The Internet came fast, though it’s tempting to take it for granted and just absorb it as it comes along without having to faint and revive yourself.
A person can hop over to Craigslist to see what types of travel trailers and cheap RVs people have they want to sell in lordee-knows-where places he tried to forget exist in Texas. Pop off an email or two to the people doing the selling.
Exhaust that and pop over, shoot off an email to the USFS district handling the Gila Wilderness to find out the condition of this-or-that trail nobody in his right mind would use. Whether a particular trail has been cleared enough to a particular spot to allow a mountain bike to use it.
Pop over to Google maps for a quickie satellite look at a mountain or three, reboot the machine to clear the memory when things start to die.
Pop to dogpile.com to do a search of bicycle forums and discussion boards to see what mountain bikes are costing and what people are saying about them. Then another search or two to find out how much weight a burro could be expected to carry. Whether anyone’s got a notion about them as riding animals and the maximum weight of the person they could carry under particular conditions.
Spang, another websearch to DIY sites looking for ideas for load carrier devices people have put together on bicycle frames, or using bicycle wheels.
Doesn’t appear to be any limit to it. However obscure and esoteric the interest, there’s somone, somewhere on the Internet thinking along the same lines who’s already done some of the heavy thinking.
The neighbor up the hill tells me people are putting together 3D printers in their garages allowing them to duplicate anything that’s ever been manufactured. Putting what they do up on the Internet so other people can manufacture the same thing somehow. Some guy making a crescent wrench that works from his old crescent wrench and a printer.
It’s no wonder the governments of the world are suspicious and concerned. With things like that going on there’s no predicting what will come of it. People might get used to thinking and begin to make a habit of it.
About a century ago two bicycle mechanics put something together the scientific community was busy agreeing couldn’t be done. Without any help they took a manned heavier-than-air flight convincing enough to turn everything upside down.
Didn’t even have computers and the Internet. If they’d had those someone might have been able to convince them they couldn’t do it. Or everyone and his dog would have been making one in his garage.
When I came across this picture on the web a while back I was fairly certain I recognized it. I believed and still believe it’s the truck belonging to the man and wife wood cutter couple murdered in Catron County, New Mexico while I was working Fox Mountain. An incident I described in loving detail in the Adams Diggings book. They were found several months later, a bear having dug them up where they were folded yinyang style into a 4’x4’x4′ grave in an ancient ruin site.
So Far From Heaven 