Get back out into that wilderness around your place for a bit and decompress, Scott. Nothing like a healthy dose of Mother Nature to help the recharge process.

Glad you got back safely. Business travel and stress usually had the opposite effect on my waistline.

AZ - That pretty much sums it up. Jeannie didn't do too well this time around with me being out of the house. No issues just uncertainties of not being supported if there's a need. It's a bit remote where we live and dark at night. Good for viewing the milky way but unnerving if alone.

Desert - Oxford, ME is rural but much more populated than rural where we are. One day I got so tired after lunch I had to rest in the car for 1/2 hour. Drove around and couldn't find one little quiet spot to park. Everything accounted for. I finally found a corner in some municipal parking lot. Not ideal but it worked. We've already hit the mountains and will do so again tonight. Just to do a 2 mile walk and have dinner. Much of the crowds have calmed down now.

pj - Last trip I put on 6 Lbs which I expected to exceed this time. But the opposite happened for some reason. And I can't explain why either. With age I've lost my youthful ravenous appetite so I don't eat as much as I used to. I don't weigh 210 Lbs either.

Thanks all for the welcome back wishes. It's nice some people still retain a sense of community and can extend an olive branch. Helps take the edge of the current craziness.

The same thing happened in my area. 50 years ago, Chandler was a small farming community. Maricopa county as a whole was mostly farmland and desert. Now it looks like downtown LA. The fields I used to work in as a teenager have been turned into zillions of HOA subdivisions, all tan, brown and green painted stucco, huge shopping malls and freeways everywhere. The 100 miles between Phoenix and Tucson used to be mostly deserted. Now it is covered with housing developments and shopping malls. I can see a time in the not to distant future when Tucson and Phoenix will basically turn into one huge metropolitan area. I would love to move out of this area, but that is no longer possible. I put my house and life savings in a trust so my kids will get it, instead of allowing the government to steal it should I ever need to go into a nursing home. So I can't sell the house or get to the money, meaning I no longer have the resources to move. Being retired, I no longer need to worry about a job.

May have mentioned this in the past. If so I don't remember just when..

In high school (mid '50s) our history teacher did a good job of busting our bubble, telling the class one day that most of us would live to see a time when everything we took for granted in our society would have been lost or well on the way to being lost.

He said his predicted degradation of life in the States would come upon us slowly at first, based on a burgeoning future population and the unmanageable social pressures that would come with it, then with increasing rapidity - and there was nothing we could do to stop it. It would simply 'rot' us away from the inside out, kinda like cancer does to its victims. As students we didn't believe anything he said that day in our mid '50s history class could actually happen, thinking our teacher was out on a limb that in time would be sawed off.

The States, as we knew them back then, were booming economically. Things were on the upswing everywhere we looked. America had 'enemies' of course. No country in the world has no enemies. But the American mindset was positive. World War 2 was 10 years in our rear view mirror, and 'can do' people all across the country were getting big things done.

Even imagining a country different than what we knew back then just seemed nuts' to us. But little did we actually know.

Yet here we are, in today's out of control world, having just been chased out of Afghanistan with our tails between our legs, leaving hundreds behind that our leaders had promised to protect, after 20 years of mindless war that accomplished nothing and cost us everything.

And here on the home front, continent wide, things we once counted as mile markers of our 'American way of life' are going from bad to worse. So buckle your seat belts for we're seeing just the beginning of where this thing will end up, and it's not going to be pretty or get any better, at least not in our lifetimes..

What you are experiencing is happening everywhere. It's natural for people to want to get away from the 'rat race' ,move out to the country, get away from the hustle and bustle of city life. But they always bring it with them, don't they?
The rural areas fill up and then the cycle repeats, with those people moving further out and making their new quiet place more crowded. There is no escape!
I have been to some really remote areas where you would think no-one wants to live, and someone is building a house there. Come back the next year and another house is being built 200 feet away. The first people must be pissed !
As long as the population keeps growing, we will have this problem. Farmland turns to subdivisions and they turn into cities. New location, same problem.

As for predicting America's fate, many scholars saw the handwriting on the wall. As pointed out, America was too busy working, making money and enjoying a lifestyle that's now fallen into obscurity. Heeding the warnings wasn't emotionally or economically convenient. National Geographic published a silver hologram issue in Dec 1988 entitled Can Man Save This Fragile Earth?. It includes some sobering population graphs running out to 2050 (as I recall). With the knee of the exponential part taking its upward swing around 2020. I was sitting in the tub enjoying warm water and reading this issue. Never thinking that 2020 would come. Well now it's here and gone in a flash (or so it seems). That NatGeo issue is excellent so read it if you can. Three Dog Night recorded, "Out in the Country" and "Family of Man" which raised concerns about over population. Ten Years After recorded, "I'd Love to Change the World". All of these recordings provided insight into what was coming. Some visions from the early 70s now 50 years gone.

Sociologists have proposed a variety of explanations for the collapse of civilizations involving causative factors such as environmental change, depletion of resources, unsustainable complexity, invasion, disease, decay of social cohesion, rising inequality, secular decline of cognitive abilities, loss of creativity, and misfortune. I'd add over population, greed and corruption to the list. America is leaning hard on the 250 year mark and based on current conditions is on the endangered species list. The NatGeo question remains without an answer unless anyone here cares to respond.

So enjoy what's left, take XT bike rides, respect the land, each other, take only what you need and leave things as you found them. Most important, bend over and kiss your sweet ass goodbye.

I'm too old for this to mean much to, but I have 2 kids in their early 30s, and a 4 month old grandson. And I am deeply concerned about what kind of future they may be stuck with. I am actually more concerned more about the changes in government than the rest of it. Under the left we are becoming more and more of a dictatorship than a Constitutional Republic. They are using the Constitution as a floormat. Just look what is happening in Australia. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPK1fwJ_WwE