We've had a nice break here at the ranch, but it's time to get on the road and aim for the east coast. Our boxes are stacked in the storage shed, Britt's scanned a bunch of slides he wants to webbify, and I'm nearly over a nasty cold that's discouraged any thoughts of heading out early. Last night we had a bonfire on a hillside out in the horse pasture; maybe our next bonfire will be on a beach somewhere.
Having no fixed address means certain complications, and we just experienced one of them -- call it a preview of what lies ahead. Since we expect to be cruising from place to place, we signed up with a mail service which caters to cruisers: we have our mail sent to their address, and then periodically we can contact them by phone or email, and they send whatever mail we've accumulated (minus the junk mail, hurray!). On Saturday, our first packet of mail arrived.
The problem was that back in mid-February, a big deposit we thought we made into a savings account actually went into a checking account. If we'd been getting mail like ordinary people, we would have been alerted when we got our account statements in early March, and been able to fix things then. So,our credit card payment, which is automatically sucked out of the savings account each month, didn't go through because of insufficient funds -- and we didn't find out about any of this until Saturday. Fortunately, a few minutes on the phone with our credit union's automated phone service, and another few minutes with the credit card's 800 number, cleared things up. But the prospect of problems like this in the future, when we may have even longer periods of time without mail, and we might not be able to make inexpensive long-distance calls, is making us think carefully about how we will handle our banking in the future.