For the past four years, enthusiasts across America have been living a nightmare after their states decided that their legally imported cars were no longer able to be driven on the road. Enthusiasts have banded together, working with their lawmakers to enact change. Now, fans of imported cars in Colorado might get the biggest victory against car bans in America since 2019. Colorado just passed a bill that would legally protect tiny cars imported from Japan from being banned by the DMV. Now, it just needs to be signed by Colorado Governor Jared Polis.

The folks of Colorado have been through a lot in the past year. Back in 2024, enthusiasts in the state claimed that the Colorado DMV had “shadow-banned” legally imported cars and trucks. The state didn’t have any published policy banning these cars, but enthusiasts reported that DMV offices simply refused to register their cars without explanation. Others reported being denied emissions testing, which meant that they could not renew their registrations.

Then, in December, the Colorado DMV decided to make its shadow policy a public-facing policy, but it was met by heavy pushback from enthusiasts. The state gave up on making its policy official and instead just went back to banning cars quietly.

Now, the rollercoaster might be coming back into the station because Colorado just passed HB25-1281. If signed by Colorado Governor Jared Polis, the nightmare will end for the owners of tiny Japanese Kei vehicles in Colorado. But this win will be even bigger than that. Since 2019, no state has protected imported cars by passing a law. If Colorado does this, it can be a signal that states are not interested in the bans being pushed by the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, car dealer associations, and state police.

Colorado’s Doing The Right Thing

If Gov. Polis signs HB25-1281, Colorado will become the first state to pass a law that beats AAMVA’s harsher recommendations and do so without silly gotchas like the Georgia bill has in it. Colorado can also become a roadmap for enthusiasts in other states to follow, too.

Here’s what the situation is like in Colorado right now, from my previous report:

According to [Colorado Public Radio], enthusiasts are still reporting that they’re not being allowed to register or emissions test their vehicles. The effect of this is that the state is running out the clock on the registrations of Kei vehicles. This makes the cars illegal to drive since the owners cannot renew their registrations without a valid emissions test. The state also refuses to give these vehicles OHV registration, so they’re effectively banned from roads – again, car-sized paperweights.

CPR spoke with one Colorado JDM owner, Ryan Albarelli, who told a frustrating story about being able to register a 1990 Honda Acty, but the state subsequently refused to emissions test it. Other folks online report similar stories.

Sadly, this strategy of a quiet ban isn’t anything new with Colorado. Enthusiasts in some counties haven’t been able to register Kei vehicles for a long time. Others who did get registrations haven’t been able to emissions test their vehicles, which meant they eventually became illegal to drive even if registered. Enthusiasts have been calling this a “shadow ban” since the state doesn’t have anything official noting the ban.

CPR‘s report also found out who supports Colorado’s ban. Many readers have suspected that the side-by-side/ATV lobby is fighting for the banning of imported cars. Yet, at least in Colorado, major supporters of the ban have been the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association and the Colorado State Patrol. Colorado has attempted to legalize imported vehicles in 2015 and 2016, but both bills failed. Here’s what the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association said when it opposed legalizing Keis in the past, from CPR:

Both groups declined to comment on the coming bill from Hinrichsen. But Tim Jackson, former president and CEO of the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association, said the arguments against legalizing kei vehicles at the state level boil down to two issues: pollution and safety.

“It does set up a two-tier system on both emissions and safety, and I think it contradicts everything that Colorado as a state has been trying to do,” Jackson said, referencing Colorado’s various efforts to improve road safety and clean up the state’s dirty air. Older kei trucks, including Albarelli’s Honda, lack modern systems like fuel injection that lower emissions.

Colorado’s current ban is also a bit harsher than other states. As of now, if you own a vintage military Jeep in Colorado, the state says you should not be eligible for registration for use on the road or on public trails. Meaning, if you own an old surplus military vehicle, the state says you can only use it on private property.

Thankfully, it seems Colorado has had enough of this nonsense. On February 20, HB25-1281 Title Register & Drive Kei Vehicles, was introduced into the Colorado House. The bill’s prime sponsors are William Lindstedt – D, Rep. Larry Don Suckla – R, Sen. Nick Hinrichsen – D, and Sen. Byron Pelton – R. Here’s the bill’s most recent summary:

A kei vehicle is the smallest road-legal, 4-wheeled vehicle in Japan and is imported into the United States as a used vehicle. The bill defines a kei vehicle as a motor vehicle for the purposes of the “Uniform Motor Vehicle Law” and the “Certificate of Title Act”. These acts govern issuing a certificate of title, registering a motor vehicle, and the rules of the road for motor vehicles. The bill authorizes a kei vehicle to operate on the roads and requires a kei vehicle to be issued a certificate of title, be registered, and obey motor vehicle traffic laws.

Driving a kei vehicle on a roadway that has a speed limit greater than 55 miles per hour or on a limited-access highway is prohibited.

For emissions testing, a kei vehicle is tested not using a dynamometer but using a 2-speed idle test. The vehicle must pass the emissions standards for the year it was manufactured.

The department of revenue, the Colorado state patrol, and the agents or contractors of these agencies may not require a vehicle to have an inspection because it is a kei vehicle or has the design or manufacturing parameters of a kei vehicle. And a kei vehicle may not be declared not roadworthy because of its design or manufacturing parameters.

Kei vehicles are included in the motor vehicle dealer and powersports vehicle dealer statutes, and this requires a person to be licensed as a dealer to sell kei vehicles at retail.

The bill would also create a new class B traffic infraction for driving a Kei vehicle on a road faster than 55 mph. One of the motivating factors in the bill is that the state has the opportunity to make some money. If passed, the bill will cost the state a one-time expenditure of $101,000 to reprogram state computer systems and to issue every Kei in the state a fresh 17-digit VIN. From there, proponents of the bill expect the state to make back $93,000 of that within two years on registrations alone and for the legalization of Keis to be technically profitable afterward.

The Cause Of Woe

I’ve been reporting on the car bans spreading across America since 2021. If you haven’t been following this saga, I’ll bring you up to speed. If you’re a regular reader, skip forward!

The United States government bans the legal entry of a car that’s under 25 years old unless that vehicle is converted to comply with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. That process is horrendously expensive and cannot be done by anyone. It effectively ensures that the average enthusiast waits more than two decades to buy their dream cars.

The American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, a non-governmental, non-profit lobbying organization run by DMV administrators and law enforcement officials in all 50 states, Washington D.C., Canada, the Virgin Islands, and Mexico, has been waging a war against legally imported cars.

Tiny imported vehicles appeared on AAMVA’s radar back in the 2000s, when states began wondering what to do with the speed-restricted off-road-only trucks that people were importing. American officials call these trucks “mini-trucks” and they’re limited to 25 mph and were never intended nor imported for road use. Some folks drove them on the road, anyway. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety crash-tested mini-trucks and found that they weren’t as safe as compact trucks built to FMVSS. In response to research, AAMVA recommended members ban mini-trucks from their roads. Many states obliged.

The organization then apparently discovered that Americans are also importing Kei cars, or the smallest class of road-legal vehicles of Japan. These cars, trucks, and vans often have top speeds as high as 83 mph and are designed for road use. The newest Keis that are legal to import can even be found with airbags.

In 2021, AAMVA announced its strictest guidance yet. The organization recommended that its members ban all vehicles not originally built to FMVSS. That includes every vehicle, regardless of country of origin and regardless of actual size. It’s everything from Kei trucks and BMW wagons to giant buses. AAMVA also took a swipe at vintage military vehicles like WWII Jeeps and Humvees, too, and recommended that those also be removed from the road.

Maine was the launch state for the new bans. The state went through the process to pass a law banning every vehicle not built to FMVSS. Readers have told us that the state’s enforcement of the law has been poor, but the law is still on the books.

Since then, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Colorado, Michigan, Illinois, Texas, and Massachusetts have either banned Japanese imports or have otherwise restricted them in some way. Enthusiasts have fought back either through lawsuits or by working with regulators. In 2024, Texas became the first state to win the battle against the new rules when enthusiasts successfully convinced TXDMV to reverse its Kei ban. Enthusiasts in Michigan and Massachusetts scored their major wins after.

Georgia is also on the cusp of something resembling a victory, as that state recently passed a bill that technically legalizes Kei cars. However, when you read that bill, you’ll realize that the state wants to make Keis about as legal as golf carts, which really isn’t a win in the long run.

The Importance Of Passing A Law

There is a sad twist to all of this, and it’s that while Texas, Michigan, and Massachusetts did score real, huge victories, the job is only halfway done. Enthusiasts in those states only succeeded in reversing DMV policies. Their states still do not explicitly allow Kei vehicles per their laws. As a result, a successive DMV administrator could easily just reinstate the bans in those states at a future date.

Even if your state doesn’t ban Keis, not having a law that explicitly allows imported cars means that your car is technically in legal limbo. Your DMV may one day decide to ban your car, and you’ll find yourself in the same situation too many of us are in right now.

As enthusiasts in Maine have learned, it’s much harder to overturn a law than it is a policy. So, it’s best to have a law that works in your favor than to have to fight a negative one. The end goal is to get imported vehicles explicitly allowed in law. In 2019, enthusiasts in North Carolina successfully lobbied for the passage of a law that allows both Kei cars and mini-trucks to access roads up to 55 mph. When AAMVA launched its harsher recommendations in 2021, North Carolina did not follow the lead of other eastern states.

Sadly, Colorado’s bill doesn’t help vintage Jeep owners, but it would still be a huge win. If Gov. Polis signs the bill into law, and he is expected to, it will be significantly harder to ban Keis in Colorado. Gov. Polis has reportedly said that he is “excited to expand consumer choice to affordable vehicles and looks forward to supporting kei freedom.”

If this win goes through, it’ll be another perfect demonstration of the power of collaboration. Instead of treating the government as an enemy to be destroyed, enthusiasts teamed up with their lawmakers to enact change. This method was pioneered by the folks in North Carolina and Texas, then proven to work again in Michigan and Massachusetts. So, if you happen to live in a state where your favorite vehicle is banned, consider getting a group together and reaching out to every lawmaker who will listen. That’s what we plan to do in Illinois.

The post Colorado May Become The First State In Years To Pass A Law Winning The Battle Against Imported Car Bans appeared first on The Autopian.

The world of shipping is a magical thing. The world is full of ships, aircraft, trucks, and trains working in concert to deliver the goods, regardless of whether they’re a simple letter or a ginormous power transformer. If you have a ridiculously heavy and large piece of equipment and you’re shipping it by rail, there’s a chance that it might end up on something called a Schnabel car. But this isn’t any normal railcar. The art of the Schnabel car is that it actually turns your cargo into a whole train car, where the cargo itself becomes a load-bearing structure complete with two dozen axles.

There are just under a few dozen Schnabel cars in the United States. Due to their rarity and their special use case, many railfans may never see a Schnabel car in action in years, if not decades, of chasing trains down the rails. For many railfans, catching a Schnabel on the rails in real life is like finding the holy grail.

Despite their rarity, Schanabel cars exist for a critical reason. According to the United States Energy Information Administration, this country is home to 12,538 power plants generating at least 1 megawatt of power. The American power grid is supported by over 500,000 miles of high-voltage transmission lines and another 5 million miles of distribution lines. That alone is mind-boggling, but there’s one more vital component to keeping the lights on and it’s the large-power transformer (LPT). These specially-constructed units, which can cost over $7 million a piece and weigh around 440 tons (970,030 pounds) or more, are used to step up or step down power along the line. If an LPT fails, it can cause an electrical service interruption and costly damage.

As Forbes reported in 2014, LPTs are made to order and are heavily customized, so there isn’t a supply of them just sitting in a warehouse waiting to be shipped. But when an LPT does need to make its way to an American locality, there’s really only one way to deliver it, and it’s by rail.

However, this presents a problem. As the United Pacific Railroad notes, standard flatcars are up to 89 feet long and can carry up to 202,000 pounds. For extra-heavy loads, there are also specialty flatcars and depressed-deck cars designed to carry up to 740,000 pounds of cargo. TTX Company, a railcar pooling provider, says these extra heavy-duty cars will often be used to support power generation, including: “Boilers, turbines (including wind energy hubs and nacelles), electrical transformers, pressure vessels, and shipments that frequently require special handling and train operations.”

But what if you have something that’s even heavier? Or what if you have something that’s so huge that it can’t fit on even a heavy-duty railcar? For those mammoth loads, you need an equally colossal, dedicated rail platform. That’s the Schnabel car, pictured above, and without it, American energy would be very different.

Nearly A Century Of Heavy Hauling

Finding history on the Schnabel car has been rather difficult, but reporting from Trains.com has helped. The Schnabel car appears to have been invented in the early 1930s in Germany. The word “Schnabel” comes from the German term “tragschnabelwagen,” which roughly translates to carrying-beak-wagon. Vintage tragschnabelwagens looked like two bird beaks connecting a large piece of equipment together and suspending it over a track.

The earliest image I could find of a tragschnabelwagen is the one above, which depicts a Schnabel wagon carrying a Karl-Gerät self-propelled mortar in 1945 during World War II. French forces also used Schnabel cars to carry their own heavy gear.

The earliest mention that I’ve found of a Schnabel car here in America is in 1958 from Westinghouse. That year, the company said that the Schnabel car was an important breakthrough as it allowed the company’s power transformers to grow large enough to handle 450,000 kVA. Back then, Westinghouse transformers weighed 250 tons and no other railcars were able to carry the gigantic beasts. That car was known as WECX 200, and it was built by Greenville Steel Car Company of Greenville, Pennsylvania in 1957. Railfans consider it to be the first Schnabel car in America.

How It Works

The concept of the Schnabel car back then was similar to how it is today. The railcar is actually two separate railcars with several axles. Attached to these railcars are two massive lifting arms. When these cars are empty, the two arms are bolted together, forming one giant railcar.

When it comes time to carry a load, the equipment is bolted to the lifting arms, and then the arms lift the equipment off the ground. Once the equipment is lashed up, the two Schnabel car ends and the equipment become one rigid railcar. In practice, it means that the piece of equipment being hauled is bearing a heavy structural load as if it were a railcar.

If, for whatever reason, the load cannot bear the weight of being a train car, there is an easy fix. An operator may insert a bridge into the lifting arms, pictured above, creating what’s essentially a super extra large depressed-deck car. However, there’s way more to a Schnabel car than that.

Since Schnabel cars carry hilariously huge and heavy loads, they’re highly specialized freight vehicles. The railcar can’t have what’s more or less a million pounds of weight centered on small patches on the rails, so Schnabel cars spread out the weight of the load across dozens of axles. The largest Schnabel car in the world, the WECX 801, built by Kasgro Railcar in Pennsylvania in 2012, has a total of 36 axles and weighs 880,967 pounds (399.6 tons) all on its own. That’s wild when you remember that these cars can then carry a single piece of equipment weighing in at a million pounds on its own. WECX 801 is so huge that it’s one of the largest railcars in the world.

One special feature of some Schnabel cars is that the arms actually sit on pivots and can use hydraulic rams. These allow the arms to move the load to the outside of a turn or help the train crew move the load to clear crossing gates, trees, signals, switches, or other obstacles that may be in the way. This is a bigger deal than you might think. A loaded Schnabel car may be as long as 300 feet or so, and that makes turns quite dramatic. If a load on a Schnabel car takes a turn on a line with two tracks, the overhang may be so huge that the load actually crosses over the entire second track during the turn.

WECX 801 is capable of shifting its load 40 inches laterally and 44 inches vertically. These movements happen shockingly slow, so slow that you might not even notice them happening.

Special Operations

If this sounds like a delicate and crazy operation, you’re not wrong. These cars also carry reactor containment vessels, generators, oil refinery towers, and anything else that’s way too huge and way too heavy to go onto a regular railcar.

BNSF Railway says that shipping something on a Schnabel car calls for a special operation. Schnabel cars are given their own special train consists.

These trains will have the pulling locomotive, the Schnabel car, and support and tool cars. They also commonly have a caboose for the train crews that need to monitor and run the train and the Schnabel car. That crew may also have mechanics and welders who can fix the train in the field if something goes wrong.

But that’s it. You won’t find a Schnabel car as a part of a regular freight train.

BNSF notes that the Schnabel cars it runs for clients permit a maximum height of 19’9″ and a maximum width of 13’1″. This substantial size means that the railroad has to plan anywhere from months to a year before a move can happen with a Schnabel car. During that time, the railroad will ensure that the load can actually fit under bridges, around curves, and through grade crossings without causing havoc. Routing is also cleared through the Railway Industrial Clearance Association.

When it’s finally go time for the move, the train will also go slowly. Some Schnabel car movements go as slow as 10 mph, while faster moves are still a leisurely 25 mph. Due to this slow speed, it can take a railroad a week or longer to deliver a load through a Schnabel train.

Other kinds of Schnabel cars include a one-piece lifting arm design that more or less “hugs” the load above the ground. There’s another one-piece design that has the appearance of a depressed-deck car that was scaled up in Photoshop. But these two other types are less common.

Chances are that most reading this piece may never see a Schnabel car. There are fewer than 100 Schnabel cars in the entire world right now, and their owners, typically private companies contracting railroads to haul the loads, use them only when needed. Keep in mind that a gigantic transformer moving at just 25 mph is going to slow down a railroad’s operation. Many other companies also get by just fine by hauling their loads on specialized semi-tractors or in much faster aircraft when such is possible.

Still, Schnabel cars fall into a sort of niche, but a very important one. They are just one major cog in the wheel of American power generation and heavy logistics. But, even if you ignore that, these railcars are also just seriously cool. If you’re a railfan or even just tangentially interested in trains, keep your eyes peeled. Maybe one day a Schnabel will roll slowly through your town.

The post Some Of The Wildest Trains Carry Million-Pound Equipment By Converting Them Into Gigantic Train Cars appeared first on The Autopian.

Motorsport has existed almost as long as cars themselves. It comes in all sorts of forms—there are rallies, circuit races, and even big smoky burnout competitions. China has never been a big innovator in this space, but I think that might be about to change. That’s because a new Chinese motorsport has been appearing all over social media this week.

The concept is simple, yet brilliant. Dig a big, conical pit. Line it with concrete. Fill it with slippery, foamy water. Competitors are then challenged to drive into the pit and attempt to make their way out. All manner of carnage then ensues. Vehicles slip, they slide, and occasionally over-rev to the point of major engine damage. I even spotted one glorious example of a G-Class ripping itself to bits in a desperate attempt to exit.

I don’t know what you even call this. The pit of without grip? Foamplay? Scrubba-dubba-don’t? It’s times like these I really wish I could speak and read Chinese.

This is great stuff. 18 minutes of low-grip glory.

Thanks to the segregation between Chinese and Western social media, it’s difficult to parse out many details on this sport.  My research indicates it’s a relatively new phenomenon—videos popping up across Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube have all been posted in the last few weeks.

Most videos appear to have been shot at an off-road show in Shanxi Province, China. The pit itself is referred to as the Shanxi Cornucopia by YouTube channel Tank Firing Gameplay, which has posted a number of videos from the colorful and eye-catching foam crater.

The infuriating thing is that everyone shooting this event apparently felt the need to use vertical video. 

The English narrator called this the Scrubbing Pan Off-Road Show in Shanxi China. I don’t think that’s what it was really called.

Escaping the pit is difficult by design. The foamy, soapy water massively reduces traction, meaning it’s very difficult to simply drive up the steep sides of the pit. After failing the easy route out, most drivers instead attempt to round the pit in circles of ever-increasing diameter, slowly climbing the walls. This can go amusingly wrong when the driver loses traction at high speed.

Many videos cut off before success. One presumes some drivers fail to exit and end up having to be towed out in disgrace.

Risks to the vehicle are numerous. Beyond crashing, there’s also a serious risk of hydrolocking your engine when driving through the water, particularly at speed. Overrevving the engine and causing damage is also plausible if one isn’t careful. Since escaping the pit usually requires high speeds, it can be difficult for drivers to stop before hitting barriers outside the pit, too.

What’s great is that vehicles of all types get involved. Videos show everything from chunky SUVs to tiny microcars getting in the pit. I’ve even seen at least one example of a semi-truck going down to taste the foam, too.

There is also a further enticing twist on this spot. There is apparently a version played in a muddy pit instead of a foamy one. YouTube videos showing this raucous variation appear to have been shot in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. Given Wuhan’s enduring notoriety for other reasons, it might be hoped that the mud pit antics make it well known for new reasons.

After four minutes in the pit, this driver figures out the trick—driving in circles to get out. They make it over the lip of the pit… only to hit a dirt berm and slide straight back into the depths. It’s great stuff.

 

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Some drivers get out by going backwards.

Finding these videos is easy enough. You can just search “china foam pit” or similar terms. In the meantime, I’m just gonna call it foampittery until the Chinese government (or a dual-language speaker) advises me of a more realistic English term.

I don’t believe the sport of foampittery is officially sanctioned by the FIA or any other major governing body (I didn’t bother to query them as they don’t appreciate silly questions). This is more like Australia’s informal burnout contests, or the massed Altima racing of the United States.

This video notes the existence of mud pits in Chongqing and Guizhou. It may be that the muddy version of this sport existed prior to the concrete-and-foam variant. 

I reckon it’s a new grassroots motorsport China can be proud of, and perhaps even export to the world. Given how popular it’s been on social media this week, expect to see this at every mudboggin’ off-road show in years to come.

Image credits: My Country Life via YouTube screenshot, Tank Firing Gameplay via YouTube screenshot

The post Chinese Off-Roaders Have Taken Muddin’ And Somehow Made It Clean appeared first on The Autopian.

It’s a universal modern-life experience to talk about something and immediately see an ad that seems like it must be a result of that conversation. Maybe you tell someone you’re planning a vacation and then start seeing advertisements for flights and hotels. Maybe you talk about how you want to take up running and find yourself bombarded by banners hawking sneakers. Perhaps you open up about how tough it is to be single and notice a series of sponsored posts about dating apps. When this happens, you might suspect your phone is “listening to your conversations.”

This belief is false and paranoid. We do not live in some tech dystopia in which our smartphones clandestinely use their mics to pick up every word we say and then feed us commercial messages based on them. The truth is simpler and not at all alarming: your phone only seems to be listening to you because it’s collecting data about every word you type, every website you visit, and, through GPS tracking, everywhere you go in the physical world.

The hysterical tinfoil-hat crowd urges you to turn off your phone whenever you’re going to discuss something private—like your political opinions, religious beliefs, or medical conditions—as if the phone is somehow going to “hear” them and tech companies will use that info against you. In reality, they already know all those things because they know what news sources you read, the contents of your emails, what WebMD pages you’ve visited, and how long you’ve spent at which church, synagogue, mosque, or ethical humanist center. So don’t even worry about it. It’s not like there are hacks every day, and there will be more and more as time progresses, and some amoral lunatic on the dark web will eventually see a transcript of every in-person conversation you’ve ever had. They’ll be too busy looking at a list of who you’ve spoken to, at what time, and for how many seconds.

Plus, you don’t need to use a phone or even a computer to have your privacy invaded. Did you know that credit-card companies can legally sell data about your purchases to third parties? It’s true! And I bet if you decide to try to evade that by shopping exclusively with paper money, you’ll probably be flagged by your bank as some kind of a weirdo who’s taking out way too much cash and must be up to something shady. Better to just surrender. Feel free to have an in-person conversation with your most privacy-conscious friend about how resistance is futile. Your iPhone or Android won’t be picking it up, and, honestly, like what you’re saying is so interesting. Be realistic, buddy. No one cares about you.

There are a lot of benefits to our advanced information technology, many of which come from the customization you get when companies know your preferences. You can’t change the world we live in, so the best thing you can do is relax and enjoy what’s good about the twenty-first century. And while it may be unsettling to confront the dirt corporations have on you, you can at least take solace in the fact that your voice-to-voice chats remain inviolable and, no matter how uncanny the ads you’re served seem, your phone is not eavesdropping on you.

Also, there’s been a software update, and your phone is now listening to your conversations.

So here’s a fun fact that you probably don’t know about Krissy: She likes to go camping. She and her family used to do a lot of it when she was younger, and she will still do it occasionally with friends. But she doesn’t get to do as much of it as she likes to, because it’s hard to carve out the time, and also she wants to be able to camp with Charlie, our dog, and it’s difficult to find a place for that near us.

Or was. Not anymore, because for Krissy’s birthday, I bought her a campground.

(A wild Fictional Interlocutor crashes through the underbrush) You did what now?

I bought Krissy a campground.

A campground.

Yes.

How?!?

In this particular case, by going onto Zillow and discovering it was for sale. Specifically, a couple miles up the road for us, a heavily wooded 6.51 acre plot of land went up for sale. It is almost entirely on the banks of the Stillwater River, and because it is technically in a flood plain, and the river occasionally rises, no permanent structures can be built on it. It can be used basically for two purposes: for camping, and as a private nature preserve.

And, well. As it turns out, Krissy wants to camp with her friends, and I’m down with keeping as much of the land as possible in a natural state to encourage local flora and fauna to flourish. So this was a pretty great piece of land for us to pick up.

So you’re saying you just bought a bunch of land so you could vibe with nature.

Yup, basically. There are animal trails all over the site, so we know deer and other creatures wander through it, and I’ve already spotted a bunch of different bird species there. The river burbles and meanders along — it’s called the Stillwater for a reason — and while it’s just off a rural road, that road gets almost no traffic. And since it’s only a couple of miles from the house, when we’re done vibing with nature, we can come back to indoor plumbing and critter-free spaces. It’s kind of perfect for what both of us want out of it.

Okay, but the words “flood plain” were mentioned a little while back.

Indeed they were. The land abuts an actual river, and while the river is mostly lazy and well-behaved, from time to time there is heavy rain and suddenly the river channels a lot more water, and that water will come up on the property. Very recently, in fact, we had some torrential rains and flooding and the results are visible on the property; there’s a fair amount of flotsam that got shoved into various corners.

How do we feel about this? Well, in a very real sense it doesn’t matter how we feel about it; the river is gonna do what it does whether we have an opinion about it or not. More practically, however, we are buying this bit of property with the understanding that, rarely, the river is going to come up on it and make its presence known. Again, we’re not planning any permanent structures on the land, and we couldn’t get permits (or insurance!) even if we did. We’re content with working with the nature of the land here, not trying to fight it. We’re going to let the river and the land do what they do, and enjoy what it affords us the rest of the time.

So you’re not going to try to mow it all down and make it, like, a field of grass?

One, absolutely not, and two, even if we wanted to it wouldn’t really be possible, much of the land is essentially steep riverbank that not suited for domestication. There is one large field area that has ground cover on it that we’ll keep covered with local plants and flowers and such, and we may plant local trees and bushes as well, as much for functionality as anything else (our land is much less likely to wash away if there’s, you know, a good root system in it). We want to have our land here be friendly to all sorts of plants and animals, including pollinators and fireflies.

That said, we are going to have some part of it reserved for a camp site, and generally there’s work to be done to clear out flood debris and otherwise deal with mud patches and such. There will be some work involved! But the end result will be nature-facing, not lots of bluegrass or whatever.

Do I even want to know how much this cost?

It cost less than the church but more than a used car; turns out acreage in rural Ohio is not all that expensive.

It’s still kind of a bougie thing to buy your spouse recreational acreage.

Sure. That said, this is going to be a space that has the potential to give us, family and friends a lot of joy over the years, and by owning it we keep a long stretch of the Stillwater River accessible to wildlife with no concern that it will be developed. We’ll have deer and foxes and wild turkeys and turtles and fish here as long as we have it. All of that feels like a reasonably good investment.

And I get to make Krissy happy, too. That’s a bonus.

What are you going to call it?

“Camp Krissy,” of course.

So what are you going to get her next year?

Probably just a card.

What if people have other questions?

They can ask them in the comments, of course.

— JS