Back East

We've covered a lot of ground on our zig-zag back to Richmond, but right now there's less than a week until I'll be back for the winter. After leaving Houston we made a straight shot for New Orleans Saturday and made it there in the early evening. As I would soon find out, there are no alcohol laws in Louisiana. Well there may be some, but most of the normal ones don't really apply. So our "low key night out" turned (after a few drinks called "hand grenades") out less low key than expected. Several jazz clubs, bars, clubs, dance parties, casinos, and impromptu street drinking songs later, I realized it was 6:30AM and I should get back to the van before the sun came up. Having gotten all that out of my system we found some good cajun food (jambalaya and alligator po' boys) and I went for a good long 13mi run in Audobon Park. The parts of the city where tourists end up have pretty well recovered from the Hurricane destruction with almost no trace that a disaster even happened. A lot of other non-tourist laden parts of the city (the 9th Ward most certainly included) are still pretty much in ruins. Abandoned houses with National Guard spray painted "tattoos" still on them are everywhere.

New Orleans is an area that's been hit pretty hard between that and the oil spill, though if you never leave the French Quarter, you'd never know it. We started up the road to Jackson, MS. Mississippi is, in a word, depressing. We spent less than 2 days there, and everyone we met was very friendly, but it doesn't take long in Mississippi to find out almost everyone there is poor, obese, bored, or tired of living there. We got a lot of attention at the Jackson Wal-Mart where we parked our van. Lots of high-school kids, locals, friends of high-school kids who were sent there specifically to see the van. And they all wanted to take a picture of it. They all also wanted to know "why the Hell did you want to come here?" which we answered by telling them we were coming from New Orleans, headed to Memphis. Jackson isn't a very popular tourist destination I guess.

Robert had a college friend in Memphis we stayed with for 2 nights, we went out on Beale Street, hit a couple other local spots and got some good barbeque. Oh, and we went to Graceland. Which, yes, is every bit as tacky as you'd expect it to be, plus a good dose of awesome. Here's a fun fact about Memphis: everyone jaywalks. And not just normal "oh, nobody's coming, how about I cross the street here" kind of jaywalking, more like they jump out in front of your car at night forcing you to slam on the brakes to narrowly avoid hitting them. It's a cultural thing I guess. Memphis, like Mississippi, is also still incredibly segregated. It's not institutional anymore, but it is definitely still there. Besides living in neighborhoods defined basically by race, there seemed to be almost zero social interaction between blacks and whites. Still. In 2010. And this is coming from a suburban white kid raised in Virginia; not exactly the most racially integrated setting either, but it's got nothing on the segregation still in the deep South. It was a whole other level of racial divide I wasn't really expecting. I thought that died out in the 70's sometime. Nope.

Turns out we have a lot of friends in Illinois, most of which we missed on our way out West, eager to get past the Rockies at least. So we took our time thru the Land of Lincoln this time, first stopping for a few days with Caitlin's parents, Bruce and Maryanne, in Carbondale. Southern Illinois reminded me a lot of western Virginia with the hills and leaves changing the weekend we were there. You're still out in the country, but not just in an endless array or cornfields. Driving the Chrismans around in the magical mystery bus, I got some good stories out of them about how they moved from California to Southern Illinois to start a communal farm and drop out of consumer society back in the day. And how Bruce became radicalized by the government's process of trying to undermine his personal beliefs and send him to Vietnam. They liked the idea of our trip; Maryanne thought the van was pretty much a throwback to 40 years ago. This gave me a lot to think about. After a run thru Amish country and a potluck breakfast with some senior citizens, we headed down the road to Bloomington-Normal. It was good to see my friend Mel there, who I hadn't seen since college. I got to introduce her to the van and catch up on old news. That's a really fun part of the trip; you get to see all these people you haven't seen in forever but wouldn't necessarily make a dedicated trip just to visit for a day. Like your own personal disjointed high school / college reuinion except you get to pick the most interesting people. Traveling gives you the excuse to reconnect with people you've lost touch with.

You know that good high school friend you had who moved to Arizona/Oregon/Montana/wherever and you never talk to anymore? You're not going to buy a plane ticket to see them for a weekend (and they might think it a little weird if you did...), but if you call them up and tell them you're driving across the country and just happen to be in their area, chances are they'll jump at the chance to try to meet up.

So then we're up in Central Illinois and we met up with Cy for a couple days. He showed us all around U of I and got us in some interesting places like his graduate lab where he knew most everyone and could show us some of the projects they had going on there. Robert and I both tried controlling his paraglider wing in the wind and then chased him around the cornfields in a truck when he went for a ride with the propellor and motor strapped to his back. Powered paragliding. Looks like a lot of fun, you don't need a license, and in Champaign, he just uses any road around as a runway.

Here we had a few days between central Illinois and Chicago, so we headed up to Madison, Wisconsin to meet up with our friend John we met at Burning Man. He's a character for sure. He's like a 20 year old basically, tho he's a doctor in his mid-forties and has a wife and 2 teenaged sons. He still has a lot of fun. Enough to embarrass the shit out of his teenage sons. John is one of the people I met this summer I know I'll keep in touch with. He took us squirrel hunting near his church and we drove there in a Prius with a bumper sticker in Arabic (he's fluent) on the back. Defying all stereotypes for sure. We went to a Wisconsin fish fry and within 30 seconds John had somehow bypassed the crowd to get fish to go so we could go on a brewery tour and also convinced 2 girls to give me and Robert Polka dance lessons. He's an expert in bullshit. He told us how he took his wife to Haiti for their honeymoon (he flew there himself) and convinced the hotel she was a Duchess so they could get the Presidential Suite at the fanciest hotel there. He's got some stories.

Next, we headed to Chicago for round 2. More on that later.

169 Days
26,635mi
Richmond is in sight...

Life Post-Canadian Rejection

Two events have influenced broadly our experience over the past few weeks: our rejection at the Canadian border and our planned finale in Cincinnati, OH. The former bumped us ahead of schedule by about a week, erasing time we’d planned to spend in Banff and Edmonton. And we’re locked into our weekend finale the weekend before Halloween due to our friends’ schedules. For better and for worse, this has meant we’ve had more time on our hands to cross through TX, New Orleans, up to Memphis, IL, and finally on to Cincinnati.

In response I’ve called on about all friends I could think of for entertainment and to pursue the possibility of visiting. Saw a bunch of people in Austin: Greg Topscher, a high school friend, Matt and Kristine Kilanski, my college and DC friends, as well as Jackie DiBiasie, another college amiga. By visiting with old friends, not only are you able to catch up but you also get a great glimpse into other people’s lives. For example, I enjoyed hanging out with Matt and Kristine and their dogs. On a deeper level, though, I achieved some more perspective on my life through learning about theirs. It’s helpful to witness the paths my peers have chosen, like Matt and Kristine who are newlyweds and have things like a home and concrete goals. By injecting myself into their lives for a day or two, I can reflect on questions such as “What are my friends doing that I wish to incorporate into my life, now that I’ve wiped the slate clean?”

We caught up with the ever-pleasant Riley Barnes in College Station. My Texan advisors were correct that there’s not a whole lot to the college town, which feels as if it’s popped out of the fields over the past decade. Ingeniously, Riley has sidestepped this factor by finding a delightful garage apartment in the country. Driving out there took me back to Lexington, to the house parties at the Dojo, his old country house just outside town. I was pleased to hear he’s leaning toward coming to DC after graduation. More East Coast friends!

One more stop separated us from New Orleans: Houston. No surprises there. The city was as expansive as expected, good and hot with the first signs of humidity I’d felt in a long time. Spent plenty of time on the interstate, first heading into town to check it out, then back west to Katy, where we stayed with a friend of my DC friend David. The friend, Jake, lives in a brand new subdivision on the outskirts in Katy. We had a very pleasant stay in his nice, new home.

New Orleans provided a welcome change of pace. We headed down the highway, over channels and through swamplands and bayous, eventually getting to the lake and downtown. For the next three nights, we made a downtown Wal-Mart parking lot our motel. This Wal-Mart made for a handy home base due to its close proximity to the good stuff: the French Quarter, downtown, the Garden District, Audubon Park, and Tulane’s campus.

With Matt’s GPS in hand we navigated on foot into the French Quarter, down St. Charles Ave. across Canal St. eventually to Bourbon St. Being a Saturday night, things were hopping. Dressy groups of thirty-somethings strolled down the street with gleeful expressions and grenade cocktails in hand. Packs of college students mingled in the bars and on balconies chucking beads and taking test tube shooters. Music streamed out of the bars, where bands were at work entertaining all the partygoers who had one thing in common: a hunger for FUN. We grabbed to-go drinks and pizza slices and hopped from place to place before getting separated. Eventually I ran out of energy and disposable cash and cabbed it back to Wal-Mart and went to sleep. Matt had a lengthier evening which he can tell you about if he wants, haha.

We explored for two more days, trying some of the famous cuisine like gumbo, jambalaya, gator and crawfish sandwiches. Beyond the French Quarter, Audubon Park was another highlight. Along with lots of residents and college students we ran around the path and hung out. I took a great walk through Garden District homes and admired the historic architecture so well preserved. New Orleans came off as an energetic city, with a lot to offer any visitor or resident. Rounding out our cultural experience there, we sat through two sessions of traditional, completely acoustic jazz at the Preservation Hall. Sure, the tickets were expensive and the hall looked a little overly “distressed” to be entirely authentic, but the music was good and the old players put on a fine show.

That day, out of curiosity, I drove through the Ninth Ward to gauge its progress in recovering from Katrina. We found some chilling scenes of vacant homes with rescuers’ scrawl still on the sides. Plenty of other old homes looked to be in decent shape, but these abandoned homes still sit on many blocks. Not knowing the condition of the neighborhood prior to Katrina, I am not one to judge its recovery status. Let’s hope residents, government, private groups, etc. are continuing to pay the city’s neighborhoods the attention they deserve so the residents can rebuild their lives.

During this period, as we were moving along and crossing plans off the list, a troubling feeling began to seep into my days. Fairly often we began finding ourselves with an excess of time on our hands. I found myself daydreaming about the past and the future while letting the present slip by. Doubt and worry crept in and maintained a burdensome presence on my mind. I suppose this is a trend that began at Burning Man, where I spent a lot of time reflecting on my experiences. Five months in I’ve begun to feel a little bit of burn-out, plus a longing to be in a more permanent home closer to more friends and family. So I’ve resolved simply to enjoy our stops for the remainder of the trip, until we get to that final weekend in Cincinnati. Time will move us forward.

Staying Awhile

Note: Here's a bit of a departure from my normal what/where/when style; this is mostly reflection and commentary at the end of the summer. Let me know what you think (whether this is boring or interesting), I'll fill you in on the details of Texas and Louisiana soon!



When I was in school or working I had to plan out my life. Well, it was planned very well for me. Now, there really aren't any milestones on the horizon at all. It's a strange thing to do to your mind, and I've found I can only do it for so long, until I plant a point out there to get to, whether it's being in Louisiana on Saturday or planning a cross-country bike trip next summer. That doesn't mean it's actually going to happen; life is unpredictable, everyone knows that. Trying to plan your future too much is a mistake; even more so when travelling. Most people get used to some uncertainty about the future; you have to. I'm trying to get used to complete uncertainty about the future. Everything becomes exciting when you let go of that security and admit you have no idea what you're going to do and just see what happens. I'm still trying to do that. Trying to stop planning a way to get back to a place I recognize and just completely let go, enjoy the ride, and see where life takes me. It always seems to be somewhere better than I could have planned anyway. I definitely feel a lot less constrained to only a few possibilities for the future. There's the other side of it tho; sometimes it can get pretty overwhelming if you genuinely let all the possibilities in. But those possibilities all actually exist, whether you want to recognize it or not. So, overwhelming as it may be, I'm trying to realize them and stop confining myself to such a narrow future by not adhering to the implied middle-class American constraints of following a definite white-collar career path, settling down, spending money, buying a house with a white picket fence... I could do that, sure, but I'm out for something more interesting, and I hope, more likely to make me happy.



That said, I'm finding I can only live like this for so long, at least in one dose. I'm meeting tons of new people, having ups and downs and all kinds of interesting experiences, but, aside from Robert, nobody can relate to them. My new friends and experiences are spread all over the place, and none of them have any context for who I am either. Even simple things add up, like not having a routine. Maybe I had too much of a routine before, but now I have nothing! I'd like to be able to take a shower when I want to, sleep in a bed where I'm not worried about the police running me off, go to the gym, get back into good running shape, watch TV, have an apartment, meet some friends for dinner, actually have real relationships with people for more than a few days, and do some work and feel productive. I need to take some time and just enjoy being in one place for a while. I'll take some time to reflect and then just decide where I'm going from here; no need to over-think it. More travelling, re-entering the workforce, grad school, or starting something completely new... these are all things I'm interested in, I'm just not sure how much, in what respect, or in what order... One step at a time.

On the practical side of things, Robert has decided to spend the winter in Richmond. He'll be back in late October. I'll get some part-time work over the winter somewhere (either NC or somewhere new depending on how I feel after a good dose of the East Coast). I'm looking forward to staying in one spot for a little while, wherever it is. Generally just being able to appreciate a lot of things that are impossible to do on the road. But then I'm going to wander some more. Not sure where yet, but here are some ideas I have for next year:

- cross-country bicycle ride (maybe I can convince Mikey to go with me)
- hiking the John Muir Trail thru the High Sierra (probably solo, to do some thinking)
- entering Zion in Utah thru the Virgin River Narrows Canyon (some other Jaskots involved?)
- mountain biking tour of the American SW
- driving a slow lap around the Great Lakes (if Canada will let me in...)


"Like the old joke about hitting yourself with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop, so part of the vagabond life is staying somewhere awhile." - Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in America, 1973

152 Days
23,965mi

A Bar in Austin, TX (Guitar Tongue)

We had another free night in Austin and wanted to hear some more live music. The previous night we discovered Sixth St., which is loaded with bars and dives and music halls. So we strolled into a big, open old bar where a band was already at work. The feature that night was the house band plus “friends.” The house band didn’t need the backup; their blues performances would demolish plenty other acts in comparison. Yet, because they’re a few of the flock of talented musicians in Austin, they essentially work for free, presumably out of love either for the act or the music. All the individuals involved added some peculiar character to the band—some more than others.

Mike Milligan, a spry black man, led the band’s first incarnation with a sharp voice and energetic harmonica solos. He bopped around, plugged the band, introduced songs. He sang some fine tunes about the Mississippi and having the blues. The group’s instrumental star, the guitarist, nodded along, looking like a young Robert Plant except with lots of baby fat. He’d step up and wedge solos into the songs, working the solos until the band caught up in intensity and he could explode with musical energy. The younger drummer and the bassist, who looked like he belonged on the Sopranos, kept the rhythms moving with tight precision.

At this point the band pivoted. Things were about to get a little more surreal. Several guys left and others took their places. First, an obese man in a silk kimono shirt (who looked a lot like Barney Frank) took over the guitar and vocals. He sang like he thought he was Roy Orbison, quivering up and down scales while strumming his blues guitar. Barney gave us probably four or five songs. I thought this was the height of live entertainment, but I was wrong. Senator Frank eventually tired and was replaced by an Asian man, dressed in black with a red tie, who’s surely of AARP age.

Like all the others, this guy could kill with his instrument (electric guitar) and was a great singer. He sang slightly dirty R&B with a Stevie Ray Vaughn drawl and cackle. Then he played one of his own compositions with the punchline “Who says a Chinese man can’t play the blues?” “I’ve been living in Texas all my life” he sang, “and people still ask me where I’m from!”

His next move was a shocker, though. He jumped over the stage banister and grabbed a metal chair off the floor. For this solo he balanced the chair in his left hand, using the leg as a slide. It wasn’t bad, either! Instantly the audience were off their feet in his face, smartphones in hand, capturing photos the bizarre scene.

Upping the ante, the Chinese bluesman broke into a guitar solo played with his tongue. It was awkward watching the guy standing with his guitar pressed against his face, playing the solo and holding his picking hand free. I just hope he’s up to date on his tetanus shots. He went in for round two in the next song. Maybe the crowd didn’t react sufficiently. This time he hopped onto the stage railing, flipped his guitar horizontally, stuck his tongue out and slobbered another solo. Remarkably the tongue solos seemed just as good. I laughed when I glanced at a table nearby and a young blonde girl, obviously on a date, cringed in disgust. They fled the scene within minutes.

- September 27, 2010

Wyoming and Trapped Tourists

Yellowstone is weird, we all know that. It's like the surface of the moon with mud and steam and water bubbling up and around everywhere. You should see it, but it's nothing I find overly interesting. It seems unreal, I can't relate to it like a trail or a mountain or a forest. There's no context for me. Plus it's pretty heavy on the tourists. By now, it's mostly retired couples, all the families are gone with their kids back in school, but it's still packed. There are restaurants and lodges where you can eat your ice cream or drink your beer while watching Old Faithful go off, taking a casual interest in one of Nature's weirder phenomena, like watching a TV show in the background. At least that's the attitude most old couples in their home-away-from-home luxury 45-foot-long "wreck-reational" vehicles project... The National Parks are strange that way; they've been set aside as places we should protect for their own sake. There's no question they are places of
beauty that merit a visit, but to lots of people they seem to be like a checklist: how many parks can I visit in my 2 week vacation, rushing along from one to the next like there's nothing in between? Can I collect all 58? I guess I just want to make sure I'm enjoying the places I go for my own sake, not just to check off points on a map. The National Parks are great, but I hardly ever see any retired couples drive their super-RVs to equally amazing places like the woods of southwestern Oregon. "Well, Ethel, there's not a park there, so it's probably not worth seeing..."


I think it's a problem with the way most people look at their time. The tourist industry markets certain "destinations" as places you should spend your vacation. There are expensive rental RVs everywhere I've seen that encourage you to "see America" by renting this giant gashog to cart your kids around major tourist destinations in the US so you can reinforce your preconceptions about America while never leaving the comforts of home. When you do that, tho, you use money to shield you from real experience. You're taking the same exact trip everyone who has rented that RV before you has... Where's the fun in that? If you stop at Subway or Mickey D's for a sandwich every day at lunch you're never going to discover that awesome little taco shop next to the laundromat in Carpinteria. If you stay in a hotel every night, you're not going to have that awkward-at-first-but-later-really-interesting conversation over dinner with that 50 year old hitchhiker you met in Montana, or the old friends who scattered across the country and you almost forgot about. You never find out about the underwater cave in the swimming hole by the side of the road near Missoula, MT. Not using money to travel requires you to depend on people (and actually meet real Americans!), and sometimes it takes a lot of energy, but it's always worth it. You can literally drive all over the country and never see any of it if you stay on interstates, eat fast food, and sleep in Holiday Inns the whole way... Plenty of people do that, and it's also the easiest way to travel because you don't have to open your mind to really anything at all. Luckily for me, I don't have enough money for a big RV or hotels. So enough on my rant about upper-middle-class-pseudo-travellers, here's some on my trip to the Grand Tetons (hey, that's a National Park!)

Grand Tetons means "large breasts" in French. They are made of rock, 7,000 feet tall, and there are 3 of them. Don't ask me... Anyway they are amazing mountains because there are no foothills; just 6,000ft to 13,000ft immediately, and right above Jackson Lake. We got there, and immediately got a permit to go backcountry up to Holly Lake and around Lake Solitude the next day. Once you walked 10 minutes from the road up the trail, the retired RV couples mysteriously disappeared... This was one of the most spectacular hikes I've been on this summer, and the fall colors were just coming out too. I hiked alone with my thoughts, Robert was in front or behind. It was a hike to Lake Solitude after all. That night I slept in my hammock just below 10,000ft, waking up occasionally and checking the time by seeing where the stars had moved to over my head. The hike back down the next day was even better, going over a pass near 11,000ft and back down thru a big U-shaped glacially carved valley.



Wyoming, as I learned from the girls at CarQuest, while changing the van's oil yet again (comes up fast...), is like a hell you can't escape from if you grew up there. That seems about right, except for a small strip on the western edge that makes it into the Rockies. It's a lot like Nebraska, brown, flat, smelly, only somehow, there are even less people in it. I was intrigued at all these endless dirt roads that just seemed to go off in a random direction forever. I never did drive one tho, as we were already close enough to the middle of nowhere. Finally I saw a tree near Colorado. We made it to Ft. Collins. Here I went for a run in the rain followed by some free beer at New Belgium.

22,465mi
143 days

"Being a vagabond means you've already dropped out... You've decided to live your own life story, not the version some dildo businessmen want to lay on you for the sake of their bank-accounts. Sure you'll make your own mistakes, but you'll make your own triumphs too. At least you'll get to feel real." - Ed Buryn, Vagabonding in America, 1973

A Sweet-Ass Double Feature: Glacier Nat’l Park & Missoula, MT!

We are now in Glacier National Park in northern MT. It is spectacular. Fall colors are already surfacing across the meadows and forest, and within weeks the roads will be closed for winter. We’ve seen several glaciers here, and some of the highest peaks have strips of snow that lasted through summer. On the first day Matt and I hiked up to a lake through the woods. A nice little hike off the main road, but nothing life-changing. As we progressed deeper into the park, though, the scenery became far more impressive and extreme. We headed east along the Journey to the Sun Road. Eventually it bypassed lakes and meadows and forests, climbing up to the pass at 6500 feet. From there we were surrounded by northern Rockies, deep valleys, and an occasional glacier. We camped on the eastern edge of the park and had a pleasant evening, grilling burgers and lounging around. The glaciers we saw here were lovely, but they’re mere ugly stepchildren to the hulking iceflows we saw around Canada and Alaska. But hey, this is the lower 48.

The next day we went to the area of the park called Many Glacier. We found a trail leading to Grinnell Glacier, which started in the woods along two large lakes. Within the first half-hour we saw a massive moose across the water, gracefully munching on something. We continued and saw another mother moose, with some calves beyond her, snacking on a bush. The path continued around two lakes then up a steep hillside which led us along some red rock cliffs to the glacial lake and finally Grinnell Glacier. The morning had started completely overcast, but by the time we reached the glacier the clouds were dispersing. We caught some sweeping views of the glacier, which looked smaller up close than far away. Grinnell Glacier is one of the ones the park has been tracking carefully, and they predict it will vanish by 2030. The hike was about 11 miles total and we got back to the starting point at about 6 pm.

We agreed it was time for a little indoor time. After the hike we returned to the first lake, upon which a huge German Alps-style lodge sits. We popped in and discovered its large wooden porch overlooking the water, as well as the plush living room inside where lots of people were relaxing. So we went to the van, changed, and grabbed booze and snacks for some porch time. As the sun continued to set behind the mountains and the temperature dropped, a hardy rain shower began and lasted for an hour or two. We moved inside and sat by the fire, where I read and did some post cards.

The two nights before Glacier Park were a lot of fun. Missoula, MT! I found us a couch-surfing host there; by coincidence she had gone to U of Delaware with Matt. Her name is Lauren and she turned out to be a gem of a host. We got in on a Saturday afternoon and for some reason the Missoulans had stuffed this weekend fill with festivals. Lauren first took us downtown to Hempfest (a brief walk from her house) where we listened to live music and got food. She showed us around the historic buildings, an artist residence, a brewery, bakeries and more. You may be wondering what Hempfest was. “What exactly is this Hempfest,” you say. Well, MT has legalized medicinal marijuana, and the festival basically consisted of music and food and specialty vendors. For example, a doctor’s office handed out half-off coupons for appointments at which you can get a medical card. Other booths sold pipes and clothes, and one booth even had jars of various varieties of weed for sale. Perhaps the oddest aspect was the consistency of the crowd. The standard hippies represented themselves, strolling along with young families, children, white-haired former flower children and other sun-baked geezers.

We also got to meet a bunch of Lauren’s friends in town, who came over for a houseparty after Hempfest music was over. The newly painted van was a big success. We showed it off to our new friends and received many compliments. “Dude, this van is tricked out!” Why, thank you.

The next day was great too. We went to the same downtown park for the day’s Germanfest and farmers’ market and poked around. Yet another festival, a pedestrian festival on the main street, took place simultaneously. After getting some pizza and warming up in the sun, we decided to go to a swimming hole Lauren recommended. It reminded me of Lexington’s Panther Falls, with a hidden cave reached by swimming under the rock. This place was right on the side of the interstate, though, so we and the other swimmers provided some entertainment for honking truckers passing by.

We stayed that night as well, enjoying a live jazz performance at a bar downtown which featured some creative martinis. Lauren and I had a potent thin mint-type creation, and Matt had a jalapeno-onion cocktail. The following morning we left for Glacier Nat’l Park, 2-3 hours to the north.

Burning Man and Montana (inside: why Canada sucks!)

I'm going to try to describe Burning Man, which is going to be impossible. The best I can do is give a good approximation of my experience and I know when I get done writing it there will be a lot of important things I left out or was unable to fully describe. You've probably heard something sometime about Burning Man either from people who have been or think it's a worthwhile thing or from people who don't try to understand it and want it to disappear, or from the news which tends to generally distort most things to be sensational anyway.

Burning Man is essentially about two things. First, it's a social experiment of a community where commerce does not exist, where you try to give unconditional love to strangers; kind of a big commune where everyone looks out for each other. Second, it's a blank canvas for artists and everyone else to basically try whatever they want. People seem to drop the roles they've acquired in "normal life" and take on whatever seems to fit them at the moment. People generally accept you at face value with an open mind, and you are absolutely guaranteed not to be the weirdest kid on the block. It took me a few days to get used to it all. Burning Man has a reputation for drug use but really it's weird enough on its own, no chemical supplements necessary. There's also this omnipresent quasi-dark sense of humor underneath everything; deep down, everything is all an elaborate joke. And there's 50,000+ people there, so almost everything that could be happening is happening somewhere.


There was a giant Mad Max style Thunderdome the audience could climb on top of and watch participants strapped to bungee cords beat on each other with giant foam sticks. There was a giant grilled cheese diner that moved to a new location every night so it was always a surprise. There was a camp that would outfit you with any costume you wanted as long as you walked down the runway and they insulted you after you put it on. There was a phone booth where you could talk to God (he's a lot more reasonable than you'd expect). There was a sarcastic fortune teller in a box who moved around the playa. There was a roller derby on the playa. There were "art cars" driving around the playa at night; everything from flying carpets to flame-throwing pirate ships that you could just hop on and join the moving party (most had a bar, though you had to bring your own cup). There were talks and classes going on and people handing you sake and bacon as you biked down the street. I did a barrel roll in an airplane at 11,000ft. I took a "shower" by running behind a water-spraying truck. I lost my bike one day and following the advice of the advice booth man sitting in the middle of the desert, I wrote "I need a bike, I lost mine" on my chest and had a new one withing a few hours. People are just waiting to bend over backwards for strangers in an environment where it's allowed and encouraged (it also helps that the festival lasts only a week...). You may have seen the van's new paint job. It came from people walking down the street in Black Rock City, I brought paint and told them to paint whatever they wanted, meanwhile serving margaritas out of my solar-powered blender. The last few days there were dust storms so bad you couldn't see 3 feet in front of you and needed a mask and goggles to get around. Your hair turned into a big grey dusty mass. There's still plenty of playa dust in just about everything I own.

So that's what the attitude of the place is like (really that's only a very very small cross-section). I met some amazing people there (one in particular) who I know I'll keep in touch with. It was nice to have friends especially after 4 months of travelling basically alone except for Robert. You make friends fast on the playa and everyone wants to go try everything and just generally hang out and get to know each other. My camp was called Wanderlust, a group of couchsurfers and travelers from everywhere: Wisconsin, Laguna Beach, Nevada, Canada, Germany... Before I went to Burning Man I was losing my wanderlust in favor of a more socially acceptable (but less personally acceptable) and safer stationary and career-oriented life. Long story short, I was re-inspired to do what I want, not what everyone else wants. I saw people there who were just genuinely happy living how they wanted to free of the normal artificial constraints people let others impose on them. Accepting that uncertainty about the future and really opening your mind to enjoy the infinite possibilities available, taking each day as a new exciting adventure, not rushing along hurriedly towards the end, but really enjoying the ride and every step of it for how much more exciting and unexpected it is. It's much more fun that way.


The main event is the burning of the Man. On Saturday night, the 200ft tall wooden Man is packed with explosives and fireworks and is lit on fire. It's the biggest bonfire I've ever seen. I dance around it with Shar after the Man falls down into a large pile and the crowd pushes me towards the fire. In a week, I've experienced a lot and in the end it's all burnt to the ground. Gone. The city starts to disintegrate and people head back towards the "default world". Sunday night the Temple burns. The Temple this year is a collection of wooden "dunes" and people come to write messages and names of those they've lost, of things they've lost, or of things they want to let go of. Then the Temple burns. It's not a party like the burning of the Man. People are quiet, watching the embers fly up into the air, each one an intensely emotionally charged piece of someone being released. I wrote in the Temple. It worked, I let go of the past, I opened myself up to the future. The sense of humor is much darker now when you realize the whole festival is about the temporary nature of everything. It all burns. You leave no trace. I'll be back to Burning Man, I know that.

We took some hitchhiking Canadian girls to San Francisco directly after the Temple burned. I drove all night and ended up on a run with Caitlin. It was weird adjusting so fast to the "real world" (even San Francisco!). We had a nice day in unusually good weather in a park in the city. I slept well that night. After catching up with Peter Felton from High School in Santa Clara and having some good home-cooked meals his mom served us, we headed back East, for the last time this year. We spent a day in Fallon, NV with Shar from our Burning Man camp. Feeding some cows, driving an ATV, exploring a cornfield, and saying goodbye as she headed to Australia and we headed to Montana. After an uneventful stop in Boise, we made it to Missoula, MT where we couchsurfed with Lauren who, it turns out, went to UD and knew some of my friends there. She was a lot of fun and since we happened to be visiting on a weekend full of festivals in Missoula we hit them all. Missoula is like a little hippie town centered around the University there, really fun and unexpected from Montana. You can check out my pictures from Glacier NP on Facebook, I'll put them up soon. But we spent 2 days there and then planned to head to the Canadian side to see Waterton, Banff, and another Burning Man friend from our camp who lives in Edmonton.

We arrived cheerfully at the border crossing at about 10:30AM, knowing that our psychedelic magical mystery van might make us the target of some extra searching or questioning or whatever, but we were not prepared for this. We were told to pull aside, then step out of the vehicle so it could be searched. It was not only searched, everything that could be removed from the van was X-rayed, swabbed, inspected. It was torn apart.

For 2 hours we had at least 4 customs agents dealing only with us. While the van was searched, I was separated from Robert and questioned, starting with the usual: where were you born? what are you going to Canada for? have you ever been arrested? Then getting more obscure and accusatory: have you ever used recreational drugs? who is this friend in Canada and how did you meet him? how long have you owned this vehicle? has anyone in your family ever been involved in a secret government organization? where were your parents born? what is that scary looking piece of electronic equipment in your van? are you SURE you don't have any drugs on you? really? even in THAT van? After assuring the customs agent I was not a drug trafficker, I was just weird, he passed us on to his supervisors. In the end, after collecting information on our previous employment history, verifying the balances on our bank accounts, taking our social security numbers, and just about everything else we could give them, they decided not to let us in because we did not have "enough ties to the US" Ties are defined by the Canadians as A) a wife in the US B) a job in the US or C) a mortgage or rent payment in the US. "But that's the WHOLE POINT! me not having ties..." He advised us to get married, find a job, or buy a house if we ever wanted to return to Canada. We were denied entry to Canada. Seriously. Really, Canada? "Glacier-Waterton International Peace Park" my ass.


After reassembling our van and what was left of our dignity, we headed back to Montana. The real reason we weren't let in was because of the van and the way we travel. We don't fit the mold of normal tourists. We're not going to spend money on lodges and restaurants, we confused them by not having jobs or W2 forms, we intimidated them because they couldn't categorize us into a safe, border-crossing acceptable category like all the older couples driving right thru the gate (equally unattached to the US I'd argue, retired with no job, taking thair wives with them, and having no fixed address aside from the monster fifth-wheel trailer towed behind them). It left me feeling terrible, somewhere between being raped and arrested. But at least those noble customs agents were able to prevent the peace love and happiness bus from threatening the national security of Canada. In contrast with Burning Man, I had the cynical feeling that strangers are suspicious and afraid of you and even hostile to you until you start paying them for something, at which point they become wonderful, loving, caring people, willing to help however they can. I hope I don't actually think of the world like that, but sometimes it seems a close approximation. Those are the situations I need to get out of. Then last night, sleeping in the van, some drunk idiot fiddled with our bikes trying to unlock them from the rack to steal them. I watched him thru the window for a few minutes, contemplating grabbing my 5-iron and jumping outside (I knew there was a reason I brought that) but in the end just looked at him and said "what's up?" "What's up?" he said, then "shit, peace..." and jogged away. People can be real assholes sometimes too. I'm trying not to focus on that though... For the most part everyone loves the new van paint. We get people asking to take pictures, asking questions, waving, and telling us the van just makes them smile. It's difficult to stay disenfranchised with humanity for long when everyone is smiling and waving excited peace signs at you when you drive by... On to Yellowstone, Denver, and Texas!

20,094mi
132 days
18 states
$5000 spent on gas... ugh

September 10, 2010

I feel like I’ve been here before. We’re driving down a two-lane blacktop that crosses rolling acres of sand and brush. All around in the distance many miles away I can see hazy mountains which blend into the blue and white cloudy sky. We’re leaving Fallon, NV behind and heading north for Boise. It’s about 75 degrees.

The scene my mind connected with this one is from a few years ago, on a college trip to Native reservations in the Dakotas. We ventured into NW Nebraska to see some sites around and the land looked a lot like this. Wonderful scenery but ultimately too dry to be welcoming.

We stopped in last evening to spend the night with a friend Matt had made at Burning Man. She kindly hosted us in her parents’ home, making a nice fish dinner and taking us out to drive ATVs this morning. I thoroughly enjoyed sipping margaritas after dinner and relaxing with some Daily Show and Colbert. Now I feel I’ve recovered most of my energy that got drained at Burning Man.

We had two great days before Nevada, too. We left Burning Man on Sunday night after the ceremonial burning of the temple. A couple of friends we made had asked us for a ride to San Francisco on that day so they could catch flights to return to Vancouver. We agreed and managed to pack them in the back of the van. When we opened any doors people and stuff would spring out like a jack in the box.

We got in line to leave the festival that evening at about 10 pm. After over two hours of waiting in a creeping line we made it to the two-lane road that led to the interstate. Luckily we had some leftover study-aid medication which gave us the energy to make the drive. In fact, we woke up and got quite chatty. Matt and I had some nice time to reflect and discuss future plans while the ladies slept and silently wished for us to shut up.

We rolled into the bay area on in the golden CA morning sun, deposited the ladies, and pulled into a Wal-Mart to have a nap. Before I could doze off, though, a snippy little Asian security guard lady tapped on the glass and told us to leave. Matt tried in vain to protest, but she would hear none of it and sped off in her buggy. So we gave up on a nap and I drove us into San Francisco, where his friend was visiting. We became fast friends with Matt’s friend’s friends (actually Matt’s friend’s sister’s friends), and they invited us to stay the night.

The weather was unbelievable for the time and place: 80 and pure sun all over San Francisco on Labor Day. We joined our friends in celebrating by going to Delores Park in the Mission District, after getting a Mexican lunch and some terrific ice cream. The park is a large space with gradual hills, a terrace-like setting that allows for unbeatable views of downtown and even Oakland. We found a spot to throw our blankets on Homo Hill, the self-named gathering spot for mostly gay locals and their friends. A guy next to us kindly offered us drinks from his pitcher of cranberry-vodka. We accepted and after hearing about our time at Burning Man he told his stories of attending Woodstock ’99. That’s the one that turned from a music festival to something like an apocalyptic mass-riot.

For dinner our group went to a nice little Thai place in the Castro district. We sat on the back patio and enjoyed our dinner and talked about movies and things and then drove Matt’s friend to the airport. The first good night of sleep in weeks, which followed this, only served to remind my body how tired it was.

We dedicated the next day to cleaning the van, laundry, changing the oil, donating leftover stuff to Goodwill, and adjusting the van’s brakes. Then we drove to our friend Peter Felton’s apartment in Santa Clara. Peter is a high school friend, and he showed us a very nice time. His mother was in town and insisted on taking care of us and cooking. Matt and I both enjoyed catching up with Peter, meeting his friends, and having some incredible meals with his mother.

These few days have been a good way to transition back to drifting after time away. The van is getting straightened out, we’re recovering from Burning Man, we’re spending good time with friends, and we’re moving forward. Next we’ll stop in Boise and stay with my friend Marshall. We are both curious to try to find out what Boise and Idaho are about.

Van Photos

Hi-

Many of you have asked for photos/ a photo tour of the Van. Please see my profile on Facebook. I've posted a link to Matt's album "Vantastic." Here you can find all kinds of van photos to get a better idea of what the Van-ship is. Enjoy.

Robert

Norhwest

After a nice relaxing week back on the East Coast (not to mention some much needed time away from Robert), Dan and Erin decided to join us out in the Northwest for a while. Erin and I were on the same flight into Seattle and we met Alex, Danny's friend who had been watching the van for us the past week, for dinner.


All was going well until we drove the van to the airport to pick Danny up from his flight. The transmission started refusing to shift on the 20mi drive to the airport, and literally when I got to the arrivals terminal, it stopped shifting at all. Permanent neutral. In the arrivals driveway with traffic everywhere... Danny called to let us he was ready at the terminal. "Well, good news and bad news Danny: we're here... but we're not going anywhere for a while." We called a tow truck which took a good 2 hours and by this time (1AM) Robert had also arrived. Thankfully the transmission was STILL under warranty (best decision yet to buy that warranty) so it wouldn't cost us a dime. We were worried about time tho, since last time AAMCO took about 2 weeks to rebuild it. We split a hotel room (a lot more reasonable split 4 ways but still expensive) and decided to figure it out in the morning. The original plan was to drive up to Vancouver with Alex until the weekend, so we just took the bus instead which worked out fine.

Here's a related aside about customs. The Canadian customs agents going into Canada from Washington State are very mean. When we drove the van in the first time, a woman who looked like Angela from the Office and had a heart of ice searched our van for 45 minutes. This time was no better on the bus. Here's a bit of an exchange I had with the customs officer:

Officer: Why are you going to Vancouver?
Me: Well, I've never been there before and I wanted to check it out.
Officer: Where are you staying in Vancouver?
Me: Hmm, I haven't figured that out yet, I guess I'll find a motel or something when I get there.
Officer: But you have NO reservations!?
Me: Nope, just kind of flying by the seat of my pants...
Officer: How long will you be there?
Me: 2 or 3 days probably.
Officer: What do you do for a living?
Me: I just travel around, I don't have a job.
Officer: Then how do you get money!?
Me: I don't. I had some saved up.
Officer: How much cash do you have?
Me: I have about $80 US and $5 Australian on me...
Officer: THAT'S IT!?!?
Me: Well I have debit cards and credit cards too, I just didn't feel like walking around with thousands of dollars in my pocket...
Officer: How much do you have access to?
Me: I'm not exactly sure what that means but at least about $10,000.
Officer: Well, what do you plan to do in case of an emergency?
Me: I don't understand how a job would help me in an emergency...
Officer: Well if you need money what will you do?
Me: I have money; if there's an emergency that somehow requires me to have more than $10,000 I guess I'm screwed.
Officer: When will you return to Virginia then?
Me: I don't really know, maybe when I run out of money, or maybe next year, or maybe not at all.
Officer: I see you don't have a return ticket on the bus. How do I know you'll come back to the US? Am I supposed to just take your WORD? (more than a hint of sarcasm here...)
Me: Uh... I guess so (and besides that Canada has nothing to offer me)

Then he confiscated my apple and let me in. I guess I answered all his questions wrong: I'm young, have no concrete plans, I'm dirty, wearing a big backpack, and have no job, so I'm instantly a national security threat. Customs agents make you feel like you've committed a terrible crime just for wanting to cross the border. Like I have to have some very explainable reason for going wherever I'm going. Since I never do, it's kind of a sticky situation. Interestingly enough, the US border agents were actually very friendy, interested in our trip, and said things like "welcome home!" I'd have thought they'd be more suspicious and ask more questions, but they didn't.

Vancouver was lots of fun, our guest drifters were out all night every night since this was their one week there. The bums there are very persistant too, "are you SURE that's all the change you have? Turn out your pockets I don't believe you." all while following you down the street. They accepted American change. Near Vancouver they have this mountain called Grouse Mountain and a 2.8km trail that climbs 2800ft up to the top called the Grouse Grind. I wish I'd timed myself running up it, but the world record is about 25 minutes for less than 2mi... it's steep. Erin took part in a lumberjack competition at the top and then we headed back down and out of Vancouver the next day.


Since the van was left outside in AAMCO's parking lot, we pulled some camping stuff out of it like a tent and a stove and rented a car for the weekend to go over to the Olympic Peninsula. We saw mountains and a rainforest and built a bonfire on the beach with some a Canadian dental student and his dad, among other things, and then came back to Seattle Monday. We had met some of Dan's UMD friends who were in Seattle and hung out with them for a day or two.

Seattle was great, I'm pretty sure I'd have been happy with it if I had moved there right after school for the other job offer. We went to a jazz/funk night and a MLS soccer game and almost forgot about the van until it was fully outfitted with a factory rebuilt transmission, ready to drive to Burning Man. We're in Reno now, after stocking up on costumes and booze and food and water and paint for the van's soon-to-be new paint job... An expensive shopping trip for sure (Robert lost his wallet in WA somewhere so I've been having to pay for everything), but I hope to be able to re-use a lot of leftover supplies. About as ready for Burning Man as I can be, and still not at all sure what to expect besides a bizarre good time.



Day 121
17,765mi
Transmission #3

Three Weeks in Alaska

August 18, 2010

I’m sitting on an express bus to Canada, pushing north through the remnants of Seattle post-work traffic. It’s a golden sunny day now, though the first half was thick with clouds. As I write this I’m listening to a weird late-70s Beach Boys’ album, one that Brian Wilson wrote while in his infamous bedroom, bathrobe, and binge-consumption phase. The songs are quick, about simple themes, and mostly just the famous harmonies with drums and synthesizers. Fun!

We crossed into Canada for the first time on this trip about a month ago. As you may have noticed, we’ve fallen behind in blogging. Mostly that’s due to us being so far removed from places with people. The thing that happened is both of us had a deadline approaching (mutual friend getting married in VA). We wanted to see Alaska in mid/late-summer, so on a Saturday morning we left Portland, OR, where we had had a very pleasant 3-day visit. Before leaving the lower 48 we stocked up on trail mix, camping food (mostly varieties of cheap dehydrated sodium noodles), and energy drinks. We needed them. We drank them.

First, we had to deal with the border. No problems there of course, but we had to wait half an hour for our surly blonde-haired customs lady to poke around the van. A little friendliness can make such a difference. She seems not to have learned this, though, in her many years. I kept on driving, away and away from the border and its commercial districts and big highways. Soon we found ourselves paralleling grayish-blue glacial rivers and going around mountains, passing through vast tracts of Native reservation lands and rural areas. Hardly any traffic was to be found, just some truckers hauling their loads about.

Gradually the sunshine tapered off. As I was relaxing after my shift I peered out and noticed the late-night sunset still in the sky, with brilliant orange, yellow, pink , and grey-violet all coloring the sky. The occasional little homes in this area of British Columbia certainly have some of the world’s most spectacular summer sunsets. Mostly the land belongs to trees and moose, though.

As we progressed we encountered much road construction, and some of the remaining stretches became riddled with bumps, holes, and dips, not to mention the brazen/clueless animals attending to their business on the roadsides. So sleep became more of a challenge for either of us while the other was driving. The main concern, though, was running out of gas. We had to make one detour to get gas, but otherwise we never ran empty. Did carry a jug in the back in the case of emergency. It smelled-- a lot.

Hit the Yukon, Canada – Alaska, US border at 4 a.m. Monday morning. The customs man didn’t have much to say and I took over driving there. We made it a couple more hours in, to where I could get gas, and then I stopped, exhausted and feeling absolutely terrible. We both napped then I got up and drove to the first stop, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

This national park is, I believe, the largest in the country with some 16 million acres or so. Since it’s a relatively new park (like some others in AK) there are private bits and pieces of land within the park. Wrangel-St. Elias has these two little 100 year-old mining towns that you can access down a 60-mile dirt road inside the park. The copper mining activity is long gone and the towns had fallen into some disrepair by the ‘50s and ‘60s, though some residents remained. Lands had been set aside as state and national preserves in the area periodically in the 20th century, but it was Jimmy Carter’s 1980 authorization that established the massive chunk of land that now comprises the park. Since then the towns, McCarthy and Kennicott, have seen a little tourist boom that’s grown from summer to summer.

We drove the van in and went for a couple hikes and bike rides around these towns. A huge stretched-out glacier runs from Kennicott up into mountains to the north. We climbed onto it for a bit but spent more time hiking up to the former grounds of copper extraction, the actual Kennicott mine, which sits in ruin on a steep rocky slope far up a mountainside. We have some fine photos of this area—check Facebook! The area still has wooden mine-house structures left from the 1930s along with huge amounts of rusty metal cans, plates, shovels, tools, glassware, even handmade shoes. I guess when the ore ran out the miners packed their belongings and fled the harsh place for anywhere else they could earn a livelihood. Our hike gave us spectacular views over the glacial valley, some glacially fed rivers, the two towns, and all kinds of surrounding valleys.

After these few days we drove to Anchorage to get supplies and a meal. We stocked up at REI, checked email, had a great pasta dinner at a Greek restaurant, then started driving North. The goal for this leg was to get to the Arctic Ocean at Prudhoe Bay. We drove thru Wasilla on the road to Fairbanks and as we progressed, homes and businesses quickly became few and far between.

Alaska seems to be a haven for the minute group of Americans who wish to be as disconnected as possible from contemporary, mainstream culture. In Alaska you can still live in a home with an outhouse in the middle of some forest. We met people whose homes are only accessible by boat. Residents in McCarthy & Kennicott send a guy with a van to Anchorage, half a day’s drive away, to Costco for food. A lot of people in the state also appear to lead relatively self-sufficient lives, hunting for their food and growing plants indoors rather than depending on a grocery store.
After picking up a slightly crazed Inuit lady and having some run-ins with little animals playing on the roads we did make it to Fairbanks. That was a depressing city to me. We slept at Wal-Mart, changed the oil, and got onto the Dalton Highway which runs to the Arctic Ocean at a spot called Deadhorse. This is the road where they film the show Ice Road Truckers in the winter. At Deadhorse are acres and acres of oil fields where all the global industry players have set up.

The scenery along this road is simply incredible. First of all, we were so far north by this time that we reached the point where there is no night. The land of midnight sun. The sun never sinks below the horizon in these brief summer months. We went through massive conifer forests across a mountain range then onto broad green plains of tundra, all along following the Trans-Alaska oil pipeline. While we each took breaks from driving we read a little book about the history of the pipeline, an engineering marvel.

The only other people out here in this vast expanse are the truckers, pipeline workers, and a few fellow travelers marveling at the land and trying to get to the Arctic. We crossed the Yukon river, a wide, fast river that’s grey from glacial till. At one point we took a break and parked off the side the road. We got snacks and water and walked through a marshy field then forded a glacial river then climbed up the foothills of mountains on the other side. It felt like we were the first people to touch the land. Mosses of red, orange, yellow and green covered the spongy ground along with blueberry bushes and other berry plants. We got in the van and kept on driving. We’d investigated where to buy gas on the road (there is one little stop called Coldfoot where you can get gas and food), and we had the extra so that wasn’t a huge worry. Gas at Coldfoot and Deadhorse ran about 4.40/gallon!
We kept driving way into the wee hours and finally found a spot about 60 mi south of Deadhorse to spend the night. The gravel path ran to the edge of a beautiful river. We went to sleep in the bright 4 AM sun after watching an episode of Breaking Bad, a new favorite show. This section of the road was so nice. I’m pretty sure it was real and not just a hallucination from my exhaustion.

We got into Deadhorse the next day. It’s an industrial place where the buildings are all prefab and there are no actual residents. Workers come for 2-week shifts on their drill-sites and stay in company lodging or the hotel. Most of the buildings are just trailers connected together. In the wintertime they build ice roads over the frozen tundra and even over the ocean. The sky was cloudy and a cold wind blew. We took a quick van ride along with some other tourists to the ocean. This is the only way you can access the coast post-Sept. 11 due to concerns with oil field security.

We then followed the road back to from where we came, beyond Fairbanks to Denali National Park. We got to Denali around 9 AM and parked and slept, then picked up wilderness permits and chose the section of the park to explore. They grid off the wilderness in order to prevent too many people from hiking the same areas; the Park Service tries to limit the chances of any groups encountering other people in the wilderness. We saw a few other groups in the distance setting up camp but that’s all. We spent the first two nights at Wonder Lake, a campsite 80 miles into the park. Private vehicles aren’t allowed so we parked and rode the park bus in. Our driver pointed out wildlife and stopped for photos along the way. We spent 2 nights at Wonder Lake, hanging out and doing day hikes and looking at the mountain range to our south.

After Denali we showered and cleaned up, then took off for Anchorage again. First, in a town called Talkeetna, we got on a 10-seater airplane tour over the mountain range for an hour. We saw a bunch of glaciers, some with blue crevasses and some black and white, and lots of sharply angular mountains that were brushed with snow and ice. After lunch we got on to Anchorage, where we ran errands and hit up some of the nightlife. The best place was Chilkoot Charlie’s, an old bar complex that had two bands playing at once and a great crowd.

After that we had a couple shorter stops: Valdez and Seward. We didn’t stick around Seward but drove thru the little port town and went to a nearby glacier park. In Valdez the following day we went on a small group tour with inflatable kayaks around a glacial lake. The lake is at the base of a glacier and has other streams feeding it and icebergs all over. It was hard to reconcile the fact that the next week I’d be sweating at the beach in South Carolina while at the moment I was cold in raingear on a partially frozen lake. We enjoyed the lake tour and then began our slow return to the lower 48. Made one tourist pit-stop in Skagway, got dinner in Whitehorse, B.C., and we stopped at Liard Hot Springs, a great little park in northern B.C. After refreshing/burning in the springs we continued slowly but surely making the miles to lower B.C. and finally Washington. We passed a herd of bison on the way.

Alaska

Note: This is the entire Alaska trip, so save it for a really slow day at work, or you can read it in pieces... I promise not to wait this long to post again, it's just that internet (and time) was a relatively scarce commodity in the land of the midnight sun.

We'd been driving for 50 hours and 2300mi. Straight. We stopped for gas every 300mi and once to cook some hot dogs by the side of the road in British Columbia. Once we had to drive close to 50mi out of the way to get to a gas station before we ran out of gas. Most gas stations in this part of Canada are not open 24 hours, and many are several hundred kilometers apart (then you have to do the math to convert to miles). Add this to the fact that we have no working fuel gauge on the van and it's kind of amazing we were able to make the trip non-stop. My diet consisted almost entirely of Red Bull and Twizzlers. When we crossed the border into Alaska, Robert finally pronounced the drive over and we slept for 3 or 4 hours in Tok, AK (Tok rhymes with smoke as an informative local magazine pointed out).




We then drove over to the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park visitor center and got some maps and information about the road into the park. A daunting-sounding 60 miles or railroad-spike infested gravel which was supposed to take 3 hours. It turned out (like a lot of things) to be pretty tame, talked up probably to make the faint-of-heart (or faint-of-their-car's-suspension) think twice before driving it. We made it into McCarthy, an old mining town which was weirdly encapsulated inside this National Park created in 1980. About 30 or 40 people live there, some year-round, and there was also a good bit of private property along the McCarthy road. It was a mix of young hiking and rafting guides there for the summer, and fiercely independent (bordering on reclusive) old-timers who seemed to resent the added tourism the National Park designation had brought in the past 30 years.

We biked up towards Kennicott, where the actual mining operation used to be and hiked out to the Root Glacier. Cool, but having no gear, we couldn't climb much on it. Robert crashed into bed about 7:30, but I couldn't quite bring myself to. I stayed up until about 11:00, still light outside, but I was good and tired. We did some mild day-hiking the next day and it gave me absolutely no sense of the entire park. There were some spectacular views but this is the biggest park in the US. It's almost impossible to get a feel for it in a short amount of time and since there is only one road that barely makes it into one edge of the park, you have to do some serious backpacking to see most of it. I'll come back, I thought. I'd planned to get on a little prop plane the next day which could fly around to get a better feel for the Alaska Range and more of the park, but it rained, putting the visibility at next to nothing; not good for flying or sightseeing.

We started the next leg of our marathon drive, this time to Anchorage, where we ate dinner and then continued north to Fairbanks. On the way, we picked up a 59-year-old Indian woman from Barrow, the northernmost town in Alaska, only accessible by plane (or, as we later found out, by a 200mi ice road over the open ocean, but that was obviously only in the winter). She was interesting, and slightly crazy. It was dark and at about 2AM, I hit a porcupine. I swerved to try and miss it, made the tires squeal, threw Robert across the back of the van where he had been sleeping, and smacked right into the damn thing. It was huge. No serious van damage, but Louisa, the Indian woman, seriously wanted me to go back and pick it up so she could cook it. Finally we made it to Fairbanks around 3:30, and she about started screaming because I didn't know where downtown was and that was where she wanted to be let off. "You have to understand, Louisa, I'm from Virginia, and I have no idea where the hell downtown Fairbanks is from here!" Quickly turned into her screaming and crying and me yelling "If you don't calm the fuck down now! You're getting out of the van here!" This did not help. Finally we found downtown thanks to the direction of some guy wandering around the street at 3:30AM. Louisa got out. We headed to Wal-Mart and slept for a few hours before heading up towards the Dalton Highway.


If you saw that show "Ice Road Truckers," that's the Dalton Highway in the winter. It's a worse road in the summer because it's all gravel and dirt that can't be smoothed out as easily as an ice road can. There are some paved sections, but for the most part, it's a 411mi long gravel maintenance road to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). Most of the traffic is trucks.
There are a few people in RVs or cars driving up to the Arcitc Circle and on up to Deadhorse (the closest to Prudhoe Bay and the Arctic Ocean that you can drive as a civilian), and by the end of the trip, you end up personally meeting most of them. The first day we drove, stopping along the way, once for a good long hike off trails, across rivers, and avoiding bears, and several times to look at the pipeline. You cross the Brooks Range driving north, and the Continental Divide goes thru here also. The same Divide we had crossed in Colorado a few months ago. Alaska's North Slope, north of the Divide, has zero trees. Just tundra and rocks. I looked at my GPS and realized I was driving faster than the sun was setting in the north. At this point, my competitive spirit kicked in and it became a race.
Van vs. sunset. I was determined to get far enough north where the sun would just go around in a crazy circle, dipping to a low in the north and then going right back up and around again without touching the horizon. It did. Weird. This picture of the van was taken at 3:19AM, when the sun was at its lowest point in the sky.


I went for a run in the morning. My first (and for a while I think, only) run north of the Arctic Circle, and what would also be my only run in Alaska due to the extreme amount of driving, backpacking, and lack of sleep. Then we drove on up to Deadhorse and got on a bus with the other idiots who had driven up here to see the very un-spectacular Arctic Ocean. Since Prudhoe Bay is private property (owned for now, at least, by BP), we had to clear a security check the day before and be bussed around with an escort. We got to the Arcitc Ocean and I was the first one to take off my clothes and dive on in. It was cold. Not as cold as some lakes I've been in, but any way you slice it, 36 degrees is cold. I hadn't brought a town or a change of shorts, so I did end up shivering uncontrollably on the bus ride back, but maybe it was worth it. I've been swimming in 3 oceans this summer, and this one was by far the least pleasant. As a sidenote, gas costs $4.55 per gallon in Deadhorse, which is slightly confusing being located less than 8mi away from the largest oil field in North America. Less confusing if you think about having to drive a tanker truck up the Dalton Highway.

After this, we drove (without sleeping) to Denali in a straight shot. We got there at 9AM and slept until 2:00. I was exhausted and needed some good rest before our week-long backpacking and camping adventure in Denali. This was day 8 of the Alaska trip, and somewhere around 25 hours of sleep total. I figured I'd sleep in August.

We got our wilderness permits and a bear keg and hopped on the big green bus the next day. The bus is the only way to get around in Denali, you're not allowed to drive on the road. There is one 80mi long road servicing 6 million acres of park. Denali was pretty overwhelming also, but after spending some time there I got a small feel for it; more so that in Wrangell-St. Elias I thought. We were camping in Wonder Lake at a group campground the first 2 nights, the heading into the backcountry around Mt. Eielson for 3 days. We got some decent views of Mt. McKinley / Mt. Denali / the big mountain / the 20,000ft monster / whatever you want to call it the first few days, which is more than a lot of park visitors get. The clouds tend to clear in the evening and morning, just when the mosquitoes are the most terrible. You get used to bites after a while. After a long day hike alone, picking up some wild blueberries and singing and talking to myself all day to ward off bears, we rested up and headed off onto the trail-less tundra for our short backpacking trip.



I wish I had a month to hike around in Denali. Or at least a few weeks. Three days is enough to see a small part well though. And it's a much better way to see anything than by riding a bus around with a bunch of retirees from Florida. Being without trails is difficult for more than just not having a pre-planned route to follow. If you've never hiked on tundra, you should try it sometime. It's exhausting. It's basically thick layers of peat moss that sinks down a good foot or two when you step on it. Slow going. The best way to get around is to follow the gravel river bars, but that ends up presenting its own set of challenges, like wading thru glacial meltwater waist-deep and climbing thru dense willows and bushes on the edges of the riverbeds. The whole time you have to be forcing conversation so as to let the bears know you're coming. You end up talking about some weird stuff when you can't let a 5 second pause happen. All in all, though, this was the highlight of the Alaska trip. It was the part where I had enough time to actually take some of the surroundings in for a few days; the tundra forces you to slow down and enjoy it.

After recovering from our trip and taking a much needed shower at the campground in Denali (it had been 17 days since my last one... a record I hope), we headed to Talkeetna. We had planned to go rafting the next day, but there weren't enough people to fill up the raft, so I was able to conince Robert to go on a plane ride with me. We were 2 of 7 people in a small propellor plane, headed into the Alaska Range for an hour-long low-flying flightseeing tour. It was spectacular. This is the kind of terrain it would take weeks to get into on foot, not to mention a lot more technical ice-climbing and mountainclimbing experience than I had (none). I took 300 pictures in an hour. The 20 or so best I put on facebook, but I think I ended up keeping about 150 of them. Just ice, glaciers, snow, ragged alpine peaks, everywhere. It was an amazing place, and it made me wish I had the skills to get there on foot and see it up close. Maybe later. I'm compiling a lot of mental lists of things I want to do in the future; even a trip like this can't cover it all.


After a weird but awesome night in Anchorage involving me getting a mullet haircut, singing karaoke, several bands, and a drag show, we drove down to Sewaed thru the Chugach Mountains, the southernmost mountain range in Alaska. I liked these mountains because they were mostly green and had some spotty snow above the treeline. We hiked around Exit Glacier for a bit, which is connected to the Harding Ice Field (bigger than the state of Rhode Island and some other states depending on who you talk to), and got right back into our super-driving routine, heading over to Valdez for a kayak trip the next day.

Valdez started out cloudy, which seemed to be the norm, but once we got out kayaks in the water it cleared up fast. We were kayaking in the Valdez Glacial Lake at the base of Valdez Glacier, in an around some huge icebergs that had calved off the face of the glacier and were now just floating around in the lake. We were able to hike around on some of these icebergs and paddle into caves in others. Really blue ice. A lighter blue than Crater Lake, but that same "oh wow, so that's what a pure-wavelength color looks like" kind of blue.


We had some extra time on the way back (we'd allowed ourselves an extra day to get back to Seattle before flying back to the East Coast) so we stopped by Skagway. Not much to report here, mostly a cruise-ship tourist town with a lot of jewelry and vaguely Alaskan trinket shops. We did stop in the town of Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon. I like it. It draws a strange breed of people I'm sure, but I like strange people anyway. Not that I'd live there... We also went further down the Alaska Highway and went in the Laird Hot Springs. That's a great place if you're ever in northeastern BC. It's 130 degrees at the source and there's a little cold waterfall feeding into it too so it cools off the further away from the source you get. Nice and relaxing. I got to the 130 degree part and threw my little rock onto the pile to prove I'd been there (some Canadian guy did it, must be the thing to do), but I only stayed there for about 5 seconds. 130 degrees is enough to "boil your kiwis off, eh?" as put by a guy from Ontario. "Don't go in there if you wanna have any children, eh?" Apparently in the winter the trees have giant icicles hanging from them, the aurora come out and it's 30 below. Sounds like a nice night to be sitting in a hot spring to me.


From there, after surviving a blow-out, some buffalo herds, lots of moose, and US Customs, we made it back to Washington State, ready to stop driving, sleep, and make it back to the East Coast for a week of relative rest at the beach.

6 August, 2010 - Day 91
16,165mi
5 oil changes
1/2 of a haircut
7,420mi driven in the past 3 weeks
Casualties: 1 porcupine, 1 possum, 1 bird, 3 million bugs

Update 8/18/2010 - Van at AAMCO again with a torn up transmission. Ugh.

San Francisco and Oregon

It's been a little while since I've updated this blog, and a few things (and a few thousand miles) have happened since. When we were done with Yosemite I drove back down to the coast to Ventura, CA, just north of where we left off for our inland detour. We had a nice time going out to the Channel Islands on a boat and hanging out for a few days for the Santa Barbara Solstice festival and other things. That festival was insane. Loads of middle-class California people in a trance state, dressed as peacocks or painted blue or you name it, dancing around throwing fire sticks, playing drums and just generally making complete idiots out of themselves but totally enjoying it! I imagined that kind of thing happening in the South... and couldn't really. People just seem to not take everything as seriously out here (except their cage-free tomatoes, diet free of "toxins", and street sweeping; they're very very serious about keeping their streets clean in California). Anyway, it's not a surprise to hear a bartender say something like "Hey! you can't smoke that out here... unless you pass it to me first (wink, wink)" or to have the police tell you "well technically... you're not supposed to sleep in your van here, but just keep moving around and have a wonderful time in California!" Unfortunately I got some kind of terrible sickness in Oxnard and had to waste a day in a motel room puking my guts up (not really what I had in mind for the day), but shortly after we were headed up the PCH.

The stretch of the PCH between Santa Barbara and San Francisco is amazing. Most people rave about how great Big Sur is, but the whole surrounding area is close to the same terrain. Sheer cliffs hundreds of feet down into the waves on rocky beaches below, and mountains thousands of feet high right at the ocean. Oh, and I bought a surfboard in Santa Barbara from some guy who had been doing research on amorphous silicon deposition at UCSB, but it took until about Monterey until I could find a beach I wouldn't kill myself on (here I was wishing for Pacific Beach in San Diego, still the best beach yet).

So we made it to San Francisco, which was great sure, but it was still a city with (I'd say) very subtle differences to any other major city out there. The difference between say the Sierra Nevadas and the Appalachains for example, is much more extreme and exciting to me than the difference between San Francisco and New York. So much of your experience of a city is the individual people you know there anywhere, so in most places you can find somewhere to fit in. I liked the fact that San Francisco is so close to these great places in Northern CA and by the beach too, but I wasn't a huge fan of all the people or the fact that there's this cold fog hanging around in the summer and you have to wear 2 sweatshirts on the 4th of July just to stay warm.

It's weird how old landmarks or symbols tend to crop up as tourist attractions once they've lost their relevance. Right now, operating on the corner of Haight and Ashbury streets, is a Ben and Jerry's ice cream store, and a place that sells "tie-dye" printed t-shirts next to people my age taking pictures with the street signs. Cannery Row in Monterey is now devoid of sardine canneries, but has hundreds of tourists milling about in mirror mazes and souvenier shops. Yosemite Valley even is a long shot from how John Muir saw it I bet, still beautiful, but full of thousands of tourists eating breakfast burritos and driving Priuses around. You really have to figure out for yourself what's happening and not listen to the whole "tourist and travel industry" telling you what to see and do. Some of the coolest things I've seen so far on the trip I've discovered completely by accident, and some of the most hyped things have been very disappointing. Anyway, I was ready to get back into the mountains when we left San Francisco.

We were headed out to Crater Lake in Oregon to meet my parents for a couple days there and on the Rogue River. Crater Lake is at 6200ft inside of a dormant volcano. It's also 53 degrees and almost 2000ft deep (I went swimming but couldn't touch the bottom, even near the shore where it wasn't quite 2000ft deep). It's so blue, the ranger identified the color by its wavelength off the top of his head, 420 Crater Lake blue. And it is. You can see literally a couple hundred feet down and it really is some blue water especially when the sun is out.

After a day and a half exploring Crater Lake, we floated down the Rogue River on kayaks which was great fun. The first real time I've been in a boat this summer and the water was warm enough to be comfortable swimming in. We asked the girl at the kayak place about some mountain biking and hiking in Oregon for this week and got some great recommendations we checked out the next day. Unfortunately our POS GPS (this Tom Tom has been out to get us all trip) decided to take us on some Forest Service Roads that would be fine in maybe a Jeep, but were quite interesting in the van. (Still the worst road prize goes to the unpaved roads in Sedona, AZ tho) We found an awesome campsite in the Siskyou National Forest for $5 and we were almost the only ones there. Tons of trails around the area which I had to bike and run around on. The mountains here, the Coastal Range, kind of reminded me of maybe the Smokies, but with different trees. I liked Oregon already.

After a day in Bend, drinking some Deschutes beer, we headed to the Mt. Hood National Forest with another endless set of trails in the Cascades. I had a particularly good long run here just down a rolling trail next to a big creek. We stopped in Government Camp, OR on the way and found out from the chatty bartender that you can literally ski all year (even now in mid-July!) on Mt. Hood.

Next we made it to Portland, where we headed immediately to the Rogue Public House to drink some beers. We actually met some girls from North Carolina there who were meeting someone's brother in Portland. He had just moved out there about a year ago and he and his friends were really trying to sell the idea of Portland to us. It wasn't a hard sell. We went to a couple other breweries with the NC people and then called it a night. Oregon may be my favorite state so far. And I'm not really even done with it yet, we decided to leave now and come back later in the fall to maximize our time in... Alaska! That's right, as I write this, we're about 1400mi (a bit over halfway...) into the long drive to the interior of Alaska. I think we're in the Yukon territory still. Anyway, we stocked up on food and bought a case of Red Bull and have just been driving non-stop for about 36 hours now, only stopping for gas and sometimes animals in the road. We should be to Wrangell-St. Elias National Park sometime Monday afternoon (we left Saturday morning). I'll have to write a lot more about Alaska later I'm sure, but for now Canada is pretty beautiful (if very very lonely feeling up further north). And by the way right now it's almost 11:00PM locally and the sun is still very much up (it rose around 3:30).


Day 72, 10,540mi (and counting very fast right now)