he intended to pass the mantle of grandmaster to her, but it was her impatience and lack of wisdom that eventually strained their relationship). I guess this one falls into him valuing strength again. But this also fot his role as a teacher now: of course youd enjoy someone who know their place but still seek to learn and improve.

Anyway I think Subz is a fair straight guy who enjoy people with a similar mindset, despite yknow, what I never shut up about

23) What does your character dislike in other people?

opposite of whats above lol. Impatience, as said with Frost. Definitely lack of discipline or downright foolishness, Jonnhy Cage only gets a pass from getting iced because theyre allies and probably have been so for years. He has a few lines about it so its safe to say he cant stand cockiness, or people getting way too over their heads because of their own power. Subz is a man with diamond hard principles so hes not big on lone wild cards as well Im betting. Bad Bosses too, Subz wants to lead by inspiring respect and value honesty so of course leaders like Shao Kahn and Sektor who led with cruelty and lies and fear would revulse him. Also hes NOT fond or authority figures somehow higher than him aka Gods, the Lin Kuei did not/do not worship them for starters, tho Raiden kinda gets a pass because hes an ally to Earthrealm, theyre equals in its protection tho Raiden is stronger, and also saved his life once so Subz is indebted but its not like he actively look up to the guy, except in a literal sense cause Raiden is stupid tall.

#I slowly but surely chipped at this each day #AND I STILL DIDNT SAY ALL I WANTED TO. I HAVE THOUGHTS ABOUT THIS MAN. THAT I CANNOT COMMUNICATE #anyway again beloved im so sorry thank you SO much again #tagging later #ask meme #miss-shydeer

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shoichee · 4 years ago

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Hello! Can I perhaps ask for no. 28. “Make me” from your prompt list for my beloved Imayoshi? It's so nice seeing him here on your theme and avatar and that pERFECT url, it feels like I finally found my people.

HELLO HELLO, and YES I WAS SO SURPRISED THAT NO ONE TOOK THIS URL... considering that it was just an alternative spelling of shoichi and its a rlly short handle too mwehe // im sort of a particular person when it comes to how something looks, whether itd be outfits, drawings, coloring, and the UI of a blog, u name it.... i may have spent hours trying to have the perfect colors for this theme PLEASEEEE, but without further ado here is our man, our little shit, Imayoshi

@knb-kreations howdy! another new work posted here!

Imayoshi x Reader

28. “Make me”

Word Count: 2331

prompt list here

»»—————　☼　—————««

Imayoshi doesn’t exactly know how he feels about you.

Scratch that, he does know. He’s quite amused at the shenanigans you pull on others around you, and a lot of times, you actually elicit a few dry laughs out of the guy. Other times though, he’d wish that you would just shut the fuck up, especially when all he hears amidst his studying was your loud “whispering” and “hushed” jokes. How you were always nearby no matter where he is was still a mystery that he casually ponders about from time to time. Perhaps your natural tendency to project your voice creates the illusion that you were near when you really weren’t?

No matter, such trivial thoughts can’t occupy his mind when college entrance exams loom closer. Then again, they weren’t particularly difficult; they were simply a hassle to secure near-perfect scores, especially when his chances of admittance rely critically on how well he does.

“That’s an awful drawing of a samurai,” Susa comments, snapping Imayoshi out of idle thought.

“Ho? Is it really terrible if you were able to tell what it is?” Imayoshi chuckles. “The point of a drawing is to convey the right idea or emotion. It seems that my drawing skills hit a bulls-eye with this sketch, no?” He playfully spins his pencil around, patiently waiting for his reply to goad him.

All Susa does in response is to roll his eyes before he turns his full attention back to his notes. He knows better than to try a comeback against Imayoshi, who can easily make it backfire against the person with a pleasant close-eyed smile. Imayoshi, seeing Susa’s nonverbal resign from engaging further banter, also looks down back to his book of scribbled notes and chicken-scratch drawings before he exhales an inaudible sigh.

School just doesn’t cut out to be mentally stimulating for him. It’s a little too repetitive and mundane for his taste.

“Argh!! Oh no!” your voice rang out, despite your poor attempt to be reasonably quiet. “I forgot applications for the Coca-Cola scholarship are due today!”

Coca-Cola… what?

Everyone looks up to warily eye you, and your few friends, who are currently rushing to pull you down and slap their hands over your mouth to mute you, were panicking at the new attention you managed to garner. Even still, your mind seems more fixated on whatever was on the laptop’s screen, rather than what they were doing to you.

Imayoshi can’t help but stifle his audible mirth from how you manage to change the mood of the entire library within seconds.

“How do you even forget something as important as a huge scholarship like that?” Susa says in dismay. “Makes me kind of wonder how (l/n) would handle life after graduation, to be honest.”

“Well,” Imayoshi begins. “I wouldn’t worry too much. It’s best not to underestimate (l/n)-san. Surely we’ve learned our lesson with Seirin?” He toys with the pencil grip before he sporadically draws some lines loosely resembling another sketch.

“Drawing again?” Susa raises a brow. “Have you even been studying?”

“Well,” he replies. “There’s still plenty of time before exams—months to be exact. Could you even study with the current distractions in here?” At his own words, he nudges his chin in your direction.

“It’s not just any exams though, it’s—”

“Whether they have more importance or not doesn’t really concern me. After all, standardized testing isn’t worth stressing out for when we’ve taken essentially the same thing all our lives.”

“What most are worried about is the content inside the exams, Imayoshi,” he said, carefully treading into dangerous waters with Imayoshi’s tendency to take all replies as mind-game challenges for his own amusement.

“‘If you have been paying attention consistently throughout the year, you wouldn’t be having much trouble…’ that’s what you once oh-so-wisely said to Wakamatsu yesterday, hmm?” His mimicking tone drips a hint of arrogance. “Unless you mean to tell me my ears do not work? But by all means, please feel free to correct me.”

“That’s different,” he sighed, his face clearly evident that he was done with Imayoshi’s shit. “That exam only tested content for the past year, not your entire academic repertoire over the courses of middle and high school.”

“I’d like to think that the logic still applies the same way.”

“Well,” Susa heaves with a languid stretch. “You generally score better on the exams than me, so you’re probably right. Still, don’t neglect your studying.”

“Right, right, Susa-senpai~”

“... Please don’t call me that again.”

“... If you say so,” he said, but his smile blatantly showed his real intentions of never stopping his irritable quips. Susa gets ready to pack up his book bag before he heads out the door with a friendly wave. Imayoshi half-heartedly returns the gesture with a casual wave of his own. He immediately notices you also packed up and about to leave with a worried frown, and of course, while audibly mumbling your concerns and makeshift schedules to accommodate time for last-minute essay writing. By now, all of your friends have left for home.

“Ah, biology lab due next week, kanji worksheets due tomorrow, hmm, um, how would I finish this on time… ah, calculus test is tomorrow too, ah shit… should I ask someone to tutor?—ah, but it’s super last minute, and there’s still that scholarship… argh, fuck!” Your voice peaked in volume at the end, and the librarian immediately shot daggers at you.

“Shhhhh!”

“A-Ah! S-Sorry, sorry!”

Imayoshi was watching you with his chin on his arm propped up on the desk, unable to control the smile that escaped his lips. You really were entertaining to watch, and you never cease to bore him.

He turns away to crack his neck and roll it around before methodically packing up his writing utensils and notebooks. Soft shuffling filled the air as he rearranged the items inside his bag. As he turns to pack the last thing on the table, which happened to be the notebook filled with his idle doodling, his face slightly softens at the drawing he did after the samurai. Yes, the one Susa chastised him for when he could’ve been studying. Yes, perhaps he was right when he was terrible at drawing after all; your panicked face and wild hand gestures didn’t really translate well into paper, and it looked a little too much like a horror comic and less than a sketch of you. Still, he’s oddly proud of it.

Imayoshi promptly pushes the chair in and leaves the library, but when he rounds the corner of the adjacent hallway, he bumps into you.

“Er—hi! I mean, please, uhhh… if it isn’t too much to ask—canyoupleasetutormeforthecalculustesttomorrowbecausemyfinalgradedependsonthat?”

Imayoshi winces at the sheer volume of your voice and plugs his ears in out of habit to block out some of the decibels. Wakamatsu was eerily similar to you in that regard. Only difference between the two of you was that you were deceptively intelligent. Extremely so.

“My, my, if it isn’t (l/n)-senpai!” He fakes a surprised look, earning him an eye roll on your end. “You need someone like me to teach you the works?”

“I—what? We’re literally in the same calc class, Imayoshi,” you retort. “Besides, drop the ‘senpai’ honorific. It feels so slimy when you say it so disingenuously… Aren’t we both 3rd years too?”

“I’m so hurt,” he mocks. “What if I was really genuine with you?”

“Look, right now, no remarks from you, Evil Glasses,” you say. “It’s really, really urgent and I don’t know how to grasp the material for the class lately, plus my essay, ugh…” You rub your fingers against your temples in an attempt to make the stressful headaches disappear while Imayoshi simply watches with his eyes slightly open.

“... You usually do well on all your exams, no? Unless my eyes and memory fail me.” It was true; even though you were as loud-mouthed as Wakamatsu, you would often shock a lot of people when your name always appeared in the higher percentiles of exam results. Apparently most students and teachers associate your rowdy personality with an expected subpar academic performance. He has you to thank for when your score reports always cause reactions of utter disbelief from the teachers. You really do liven up the school and make it a lot more unorthodox.

“I guess…” you mumble. “But I really wanna do especially well for this one because math is my weakest subject, and you always score the highest for these types of exams, so…”

“It may be my best subject,” he says, leaning slightly closer to your face. “But I’m not the one with the highest scores in any math subjects throughout these years, and we both know that quite well, don’t we, (l/n)? Why don’t you come clean about the real reason why you’re here?”

“Oh my literal fuck—Imayoshi, you’re one of the best students in calc right now regardless of exam results,” you petulantly huffed, not backing down from his intimidation. Imayoshi notes your cheeks reddening, and he figured it was either because of the close proximity between your faces or the fact you were frustrated… perhaps both. “And you’re the only one around here on campus who I could ask!”

“Really now,” he chimes, moving closer to whisper in your ear. “Are you sure?” With incoherent stammers, you backed away from him, slapping your hands against both of your ears to protect them.

“W-W-What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Looks like I won this one, (l/n)-san,” he purrs, relishing the fact that only he could render you this quiet. “Ho? What’s wrong? Cat got your tongue?”

“I—Shut up!” you lamely shoot back. “You can just say no if you really don’t wanna do this—urgh, I’m leaving, I’m not gonna waste any more time—”

“How hurtful,” he dryly remarks, standing up straight again after leaning for a quite a while. “It’s almost as if you’re rejecting me~” He knew you would always take his bait and quip back (unlike Susa), regardless of whether or not you tell him that you weren’t going to engage further.

“As if,” you snorted, making another exaggerated eye roll. “You’re the last person who would ever be hurt from this.”

“Dear me!” he exclaims. “Have you ever considered that perhaps I don’t help out people for free? Did you think I would be a gracious, selfless person who would help you like a saint?”

“Okay, fine! Perhaps I didn’t think that far ahead, okay? You just were the first person that came to mind, and I thought asking you wouldn’t hurt.” His smirk widens almost maliciously at your words, lips already opening to deliver another irritating quip before you immediately spoke again to stop him. “Okay, Imayoshi, you little shit, just shut up—I don’t wanna hear anything from your mouth right now.”

“I don’t see any reason why I should listen to you at all,” he muses. “Why don’t you make me?” He has a shit-eating grin plastered across his face, eagerly eyeing your next move, and as he expected, you let out a frustrated noise that prompted passerby students to shoot pointed looks towards the both of you.

What he didn’t expect was for you to take a huge step towards him, unceremoniously pull him down to your level, and press a reverberating smack on his lips. His eyes are immediately blown wide open to look at your embarrassed, but determined face. His fingers unconsciously move to touch his warmed lips.

“... That was quite romantic, wasn’t it, (l/n)?” he dryly says, recovering almost immediately from the shock. All the other students fled from the blatantly bold scene to save face. Not that Imayoshi really cared.

“Okay, you know what? Bye, I’m not gonna play anymore mind games with you,” you grumble. “Essays and studying aren’t gonna be done by themselves—wah!”

Imayoshi gently tugs you back to reciprocate back a kiss, meticulously slipping his hands behind your head and on your waist to accommodate you. Your eyes are completely open from the shock that the Imayoshi Shoichi was actually kissing you. You don’t close your eyes from the sensation, completely entranced when you make eye contact with his half-lidded eyes watching your every reaction closely. The kiss ended all too soon, and Imayoshi separates himself from you, secretly admiring your dazed look.

“That was quite a strong reaction to just a simple kiss.”

“I—that was not just a ‘simple kiss!’”

“Now would you like to tell me the true reason why you approached me?”

“You’re… insinuating that you know something.”

“Well we wouldn’t know unless you come clean,” Imayoshi purrs. “I can sometimes be wrong too.”

“Ugh, what the hell—fine, I am quite enamored by you, and uh, I… find it infuriating to be with you, but it also gives me butterflies… so I thought I could be with you more… if I asked you—don’t get it twisted, though! I still need your help to study!...” He covers his mouth to suppress a laugh at your honesty.

“Was it really so hard to say that in the beginning, (l/n)-san?”

“Okay, that’s it! I’m really, really leaving! Fuck off, Imayoshi, I swear to—”

“Ho? Just a minute, darling~” he tuts, reaching to hold your hand. “Perhaps if you offer more kisses as an incentive, I’d be more inclined to offer my expertise.”

“How quaint,” you dryly reply. “It’s almost as if we’re in a relationship.”

Imayoshi can’t help but bark out a genuine laugh. You even managed to pick up some of his mannerisms so quickly.

“That’s an interesting proposal, (l/n),” he murmurs. “Should we try that?” You tut at him irritatedly as you tug your interlocked hands while speed-walking ahead.

“Hurry up, or I’ll consider breaking up with you right now.”

“Ah ha!~” he chuckles at your attitude. “How mean, (l/n)-san! Too bad that we both know that’s not going to happen anytime soon.”

#ask #narnvaeron #knb #knb scenarios #kuroko no basket #imayoshi shouichi #imayoshi shoichi #imayoshi x reader #imayoshi #knb fic #knb fluff #100 followers #100 follower milestone

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queer-as-in-fuck-12 · 5 years ago

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Man, some people just really hate homeless people huh. I saw someone in the YouTube's comment section talking about fixing up an abandoned mall and turning it into a shelter and people were literally so fucking opposed to it even though itd have no fucking impact on their privileged asses in any way.

They kept saying shit along the lines of "oh well i don't want those ~dirty drug addicts~ near my town". First of all I hate to burst ur fucking bubble but many homeless ppl aren't addicts. Second of all, addicts still fucking deserve homes and food and financial security. They're dealing with a horrible disease and they should be receiving medical fucking treatment instead of all this bullshit.

And some were like "oh it's just not realistic it wouldn't work itd cost money blah blah insert more bs excuses here" like shit if you're not willing to change things for the better then fine, get out of everyone else's way and zip it.

Honestly how can people justify this shit to themselves? How literally fucking comically evil do you have to be to hate homeless and sick people. Like jesus fucking Christ.

And other people were just complaining about all the homeless people in their town that just happened to not be the nicest, like yeah, that sucks, and you don't have to put up with poor treatment, but if you think having some bad experiences with some homeless people means that every other homeless person deserves to be homeless? Fuck off

The poor actions of a few do not justify the mistreatment of the many.

Like shit, call me a dirty fucking socialist if u want but I think homeless people deserve basic human fucking rights

Honestly if u think any of this is acceptable then get off my fucking blog, this place is not for you.

TLDR: stop being dicks to homeless people, stop dehumanizing addicts, and eat the fucking rich

Sincerely, a really pissed off punk

#addicts and homeless people are human you fucking monsters #take it from someone who HAS BEEN HOMELESS (but thankfully had a place to stay)#im so fucking angry right now i cant even type #classism #eat the rich #eat the fucking rich #homeless #homelessness #tw addiction mention #tw homelessness #punk culture #socialism #(?) idk #tw swearing #anti capitalism #social justice #activist #activism #homegrown post

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antiloreolympus · 3 years ago

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7 Anti LO Asks

1. I think yet another part of RS' writing issues is that she things antagonists always have to be evil villains. Lore Olympus often reads like a satirical example that a writing professor pulls out to yell about black and white morality in fiction.

2. More so, wouldnt Zeus actually be the mama’s boy in LO, not Hades? Rhea was able to save him when she couldn’t save her other kids and raised him alone to take out Kronos, they should have this close relationship, not Rhea and Hades. There’s a few things to note with this:

Hades holds some .. questionable feelings about his mother, seeing as she looks nearly identical to Persephone to an almost comical degree. It’s obviously more Rachel can’t character design her way out of a paper bag, but seriously? It looks bad, especially since it’s confirmed Hades is basically Kronos Jr in terms of looks and personality. Not the best ship to compare yourselves too …

It’s clear bias and just a terrible reading on the mythology, if not completely not reading the mythology to begin with. Zeus can be framed as an asshole and still have trauma from his youth, the fact only “good” characters have trauma for you to sympathize with but all the “bad” guys have what could be real trauma demonized or completely removed so they don’t look sympathetic at all is like? Really?

I don’t agree with it, but it could have been a shared parallel between Hades and Persephone if it turned out he too was the unfavored/unloved child compared to Zeus. Not only does it aide in HxP having a similar “my mommy is mean to me!” Sob story, but also aide in why Hades and Zeus don’t get along. It would sting a lot to know your mother didn’t save you, but made sure to save him.

3. they voted for it???? jesus christ

4. That’s also what I don’t get? Dislike Zeus all you want, whether it be mythology or a fictional reimagining, but he did work hard and lead the Olympians to victory over Kronos and earned his title and role as their king, and was considered a good one too. Him being horny doesn’t mean he’s somehow a bad leader, none of the mythology or actual society/culture ever said that, since his illicit liaisons weren’t a mark of his leadership qualities. Rachel playing the “Not only is Hades better suited for being the King, he’s also so humble he didn’t even want it! And was forced to rule the underworld! But also he’s the best king! Also everyone loves and respects him but not Zeus! Even his own wife wants Hades over him!” Is so childish. It is one thing to favor a character you like over another, but literally making Zeus a jealous, washed up loser compared to Hades? That’s just stupid. You can like Hades all you want, but acting like he’s better than Zeus in every regard to illogical degrees is a clear show of not getting the actual mythology and being more akin to a tumblr “scholar” than a supposed mythology expert as RS claims to be

5. thetis is like that because the only female villain smythe knows how to write is 'manipulative slutty mcslutslut out to STEAL MEN with her EVIL SEX BODY' and knowing what zeus does to thetis in the actual myths, it just feels ... disgusting. greasy. imagine being that much of a victim-blamer.

6. with a name like LO youd think itd actually be about Zeus, tbh, or just the Olympians in general. A story about how Zeus and Hera are dealing with king/queenship would be way more interesting. The fact its instead about how sad Hades is over his broken dick and Persephone being totally cool with slavery now so she can bang him is like ... why ...

7. Hmmm had a terrifying and worrysome thought - so with the "golden traitor" story and sort of parallels between Hera and Persephone, you don't suppose RS is using that to be foreshaodwing? Like she wouldn't have Persephone try and seduce / trick Zeus to lighten her sentence, right?

Or have Persephone do something similar with Kronos (because who knows where that plots going, aside from maybe Leto sacrificing Persy so Apollo can take over and rule Olympus and she can get revenge on Zeus?

Cause Hera seduced Kronos to help her siblings out and theres been some parallels between her and Persephone (didnt RS say Kore liked being compared to Hera?) So, she might have Persephone "seduce" Zeus to lighten her sentence and get her and her mother off the hook for her act of wrath?

#anti lo #anti lore olympus #lore olympus critical #lo critical

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runearcana · 4 years ago

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Reasons I am Terezi:

My soon to be deadname sounds like Terezi.

I have an absurdly long tongue.

I look and dress like Terezi. [my hair ends up short, and when I straighten it, it always has a curve at the ends like hers. Ive always thought I look like a female version of Karkat and even tried to be more like him.] I primarily wear black t-shirts with nerdy images.

I love mysteries, solving them, and have a knack for knowing the law on an intuitive level.

I had a best fuckin friend forever that I did everything with. We called ourselves the Greythorne Sisters. I was Wither and she was Malice. [telling much?]

When I broke up with her, I.. used my very strong foresight and saw that there would be issues if we stayed friends. Karkat also encouraged me to do it and was outside when I went through with it. After I told her, she literally crumpled, and I hugged her one last time. She didnt expect it at all. ._.

I went insane with regret and self-hatred afterwards.

My ultimate crush looked, acted, and spoke [yelled] EXACTLY like Karkat.

The reason I got into Homestuck was because I was incredibly shocked at how his likeness was captured in the fan art, and even the official art. EVERYTHING is the same except he has grey-blue eyes, caucasion skin color, lacks horns. Everything else is the same. He sounds most like a more masculine version of Broadway Karkat. Very wicked and masculine voice. Extremely intimidating guy despite his size. [hes not short, just shorter than youd expect someone with a cocky personality like his.]

Karkat even called us the Scourge Sisters.

He hated Vriska. He was jealous of her as well, as anyone interested in me would have been.

I loved Karkat, more than anyone except Vriska, but my self-esteem was too low to believe he legitimately cared about me. On some level I knew he cared about me, but I was too BLIND to see it.

I didnt know I loved Vriska more than Karkat until I had already lost her. v.v

Vriska and I had a serious BDSM relationship [kismesis] after being moirails a very long time. We should have stayed moiraills. :[ It was really my fault that she acted the way she acted.

I am an empath and I can legitimately taste peoples energies.

I may as well be blind because my eyesight is useless to me without glasses.

My favorite color isnt red, its TEAL, but I have a crazy fetish for fiery guys.

Libra ascendant, which is funny because A. your ascendant was your sign in a previous life, and B. its the realm of your PERSONALITY. [Sun is about your life path and moon is about emotions. :P]

I am creepy and cute [or was when I identified as female]. I love scaring the shit out of people. >:]

I like 1337, but I refuse to type that way all the time even though quirks are awesome conceptually. I mean if I could program the computer to remember my quirk, itd be different, but that isnt a thing yet. Itd definitely spice the internet up much more. :]

I still play with plushies and whatevers at hand and draw with chalk.

I adore dragons and see myself as one because I was born in the year of the dragon. :P

I like to cosplay, and wear capes pretty often.

Dave is someone I cared about a great deal. He had a crush on me, but I saw him as a brother. Dirk is a total piece of shit and hurt Dave and Karkat and its why they have so much in common. He IS Daves bro. Dave sort of sticks up for him and Dirk has clueless followers.

Gamzee was a best friend of mine like Dave and we technically had a kismisitude relationship. Gamzee told me Karkat was his best friend but I didnt know it was mutual. He was very upset that Gamzee and I were kinda together.

One night I was sitting at the end of Vriskas bed, thinking she was asleep, and trying not to wake her up with blowing my nose. She was awake and spooked and said she thought I was cackling like a maniac at the end of the bed like a creep. I thought it was pretty much a good assessment.

Another time she told me that while I was asleep, she saw an *evil* me with a sharp toothed grin and grey skin. It didnt seem improbable to me.

John is my biological brother. Hes a Virgo sun, and hes a nerd. :] Hes the only person beside my dad and aunt I talk to. [lots of friends I have, lol.]

Rose is a c*nt but I was fascinated with her for some reason. Rose hates Homestuck because of the fanbase. [lolll]

Kanaya is her sister, not gf/wife. Shes cool, and a reasonable person and was a friend, but we didnt talk much. I dont know why really.. x.x

Aradia was my best friend before Vriska. She and Sollux are married. I had a crush on her hsband and it was awkward.

Equius is an ex. Longest relationship Ive been in was with him.

Eridan is as much of a insufferable asshat as he is in the series, but not good looking in the slightest. He can be.. surprisingly insightful at times. None of us like him, even us INFPs. [Dave and I.]

I see Aranea as my mother. Talks non-stop, ruins lives.. but I used to look up to her.

Calliope was a fellow dragon lover friend that Dave introduced me to. Her handle was Celestial Serpent and she is even more asexual than I am. :]

My friends saw my and Karkats connection as being more like Karkats and Nepetas. He treated me like I was autistic and mostly ignored me. Probably until I confessed to him, and then after I went crazy because I had lost Vriska, and hoped that I could rely on him to be there for me. but despite all that bravado cockiness of his, hes a total wimp. ._.] Karkat and I had a ridiculously brief unspoken relationship that was only through telepathic communication and I got beyond frustrated and kissed a woman, and it was over like that. No one knows about this but us. Its another thing that I have ruminated on and hated myself for and deeply regretted.

I envy gamer girls who are actually good at games and wish I could be more confident and popular. v.v; [Latula]

I had a character on Gaiaonline with the Chucku Norisu scarf and the winged staff item and people drew freebie art of it for me, and when I looked at my pictures after learning about Homestuck it was pretty crazy.

Vriska [best artist I know] drew a character that looked a lot like Terezi that I had liked a lot.

I was very isolated when I was young. Neglected by my parents for the most part and felt too different from other humans. I always wanted a tree house and bulit my own club house that I hung out in as a kid.

My friends pretty much unfairly looked down on and even despised Vriska except Gamzee.

I love the taste and sight of blood. [Im a sadist.]

Dave made a proposition that he, me and Karkat be in a poly relationship and I turned it down. [I did not want to share Karkles with ANYONE. I know in the comic Dave actually disliked the idea, but the poly thing came up with the three of us. I dont know if Karkat was cool with it or not because he always used Dave as our go-between, but if Dave made the offer it must have been Karkat approved. Asshole. -.-]

Karkat and Dave live together and are more than likely morails. Karkat isnt attracted to Dave, but Dave has said he is attracted to Karkat.

I had a dragon umbrella that looked like a cane that I loved a lot.

Karkat is pretty much the unofficial group leader, or at least he was in my opinion. I could see Sollux saying Id make a better leader, though, because Im more clear-headed and calm about things and people from that group respected me [more than I was aware of].

We are all connected somehow.. but the main group consisted of Dave, Gamzee, Rose, Kanaya, me [Terezi], Karkat, and a few people I didnt see as characters from Homestuck. Vriska was not allowed to hang out with us at first. When she finally got her freedom [with my help] she wouldnt hang with the group, and they saw her as taking me away from them. They thought she treated me poorly, but she really didnt. -.- [Vriska did nothing wrong, theyre all just jerks.]

I dont hang out or talk to any of them anymore except John. Im always finding myself reminiscing and I really just wish I could forget I ever met them so I could start over fresh.

I have a spirit guide that is a DRAGON and teaches me anything Id like to know, especially in esoteric matters. His name is Shadowfall Ryu. Ryu is Japanese for Dragon. [lusus] and I agonize that I dont know him irl. Everyone knows about him. I have drawn so much art of him and talked about him so much. He is my ideal self. [i know the lusus in the comics is female, but whatever. Its still interesting.]

I collect dragon stuff, including plushies. I still play with them and wish others would play with me.

List goes on and on.

I cant make this stuff up.

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1milzine · 5 years ago

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As we celebrate over 200 followers on tumblr, here’s round two of favorite rarepairs!

@lurkerwithcomputer said: Still taking fave rarepair asks? I have a slowly growing love of Toga Himiko/Kaminari Denki. I'm honestly surprised it's so rare considering all the Traitor Kaminari theories. (I mean, there are only *2 fics* - I kid you not - on Ao3 with this ship and one of them is mine...)

Mod Muse: Oooh, good point. This will be a very valid ship if the traitor theory turns out to be true! Heck, even if it doesn't, I could see the dynamic being a lot of fun. Toga's chaos, empathy, and undercurrent of cunning combined with Kaminari's raw chaotic dumbass… chaos squared.

Mod Echo: I’m fond of the “Kaminari is the traitor” theory just because Kaminari is cool but like he could be even cooler with a shadowy past, and Toga and Kaminari would just be amazing to see together in general. I feel like these two are a pair I would not want to meet in a dark alley. @_@

Anon said: this is gonna sound weird but bakugo and that friend he had in middle school (the one w the long fingers) they WERE childhood friends, nd i feel like theyd have a very “no homo” kinda relationship (but secretly Yes Homo) nd angst bc the friend ISNT a hero student and esp w bkg rebuilding his relationship w deku, he could feel like hes not Good Enough to act on his feelings 4 bkg. idk i think itd b cute bc hes the friend bkg had a consistent good relationship w/ and i wanna explore that dynamic

Mod Muse: I don't think it's weird at all! I could definitely see that sort of vibe coming from them and the potential for angst, character development, and all those other things is… delicious. I love rebuilding old relationships type ships, and this hits that mark perfectly. :D

Mod Echo: “Childhood friend” ships are A+ in my book; I love those wholesome moments of “Remember that time when we…” Doesn’t seem like a weird ship to me at all!

Anon said: Dunno if you’ll do another round of fav rarepairs but I think ShinIzuOcha is so cute!! Also Kendo x Momo x Jirou are adorable

Mod Muse: Oh gosh, you're right, they are cute! I should have thought twice before suggesting this event… i'm… gonna end up with too many ships. RIP me

Mod Echo: Y’all ever look at canon and go “Wow, you’re just not trying hard enough. There are 505607920 ways you could be infinitely more awesome.” And here’s two of them right here! I’m a big fan of Shinsou in general so sign me up for ShinIzuOcha, and Kendo, Momo, and Jirou just seems like a totally natural ship--their connections all have good development!

@fleurdesamione said: I love the big three as a polyship! They're just such a good balance for each other and so sweet in their friendship! The idea of them sharing a romantic bond just makes me soften!

Mod Muse: *teary eyes* Too right OP… too right

Mod Echo: L I S T E N they’re not called “The Big Three” for nothing, okay??? There are some characters yah just don’t separate and this is it right here, gold standard. Nejire and Mirio’s outgoing natures balance out Tamaki’s shyness and Tamaki’s determination gives the others motivation to keep going. So good, just so good.

Anon said: Todoroki/shinso has got a killer vibe going for it right now with me! I love the idea of the two who declare from the start they don't want to make friends coming together and finding a warmth and love from each other.

Mod Muse: That sort of dynamic is always nice! I’ll admit, I probably wouldn’t have thought of Todoroki/Shinsou on my own, but now that you mention it, it sounds like it has a lot of potential.

Mod Echo: Yesss, let’s continue to further the Shinsou agenda… I think there’s so much good stuff that could happen in a ship like this--they both have elements of their quirks that they hesitate to use or don’t view as heroic, so finding a way to make their quirks into something they love and feel great about TOGETHER is just flawless.

@coffee-craving-canine said: I have A LOT of rarepairs, but currently, my favorites are Frozen Marbles (Rei/Compress) and DabiHawksMiruko. Compress, despite being a villain, is much more of a gentleman than Endeavor ever could be and would treat Rei so much better; plus he's very charming. Rei deserves good things. The scandal with Dabi secretly dating two heroes is angst heavy, making it fun to plot how it could work out. Hawks and Rumi can relate to each other with their animal instincts (plus "Dabi is a furry" jokes)

Mod Muse: Is now the time to say that I actually ship Dabi/Miruko myself? So yes, Coffee, I definitely understand where you’re coming from! And you’re dead right about Rei deserving good things! Compress may be a villain, but at least I have little doubt that he would treat her right.

Mod Echo: YOOOOO, I love this!! Mr. Compress more like Mr. Steal Yo Girl!!! He should totally go save Rei; Horikoshi get on this stat! DabiHawksMiruko is hilarious to me because I’m imagining how such a situation would happen in canon and what people’s reactions would be… Great stuff.

Anon said: My favorite rarepair (and just bnha ship in general) is Setsumori! (Setsuna/Kinoko) They have such a cute dynamic: Excited tol and shy smol (in the most simple terms). They're also just both cuties!!

Mod Muse: You have me intrigued. Excited tol and shy smol girls is a worthwhile shipping investment indeed!

Mod Echo: Class 1-B needs way more love! There are so many fun characters and dynamics there and then the comic just glances right over them. I want to see some interactions with these two in canon!

Anon said: Inko/Yagi/Naomasa! All Might and Naomasa have such a good rapport in Vigilante! But Toshinko is such a wholesome ship! So why not make a ot3, you know?

Mod Muse: I do know! Naomasa deserves more love, and Inko and Toshinori both deserve nice things. Ship them all together and let them all be happy and warm and wholesome. ^.^

Mod Echo: There are so many shippers with great taste submitting responses here. I love All Might/Inko, and I also love All Might/Naomasa--Inko/All Might/Naomasa is like double the love! We all know Toshinko is A+ but man, I feel like Naomasa’s calm and just generally kind demeanor is a great match for Inko too. This was a great idea for acquiring new ships....

Anon said: Shipping Fuyumi with Miruko is popular but I'm also intrigued by Mt. Lady and Fuyumi together, considering they also have such clashing personalities. With Mt. Lady very self-assured and attention-seeking and Fuyumi tends to throw her all into supporting others.

Mod Muse: Oooh, I could see them making lovely foils! I approve! Also, imagining the surprise of Fuyumi’s family and friends finding out she’s dating Mt. Lady… lmao

Mod Echo: I like Fuyumi with like… everyone. XD She’s just a perfect cinnamon roll, too good for this world… But Fuyumi with Mt. Lady could be really cool! I feel like Mt. Lady is really good at putting on a media personality, but having to be herself around Fuyumi could be very interesting challenge!

Anon said: i have such a soft spot for kirishindeku ;;w;; shinsou and deku already have a friendship in the series, and kirishima would absolutely get along w shinsou as well!! they make me all sorts of emotional, haha

Mod Muse: S o f t. I think that Kirishima and Shinsou would balance each other out really well, and then Deku falls really nicely somewhere in the middle of the relative soft-stale cinnamon roll spectrum.

Mod Echo: I see you, fellow Shinsou fans; I see you. Kirishima and Deku are already adorable together just by themselves, but Kirishimi and Shinsou is a dynamic I hadn’t even thought of. I could totally see Kirishima hyping Shinsou’s joining the hero class, and can we just talk about the sheer amount of motivation contained in a KiriShinDeku ship???

Anon said: I really like Mei/Himiko/Iida! mostly because of how hilarious it would be to pair off Iida, one of the most intense and serious members of class A, with two of the wackiest, one-track mind characters.

Mod Muse: O-oh my gosh. I have no words, this is… this is just utterly fantastic. Bless Iida and, in this scenario, heaven help him. I could actually see this relationship being good for all three of them though!

Mod Echo: RIPPPP Iida! XD There are some ships you like because they’re serious and deep and thought-provoking… And then there are some ships that you love that are just plain comedic genius. The potential for wacky hijinks here is truly and completely off the charts. Just yes, please.

#rarepairs #bnha rarepairs #(minor) Announcement

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keycrash · 5 years ago

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figured i’d discuss my thoughts on all the panels and my post-ztd ideas behind them for the song comic since i did it on twitter and i love overexplaining. ztd spoilers

intro

so, carlos kills delta. i’m actually a little pleasantly surprised that most of the fandom headcanons this for him— i do, of course, but with a ‘nice’ character like carlos you often expect people to insist they’re not one for violence. but yeah it’s in large part pantry fragment that makes me so certain he’d do it— carlos kills akane bc akane is dangerous, and carlos even kills himself when he thinks he’s dangerous. he’d feel guilty just by the sheer fact of taking a life when all he’s done his entire life is save people, but violence is on the table as a last resort and they cant afford to have delta alive, so he’d take that burden of guilt so as to spare everyone else

i don’t have many in depth hcs for how the gang leaves dcom so i figured akane psychic calling aoi for a ride made some amount of sense. aois yelling at junpei and phi to buckle up. akane already is like a good girl.

Q team

mira’s in jail catching up on philosophy reading, eric’s in therapy thankfully. imo the... Magical Change mira has in the epilogue files is a bit... of a jarring change of heart as far as realism goes so i feel like given her circumstances she’d probably have psychotherapy as well

sigma has tons of robotics experience, so... he builds sean a head so he can operate in society a bit easier. i had bree’s sean design in the back of my mind so i wanted to give credit there.

C team

my babes. i love them. i love th.

i figure there’s some point where junpei and akane are working on crash keys business w catching the terrorist but carlos has to stay behind to rehabilitate maria; so junpei and akane on a business trip to japan, finding a few spare hours to call carlos despite the timezone difference... the epilogue shows that they haven’t really been in much contact, so i feel like it’s probably a result of carlos not being used to having deep longstanding friendships. he doesn’t want to bother junpei and akane when they’re busy with crash keys business and their relationship, meanwhile they’re like Carlos Hasn’t Called Us In Weeks Is He Dead Or What

also that panel has a beer in the back because i feel like it’d take a while for everyone around junpei to realize that his alcoholism is like, Alcoholism, and then even longer for him to get a handle on it

the second panel is the moment maria wakes up after carlos spending half his life trying to get her back... cries......................

and then Junepei Is Beautiful And Dysfunctional: A Dissertation. they love each other of course but junpei’s severely traumatized by akane’s actions and akane has trouble adjusting to normal life especially with all of that being brought to the surface again; she doesnt know how to process guilt or help junpei, she cant even tell him she was wrong to apologize bc she doesnt think she was, she just regrets that he had to be caught up in it. anyway not directly related but i hc that they break up once it gets too much to handle then go back for another try after they fix some things. they’re a mess but they dont care that they’re a mess because they’re so hellbent on being together because having each other is a sign of victory and safety and theyll learn to exist together eventually

... again, just general post-ztd, but junpei would be resistant to any kind of medication/therapy for his struggles but i feel like if people he loved expressed their concern enough he could be convinced

also they date carlos later thank u.

D team

sigma’s panel is a reversal of the end of vlr; instead of being young and discovering his old reflection, he’s old and looking at his younger self, realizing he’ll be in this mismatched body forever, for better or for worse

diana’s panel is ambiguous about if she’s moving out of her old home or into a new one, but either way, it’s a positive change for her, finally escaping the looming threat of her ex husband and building new friendships to help her through it

and phi’s was a little hard to get across, but she’s calling her foster parents. one of them is a different phi clone, after all, and they Knew— so phi wants answers, and she wants to tell them she found her biological parents, and she wants to tell clone mom she found HER biological parents too. ... also i want her college dorm, it’s so aesthetic

outro

please dont make me decide where gab lives. that plant’s named kyle, though.

the crash keys HQ panel has phi in the back, who else could pull off that vest. a few of the details have aoi and junpei arguing through notes and drawings on the desk, lmao. anyway i figure this is a breakthrough on the terrorist after tons of sleepless nights bc akane’s a workaholic; though i do headcanon that there’s no terrorist due to the fanatic bio r/fabrication anagram

of course, sean busts mira out of jail and they go back to Fix the timeline... i was thinking abt using these panels for something else but i figured they fit too well to ignore. that epilogue is a beautiful mess. let me tell you though, itd immediately turn akane from super accomplished in the last panel to Furious; i feel like crash keys & the SOIS would unite for the taking down free the soul/the terrorist efforts, and in doing so would also give mira legal help/resources in exchange for information about delta etc, but they all know mira’s kind of a wildcard and they’re happy to have her in jail, especially for akane who’s quickly come to discover that mira was a contributor to her parents’ deaths. so mira escaping is like WHO LET THIS HAPPEN

anyway... that comic took up my life for like 4 days so i needed to air out thoughts. there we go. one motivation in making it was because i’ve shit on ztd a lot in the time since it came out; i’ve mellowed out since, and yeah i still have bitter feelings, and it’s not like i suddenly think its writing decisions i had gripes with were good, but i figured for all the negativity i’d put out there i should try to highlight ztd’s merits where it has them as well

#ze talk #peko.txt #alcoholism ment #999 spoilers #vlr spoilers #ztd spoilers

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haeroniel-doliet · 3 years ago

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Turns out its a helluva mess when i start messing beyond flat colors!! Might be a sign to not do so much again (but yet .. practice to get to where im one day happy??)

Like ive done as much as i know how to do at this point in time to the portraits (still gratuitously bloody shame on me :') ) oh except for a background bc WHAT does one DO for a character shoulders up portrait background??? Settled for now on a gradient old school photo style lmao

I like the fix it one as is, a lot (but also i liked the lineart for the portraits better i think) and idk, imngonna try give it a light bit of shadows and lights, maybe step away from a lot of blending bc i think i think thats where i went wrong on the other one

Like, they look fine, but they also look. Meh. Like ive used too much blur tool (i havent, i tried using kritas wet brush thing and it looks....ok close up but the effect is no good when zoomed out like posting size APPARENTLY) and its all noncommittally washy.

(cont'd over thinking)

Am i gonna 'render' them a third time??? Do i have the mental strength?? Bc i think maybe trying for something not so, "realistic" could do me better, like a little more cell shady. But also i dont?? I dont know how to cell shade? I dont watch anime or cartoons v much and my style isnt that cartoony or clean lined?

Maybe on the fix it i can try a more....... Conservative and less blended shade/highlights? (And if i like it/learn smth new go back and re re do the portraits same style) I also just. Idk. How does one make it not look so. Flat and meh?? Im doing basic color stuff ok i think, ive got a bit of texture but its still? Eh???

Honestly i could just post them and move on but i dunno, i have the energy to problem solve a lil bit so why not?? (Not tonight. Im gonna sleep on this all)

Why post shit im not 100% proud of? (Ngl kinda been in the mood to take down that first sketch of the fix it bc it looks nowhere near as good as what i fixed it up to but ....... Ah fuck it i was happy w it when i did it so eh)

Why why why oh why is art so hard?????????

I wanna try and become one of those cool artists who post multiple fun things yknow, like u get inspired and can draw it beginning to post in one evening! Im probably way over thinking and pushing myself to some standard of unrealistic perfection i have for myself...

(also i like thumbnail doodled out like, all these things i wanna draw for a really nice fic i read and even after editing some i have like 8 bits i wanna draw?? 4 as like a mini comic bc i havent done one since i was a child and i think itd be kinda rad if i learned to draw short comics for fic scenes i like??? But yeah basically in one inktober post there would only be 5 ideas (a lil more complicated on average i do give for granted but like. Those took me WEEKS) but yeah i just. I wanna draw them. Even if itll probably take me for fuckin ever... (And i didnt even finish off the last two inktober batches, oh. And i have a uni thesis to do ew) .... I wanna push myself to draw faster (less iterations to get it right) and so i can have rly solid and good and quickly done drawings to then color in as i learn to for future?)

Ugh man. You know what i need to do/shouldve been doing before i jumped into coloring original stuff?? I shouldve done colored studies. Like ive been drawing scenes both from reference and original on the inktobers and i think thats why my drawing/character stuff has gotten decent. I really should just whip out like prettily colored movie screencaps and work on painting studies of them. That would really fix up why i cant figure out lights and shadows and blending in coloring! No horrid tutorials just figuring out how can i make it work for me

And you know? You know what it is okay to have pieces that are from before i figured it out right? Im gonna try a slightly different thing for the fix its (if i hate it, theyre good as flat colors too) and yes they dont have a background either please love of god someone tell me how to add random backgrounds bc im not in the mood of scene building further but they float in off white space atm.

If i learn smth ground breaking and can QUICKLY do a bette rendition of the portraits, sure the perfectionist wins. But maybe just maybe. It would be fine to post them as they are. Yea, they look roughly as lifeless as my first big painting/that dinluke poster redraw. And maybe thats okay. Because hi if i do dedicate to doing like a good few color focused studies of star wars scenes as a treat i can come back stronger and have a better piece???? Its about growth babes. YEA

Alright i said to myself thats it in gonna go sleep on it and continue tomorro but. I thought id slip in here a secret surprise for anyone unfortunate enough to have clicked read more... And i got a little whiplash opening the picture bc it looks. SO WRONG but the more you look at it its like ... Fine. Ok judge for urself and tell me pls, first and second attempts at 'rendering' the portraits (the darker bground was the first attempt just going by gut, the lighter one after trying to watch like 1 tutorial and using more brushes and just generally trying rly hard!!)

yes ive clearly fixed issues in the sketch differently in both so they... look... like different expressions?? idk man idk idk idk see now this small they look differently off!! god the curse of the zoom in and out and perception.

#art woes #but make it extra long because im DISTRESSED at not being able to just whip out ideas from my brain to page and it look good in one try #long and rambly and probably doesnt make much sense no pressure or expectation for anyone to read lmao #love yall kiss kiss time for bed itll be easier after sleep #did include a pic of current progress at the v bottom eheheheh

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sorcieresque · 8 years ago

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naisy gossip from the past couple of days on: ai’s shapeshifting and the legitimacy thereof, the shape of daisy’s head, trans troubles, daisy being offended by her implied sluttiness, a detour to dick jokes, a detour from dick jokes to feelings jamming, a detour about ines’s annoyingness factor, lesbian island and clea

nickatnightwalker brief interjection: you doing okay with tweedle drunk and tweedle drunker over there?

sorcieresque Are you.

nickatnightwalker well, ive been completely cured of the siren charm probably forever

sorcieresque Good. He's not that cute either way. Tyler's a mess. It's embarrassing.

nickatnightwalker it's amazing how fast my interest in either of them dropped. like watching a rock plummet off the empire state building and then kill some passers by

nickatnightwalker anyway me and damian are going for a walk until their blood alcohol levels drop below .6. wanna come

sorcieresque I take a low res picture, fry it, and caption the rock in comic sans: My interest, the passers-by Tyler's chances of getting laid, the empire state building is captioned God. I'm not going to third wheel you. I’ll have you know I have better social skills than that.

nickatnightwalker this is an escape run daise take it or leave it

sorcieresque Fine. This doppelganger fiasco is getting boring either way.

nickatnightwalker shes not real good is she

sorcieresque No. Having a 3D mirror was fun for all about twenty minutes, which makes for better bragging rights than most people have ever had. She should be proud.

nickatnightwalker now do you get what i mean about your head being weird shaped

sorcieresque Fuck you. My head is perfectly round.

nickatnightwalker round ish

sorcieresque Your face is round-ish.

nickatnightwalker no it's not my jawline is the only good thing my dad ever gave me and you cant erase that fact

sorcieresque I could if I wanted to. Take back that my head is weird-shaped.

nickatnightwalker you cant change my face

sorcieresque I can and I shall.

nickatnightwalker cant and shant

sorcieresque Take it back.

nickatnightwalker you must have seen it though

sorcieresque I was too busy being mesmerized by the acute angles of my cheekbones.

nickatnightwalker huh you really missed an opportunity there then

sorcieresque Let a shapeshifter pour themselves into an unholy you-shaped mold and then you shall throw stones.

nickatnightwalker absolutely not hey do you think ai could even turn into me she doesnt really know what i look like

sorcieresque What do you mean.

nickatnightwalker i mean it's not like ive stripped and tap danced through the quad shes gonna get shit wrong

sorcieresque Right. I assumed that was left to her vague interpretation. It's not like she knows what the hot goods look like beneath my skirts.

nickatnightwalker kind of unsettling maybe everythings just barbie and ken under there when she turns into us

sorcieresque On a scale of one to very, how rude would it be to ask her to take her clothes off.

nickatnightwalker for you i think she would happily

sorcieresque I know. It's charming. My intentions are only pure and scientific.

nickatnightwalker that part she might not love

sorcieresque That sounds like a her-problem.

nickatnightwalker itll be a you problem if she says no

sorcieresque What if she knows how to mold us to a T.

nickatnightwalker how could she possibly

sorcieresque Magic? (Finger waving, etc.)

nickatnightwalker no, she has to know what somethign looks like to be it theres no way shes gotta just be vague nothing underneath

sorcieresque Then what's the big deal. Don't be a pussy.

nickatnightwalker well excuse me for being reluctant if the odds arent 100% against her finding out ive GOT one

sorcieresque What, did you forget you're not the only one in the world? She didn't seem to know about me.

nickatnightwalker theres a lot less to guess on with you daise

nickatnightwalker no offense but im pretty sure everyone heres seen you shirtless or close enough to to make a good approximately of nearly everything going on up there

nickatnightwalker and most of us have seen your ass too

sorcieresque That's an exaggeration, but you're welcome. There is not "less" going on with me, just different issues in the downstairs department.

nickatnightwalker no, not less, just less that people dont know about it's the public semi-nudity daise

sorcieresque You make it sound a lot worse than it is.

sorcieresque You'd think after all these years you wouldn't be so scandalized of my alleged indecency.

nickatnightwalker oh no im not but everyone else isnt hardened to it yet

sorcieresque Haha. Hardened.

nickatnightwalker i dont get it can you explain?

sorcieresque Penis Havers + Sight of Skin = Profit.

nickatnightwalker hm. yknow ive always managed it without the sight of skin part?

sorcieresque Ooh, Mr. Nick, ooh.

sorcieresque The mere sight of your melaninless face sends every phallus in a two mile radius from solid to mega solid.

nickatnightwalker you joke and yet

sorcieresque Deepthroating a banana is cheating.

nickatnightwalker no it is NOT besides thats just how i eat them

sorcieresque Perhaps you and Ines are much more similar than you'd like to believe.

nickatnightwalker please, as if she could eat a banana like i can

sorcieresque She can unhinge her jaw, Nick.

nickatnightwalker you got me there but that really seems like a sacrifice in terms of pressure and suction

sorcieresque I suddenly don't care about this.

nickatnightwalker some principles are universal daisy

sorcieresque I hardly see how unhinging your jaw would aid one outside of pleasing the mighty sword of Venus, oh Great Kahuna of Oral Sex.

nickatnightwalker itd kinda be win some lose some just because youd get greater range of motion but lose a lot of use of your lips

sorcieresque Not that this conversation isn't dripping mystery and pulsing with excitement, but are you okay.

nickatnightwalker what oh yeah he just asked if i like being human

nickatnightwalker like...idk man do i like that ive been consigned to a particularly fragile and ill-fitting meat suit? sure i guess, since the alternative was not existing at all shout out to my dads poor planning aaaaaaaay

sorcieresque Aaaay! Asking you that must count as a micro-aggression around here.

nickatnightwalker oh fuck if i know everything is a micro-aggression around here asking somebody their favorite food is a micro-aggression around here "hey whats your favorite color" "do you not know how PERSONAL colors are to me once a color murdered my entire family and now im forced to brood silently yet threateningly whenever i see it"

sorcieresque Does he like *not* being human? Respond in 2000-5000 words MLA format on your desk by tomorrow.

nickatnightwalker as a matter of fact thats exactly what i just told him

sorcieresque Twinsies.

nickatnightwalker i bet we could start telling people that tomorrow and theyd swallow it hook line and sinker

sorcieresque On that note, has Damian grown out of his sisterwife kink yet?

nickatnightwalker while i dont know what his personal feelings are on it knocking that joke out of the repertoire was part of the motherfucking bargain in exchange for letting him talk to me after hurricane daniel

sorcieresque You've always been good at haggling.

nickatnightwalker thank you you know i really, really debated putting an allowance in there for a while?

sorcieresque Ha! Perhaps not quite so good, then.

nickatnightwalker that was a trade off for my own self respect daisy

sorcieresque I suppose some of you /humans/ have that.

nickatnightwalker oh god dont even go there or i'll vanish your hair too

sorcieresque Someone's touchy.

nickatnightwalker shes just about as annoying as an asscrack full of sand

sorcieresque An asscrack full of sand and sticky hands from a rapidly melting Popsicle?

nickatnightwalker with sand glued onto your arms and legs with too-thick sunscreen scratching gently but persistently at your sunburn

sorcieresque And your sunglasses are smudged.

nickatnightwalker and your towel is too sandy to clean them on

sorcieresque And there's Sandflies.

nickatnightwalker when you shower youre gonna find dried seaweed down your bathing suit thats been there for hours

sorcieresque Like lovingly cradling Satan against your crotch. Anyway.

nickatnightwalker anyway shes real fuckin annoying

sorcieresque She's not so bad. I would have stopped around the sunglasses.

nickatnightwalker you havent seen her raging superiority complex up close and personal

sorcieresque I've seen her raging Mine Song complex.

nickatnightwalker that is one can of lesbian worms i am not gonna go anywhere the fuck near

nickatnightwalker im gonna just stay over here in my lane and not get in anywhere near anything the amazon warriors have claimed, up to and including the entire proteus dorm

sorcieresque What about /my/ problems, Nick.

nickatnightwalker cleas gotta come out, im not goin in

nickatnightwalker i dunno if you wanna take on the sapphic equivalent of the mongol horde that's your bad choice not mine

sorcieresque Well mark my death as "mysterious" on my Wikipedia page and call me sexy Genghis Khan, I'm ready.

nickatnightwalker is there anything really worth conquering over there anyway

sorcieresque Yes.

nickatnightwalker name names bitch!

sorcieresque What is this, a middle school sleepover?

nickatnightwalker yep

nickatnightwalker ive got the popcorn in the microwave now spill

sorcieresque You're subscribed to the Daily Daisy, I was under the impression that you would have an idea. Unless it's tagged Nick don't look, in which case you do not, because we respect each other's privacy.

nickatnightwalker of course i dont but i have YET to see a name drop

sorcieresque Are you asking me if there is a lucky military strategist I would particularly like to conquer?

nickatnightwalker yes imagine some clapping emojisfor me

sorcieresque You're very insistent.

nickatnightwalker well yeah

nickatnightwalker course i wanna hear whats up

sorcieresque Oh.

sorcieresque Well, no single tactician has caught my eye just yet, but I find some of the army members, how do you say, cute. Ines among them.

sorcieresque You love to joke about it, but I don't actually find Tyler's game plans all that exciting. Val's too annoying and Gabriela too dumb to strive beyond eye candy. I've caught glimpses of Clea, you know.

nickatnightwalker thats vague and intriguing keep going

sorcieresque That's all there is to say.

sorcieresque Sometimes they are there, and then they are back to being a walking kaleidoscope on steroids. I think they're cute.

nickatnightwalker they sent me a picture of them before yknow, before why can you see them?

sorcieresque I don't know. And oh. How very juicy of them.

nickatnightwalker dyou want it

sorcieresque Absolutely I do.

nickatnightwalker [it's an incredibly middle-school mirror selfie]

sorcieresque I see. Thank you for your candor.

nickatnightwalker youre welcome you and clea all straightened out? after what they said and everything i know they apologized but still

sorcieresque I made them clamber up the vine and hang from my window. It was very romantic.

nickatnightwalker oh thats so smooth im impressed of you i mean since you told them what to do

sorcieresque And isn't that a most excellent quality in a person.

nickatnightwalker obedience? generally speaking a better quality in a housepet than a person but cleas got other perks

sorcieresque Yes? And what would those be.

nickatnightwalker a fourth dimension australian accent

sorcieresque The compulsive chivalry grew on me.

nickatnightwalker it really is compulsive i swear they keep trying to stop

sorcieresque Interesting.

sorcieresque I could've sworn that was supposed to be their shtick.

nickatnightwalker i thought their shtick was quirky 90s friend

sorcieresque They contain multitudes. That's why they look like that.

nickatnightwalker well shit youre not wrong there i feel threatened by their only-sane-man and rational-human motifs though that's really kinda my thing

sorcieresque Your shtick is far more interesting than being a "rational" person.

nickatnightwalker thank you i do try to work that in though at least sometimes

sorcieresque Do you think it brings an eclectic factor to the jittery je ne sais quoi of your attractiveness?

nickatnightwalker absolutely i do i think it emphasizes that my jitteriness is not unfounded

sorcieresque Wow, you're even internally consistent.

nickatnightwalker oh yeah definitely what you see is what you get with me

sorcieresque Whatever happened to the mystery!

nickatnightwalker new school new me

sorcieresque Your transparency of character disgusts me.

nickatnightwalker oh man daise it disgusts me too

#nickatnightwalker #IM

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themoneybuff-blog · 6 years ago

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Exploring the U.S. by RV: The price of adventure

Shares 352 Two years ago today, Kim and I returned to Portland after fifteen months traveling the United States in an RV. Believe it or not, Ive never published an article about the trip and how much it cost. Although we kept a travel blog for most of the adventure (including a page that documented our expenses), Ive never gathered everything into one place. Until now. Today, I want to share just how much we spent on the journey and some of our favorite stops along the way. It seems like the perfect post to celebrate the start of summer, dont you think? The Lure of Adventure All my life, Ive wanted to take a roadtrip across the United States. When I was young, I was lured by the adventure. I wanted to climb mountains, swim rivers, and explore canyons. The older I got, the more fascinated I became by the countrys regional differences. The U.S. is huge, a fact that most foreign visitors forget. Most American citizens dont even realize how big the country is. I wanted to see and experience it all. Although Ive dreamed of a cross-country roadtrip, its never been practical. As a boy, my family was poor. My parents didnt have money for something like this. As a young adult, I couldnt afford it either. For a long time, I was deep in debt. Besides, where would I find the time? I had to work! To top things off, my wife had zero interest in driving cross country. But in my forties, a curious set of circumstances came together to move my epic roadtrip from dream to reality. One day in early 2014, my girlfriend Kim asked me out of the blue, What do you think about taking a cross-country roadtrip? What did I think? Hell yeah! is what I thought Making a Plan As Kim and I began to discuss this adventure, our biggest concern was money. As a financial writer, Im acutely aware that every dollar I spend today is roughly equivalent to seven dollars I could have in retirement. Every day, I preach the power of saving. I wanted to keep our trip as cost-effective as possible. (Besides, Kim would have to quit her job as a dental hygienist in order to travel a huge financial sacrifice.) My goal was to keep our costs under $50 per person per day. In fact, I had high hopes we could do the trip for $33 per person per day (for a total of $24,000). But the U.S. is expensive. How could Kim and I make this happen? From the start, we knew hotels were out. Even cheap lodging would be far too expensive for us to stay within budget. Personally, I liked the idea of bicycling across the country like my friends Dakota and Chelsea have done. Kim wasnt keen on the idea. (Nor was she willing to make the trip by motorcycle despite being a die-hard Harley girl.) After a lot of research, and after talking with Chris and Cherie from Technomadia, I came to a conclusion: The best balance of cost and comfort would come from crossing the country in an RV. With this bare outline of a plan, the true trip prep began. Searching for Bigfoot After deciding to travel by RV, there were more questions to answer. Neither of us had experience with recreational vehicles. Among other things, we needed to figure out: Should we buy a truck and a trailer?Would it be better to buy a motorhome and tow my 2004 Mini Cooper?What about new or used? With used, you never know what youre getting. But a new RV costs $80,000 or more and loses value quickly.How much space did we need? What kinds of amenities? After crunching the numbers, there was an obvious best choice for us. If we bought a used motorhome, we could tow a car we already owned while (we hoped) avoiding a big hit from depreciation. In fact, if we were diligent every step of the way, it might even be possible to resell our RV after the trip and recoup most of what wed paid for it! We spent the autumn of 2014 patiently sifting through Craigslist ads for used motorhomes. We visited dealerships. We attended the local RV Expo. We walked through dozens of models searching for the right fit. Some were too long. Some were too short. Some were too fancy. Many were run-down and in a state of disrepair. Finally, in early January 2015, we found the perfect rig: a 2005 Bigfoot 30MH29RQ. (Translation: A 29-foot motorhome with a queen bed in the rear.) The owner wanted $38,000 for it a fair price. He wouldnt budge when I tried to negotiate, but I was okay with that. My research revealed he was actually selling a slightly better model, one worth a few thousand dollars more than he was asking. We bought it. [embedded content] Over the next two months, Kim and I prepped Bigfoot for departure. We spent $2000 making minor repairs and installing a towbar on the Mini Cooper. We cleaned the motorhome from top to bottom. We took weekend test trips to RV parks around Oregon and Washington. When all was said and done, wed invested $40,000 to get our caravan ready for the road. Into the West Kim and I left Portland on the morning of 25 March 2015, my forty-sixth birthday. We sped through Oregon we love the state, but were both familiar with it and entered northern California. We spent our first week on the road exploring the Redwoods and weaving through wine country. Along the way, we got a crash course in driving a motorhome. Near Cloverdale, California we took a wrong turn onto a cliff-side gravel road. We stopped immediately. Good thing, too. Turns out a week earlier some other poor soul had driven his RV over the side of the cliff. East of Sacramento, we took another wrong turn and found ourselves driving down a narrow dike road during rush hour while high winds buffeted the RV. Very scary. At times we felt like Lucy and Desi in The Long, Long Trailer, but after a couple of weeks Kim and I had learned how to handle our motorhome, both on the road and off. [embedded content] Early in the trip, our expenses were out of sight. We ate out too often. We bought too much wine. We did too many touristy things without searching for discounts. We rationalized that since we were visiting all of these new places (and might never return), we might as well pay to experience them to the fullest. This was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, after all. The problem, of course, was that lots of fun costs lots of money. Ten days into the trip, our average spending was over $120 per day (or over $60 per person per day) almost twice what wed hoped to spend. Yikes! We tightened the purse strings. We stopped eating out so much and cooked in the motorhome. (We cook a lot at home normally, so this wasnt a tough transition.) We bought a National Parks pass, perhaps the best purchase of our entire trip. (For an $80 one-time fee, you get one year of unlimited access to all sorts of government-owned sites.) We learned to entertain ourselves at night with books and boardgames and a hard drive filled with old movies and an iPad filled with comic books. During our 33 days in California, we marveled at the states vast variety of terrain. We drove through forests and deserts, skirted ocean cliffsides and walked across mountain streams. We hated L.A. traffic not recommended when youre in a motorhome towing a car but enjoyed almost everything else. We loved Arizona even more. Maybe we had low expectations, but we were blown away by the magnificent scenery of the Grand Canyon state. For nineteen days, we basked in the warm spring sun and admired the colorful rock formations. It was in Arizona that we discovered the joys of drycamping (or boondocking). For the first seven weeks of our trip, we mostly stayed in RV parks and campgrounds. At $20 to $50 per night (with the average park costs around $35), lodging was our biggest expense by far. Drycamping costs nothing. All you do is find a spot where you can legally park for the night National Forest land, a friends driveway, certain businesses and casinos and set up camp. You dont have access to electricity or fresh water, but thats okay. The beauty of an RV is that its self-contained. (Our Bigfoot had a generator for electricity and a 63-gallon freshwater tank.) After boondocking only once during our first 50 days on the road, we managed to live off the grid for 33 of the next 80 nights. Once we began pinching pennies, our travel costs plummeted. We werent spending $120 per day anymore. Our average daily spending fell to $50, which lowered the trip average to about $80 per day. A Costly Repair With all this frugality, did we feel like we were depriving ourselves? Not at all! As we made our way from Arizona to Utah to Colorado, we found we could still afford wine and an occasional restaurant meal. Plus, we were paying to do a lot of touristy things, such as soak in the hot springs in Ouray and ride the narrow-gauge train from Durango to Silverton. At the end of May, we stopped for a week to visit family and friends near Denver. During this break, our RV costs dropped to zero no fuel or lodging expenses while we stayed with Kims mother and hung out with Mr. Money Mustache which allowed us to spend a little more on fun. Good thing too because Fort Collins has a great beer scene. We hit the road again in early June, making our way into Wyoming to visit Yellowstone and the Tetons. We zipped over to Idaho to spend time with Kims father in Sun Valley. From there, we drove north into Montana to lounge around Flathead Lake and explore Glacier National Park. Costs stayed low as we crossed Montana to enter the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota. After celebrating Independence Day in Deadwood, our average daily spending for the trip was about $84. We felt good about that number. Itd be nice if it were lower, but $42 per day per person seemed reasonable. At that rate, the trip would cost us $30,000 for the entire year. On July 8th, the tenor of our trip changed. So did our costs. We were cruising across the vast emptiness of central South Dakota when the motorhomes engine overheated. We pulled off to give it a rest. The oil level looked fine, but I added more just in case. It didnt help. An hour down the highway, the engine seized up completely. Turns out Bigfoot had spun a bearing and the engine was toast. (Also turns out that spun bearings are not uncommon with this particular engine.) Unfortunately, we were in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town was Plankinton, South Dakota (population 707). Fortunately, the folks in Plankinton were friendly. The owners of the local garage diagnosed the problem and ordered parts. Meanwhile, we got to know the owners of the only RV park in town. We spent ten days drinking beer with Plankintonians while exploring nearby attractions such as the Corn Palace and the real-life homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder. In the end, the engine repair cost $7751.39. Ouch! We did not count this against our daily trip budget but instead factored it into our overhead, much like we had with the purchase price of the RV. (You might choose to account for it differently.) The Expensive East When the new engine was ready, we waved good-bye to our new friends in Plankinton. We drove through Minnesota to Wisconsin, where we spent a week in the Great North Woods. (At the recommendation of world traveler Gary Arndt, whom we had lunch with near Milwaukee, we took a boat ride out to view the amazing Apostle Islands.) After eating our fill of Wisconsin cheese, we crossed into Michigans upper peninsula and then drove south to Indianas Amish country, where we rested for a week. (We also took the time to dart into Chicago for an overnight trip.) From there, we moved to Indianapolis and Cincinnati. As we made our way east, we noticed some interesting changes. First, there were fewer opportunities for boondocking. Theres less government-owned land in the East than there is in the West. (The western U.S. is largely government land, which means lots of places to camp for free.)Second, while gasoline prices were lower in the east, everything else was more expensive. RV parks were more expensive. Groceries were more expensive. Beer and wine were more expensive. Restaurants, especially, were more expensive. Our average daily spending started to creep upward. By the time we reached Ohio in mid-August, we were shelling out $120 per day again. After 150 days on the road, the average for the entire trip was $93.48 per day (or $46.74 per person). By this point it was clear that we couldnt spend a year on the road for our initial $24,000 budget. (You might, but we couldnt. Not while enjoying the lifestyle we wanted.) Even $30,000 for the year seemed unlikely. We revised our budget upward to $36,000 (or about $50 per person per day) not counting the expensive engine repair. We had plenty in savings, so we could afford to stretch some, but we still wanted to spend as little as possible. From Cincinnati, we traveled to beautiful West Virginia, then north to Cleveland. After that, we hopped over to Niagara Falls, where we camped for a few days at a winery. (We helped bottle brandy and bought a few bottles of wine in exchange for firewood and a place to park.) Stopping in Savannah During September, we sort of lost our steam. The enthusiasm wed had at the start of the trip petered out. Instead of exploring Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina, we holed up in the RV and worked. It might sound crazy, but we missed being productive and making money! Being hermits saved us money, of course, but we felt like we were wasting an opportunity. After much discussion, we decided to take a break. We spent a week driving around the eastern seaboard, looking for a place to park for the winter. We fell in love with Savannah, Georgia, so we rented a condo and put the RV in storage. For six months, we lived a relatively normal life. Kim found full-time work as a dental hygienist, and I launched Money Boss (which Ive been folding into Get Rich Slowly since re-purchasing this site). Our six months in Savannah were interesting. I had never lived outside of Oregon, so I suffered some culture shock. I always say that Im relatively conservative for the Portland area but that still makes me pretty liberal for anywhere in the southeastern U.S.! While in Savannah, we didnt just work. We made sure to have some fun too. Over Christmas, we flew to New York City for a long weekend, where we got to hang out with some of our favorite money bloggers. In February, we took a couple of weeks to tour the state of Florida, from Jacksonville to Tampa to Miami to Key West to the Kennedy Space Center. Important note: By this time nearly one year into our trip Kim and I had both started packing on the pounds. Sad but true. We were eating great food and drinking great beer everywhere we went, and we were out of our exercise routine. Not good. After returning from Florida, we began planning for our return trip to Potland. It had taken us six months to make it from the Pacific to Atlanta. It seamed reasonable to budget the same amount of time for heading home. Old Pros If this were a travel blog, Id cover the return trip in depth. A lot of fun stuff happened during our final three months on the road. But this is a money blog, and Im trying to focus this article on the financial side of our journey. As a result, Im going to gloss over a lot. Financially, not much exciting happened. From the start, the return leg felt different. For one thing, we were old pros at the whole RVing thing by this point. At the start of the trip, everything had been new and exciting and even a little scary. A year later, however, Kim and I had things down to a science. We were no longer freaked out by little problems. On our first day back on the road, one of our headlights went out. No problem! Kim promptly repaired it. The return trip felt different too because we spent less time with friends and family. While we did stop to see people along the way, we didnt have nearly as many contacts in southern states as we had in the north. Also, we spent much more time in state parks during the drive home. Traveling east, our camping spots had been varied. Sometimes, we parked in driveways of friends or family. Other times, we did drycamping on Forest Service land. Many of our campsites were located in Thousand Trails parks, which means they were essentially free. (Kim had access to an annual pass through her father.) But these options were few and far between in the Southeast, so we learned to love state parks, which are cheap and plentiful all over the United States. (State parks can get busy on holiday weekends, but otherwise are nearly empty especially midweek.) Finally, we changed the pace of our travel. On the outbound leg, we moved camp every two or three days. (We moved every 2.84 days, to be precise.) But going home, we intentionally slowed down. We tried to say four or five days in each location. (Until we picked up our puppy in Oklahoma about which, more in a moment we moved every 4.25 days.) In short, we stayed in each location nearly twice as long on our way west as we had on our way east. The Journey Home We had intended to spend six months driving home, just as wed spent six months getting to Savannah. That was the plan. We knew that our first two months would be spent carving an S through the southeastern United States. And, surprisingly enough, those two months went as we thought they would. We left Savannah at the end of March and drove to Asheville, North Carolina. (This town is like a training ground for hipster who arent ready for the West Coast, I observed.) We visited Dollywood and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Eastern Tennessee. We dallied a few days in Nashville home to the worst drivers we encountered on the entire trip (no joke!) where we had a lot of fun immersing ourselves in country music culture. I was pleased to see the Taylor Swift exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame! One of our favorite stops on the entire trip came in Lexington, Kentucky. For one, we got to hang out with friends for the first time in months. More than that, northern Kentucky is beautiful, filled with rolling green hills and horse pastures. Kim and I spent our fourth anniversary as a couple watching the races at Keeneland. And, of course, we sampled the Bourbon trail. [embedded content] From Kentucky, we drove west to St. Louis, then to central Missouri. My grandmother was born near Lake of the Ozarks, so I spent my time there trying to imagine what it must have been like for her as a girl 100 years ago. (By the way, did you know that the Ozark Mountains are the opposite of most mountains? Most mountains are formed when land thrusts up from the Earths crust. The Ozarks were formed by erosion when the vast inland sea that once occupied the space between the Rockies and the Appalachians drained away.) Our next stop was special. In late April 2016, we drove into northeast Oklahoma to visit my cousin Gwen and her family. She and her husband Henry moved from Oregon many years ago, and they now own a 100-acre creek hollow outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma. (Tahlequah has two claims to fame. First, its the endpoint of the Trail of Tears. Second, its the setting for Where the Red Fern Grows. In fact, one scene in the book takes place on my cousins property!) From Tahlequah, we doubled back on ourselves, turning east. This part of our trip was educational, to say the least. We got to see some of the poorer parts of the country. We spent a couple of nights in beautiful Hot Springs, Arkansas, for instance. Hot Springs was once a booming resort town, popular with tourists from the East Coast. Today, the downtown area is a hollow core of what it once was (although there are a lot of people doing their best to save it). Memphis was even worse. Kim and I spent several days in the Memphis area, driving down into Mississippi to travel the Blues Highway. This part of the U.S. is poor. Its infrastructure roads and services and so on is falling apart. It was shocking. (About a month after we drove the Blues Highway, we stayed a few days in Natchez, Mississippi, a few hundred miles south. Conditions in that region were even worse.) Our eastward extent ended in Huntsville, Alabama, where we enjoyed spending time with my college roommate and his boyfriend. From there, we headed south to the Gulf of Mexico, which we followed from Gulf Shores, Alabama to New Orleans. Kim and I loved southern Louisiana. The culture is distinct. The people are friendly. The food is amazing. It was here that we realized our favorite parts of the United States are those that retain a distinct character. You see, much of the U.S. has become homogenized. Indianpolis could be Orlando could be Sacramento could be Cleveland. No knock on any of these cities, but theres a sameness about them despite the unique aspects of each of them. Cities like Miami and New York and New Orleans, however, feel very different. Theyre unique. They have a unique culture, and they cling to it in the face of pressure to conform. As a result, theyre the most fun places to visit. (In each case, we believe this is because the population of these places is so diverse.) Our leg across the Mississippi to Houston was interesting. And frustrating. It was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend 2016, and the heavens opened up. It rained and rained and rained. Texas isnt equipped to handle so much rain. There was flooding everywhere, and roads became impassable. What ought to have been a five-hour drive to our campground turned into eight or nine hours of struggling to get where we wanted to go. We had to change plans and camp at the first place we could find with open space. As you know, Texas is h-u-g-e. I mentioned earlier that the United States is larger than most folks realize. Well, Texas is too. During our nearly two weeks there, we visited Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. Even with all of that driving, we barely scratched the surface of the state. The Home Stretch At this point, we were just over two months into our planned six-month return trip. We had planned to head toward west Texas, then revisit some of our favorite western spots from the previous year. That plan changed when: The couple who had been watching our condo in Portland found a home of their own. The extended housesitting gig worked out well for them because they were between places. It gave them time to be patient and purchase the perfect house. But once they found it, they were eager to leave. (And understandably so.) As a result, we needed to return to Portland sooner than anticipated.We got a dog. When wed stopped in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in late April, Kim fell in love with a litter of puppies. Can we take one home? she asked. At the time, I argued against it. But over the next few weeks, she whittled down my defenses. By the time we reached Dallas just a few hours from Tahlequah I agreed we could get a dog. So, after our time in Dallas, we returned to the 100-acre creek hollow where my cousin lives. We picked out our puppy (which we named Tahlequah, naturally) and spent a few days getting her used to the RV. When we felt like she was ready, we hit the road making a bee-line directly for home. But even when youre trying to make tracks in an RV, things still take time. Despite the fact that we were rushing the last part of the trip, it took us three weeks to get from northeastern Oklahoma to northwestern Oregon. We spent our first two nights with the puppy in tiny Kingman, Kansas. There, we enjoyed one of our favorite campsites: An entire country fairground where we were the only guests. We had the run of the place, which was awesome because we could get the puppy used to us and we could get used to her. Plus, the fairground was cheap cheap cheap. Note: By the way, we found this location with our copy of the book Free and Low-Cost Campgrounds, which was a godsend on the trip. Although were all accustomed to great cell service in cities, the reality is that most of the U.S. has shitty coverage. Theres just no need for it in sparsely populated areas, and most of the U.S. is sparsely populated. (This fact surprised me, by the way. For some reason, I thought the reality was population density but the opposite is true.) As a result, when youre doing an extended road trip, you need important info in print format. From Kansas, we drove through the most barren stretch of our entire trip eastern Colorado to visit Kims mother in Fort Collins (and to see our pal Mr. Money Mustache once more). Then we burned rubber (literallytwo of the RV tires started to fall apart!) to make it to her father outside Boise. We spent the last two days of the trip visiting my brother in central Oregon, then on 29 June 2016, we pulled into Portland. At long last, we were home. Culture Shock at Home Once Kim and I returned home, we experienced unexpected culture shock. After fifteen months of what was essentially an extended holiday (despite the fact we both worked in Savannah), normal life feltwell, normal life felt crazy. We were overwhelmed by the busy-ness of it all: the pace, the scheduling, all of the requests for time and attention. Why is this so tough for us? I asked after a couple of weeks at home. I dont know, Kim said. But it sucks. She was right. It did suck. About that time, I read Guardians of Being, a short book that mixes the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle with the animal art of Patrick McDonnell (from Mutts). Tolle, of course, is best known for his massive bestseller, The Power of Now, which encourages readers to get out of their heads and be more present in the moment. I was struck by this quote from Guardians: Most of us live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image making a world of thought. We are immersed in a continuous stream of mental noiseWe get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. While we were on the road, Kim and I lived in the Now. We were always present in the moment. We might have vague plans for where we wanted to be in a few days or a few weeks, but mostly we made things up as we went along. Where do you want to go next? Kim might ask, and then wed pick a spot. Where should we camp tonight? I might ask as we drove to the new town, and Kim would find a campground. What should we do for dinner? Should we visit that park? This site is awesome lets stay a few more nights. Nearly everything we did was spontaneous. We had no plans or commitments and it was wonderful. But back home, even without jobs to go to and few plans, the pace of modern life was staggering. We were always doing something with somebody. We scheduled appointments and anticipated commitments. We had to-do lists. We went to the gym three mornings a week, took the puppy to puppy classes, agreed to help colleagues, and so on. There was so much going on that there was never a chance to simply be present in the Here and Now. We had no margin in our lives. And the stuff! There was so much stuff! We had few possessions in the motorhome; we didnt miss what we did not have. At home, even though we had less than many folks, we were surrounded by tons of stuff. Tons of stuff! So many books! So many clothes! So many dishes! So much in every closet and cupboard. Kim and I were overwhelmed because we made a sudden transition from doing and having very little to doing and having a lot. All of the stuff and commitments comes with mental baggage. It takes brainwidth. Even after we had settled down, we found it tough to resume normal life. Kim went back to work four days a week as a dental hygienist. I resumed writing and giving speaking gigs. We did our best to return to our old lifebut it all felt wrong, like old clothes that no longer fit. So, we bought a place in the country. We have access to the city when we want it. Mostly, though, we stay at home and enjoy the relaxed pace with our ever-growing zoo. It feels good to not be racing around so much. It feels nice to just be, you know? Getting Rid of Bigfoot Aside from the culture shock, Kim and I faced another problem upon our return. We no longer needed a motorhome. It was time to sell our loyal companion. For some reason, we thought selling the RV would be simple. It wasnt. From the time we started the process which was eight or nine months after returning home it took a year to actually get rid of Bigfoot. We started by listing the rig on both Craigslist and RV Trader. Plus, I created a sales page that contained more information than we could fit in a normal advertisement. We waited. And waited. And waited. Nobody seemed interested. Maybe were asking too much, Kim suggested after a few months with zero responses. We had purchased the RV for $38,000, remember, and then spent nearly $8000 to replace the engine. By our reckoning, we had a $46,000 vehicle on our hands (and wed made other upgrades too!) so we wanted $40,000 in return. Nobody wanted to pay $40,000. We lowered the price to $38,000. As a result, we received a few email inquiries, but nobody came out to see the RV in person. We lowered the price to $35,000. We got more email inquiries, but still nobody wanted to view it. When we lowered the price to $32,000, we finally got a reasonable number of responses and had a few people come out to take a look at the motorhome. We also learned that the price wasnt the only thing holding people back. To us, the fact that Bigfoot had a new engine was a selling point. Turns out, thats a red flag to a lot of people. Their reasoning is that if the engine went out once, itll go out again. This baffles me, but thats what people were telling us. Weve got to get rid of that thing, Kim said last Christmas. I know, I said. Its an albatross. Lets lower the price to $30,000. After we lowered the price to $30,000, we immediately had buyers interested. We were flooded with email. One guy drove out right away to look at the RV. I cant have money for you until Monday, he told us. Will you hold it for me? Given our inability to sell the thing, you might think wed take him up on his offer. But we didnt. The next day, a couple drove seven hours from Sandpoint, Idaho to look at the motorhome. Weve been looking all over for a Bigfoot! they told us. After several hours of inspecting the rig, they made us an offer: $28,000. We accepted. After three years of ownership, we were rid of the RV. The Great Reckoning So, this is a money blog. The most important question to answer is: How much did this trip cost us? Great question. We dont have a precise answer, but Ill share as many numbers as I can so that you can decide whether a trip like this would be worth it for your family. Because Im a money nerd, I keep detailed stats on most of my life. The RV trip is no different. I have a spreadsheet with detailed trip info, and I published trip stats at my travel blog. Here are some highlights: During 283 days on the road, we spent 371.3 hours (15.5 days total!) driving the RV across the U.S. We put 17,250 miles on the motorhome and 17,718 miles on the Mini Cooper. Thats a total of 34,968 miles driven about 1.5 times the circumference of the Earth! Between the two vehicles, we drove an average of 120 miles per day.Everyone wonders about fuel efficiency in an RV. Well, it sucks. We had hoped to average 10 miles per gallon; we got 7.7. (No, replacing the engine didnt make things better.) The motorhome consumed 2202.6 gallons of fuel at an average price of $2.48 per gallon. It cost us 32 cents per mile to drive that beast and thats only counting gasoline.On the first leg of the trip, we spent a total of $17,137.07 for budgeted daily items. Fuel and routine maintenance for the motorhome and car ate up a third of that budget. Food (both groceries and restaurants) consumed another third. We spent $3086 on lodging, which works out to $16.24 per night. The remaining $2000 was spent on alcohol, fun, and miscellaneous expenses. (Our stats for the return leg werent as detailed.)About two-thirds of our nights were spent in campgrounds or RV parks. We drycamped 19% of the time on the way east (but not once on the way home). We spent 18% of our nights in somebodys home or driveway. We visited 38 states. We spent the most time in California (33 nights) and Colorado (25 nights). We loved them all.Arizona and West Virginia were the two most beautiful states we saw on our trip, although the area around Jackson, Wyoming was probably the single prettiest place. Charleston, South Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana had the best food (the Midwest had the worst) and Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown, New York had the best beer. The worst drivers? Orlando, Savannah, and especially Nashville. To me, the most important numbers is what Id call our base costs. These are the combination of gas and lodging, the costs for keeping the RV in action. During the first leg of our trip, our base costs were $35.09 per day (with an overall cost of $90.20 per day). During the second leg, our base costs were $41.25 per day (and I didnt keep track of total costs). How much you would spend beyond these base costs is, well, up to you. Obviously, we were spending an extra $50 to $60 per day, or about $25 to $30 per person. This includes food and fun but it does not include the cost of the RV and/or maintenance. (Our net cost for the RV was $10,000 $38,000 purchase price, $28,000 sale price plus the $7751.39 for engine replacement.) And dont forget that we spent about $2000 to furnish the RV before setting out, plus had to make miscellaneous repairs. My guess (and this is only a guess) is that our total cost for for the RV trip outside daily expenses was $23,500. This equates to about $80 per day. If you add this to our ongoing daily expenses, you get a total of $170 per day. Lets round that to $175 per day. [Note that these are corrected numbers. My original calculation of daily cost forgot the engine repair. Oops.] All told, to live like we did on the road which was living well it cost about $180 per day (or about $5400 per month) for two people. Im sure it can be done for less. And we met tons of people who spend much more. I realize that not everyone can afford this sort of adventure. Nor do many people have the ability to pick up and leave their lives for six or twelve or eighteen months. In other words, this isnt the sort of trip that everyone has the time and money to make happen. But for those who do have the resources, exploring the United States by motorhome can be relatively affordable especially if your engine doesnt need to be replaced! On the Road Again? Heres the thing: Our story is not unique. Theres this idea that RVing is only for old people with more time and money than sense. Sure, there are plenty of retired couples out there in brand-new $200,000 luxury motorhomes, but there are also a surprising number of younger couples on the road full time including couples with kids! Everyone we talked to reported the same thing: If youre careful, its perfectly possible to live large in a motorhome on a modest budget. There are plenty of awesome side-effects too. The trip strengthened my relationship with Kim. (If you can make things work in 245 square feet, you can certainly do it in a larger space!) It taught us that we need far less Stuff to live than we thought. The best side effect of all? Realizing just how awesome everybody is. Im not joking. The media has whipped us into a state of hysteria in this country. The Left hates the Right. The Right hates the Left. Nobody talks or takes time to understand the other side. Thats bullshit, to be honest. During our fifteen months away from Portland, we had two bad experiences and they werent even that bad. (Maybe the people were just having off days?) Universally, everybody was friendly and polite and fun. This morning, as I was finishing this article, Kim and I got to talking. Wouldnt it be fun to do a trip like that again? she asked. Maybe we should buy another RV. Haha. Maybe. I told her we should put it off until next year. Our adventure across the U.S. truly was the trip of a lifetime. What are you waiting for? If you too have always dreamed of an epic cross-country roadtrip, get cracking. Draw up a plan. Save your money. Make it happen. Shares 352 https://www.getrichslowly.org/us-by-rv/

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themoneybuff-blog · 6 years ago

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Exploring the U.S. by RV: The price of adventure

Shares 348 Two years ago today, Kim and I returned to Portland after fifteen months traveling the United States in an RV. Believe it or not, Ive never published an article about the trip and how much it cost. Although we kept a travel blog for most of the adventure (including a page that documented our expenses), Ive never gathered everything into one place. Until now. Today, I want to share just how much we spent on the journey and some of our favorite stops along the way. It seems like the perfect post to celebrate the start of summer, dont you think?

The Lure of Adventure All my life, Ive wanted to take a roadtrip across the United States. When I was young, I was lured by the adventure. I wanted to climb mountains, swim rivers, and explore canyons. The older I got, the more fascinated I became by the countrys regional differences. The U.S. is huge, a fact that most foreign visitors forget. Most American citizens dont even realize how big the country is. I wanted to see and experience it all. Although Ive dreamed of a cross-country roadtrip, its never been practical. As a boy, my family was poor. My parents didnt have money for something like this. As a young adult, I couldnt afford it either. For a long time, I was deep in debt. Besides, where would I find the time? I had to work! To top things off, my wife had zero interest in driving cross country. But in my forties, a curious set of circumstances came together to move my epic roadtrip from dream to reality. One day in early 2014, my girlfriend Kim asked me out of the blue, What do you think about taking a cross-country roadtrip? What did I think? Hell yeah! is what I thought Making a Plan As Kim and I began to discuss this adventure, our biggest concern was money. As a financial writer, Im acutely aware that every dollar I spend today is roughly equivalent to seven dollars I could have in retirement. Every day, I preach the power of saving. I wanted to keep our trip as cost-effective as possible. (Besides, Kim would have to quit her job as a dental hygienist in order to travel a huge financial sacrifice.) My goal was to keep our costs under $50 per person per day. In fact, I had high hopes we could do the trip for $33 per person per day (for a total of $24,000). But the U.S. is expensive. How could Kim and I make this happen? From the start, we knew hotels were out. Even cheap lodging would be far too expensive for us to stay within budget. Personally, I liked the idea of bicycling across the country like my friends Dakota and Chelsea have done. Kim wasnt keen on the idea. (Nor was she willing to make the trip by motorcycle despite being a die-hard Harley girl.) After a lot of research, and after talking with Chris and Cherie from Technomadia, I came to a conclusion: The best balance of cost and comfort would come from crossing the country in an RV. With this bare outline of a plan, the true trip prep began. Searching for Bigfoot After deciding to travel by RV, there were more questions to answer. Neither of us had experience with recreational vehicles. Among other things, we needed to figure out: Should we buy a truck and a trailer?Would it be better to buy a motorhome and tow my 2004 Mini Cooper?What about new or used? With used, you never know what youre getting. But a new RV costs $80,000 or more and loses value quickly.How much space did we need? What kinds of amenities? After crunching the numbers, there was an obvious best choice for us. If we bought a used motorhome, we could tow a car we already owned while (we hoped) avoiding a big hit from depreciation. In fact, if we were diligent every step of the way, it might even be possible to resell our RV after the trip and recoup most of what wed paid for it! We spent the autumn of 2014 patiently sifting through Craigslist ads for used motorhomes. We visited dealerships. We attended the local RV Expo. We walked through dozens of models searching for the right fit. Some were too long. Some were too short. Some were too fancy. Many were run-down and in a state of disrepair. Finally, in early January 2015, we found the perfect rig: a 2005 Bigfoot 30MH29RQ. (Translation: A 29-foot motorhome with a queen bed in the rear.) The owner wanted $38,000 for it a fair price. He wouldnt budge when I tried to negotiate, but I was okay with that. My research revealed he was actually selling a slightly better model, one worth a few thousand dollars more than he was asking. We bought it. [embedded content] Over the next two months, Kim and I prepped Bigfoot for departure. We spent $2000 making minor repairs and installing a towbar on the Mini Cooper. We cleaned the motorhome from top to bottom. We took weekend test trips to RV parks around Oregon and Washington. When all was said and done, wed invested $40,000 to get our caravan ready for the road. Into the West Kim and I left Portland on the morning of 25 March 2015, my forty-sixth birthday. We sped through Oregon we love the state, but were both familiar with it and entered northern California. We spent our first week on the road exploring the Redwoods and weaving through wine country.

Along the way, we got a crash course in driving a motorhome. Near Cloverdale, California we took a wrong turn onto a cliff-side gravel road. We stopped immediately. Good thing, too. Turns out a week earlier some other poor soul had driven his RV over the side of the cliff. East of Sacramento, we took another wrong turn and found ourselves driving down a narrow dike road during rush hour while high winds buffeted the RV. Very scary. At times we felt like Lucy and Desi in The Long, Long Trailer, but after a couple of weeks Kim and I had learned how to handle our motorhome, both on the road and off. [embedded content] Early in the trip, our expenses were out of sight. We ate out too often. We bought too much wine. We did too many touristy things without searching for discounts. We rationalized that since we were visiting all of these new places (and might never return), we might as well pay to experience them to the fullest. This was a once-in-a-lifetime adventure, after all. The problem, of course, was that lots of fun costs lots of money. Ten days into the trip, our average spending was over $120 per day (or over $60 per person per day) almost twice what wed hoped to spend. Yikes! We tightened the purse strings. We stopped eating out so much and cooked in the motorhome. (We cook a lot at home normally, so this wasnt a tough transition.) We bought a National Parks pass, perhaps the best purchase of our entire trip. (For an $80 one-time fee, you get one year of unlimited access to all sorts of government-owned sites.) We learned to entertain ourselves at night with books and boardgames and a hard drive filled with old movies and an iPad filled with comic books.

During our 33 days in California, we marveled at the states vast variety of terrain. We drove through forests and deserts, skirted ocean cliffsides and walked across mountain streams. We hated L.A. traffic not recommended when youre in a motorhome towing a car but enjoyed almost everything else.

We loved Arizona even more. Maybe we had low expectations, but we were blown away by the magnificent scenery of the Grand Canyon state. For nineteen days, we basked in the warm spring sun and admired the colorful rock formations.

It was in Arizona that we discovered the joys of drycamping (or boondocking). For the first seven weeks of our trip, we mostly stayed in RV parks and campgrounds. At $20 to $50 per night (with the average park costs around $35), lodging was our biggest expense by far. Drycamping costs nothing. All you do is find a spot where you can legally park for the night National Forest land, a friends driveway, certain businesses and casinos and set up camp. You dont have access to electricity or fresh water, but thats okay. The beauty of an RV is that its self-contained. (Our Bigfoot had a generator for electricity and a 63-gallon freshwater tank.)

After boondocking only once during our first 50 days on the road, we managed to live off the grid for 33 of the next 80 nights. Once we began pinching pennies, our travel costs plummeted. We werent spending $120 per day anymore. Our average daily spending fell to $50, which lowered the trip average to about $80 per day. A Costly Repair With all this frugality, did we feel like we were depriving ourselves? Not at all! As we made our way from Arizona to Utah to Colorado, we found we could still afford wine and an occasional restaurant meal. Plus, we were paying to do a lot of touristy things, such as soak in the hot springs in Ouray and ride the narrow-gauge train from Durango to Silverton. At the end of May, we stopped for a week to visit family and friends near Denver. During this break, our RV costs dropped to zero no fuel or lodging expenses while we stayed with Kims mother and hung out with Mr. Money Mustache which allowed us to spend a little more on fun. Good thing too because Fort Collins has a great beer scene.

We hit the road again in early June, making our way into Wyoming to visit Yellowstone and the Tetons. We zipped over to Idaho to spend time with Kims father in Sun Valley. From there, we drove north into Montana to lounge around Flathead Lake and explore Glacier National Park. Costs stayed low as we crossed Montana to enter the beautiful Black Hills of South Dakota.

After celebrating Independence Day in Deadwood, our average daily spending for the trip was about $84. We felt good about that number. Itd be nice if it were lower, but $42 per day per person seemed reasonable. At that rate, the trip would cost us $30,000 for the entire year. On July 8th, the tenor of our trip changed. So did our costs. We were cruising across the vast emptiness of central South Dakota when the motorhomes engine overheated. We pulled off to give it a rest. The oil level looked fine, but I added more just in case. It didnt help. An hour down the highway, the engine seized up completely. Turns out Bigfoot had spun a bearing and the engine was toast. (Also turns out that spun bearings are not uncommon with this particular engine.)

Unfortunately, we were in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town was Plankinton, South Dakota (population 707). Fortunately, the folks in Plankinton were friendly. The owners of the local garage diagnosed the problem and ordered parts. Meanwhile, we got to know the owners of the only RV park in town. We spent ten days drinking beer with Plankintonians while exploring nearby attractions such as the Corn Palace and the real-life homestead of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

In the end, the engine repair cost $7751.39. Ouch! We did not count this against our daily trip budget but instead factored it into our overhead, much like we had with the purchase price of the RV. (You might choose to account for it differently.) The Expensive East When the new engine was ready, we waved good-bye to our new friends in Plankinton. We drove through Minnesota to Wisconsin, where we spent a week in the Great North Woods. (At the recommendation of world traveler Gary Arndt, whom we had lunch with near Milwaukee, we took a boat ride out to view the amazing Apostle Islands.)

After eating our fill of Wisconsin cheese, we crossed into Michigans upper peninsula and then drove south to Indianas Amish country, where we rested for a week. (We also took the time to dart into Chicago for an overnight trip.) From there, we moved to Indianapolis and Cincinnati. As we made our way east, we noticed some interesting changes. First, there were fewer opportunities for boondocking. Theres less government-owned land in the East than there is in the West. (The western U.S. is largely government land, which means lots of places to camp for free.)Second, while gasoline prices were lower in the east, everything else was more expensive. RV parks were more expensive. Groceries were more expensive. Beer and wine were more expensive. Restaurants, especially, were more expensive. Our average daily spending started to creep upward. By the time we reached Ohio in mid-August, we were shelling out $120 per day again. After 150 days on the road, the average for the entire trip was $93.48 per day (or $46.74 per person). By this point it was clear that we couldnt spend a year on the road for our initial $24,000 budget. (You might, but we couldnt. Not while enjoying the lifestyle we wanted.) Even $30,000 for the year seemed unlikely. We revised our budget upward to $36,000 (or about $50 per person per day) not counting the expensive engine repair. We had plenty in savings, so we could afford to stretch some, but we still wanted to spend as little as possible. From Cincinnati, we traveled to beautiful West Virginia, then north to Cleveland. After that, we hopped over to Niagara Falls, where we camped for a few days at a winery. (We helped bottle brandy and bought a few bottles of wine in exchange for firewood and a place to park.)

Stopping in Savannah During September, we sort of lost our steam. The enthusiasm wed had at the start of the trip petered out. Instead of exploring Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and North Carolina, we holed up in the RV and worked. It might sound crazy, but we missed being productive and making money! Being hermits saved us money, of course, but we felt like we were wasting an opportunity. After much discussion, we decided to take a break. We spent a week driving around the eastern seaboard, looking for a place to park for the winter. We fell in love with Savannah, Georgia, so we rented a condo and put the RV in storage. For six months, we lived a relatively normal life. Kim found full-time work as a dental hygienist, and I launched Money Boss (which Ive been folding into Get Rich Slowly since re-purchasing this site).

Our six months in Savannah were interesting. I had never lived outside of Oregon, so I suffered some culture shock. I always say that Im relatively conservative for the Portland area but that still makes me pretty liberal for anywhere in the southeastern U.S.! While in Savannah, we didnt just work. We made sure to have some fun too. Over Christmas, we flew to New York City for a long weekend, where we got to hang out with some of our favorite money bloggers. In February, we took a couple of weeks to tour the state of Florida, from Jacksonville to Tampa to Miami to Key West to the Kennedy Space Center.

Important note: By this time nearly one year into our trip Kim and I had both started packing on the pounds. Sad but true. We were eating great food and drinking great beer everywhere we went, and we were out of our exercise routine. Not good. After returning from Florida, we began planning for our return trip to Potland. It had taken us six months to make it from the Pacific to Atlanta. It seamed reasonable to budget the same amount of time for heading home. Old Pros If this were a travel blog, Id cover the return trip in depth. A lot of fun stuff happened during our final three months on the road. But this is a money blog, and Im trying to focus this article on the financial side of our journey. As a result, Im going to gloss over a lot. Financially, not much exciting happened. From the start, the return leg felt different. For one thing, we were old pros at the whole RVing thing by this point. At the start of the trip, everything had been new and exciting and even a little scary. A year later, however, Kim and I had things down to a science. We were no longer freaked out by little problems. On our first day back on the road, one of our headlights went out. No problem! Kim promptly repaired it.

The return trip felt different too because we spent less time with friends and family. While we did stop to see people along the way, we didnt have nearly as many contacts in southern states as we had in the north. Also, we spent much more time in state parks during the drive home. Traveling east, our camping spots had been varied. Sometimes, we parked in driveways of friends or family. Other times, we did drycamping on Forest Service land. Many of our campsites were located in Thousand Trails parks, which means they were essentially free. (Kim had access to an annual pass through her father.) But these options were few and far between in the Southeast, so we learned to love state parks, which are cheap and plentiful all over the United States. (State parks can get busy on holiday weekends, but otherwise are nearly empty especially midweek.) Finally, we changed the pace of our travel. On the outbound leg, we moved camp every two or three days. (We moved every 2.84 days, to be precise.) But going home, we intentionally slowed down. We tried to say four or five days in each location. (Until we picked up our puppy in Oklahoma about which, more in a moment we moved every 4.25 days.) In short, we stayed in each location nearly twice as long on our way west as we had on our way east. The Journey Home We had intended to spend six months driving home, just as wed spent six months getting to Savannah. That was the plan. We knew that our first two months would be spent carving an S through the southeastern United States. And, surprisingly enough, those two months went as we thought they would. We left Savannah at the end of March and drove to Asheville, North Carolina. (This town is like a training ground for hipster who arent ready for the West Coast, I observed.) We visited Dollywood and Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Eastern Tennessee. We dallied a few days in Nashville home to the worst drivers we encountered on the entire trip (no joke!) where we had a lot of fun immersing ourselves in country music culture. I was pleased to see the Taylor Swift exhibit at the Country Music Hall of Fame!

One of our favorite stops on the entire trip came in Lexington, Kentucky. For one, we got to hang out with friends for the first time in months. More than that, northern Kentucky is beautiful, filled with rolling green hills and horse pastures. Kim and I spent our fourth anniversary as a couple watching the races at Keeneland. And, of course, we sampled the Bourbon trail. [embedded content] From Kentucky, we drove west to St. Louis, then to central Missouri. My grandmother was born near Lake of the Ozarks, so I spent my time there trying to imagine what it must have been like for her as a girl 100 years ago. (By the way, did you know that the Ozark Mountains are the opposite of most mountains? Most mountains are formed when land thrusts up from the Earths crust. The Ozarks were formed by erosion when the vast inland sea that once occupied the space between the Rockies and the Appalachians drained away.) Our next stop was special. In late April 2016, we drove into northeast Oklahoma to visit my cousin Gwen and her family. She and her husband Henry moved from Oregon many years ago, and they now own a 100-acre creek hollow outside Tahlequah, Oklahoma. (Tahlequah has two claims to fame. First, its the endpoint of the Trail of Tears. Second, its the setting for Where the Red Fern Grows. In fact, one scene in the book takes place on my cousins property!)

From Tahlequah, we doubled back on ourselves, turning east. This part of our trip was educational, to say the least. We got to see some of the poorer parts of the country. We spent a couple of nights in beautiful Hot Springs, Arkansas, for instance. Hot Springs was once a booming resort town, popular with tourists from the East Coast. Today, the downtown area is a hollow core of what it once was (although there are a lot of people doing their best to save it). Memphis was even worse. Kim and I spent several days in the Memphis area, driving down into Mississippi to travel the Blues Highway. This part of the U.S. is poor. Its infrastructure roads and services and so on is falling apart. It was shocking. (About a month after we drove the Blues Highway, we stayed a few days in Natchez, Mississippi, a few hundred miles south. Conditions in that region were even worse.) Our eastward extent ended in Huntsville, Alabama, where we enjoyed spending time with my college roommate and his boyfriend. From there, we headed south to the Gulf of Mexico, which we followed from Gulf Shores, Alabama to New Orleans.

Kim and I loved southern Louisiana. The culture is distinct. The people are friendly. The food is amazing. It was here that we realized our favorite parts of the United States are those that retain a distinct character. You see, much of the U.S. has become homogenized. Indianpolis could be Orlando could be Sacramento could be Cleveland. No knock on any of these cities, but theres a sameness about them despite the unique aspects of each of them. Cities like Miami and New York and New Orleans, however, feel very different. Theyre unique. They have a unique culture, and they cling to it in the face of pressure to conform. As a result, theyre the most fun places to visit. (In each case, we believe this is because the population of these places is so diverse.) Our leg across the Mississippi to Houston was interesting. And frustrating. It was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend 2016, and the heavens opened up. It rained and rained and rained. Texas isnt equipped to handle so much rain. There was flooding everywhere, and roads became impassable. What ought to have been a five-hour drive to our campground turned into eight or nine hours of struggling to get where we wanted to go. We had to change plans and camp at the first place we could find with open space.

As you know, Texas is h-u-g-e. I mentioned earlier that the United States is larger than most folks realize. Well, Texas is too. During our nearly two weeks there, we visited Houston, San Antonio, Austin, and Dallas. Even with all of that driving, we barely scratched the surface of the state. The Home Stretch At this point, we were just over two months into our planned six-month return trip. We had planned to head toward west Texas, then revisit some of our favorite western spots from the previous year. That plan changed when: The couple who had been watching our condo in Portland found a home of their own. The extended housesitting gig worked out well for them because they were between places. It gave them time to be patient and purchase the perfect house. But once they found it, they were eager to leave. (And understandably so.) As a result, we needed to return to Portland sooner than anticipated.We got a dog. When wed stopped in Tahlequah, Oklahoma in late April, Kim fell in love with a litter of puppies. Can we take one home? she asked. At the time, I argued against it. But over the next few weeks, she whittled down my defenses. By the time we reached Dallas just a few hours from Tahlequah I agreed we could get a dog. So, after our time in Dallas, we returned to the 100-acre creek hollow where my cousin lives. We picked out our puppy (which we named Tahlequah, naturally) and spent a few days getting her used to the RV. When we felt like she was ready, we hit the road making a bee-line directly for home.

But even when youre trying to make tracks in an RV, things still take time. Despite the fact that we were rushing the last part of the trip, it took us three weeks to get from northeastern Oklahoma to northwestern Oregon. We spent our first two nights with the puppy in tiny Kingman, Kansas. There, we enjoyed one of our favorite campsites: An entire country fairground where we were the only guests. We had the run of the place, which was awesome because we could get the puppy used to us and we could get used to her. Plus, the fairground was cheap cheap cheap. Note: By the way, we found this location with our copy of the book Free and Low-Cost Campgrounds, which was a godsend on the trip. Although were all accustomed to great cell service in cities, the reality is that most of the U.S. has shitty coverage. Theres just no need for it in sparsely populated areas, and most of the U.S. is sparsely populated. (This fact surprised me, by the way. For some reason, I thought the reality was population density but the opposite is true.) As a result, when youre doing an extended road trip, you need important info in print format.

From Kansas, we drove through the most barren stretch of our entire trip eastern Colorado to visit Kims mother in Fort Collins (and to see our pal Mr. Money Mustache once more). Then we burned rubber (literallytwo of the RV tires started to fall apart!) to make it to her father outside Boise. We spent the last two days of the trip visiting my brother in central Oregon, then on 29 June 2016, we pulled into Portland. At long last, we were home.

Culture Shock at Home Once Kim and I returned home, we experienced unexpected culture shock. After fifteen months of what was essentially an extended holiday (despite the fact we both worked in Savannah), normal life feltwell, normal life felt crazy. We were overwhelmed by the busy-ness of it all: the pace, the scheduling, all of the requests for time and attention. Why is this so tough for us? I asked after a couple of weeks at home. I dont know, Kim said. But it sucks. She was right. It did suck. About that time, I read Guardians of Being, a short book that mixes the philosophy of Eckhart Tolle with the animal art of Patrick McDonnell (from Mutts). Tolle, of course, is best known for his massive bestseller, The Power of Now, which encourages readers to get out of their heads and be more present in the moment. I was struck by this quote from Guardians: Most of us live in a world of mental abstraction, conceptualization, and image making a world of thought. We are immersed in a continuous stream of mental noiseWe get lost in doing, thinking, remembering, anticipating lost in a maze of complexity and a world of problems. While we were on the road, Kim and I lived in the Now. We were always present in the moment. We might have vague plans for where we wanted to be in a few days or a few weeks, but mostly we made things up as we went along. Where do you want to go next? Kim might ask, and then wed pick a spot. Where should we camp tonight? I might ask as we drove to the new town, and Kim would find a campground. What should we do for dinner? Should we visit that park? This site is awesome lets stay a few more nights. Nearly everything we did was spontaneous. We had no plans or commitments and it was wonderful. But back home, even without jobs to go to and few plans, the pace of modern life was staggering. We were always doing something with somebody. We scheduled appointments and anticipated commitments. We had to-do lists. We went to the gym three mornings a week, took the puppy to puppy classes, agreed to help colleagues, and so on. There was so much going on that there was never a chance to simply be present in the Here and Now. We had no margin in our lives. And the stuff! There was so much stuff! We had few possessions in the motorhome; we didnt miss what we did not have. At home, even though we had less than many folks, we were surrounded by tons of stuff. Tons of stuff! So many books! So many clothes! So many dishes! So much in every closet and cupboard. Kim and I were overwhelmed because we made a sudden transition from doing and having very little to doing and having a lot. All of the stuff and commitments comes with mental baggage. It takes brainwidth. Even after we had settled down, we found it tough to resume normal life. Kim went back to work four days a week as a dental hygienist. I resumed writing and giving speaking gigs. We did our best to return to our old lifebut it all felt wrong, like old clothes that no longer fit. So, we bought a place in the country. We have access to the city when we want it. Mostly, though, we stay at home and enjoy the relaxed pace with our ever-growing zoo. It feels good to not be racing around so much. It feels nice to just be, you know?

Getting Rid of Bigfoot Aside from the culture shock, Kim and I faced another problem upon our return. We no longer needed a motorhome. It was time to sell our loyal companion. For some reason, we thought selling the RV would be simple. It wasnt. From the time we started the process which was eight or nine months after returning home it took a year to actually get rid of Bigfoot. We started by listing the rig on both Craigslist and RV Trader. Plus, I created a sales page that contained more information than we could fit in a normal advertisement. We waited. And waited. And waited. Nobody seemed interested. Maybe were asking too much, Kim suggested after a few months with zero responses. We had purchased the RV for $38,000, remember, and then spent nearly $8000 to replace the engine. By our reckoning, we had a $46,000 vehicle on our hands (and wed made other upgrades too!) so we wanted $40,000 in return. Nobody wanted to pay $40,000. We lowered the price to $38,000. As a result, we received a few email inquiries, but nobody came out to see the RV in person. We lowered the price to $35,000. We got more email inquiries, but still nobody wanted to view it. When we lowered the price to $32,000, we finally got a reasonable number of responses and had a few people come out to take a look at the motorhome. We also learned that the price wasnt the only thing holding people back. To us, the fact that Bigfoot had a new engine was a selling point. Turns out, thats a red flag to a lot of people. Their reasoning is that if the engine went out once, itll go out again. This baffles me, but thats what people were telling us. Weve got to get rid of that thing, Kim said last Christmas. I know, I said. Its an albatross. Lets lower the price to $30,000. After we lowered the price to $30,000, we immediately had buyers interested. We were flooded with email. One guy drove out right away to look at the RV. I cant have money for you until Monday, he told us. Will you hold it for me? Given our inability to sell the thing, you might think wed take him up on his offer. But we didnt. The next day, a couple drove seven hours from Sandpoint, Idaho to look at the motorhome. Weve been looking all over for a Bigfoot! they told us. After several hours of inspecting the rig, they made us an offer: $28,000. We accepted. After three years of ownership, we were rid of the RV. The Great Reckoning So, this is a money blog. The most important question to answer is: How much did this trip cost us? Great question. We dont have a precise answer, but Ill share as many numbers as I can so that you can decide whether a trip like this would be worth it for your family.

Because Im a money nerd, I keep detailed stats on most of my life. The RV trip is no different. I have a spreadsheet with detailed trip info, and I published trip stats at my travel blog. Here are some highlights: During 283 days on the road, we spent 371.3 hours (15.5 days total!) driving the RV across the U.S. We put 17,250 miles on the motorhome and 17,718 miles on the Mini Cooper. Thats a total of 34,968 miles driven about 1.5 times the circumference of the Earth! Between the two vehicles, we drove an average of 120 miles per day.Everyone wonders about fuel efficiency in an RV. Well, it sucks. We had hoped to average 10 miles per gallon; we got 7.7. (No, replacing the engine didnt make things better.) The motorhome consumed 2202.6 gallons of fuel at an average price of $2.48 per gallon. It cost us 32 cents per mile to drive that beast and thats only counting gasoline.On the first leg of the trip, we spent a total of $17,137.07 for budgeted daily items. Fuel and routine maintenance for the motorhome and car ate up a third of that budget. Food (both groceries and restaurants) consumed another third. We spent $3086 on lodging, which works out to $16.24 per night. The remaining $2000 was spent on alcohol, fun, and miscellaneous expenses. (Our stats for the return leg werent as detailed.)About two-thirds of our nights were spent in campgrounds or RV parks. We drycamped 19% of the time on the way east (but not once on the way home). We spent 18% of our nights in somebodys home or driveway. We visited 38 states. We spent the most time in California (33 nights) and Colorado (25 nights). We loved them all.Arizona and West Virginia were the two most beautiful states we saw on our trip, although the area around Jackson, Wyoming was probably the single prettiest place. Charleston, South Carolina and Lafayette, Louisiana had the best food (the Midwest had the worst) and Ommegang Brewery in Cooperstown, New York had the best beer. The worst drivers? Orlando, Savannah, and especially Nashville. To me, the most important numbers is what Id call our base costs. These are the combination of gas and lodging, the costs for keeping the RV in action. During the first leg of our trip, our base costs were $35.09 per day (with an overall cost of $90.20 per day). During the second leg, our base costs were $41.25 per day (and I didnt keep track of total costs). How much you would spend beyond these base costs is, well, up to you. Obviously, we were spending an extra $50 to $60 per day, or about $25 to $30 per person. This includes food and fun but it does not include the cost of the RV and/or maintenance. (Our net cost for the RV was $10,000 $38,000 purchase price, $28,000 sale price plus the $7751.39 for engine replacement.) And dont forget that we spent about $2000 to furnish the RV before setting out, plus had to make miscellaneous repairs. My guess (and this is only a guess) is that our total cost for for the RV trip outside daily expenses was $23,500. This equates to about $80 per day. If you add this to our ongoing daily expenses, you get a total of $170 per day. Lets round that to $175 per day. [Note that these are corrected numbers. My original calculation of daily cost forgot the engine repair. Oops.] All told, to live like we did on the road which was living well it cost about $180 per day (or about $5400 per month) for two people. Im sure it can be done for less. And we met tons of people who spend much more. I realize that not everyone can afford this sort of adventure. Nor do many people have the ability to pick up and leave their lives for six or twelve or eighteen months. In other words, this isnt the sort of trip that everyone has the time and money to make happen. But for those who do have the resources, exploring the United States by motorhome can be relatively affordable especially if your engine doesnt need to be replaced!

On the Road Again? Heres the thing: Our story is not unique. Theres this idea that RVing is only for old people with more time and money than sense. Sure, there are plenty of retired couples out there in brand-new $200,000 luxury motorhomes, but there are also a surprising number of younger couples on the road full time including couples with kids! Everyone we talked to reported the same thing: If youre careful, its perfectly possible to live large in a motorhome on a modest budget. There are plenty of awesome side-effects too. The trip strengthened my relationship with Kim. (If you can make things work in 245 square feet, you can certainly do it in a larger space!) It taught us that we need far less Stuff to live than we thought. The best side effect of all? Realizing just how awesome everybody is. Im not joking. The media has whipped us into a state of hysteria in this country. The Left hates the Right. The Right hates the Left. Nobody talks or takes time to understand the other side. Thats bullshit, to be honest. During our fifteen months away from Portland, we had two bad experiences and they werent even that bad. (Maybe the people were just having off days?) Universally, everybody was friendly and polite and fun. This morning, as I was finishing this article, Kim and I got to talking. Wouldnt it be fun to do a trip like that again? she asked. Maybe we should buy another RV. Haha. Maybe. I told her we should put it off until next year. Our adventure across the U.S. truly was the trip of a lifetime. What are you waiting for? If you too have always dreamed of an epic cross-country roadtrip, get cracking. Draw up a plan. Save your money. Make it happen.

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