Category: Blog

Chicago, USA

Traveling in the Kia works. It’s certainly a very different trip than we would have had with Anne Marie, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is an expensive thing though, and even though we’ve never paid for lodging, costs stack up.

Wakarusa was wonderful. Everyone enjoyed their time there. It was hot, and humid, but it was excellent. Bonnaroo was hot, and dusty, and less excellent. There was very little about Bonnaroo that I enjoyed. The sole redeeming aspect of Bonnaroo was the group of people we worked with. They were fun, and made the festival enjoyable.

We’ve been in Chicago for about a week now, after a brief stay in Memphis. We’re moving on to Electric Forest this week – our last festival before returning for a pit stop in CT. People have been nothing but good to us this whole trip, but I don’t feel any sense of serendipity. I don’t know how to explain that further, but it’s something I’ve been missing on this trip. It makes it feel less like an adventure and more like a vacation.

Electric Forest should be a nice break. It looks like it will be a smaller festival with cooler weather, and plenty of trees. I’m looking forward to it, but I’m honestly looking forward to being back in Middletown more.

Failure

Maybe I should rename this summer the “Anti-Tour.” If there was an accurate antonym for serendipity, this trip would be it. We’ve scrapped any plans involving the bus as it has become clear that there is no way that we’re going to make any destinations with our unreliable refinery. We’re going to take Nishi’s car which is good on gas, but small and not fun. There isn’t anything remotely adventurous about this summer, it’s just a long vacation.

False Start the Billionth

Anyone who has ridden on the bus, heard about the bus, or even seen the bus, knows that reliability is not its strong point. Though to be fair, in this case it may be designer error. We’re having problems with the veggie system. After installing a new pump, we found that it couldn’t make enough pressure to push veggie through the filters. We installed a backup pump, and had a similar problem. We were looking in the wrong place, and have since narrowed the problem down to the filters. Something about the filters isn’t allowing veggie to flow freely through. We’re going to cannibalize the filters from Mike’s bus, and see if that can get us on the road.

Liftoff

The plan is we leave tomorrow morning. We’ve been working nonstop for a week, and we’re both exhausted. I’m nervous. I’m worried something will go wrong with the pump, I’m worried we won’t be able to get veggie, I’m worried the bus will experience more serious mechanical problems. I was this same way before we left the first time. It took me about a month to really chill out about it all, and just let it wash over me.

I drove the bus up to Middletown from Niantic, a forty-five minute or so drive, and it really made me feel good. There is something incredibly relaxing about driving the bus. I think it’s due to the governor on the engine, which keeps it from exceeding 65 mph. Knowing that it’s not possible to go faster than that, and letting cars continually pass me feels good. I know that’s I’m going as fast as I possibly can, and it doesn’t matter if it’s slower than everyone else.

I hope I can get into the swing of things faster this time around.

Festivals

We’ve secured our spots volunteering at Electric Forest, which is July fourth weekend. Looks like it will be cool. Our route will take us in a complete circle, down the East Coast, into the heartland, then up towards the Great Lakes and finally back East. Now to just get the house, and the bus, ready.

Summer Trips

I guess I spoke too soon. We got word last night that our first stop is going to be cancelled due to floods. Apparently the county it’s in has been declared a disaster zone, so that’s a bummer. It’s certainly the festival we were looking forward to most, but it might turn out to be ok that it was cancelled. We knew it was either going to be awesome or horrible, and it seems like it may have turned out to be closer to the latter. Putting aside the weather in the midwest, it turns out only 21 people had bought tickets by the time the show had been cancelled. I guess most people were getting in for free as artists or performers (like us). We’re rerouting our summer plans now. I need to figure out what to call this summer.

Chris at 7:21pm is riding across the country this summer, and blogging it. I’m going to do my best to follow his progress over the summer, and highly recommend tuning in.

T-minus Seven Days

Ideally looking to leave a week from today. Not sure whether that will happen, but that’s the goal. Lots to do before we leave – both to the house and to the bus. In fact, we’re nearly done painting the house, but there is still much to do to it.

I’ve been having a weird sense of time recently. The days seem long, but they also seem to blow by quickly. I’m not sure how that works, but I’ve been feeling it much more often lately. I wonder if that’s just my new sense of time, or if it’s my current lifestyle. It’s a very similar feeling to what I had on the bus. I can remember lots of things about a day, but when I look back on my previous days, they seem so fleeting. I guess it’s just a weird perspective. I’m hoping to update a little bit from the road, but it likely won’t be more than some short videos or photos. Moreover, I’m hoping to post a bit about the work we’re going to be doing to the bus before, and during the early stages of, this summer’s trip.

Loan Shark

Stephen King wrote a book called The Stand, which was eventually put on film as a TV mini series. Four episodes, each an hour and a half long, faithfully recreating the story. Jack and I watched it on a whim one night, when we couldn’t decide what else to rent and the store was closing. We must have started it after eleven o’clock that night, and didn’t finish until five or six in the morning. It was quite good, and only more epic considering the struggle we went through to watch it all.

He shot me a text the other day saying that it was on TV in its entirety. I didn’t have cable, but it was streaming on Netflix and Nishi was game to watch it. There is a character in The Stand named Larry who is an aspiring pop musician who gets into trouble with loan sharks on the west coast. He borrowed a bunch of money in the anticipation of his record sales, but they didn’t cover what he owed. The thing is, shortly after he defaults on his debt, the plague hits and kills very nearly everyone. Including (I assume) the loan shark. This fantastic luck is never really mentioned in the story, on account of his mother and everyone he knows also dying. But he managed to be perfectly timed to profit on the apocalypse. He took out a big loan, spent it all, and never had to pay it back. This amuses me to no end.

I got to thinking about loan sharks in general, the break-your-legs kind, not the exorbitant rates kind. Wikipedia says they’re mostly gone now, and even when they were around they were just an appendage of the mafia. Despite that, I thought it could make for a good story where a man goes to a loan shark for some large amount of money, which he then uses to hire a hitman to kill that very loan shark. Yeah, I think there’s a fun story there.

Free Stuff

In my quest to clean this house, many things need to be removed from the house. Much of that is paper waste that can be recycled, much of that is garbage that need to head to the dump, but there are lots of things here that are perfectly usable but unwanted. Most of that I’ve been shuttling over to the Goodwill donation site near here, but there are things that they categorically won’t accept, or won’t accept because of condition. I tossed a lot of that on Craigslist’s free section today, and I was amazed by the amount of response. I honestly didn’t know that many people watched the free sections. I’ve gotten many cool things from there before without much competition. I was also amazed at who was getting stuff. The first people to come seemed like they were ready to take anything. This left me feeling kind of off, since I knew they wouldn’t be using everything themselves, but scrapping or reselling some stuff. I guess it’s still helping people out, but not quite in the way I’d intended.