This morning, on nytimes.com, I saw a link to an article which is being updated all day today, as the journalist liveblogs Thanksgiving. I thought liveblogging was corny before (mostly because I am picky about which internet/blogging trends I fall for), but now liveblogging has gone too far. To out corny them (because that’s what we’re about here at Wanderful, corny), I’m going to take it one step further and liveblog MY THANKSGIVING! But not like that, no - see, I always wanted to keep a list of all the things I am thankful for on Thanksgiving, but I usually forget or fall asleep for most of the afternoon. This year, whenever something comes to mind that I am thankful for, I’m going to liveblog it right here on Wanderful. Perhaps this isn’t really liveblogging - I think liveblogging is supposed to have something to do with following your own or someone else’s actions for a day. I don’t care, I’m liveblogging my thoughts, that’s what I’m liveblogging. Here we go: I am thankful for… 9:13PM
Wine.
“Where are they?” Katie asks, holding back tears. I drive us through the urban streets, circling the same city blocks as the headlights cut into the fog. Katie stretches her neck out the window, her voice quavers in the wind. We search the area for half an hour, no luck. The people who took our money are gone.
I can’t stress to you enough how nervous I get before meeting someone for the first time — especially when there is plenty of time leading up to the initial introduction to ruminate over the possibilities. My brain cramps up imagining all the ways the meeting could go awry. But, really, how many strangers actually plan to kill me and wear my skin as a fancy bathrobe? Hopefully no more than 12 or 13 out of six billion. Certainly, the daughter and son-in-law of Georgia and Roger (remember Georgia and Roger from Michigan? They were so nice!) would not invite us to their home for dinner with the nefarious intention of harvesting our flesh, right? Judging by the sweet smell of oven-baked cookies and the warm greeting Pete and Marcy extended to us upon our arrival, it quickly became clear that they had no murderous motives.
Walking into a crowded bar on a Friday night can be an unpredictable experience. This particular bar was called The Chieftain, in the Mission District of San Francisco. It was an Irish pub, but the bouncer on this particular night was a plump, redheaded Brit. He cracked a joke as he asked to see our ID’s.
“Huh?”
He smiled and his lips moved again, giving voice to his musical British inflections; however, I couldn’t make out a single word. People were talking all around. Couples had to yell at each other across their tables just to be heard. Being somewhat hard of hearing and largely unfamiliar with non-James-Bond British accents, I had to pretend to understand his joke. Thinking quickly, I said “Hahaha!!” He let us in without incident.
According to Penny, we still had three miles to go before we would reach the bottom of that hill. I was nervous for our own safety, but it was hard to concentrate so much on that when I was worrying about the fate of Wanda, stuck in the mud, cliffside - especially because we realized ten minutes after leaving the T@b, that we didn’t put her emergency brake up. After a minute of wondering how much of a chance she had of not rolling off the cliff, we realized she would be pretty safe because she was STUCK IN THE MUD.
Mark, Mister and I left Fort Bragg and headed towards San Francisco, around 6pm on Sunday night. Mark drives most of the time during the day, and always when it’s dark out. Lately we’ve only been driving at night and always down some loopy road. As Mark guided the three of us in the jeep, with Wanda the T@b in tow, down and around a windy highway, my mind began to wander. I thought about what I should write about for Wanderful’s Monday morning post. The past two weeks have been pretty enjoyable, but all we’ve been doing is spending the time looking at the Pacific, picking up rocks and thinking about the Redwoods - nothing you guys want to hear about I’m sure. My thoughts shifted as we made a left on a road (as advised by Penny, our GPS) with a bright yellow caution sign that read “WARNING: Through Traffic Not Advised”. A sign anyone would have listened to….except for us.
Back in September, I found that someone had clicked to our website from a blog called Swiss Miss. It turned out it was not Wanderful that was the cool website to be written about in that post, but another road trip blog called The Continental Crawler, named after Michael and Jen’s eBay bought 1950’s trailer. Our pal Ratcliffe left a comment on the Swiss Miss blog post with our web address in it and that’s how people were finding us. So I visited their blog and thought it was pretty crazy that we had both taken off from about the same area (Montclair/Brooklyn) and at the same time - except they were going the more exciting and scenic way, and we were driving through Pennsylvania and Ohio. I emailed them and received a reply from Michael, we decided “let us be linked-blog friends.” and so we were. Every so often we’d receive emails from Michael about random things like “Go to this ghost town.” (we had already passed it) or “Is there still corn?” (yes there was, it was a late year for corn harvesting). Their final destination was Portland, OR, where they were moving to lead a less stressful life. Both Michael and Jen are freelancers (photography, graphic design) which made the move that much easier for them and inspiring for me - for I too am a graphic designer/photographer (but not really the latter), and I like seeing others in the field living wherever they’d like to live after creating a name for themselves.
Michael invited us over their AWESOME house when we were in Portland, and after skipping out the first, I don’t know, five times we were supposed to go there, we finally ended up at their place the night before we left. We spent about five hours talking about life and life on the road, I didn’t even know we had that many hours of road stories. Being that they are more seasoned in living life and doing business, we got a lot of great advice on just about everything, including: moving, living, working, freelancing, traveling, what dog food will make your dog fart a lot in front of guests (never heard a dog actually fart, oh Wally), that sound really matters for online videos, and a bunch of blog tips - they prefer to keep posts short, one line - I meant to keep this post at only one line for them, but it turned out to go on a little longer. They’ve also inspired us to do some sort of weekly video on Wanderful, an episode about our day maybe, after watching their well done Continental Crawler episodes.
We were recording a great video for all you Wanderful fans the other day when my camera BROKE! The screen went black and now I can’t see a thing I’m recording. SO while I had big plans to premiere a video today, it was all ruined by Canon’s ability to disappoint me over and over again. Don’t worry, I am upgrading to something even better. I have been too lazy to post videos on our Wanderfilm page here, but you can visit our Vimeo page for some short clips. I swear, in the next two weeks you’ll have at least an hour’s worth of Wanderfilm to catch up on.
Anyway, thanks for having us over Jen & Michael. & Wally + Tanner even though she was sleeping.
Our pal Kate (aka Ms. Dawes) is teaching in a 5th grade class this year. They’re following our road trip on Wanderful and have their own blog, Wanderkids, where they’ll be posting their Wanderful related findings, projects, and questions for us to answer.
How did you and Mark meet?
Mark and I met in college at Montclair State University. Just one of many reasons college is awesome.
What the best thing that happened to you so far on the trip?
Best things to happen on the trip so far: Badlands, making friends in Minneapolis, seeing so many landscapes we’ve never seen before, meeting all types of people in general and being welcomed into other’s homes, every city we’ve visited, the visit with Mark’s family, first view of the Pacific Ocean, and when we realized we want to continue on the road trip for another few years, etc. etc.
Does Mister have any clothes. Does he like them? Does he have shoes too?
Even before Mister received a box load of clothing in the mail from Doggles, he was a big fan of wearing scarves, sweaters and handkerchiefs (he does not like shoes). Some people think dressing dogs up is torture, but Mister would beg to differ:
This morning I woke up with all intentions of doing something in Portland all day. Instead I stayed in the T@b and threw myself a pity party. Ooooh poor me I’m on a road trip and feeling sad. What is wrong with me?
Tired of my whining, Mark slyly slipped out and went to the Store-That-Shall-Not-Be-Named (STSNBN) to exchange our propane tank for the second time in TWO WEEKS! How can propane run out so quickly? I’ll tell you how: Winter. Really, it’s coming along quite nicely this year. Although Portland has been great when it comes to weather, the 70’s! Could you imagine? And they have trees here! Real trees! All we’ve been seeing for the past two or three weeks are pine trees. I thought surely by the time we reached a state with leafy trees, all the leaves would have fallen off the branches. But I was wrong and wow they’re orange and red and yellow! So Mark’s propane exchanging trip took over an hour because he had to wait over an hour for someone to simply unlock the cage, grab a propane tank and give it to Mark - He already paid! But for some reason the store just couldn’t function correctly in that hour leaving Mark with no choice but to “yell” at them. Sometimes I laugh when Mark yells at me because I think he’s joking, but sometimes his yelling can be scarier than how my mother yelled at me when I was younger. And I have a feeling Mark scared those people because he said all the managers had a meeting and then came out to apologize to him. And at the end of the story he added “And all the customer service people looked as though they were crying, must have been a tough day.”
So while Mark was making everyone in customer service cry at the STSNBN, I was laying in the grass, recovering from a run and was approached by our neighbor who lives in the sweet Airstream (can I mention Airstream on here since we are sponsored by T@B? T@@@BBBT@B. Okay, that should make up for it.) Maybe our neighbor, Alan, knew I was having a self-inflicted bad week, because he went on and on (in a good way) talking about how everything ‘just is’ - if it’s good, that’s because you are thinking of it in a positive way. And if it’s bad, that’s because you’re thinking of it in a negative way. And you’ve got to step back and think about whether you like the way you feel because of the way you’re reacting to things, etc. etc. Everything he said I’ve thought of before, but maybe he was just supposed to remind me about these things.
Mark came home an hour later as Alan was giving me an energy cleansing……………….
And that turned into Mark and me laying in our bed for an hour, earphones connected to our computers and ears of course, playing BRAIN POWER, a CD we copied to our iTunes that Alan loaned us. Maybe it was the sun shining on my already-tired-from-running forehead for the entire hour Alan and I spoke, or perhaps the vibrations produced by the deep beat that CD made, that caused me to fall asleep right away. I woke up ten minutes before the CD ended, freaked because it was now blasting a noise that sounded like an airplane taking off next to our T@B. My ears adjusted and I fell back asleep only to be woken up by extremely loud beginning notes of Led Zeppelin’s version of You Shook Me.
Then we ate some excellent Indian food and so much ice cream that my stomach muscles hurt from being stretched too far. Good night!
