Stealth Bloggers

Tonight is our first night “Walmarting” in a commercial parking lot, overnighting for free with quasi-permission. We are in a (location undisclosed) parking lot in Kingston, New York, on our way up to Lake George (in the Adirondack mountain range). We’ll be there for at least a month, through the 4th of July and probably a bit beyond, depending on my sister’s travel plans.

It’s eerie, parking in a public place, being all stealthy and stuff. We closed the blinds. The store just closed, so the lot should empty out pretty soon. If worse comes to worst and the cops arrive to tell us to move along, even though a store employee gave permission, we will move up the road to the Wal-Mart. We avoided it this time because their lot is fairly small for a Wal-Mart and there simply wasn’t room for us to get in, much less to take up 8 parking spaces.

Also, their lot slopes quite a bit– here, the slope is gradual enough that we eventually got level.

However, one interesting effect of this stealth mode, aside from the standard things like not putting out lawn chairs and being on “boondocking” rules (which include not showering unless necessary and conserving water and power): I don’t feel comfortable putting up the satellite dish– I think it’s too conspicuous. As a result, I’m blogging on my laptop, but uploading via my cell phone. Sharing the cell phone connection is tenuous– we tried several times, but John had a lot of trouble and was only able to download mission-critical emails.

Limited Internet access means we’ll be less accessible until Sunday, and won’t be able to read blogs. As a result, I hope everyone has a terrific weekend– drop a message and let me know what you did, how your weekend went, when you get a chance!