Ander and I went on a day-trip to Olympia on Friday, and when we returned the next day we were driving past Seattle and on towards the Canadian border when we saw that the trees on the side of the curvy road looked weirdly lit. Then we realized that they were covered in snow.
When we got back to the Farmhouse, the entire garden was covered over with snow. It's still covered with snow. Actually, it is currently dumping even more snow on it from the sky.
Garden status update: The kale, chinese greens, and other leafy greens everywhere are sadly frozen solid. The broccoli and brussel sprouts we have a little more hope for unthawing, and if not we'll just eat them. The grains that we hadn't finished harvesting yet (amaranth and flax) are ruined, I assume. Two beds had already gotten sheet-mulched, but the rest were still going so well that we didn't want to pull everything up. I don't know a lot about sheet-mulching yet, but I bet we're just going to mulch over everything once the snow melts.
I sure hope the snow melts. It can't snow straight from now until March, can it?
Our newest roommate Willow moved in on Monday, and we now have a full house.
The greenhouse generally stays above freezing. There's some kale babies in there right now, I know, and a basil plant that we rescued before the snow. We'll be trying to sprout some winter peas, cabbage, and other hardy plants soon enough. Ander and I have already filled the trays with some good dirt, and now we just have to find a warmer place for the trays to sit for germination. (The greenhouse is warmer than the outside, but not that warm.) Maybe we will do this soon, because it'll get the seedling project out of the processing kitchen.
The Farmhouse has two kitchens. They're both pretty standard (fridge, oven, stove, countertops, sink), but the upstairs one is more frequently used. The downstairs kitchen was covered in junk because the basement flooded and Sara's furniture was still in the kitchen until her room was re-carpeted. Well, happy day, that was yesterday, and now I think I will spend today getting that kitchen into better shape.
Whyyy, you may ask! Well, the downstairs kitchen is where we can process our harvests and other big projects. Our next big project, which we have just finished gathering equipment for, is wine-making from fruit. (Grapes, pears, apples... you could make Apple-Jalapeño Wine, if you were so inclined.)
Tonight we will obtain enough fruit to get started on the wine. It was supposed to be today, but yesterday was a bust. That's not true: I did get a wine corker from a very nice pair of Swiss men who gave me recommendations about how to distill wine without a still and told me stories about their many landlords. And I drove two composters over to Ander's cafe. But still, we need more fruit.
Also planned for tomorrow, the pickling of green beans and perhaps beets. Mmmm, pickled beets.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Monday, November 8, 2010
Life in the Farmhouse
Firstly, I have a horrible cold with a hacking congested wheezing sort of cough that I really wish would go away. Anyway...
View Larger Map
Here is where we may be living until February!
The Farmhouse doesn't actually look like that anymore: Many plants are gone for the winter, and the grass/concrete sidewalk business has been replaced with an INFINITE AMOUNT OF WOOD CHIPS. Excess wood chips are still chilling out in the backyard. They are also just starting up their blog; you can tell from the single entry.
The Farmhouse consists of Sara, Ander, Dan, and now Patrick, Tomko, myself, and soon another person named Willow that no one has ever met before. The collective house has existed for five years or more. "We are here to garden this fucking place, not destroy it," a sign in the kitchen says. We make mostly-vegetarian/vegan meals, as much out of the garden as we can muster at this late stage. We're going to be putting winter seedlings out into the greenhouse soon. I've been painting and cleaning out the shed. Maybe we will make wine in the basement over the winter. We could do all sorts of things.
Our future plan, which doesn't have much solidity at this point, involves Mary Tully leaving Baltimore in February, Patience's poor little engine being rebuilt this winter, and Latin America. In preparation for this plan, Tomko and I are trying to find jobs in Vancouver to make some money over the winter. Tomorrow, everyone has the day off except Patrick and the household is going on an adventure to Pender Island to pick up Byzantium and hang out on the ferries.
View Larger Map
Here is where we may be living until February!
The Farmhouse doesn't actually look like that anymore: Many plants are gone for the winter, and the grass/concrete sidewalk business has been replaced with an INFINITE AMOUNT OF WOOD CHIPS. Excess wood chips are still chilling out in the backyard. They are also just starting up their blog; you can tell from the single entry.
The Farmhouse consists of Sara, Ander, Dan, and now Patrick, Tomko, myself, and soon another person named Willow that no one has ever met before. The collective house has existed for five years or more. "We are here to garden this fucking place, not destroy it," a sign in the kitchen says. We make mostly-vegetarian/vegan meals, as much out of the garden as we can muster at this late stage. We're going to be putting winter seedlings out into the greenhouse soon. I've been painting and cleaning out the shed. Maybe we will make wine in the basement over the winter. We could do all sorts of things.
Our future plan, which doesn't have much solidity at this point, involves Mary Tully leaving Baltimore in February, Patience's poor little engine being rebuilt this winter, and Latin America. In preparation for this plan, Tomko and I are trying to find jobs in Vancouver to make some money over the winter. Tomorrow, everyone has the day off except Patrick and the household is going on an adventure to Pender Island to pick up Byzantium and hang out on the ferries.
Saturday, October 23, 2010
A month on Quadra Island
It's been a month since I updated. Quadra Island has internet access at a few places (the HBI pub, a coffee shop...) but it's incredibly spotty even at those locations. Allegedly there is cell reception out on Rebecca Spit, but I never actually checked.
View British Columbia in a larger map
(Click the icons on the map for details.)
Quadra is a fairly large island, sandwiched between big Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland in Discovery Passage, which I assume is named after the ship belonging to Captain Vancouver.
Of all the Discovery Islands (Quadra, Cortes, West and East Redonda, Read, and some others), Quadra is the closest to being civilization. It has several paved roads, an RCMP office, community center, and schools up to grade 10. There are two towns worth calling such--Q. Cove, where the ferry lands from Vancouver Island, and Heriot Bay, where the ferry takes you to Cortes Island. We're staying in Granite Bay, which I think is the third-largest town on the island for loose definitions of towns. It's logging territory, where the public lands on Quadra have been leased to logging companies. A good number of people I've met have once been tree-planters. Logging companies need to replant trees after logging, and so people set off with a pack full of trees and a shovel and get paid by the tree. Tree-planting camps seem to be overrun by hippies and dogs, because all of the dogs I've met have also come from tree-planting camps.
We were staying with Emily and Sam. Emily runs around doing permaculture landscaping and all sorts of things largely in other peoples' yards. Sam is a carpenter and cabinetmaker who's making an addition onto his shop. Sam makes a great host because he's crazier and friendlier than most other people you'll run into, and Emily does the responsible things to make sure that the farm doesn't collapse, god bless her.
Permaculture! What is it? Uhhhhh... people sort of pause here, but let me just take some examples from the farm and you'll see. Permaculture seems to involve two things to me: (a) making the land and animals work for you instead of having to utilize excessive time, effort, and machinery and (b) making closed systems so that you do not have to bring in outside products such as chemical fertilizers.
Emily and Sam have (did have, when they are carved up into delicious bacon in two days) three pigs that they keep penned in with an electric fence. The electric fence can easily be moved, and the pigs are taken over to garden beds to root through them after the harvest is done in that area. (There are three garden areas for spring, summer, and fall crops.) Instead of having to till up the soil, the pigs do it for them with astounding thoroughness. Pigs also can be used to clear land. When we collected bruised and bug-gnawed apples, we would hurl them into the blackberry patches for the pigs to dig into and trample. Go, pig tractors, go!
You can also have chicken tractors (chickenwire boxes on skids that will allow chickens to nibble bugs and grass below them). Anyone who's seen a crowded chicken coop knows that the ground beneath the chickens turns into a grassless, muddy slop after a while. Sam and Emily don't have this problem because their chicken coop covers an area the size of the average suburban lot, including little bits of different areas--the swampy wetlands, the forest underbrush, and some nice grassy areas around the chicken coop. The only place that the chickens have dug up all the foliage is right next to the gate, where they drop the chicken food.
Permaculture would suggest that you would send a series of animals through your land to make a forest viable farmland. Maybe (I'm speculating here), you'd start with the pigs, who can even knock down trees if you put some tasty food treats into holes around the roots, then put in some goats to take care of most of the remaining foliage, and then the chickens to run clean-up. Each of the animals deposits manure, which fertilizes the soil for better crop-growing later.
After the pigs ran through their summer garden, we went through to make sure it was done. (Domesticated pigs do not really like to eat cooch grass rhizomes, which are Emily's invasive public enemy number one, so we removed a number by hand. She is thinking about getting a wild boar to solve this problem.) We piled the rhizomes into a big compost pile, then put five or six wheelbarrows full of seaweed put on top for the proper nitrogen and carbon ratios. (These ratios are some of the tricky, science-y stuff that Emily had to study at permaculture school.) Then we sowed fall rye onto the ground and spent a few days chasing blue jays off from the seeds. (The dogs know the command "bad birds! go get bad birds!" which makes it a lot easier than running into the field from the house every two minutes. I threw dirt at them all day while digging up potatoes.) The fall rye is an excellent crop because it can live through the British Columbian winter into the spring. At this point, instead of being harvested, the soil is going to be turned over to return the rye to the earth. The rye processes the nitrogen in the soil left behind by the pig manure, adding its own nitrogen content, and prevents the nitrogen from leeching out over the winter. The winter, which is very wet and rainy, would otherwise wash away all the valuable nutrients left by the pigs before the garden is re-planted the following spring.
Another component of permaculture. I am now at the Farmhouse in Vancouver reading The Humanure Handbook, which is the big treatise on composting toilets. Composting toilets are pretty normal to me now, but it'd be nice to know more about them. You can read the book to read about the horrors wrought by modern sewage systems, but composting toilets are a good option because:
1. Properly run, they barely have any smell, unlike a traditional outhouse, which is pretttty unpleasant to get used to.
2. They convert sewage into usable compost over time.
At its simplest, a composting toilet is a five gallon bucket with a toilet seat attached. It can also get a bit fancier, as you can see from these guys. The important thing is layering the fecal matter between layers of another medium to add carbon content, since feces are almost entirely nitrogen. Melissa in Virginia dug humus from the forest floor; Sam on Quadra used wood shavings from his shop's planer; the Farmhouse in Vancouver uses used coffee grounds from one housemate's job as a barista. After a day or so of usage, the bucket is dumped into a designated compost pile outside, which also surprisingly has no noticeable smell. (It's technically illegal to do in the city of Vancouver, but out of all the things that the Farmhouse's neighbors complain about, no one has noticed it yet.) If anyone cares, I'll report back more once I actually finish reading the book instead of just the first twenty pages.
View British Columbia in a larger map
(Click the icons on the map for details.)
Quadra is a fairly large island, sandwiched between big Vancouver Island and the Canadian mainland in Discovery Passage, which I assume is named after the ship belonging to Captain Vancouver.
Of all the Discovery Islands (Quadra, Cortes, West and East Redonda, Read, and some others), Quadra is the closest to being civilization. It has several paved roads, an RCMP office, community center, and schools up to grade 10. There are two towns worth calling such--Q. Cove, where the ferry lands from Vancouver Island, and Heriot Bay, where the ferry takes you to Cortes Island. We're staying in Granite Bay, which I think is the third-largest town on the island for loose definitions of towns. It's logging territory, where the public lands on Quadra have been leased to logging companies. A good number of people I've met have once been tree-planters. Logging companies need to replant trees after logging, and so people set off with a pack full of trees and a shovel and get paid by the tree. Tree-planting camps seem to be overrun by hippies and dogs, because all of the dogs I've met have also come from tree-planting camps.
We were staying with Emily and Sam. Emily runs around doing permaculture landscaping and all sorts of things largely in other peoples' yards. Sam is a carpenter and cabinetmaker who's making an addition onto his shop. Sam makes a great host because he's crazier and friendlier than most other people you'll run into, and Emily does the responsible things to make sure that the farm doesn't collapse, god bless her.
Permaculture! What is it? Uhhhhh... people sort of pause here, but let me just take some examples from the farm and you'll see. Permaculture seems to involve two things to me: (a) making the land and animals work for you instead of having to utilize excessive time, effort, and machinery and (b) making closed systems so that you do not have to bring in outside products such as chemical fertilizers.
Emily and Sam have (did have, when they are carved up into delicious bacon in two days) three pigs that they keep penned in with an electric fence. The electric fence can easily be moved, and the pigs are taken over to garden beds to root through them after the harvest is done in that area. (There are three garden areas for spring, summer, and fall crops.) Instead of having to till up the soil, the pigs do it for them with astounding thoroughness. Pigs also can be used to clear land. When we collected bruised and bug-gnawed apples, we would hurl them into the blackberry patches for the pigs to dig into and trample. Go, pig tractors, go!
You can also have chicken tractors (chickenwire boxes on skids that will allow chickens to nibble bugs and grass below them). Anyone who's seen a crowded chicken coop knows that the ground beneath the chickens turns into a grassless, muddy slop after a while. Sam and Emily don't have this problem because their chicken coop covers an area the size of the average suburban lot, including little bits of different areas--the swampy wetlands, the forest underbrush, and some nice grassy areas around the chicken coop. The only place that the chickens have dug up all the foliage is right next to the gate, where they drop the chicken food.
Permaculture would suggest that you would send a series of animals through your land to make a forest viable farmland. Maybe (I'm speculating here), you'd start with the pigs, who can even knock down trees if you put some tasty food treats into holes around the roots, then put in some goats to take care of most of the remaining foliage, and then the chickens to run clean-up. Each of the animals deposits manure, which fertilizes the soil for better crop-growing later.
After the pigs ran through their summer garden, we went through to make sure it was done. (Domesticated pigs do not really like to eat cooch grass rhizomes, which are Emily's invasive public enemy number one, so we removed a number by hand. She is thinking about getting a wild boar to solve this problem.) We piled the rhizomes into a big compost pile, then put five or six wheelbarrows full of seaweed put on top for the proper nitrogen and carbon ratios. (These ratios are some of the tricky, science-y stuff that Emily had to study at permaculture school.) Then we sowed fall rye onto the ground and spent a few days chasing blue jays off from the seeds. (The dogs know the command "bad birds! go get bad birds!" which makes it a lot easier than running into the field from the house every two minutes. I threw dirt at them all day while digging up potatoes.) The fall rye is an excellent crop because it can live through the British Columbian winter into the spring. At this point, instead of being harvested, the soil is going to be turned over to return the rye to the earth. The rye processes the nitrogen in the soil left behind by the pig manure, adding its own nitrogen content, and prevents the nitrogen from leeching out over the winter. The winter, which is very wet and rainy, would otherwise wash away all the valuable nutrients left by the pigs before the garden is re-planted the following spring.
Another component of permaculture. I am now at the Farmhouse in Vancouver reading The Humanure Handbook, which is the big treatise on composting toilets. Composting toilets are pretty normal to me now, but it'd be nice to know more about them. You can read the book to read about the horrors wrought by modern sewage systems, but composting toilets are a good option because:
1. Properly run, they barely have any smell, unlike a traditional outhouse, which is pretttty unpleasant to get used to.
2. They convert sewage into usable compost over time.
At its simplest, a composting toilet is a five gallon bucket with a toilet seat attached. It can also get a bit fancier, as you can see from these guys. The important thing is layering the fecal matter between layers of another medium to add carbon content, since feces are almost entirely nitrogen. Melissa in Virginia dug humus from the forest floor; Sam on Quadra used wood shavings from his shop's planer; the Farmhouse in Vancouver uses used coffee grounds from one housemate's job as a barista. After a day or so of usage, the bucket is dumped into a designated compost pile outside, which also surprisingly has no noticeable smell. (It's technically illegal to do in the city of Vancouver, but out of all the things that the Farmhouse's neighbors complain about, no one has noticed it yet.) If anyone cares, I'll report back more once I actually finish reading the book instead of just the first twenty pages.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Chickens
Tomatoes and chickens have been everywhere we went, except there were no chickens on the homestead at Refuge Cove. So here's what I know and have learned about them so far.
Chickens are gross and dumb. They will eat basically anything, so if you keep chickens you can keep two types of compost: One with egg shells and other things that chickens shouldn't eat, and one that isn't actually compost because the chickens will eat it--rotten tomatoes, y'know, whatever you have. Besides that, they need store-bought type food: scratch, for throwing out into their pen and having them peck at it, and a grain mixture called mash. The type of mash depends on the age of the birdies, e.g., laying hens should be fed "lay mash", and early babies should be fed "starter mash." For hens that are laying eggs, we would throw in crushed oyster shells, which would increase the strength of their eggs.
Some chickens are nice. Some chickens peck. Some chickens are pissed off all the time. According to rumour, there is a positive correlation between how much space they have and how nice they are, which would make sense, but even then you are going to have easily irritated ones who peck your hand when you try to reach under them for eggs. In this case, stick something over their head. A largish yogurt container works pretty well.
More on chickens being gross. Chickens will poop all over everything, including their eggs, even if you try to collect them every 12 hours. You have to do this because otherwise the chickens will attack their or each others' eggs, I'm not exactly clear on this. Also, once one chicken starts laying eggs somewhere, all the rest of the chickens jump on the egg-laying bandwagon and try to lay their eggs there, even if it is a really filthy corner behind their feed barrels. This is why you'll find a bunch of eggs under one hen in the evening--she didn't lay all those in the last twelve hours, she just was the most recent one to jump onto the eggs and start laying there.
After you collect the eggs, they are covered in dirt and chicken poop and who knows what else. However, they have some sort of magical air-tight coating that will keep them sterile for three weeks, unrefrigerated. This is because a chicken wants to have a whole bunch of chicks at the same time, but isn't going to lay all the eggs in one day. She'll lay eggs, then wander off, peck at food, lay some more, etc... and then when she decides that she has enough egg, she'll actually sit on them and heat them up to the point that (a) the air-tight coating will disappear and (b) they'll start incubating into chicken-babies. (This is also why you want to take the eggs away from her every 12 hours, before she does this.) So once you collect the eggs, they can sit out in their basket for a few days before you wash them with no ill effects.
Then you wash them in warm water and allow them to dry. If they aren't dry before they go into the egg cartons, then they'll stick and crack when you try to take them out. Then you have a carton of eggs! Horray!
Chickens are still gross.
The way that I've been told to deal with the baby chicklets is "feed them and leave them alone," more or less. So I don't know much, but I do know: You can order day-old chicken babies in the mail. In the mail! For like $1.50/each or something. Turkey babies are more expensive, like $4/bird because turkeys are so retardedly inbred that they do not know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated. (At this point, the species should just die. Seriously, them and pandas too.)
Chickens are gross and dumb. They will eat basically anything, so if you keep chickens you can keep two types of compost: One with egg shells and other things that chickens shouldn't eat, and one that isn't actually compost because the chickens will eat it--rotten tomatoes, y'know, whatever you have. Besides that, they need store-bought type food: scratch, for throwing out into their pen and having them peck at it, and a grain mixture called mash. The type of mash depends on the age of the birdies, e.g., laying hens should be fed "lay mash", and early babies should be fed "starter mash." For hens that are laying eggs, we would throw in crushed oyster shells, which would increase the strength of their eggs.
Some chickens are nice. Some chickens peck. Some chickens are pissed off all the time. According to rumour, there is a positive correlation between how much space they have and how nice they are, which would make sense, but even then you are going to have easily irritated ones who peck your hand when you try to reach under them for eggs. In this case, stick something over their head. A largish yogurt container works pretty well.
More on chickens being gross. Chickens will poop all over everything, including their eggs, even if you try to collect them every 12 hours. You have to do this because otherwise the chickens will attack their or each others' eggs, I'm not exactly clear on this. Also, once one chicken starts laying eggs somewhere, all the rest of the chickens jump on the egg-laying bandwagon and try to lay their eggs there, even if it is a really filthy corner behind their feed barrels. This is why you'll find a bunch of eggs under one hen in the evening--she didn't lay all those in the last twelve hours, she just was the most recent one to jump onto the eggs and start laying there.
After you collect the eggs, they are covered in dirt and chicken poop and who knows what else. However, they have some sort of magical air-tight coating that will keep them sterile for three weeks, unrefrigerated. This is because a chicken wants to have a whole bunch of chicks at the same time, but isn't going to lay all the eggs in one day. She'll lay eggs, then wander off, peck at food, lay some more, etc... and then when she decides that she has enough egg, she'll actually sit on them and heat them up to the point that (a) the air-tight coating will disappear and (b) they'll start incubating into chicken-babies. (This is also why you want to take the eggs away from her every 12 hours, before she does this.) So once you collect the eggs, they can sit out in their basket for a few days before you wash them with no ill effects.
Then you wash them in warm water and allow them to dry. If they aren't dry before they go into the egg cartons, then they'll stick and crack when you try to take them out. Then you have a carton of eggs! Horray!
Chickens are still gross.
The way that I've been told to deal with the baby chicklets is "feed them and leave them alone," more or less. So I don't know much, but I do know: You can order day-old chicken babies in the mail. In the mail! For like $1.50/each or something. Turkey babies are more expensive, like $4/bird because turkeys are so retardedly inbred that they do not know how to mate and must be artificially inseminated. (At this point, the species should just die. Seriously, them and pandas too.)
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Pender Island
We woke up in Courtenay, after I stayed up past 3am sending out messages to new WWOOF hosts. Later, when I thought about the fact that no one checks their e-mail and responds to it early in the morning before check-out at the hostel (10:30), so I set Tomko to making phone calls to some other host listings while I took a shower.
Shower was a general fiasco (dropping my magic soap in the hallway, spending a lot of time diluting it enough to mop it up) and the manager just said to shove our key under the office door and make sure the main door was locked on our way out. Thanks, awesome manager boy! Their British WWOOFer hostel-monkeys were also very nice. A++, Cona.
When I arrived from the shower, Tomko had two sort-of successes: A woman from Pender Island and a man from Quadra Island had both said, "Maybe, I need to check my computer to see what other WWOOFers are coming by." When Tomko named the farm that the man came from, I recognized it on two counts: (1) they're friends of the Parkers (from Refuge Cove) and (2) their profile says no smoking on the property. (Most profiles pick the "on the property but not in house" option.) I did not think that option appealed to Tomko, so I called the other person.
Ellen said that it would be fine, but she had two WWOOFers already... oh, and a third one just walked into the door. Paul, who we met later, had just landed on Pender Island the day before, bought a Westphalia, logged onto the internet from the library a mile from Ellen's house, saw her profile, drove up to her gate and called to see if she wanted extra WWOOFers. Sure, why not!
So we packed up from the hostel and headed south for our next ferry from Sidney.
View Larger Map
I indulged in sushi to improve our day, and we made it to the ferry with two hours to spare. I spent those two hours sitting in the ferry lane, pulling everything out of Byzantium and re-packing, since things had become pretty discombobulated with all our moving around and I hadn't re-packed properly since crossing the border. Now everything has a place and is where it goes.
Once off the ferry, Ellen's house was just as easy to find as she said it was. We pulled up to the gate around dusk and I called the house, where Ellen's partner, Rob, explained how to open the gate. He called it a cougar gate. Apparently there are cougars around these parts. (We had been warned of cougars before. If you see one, look big, spread out your jacket, and don't make direct eye contact, they say.)
Ellen and Rob had a couple over as guests for dinner, in addition to the rest of the WWOOFers--Paul, who I mentioned before; Remy, a boy from France, and a Quebecouis girl whose name I haven't quite figured out. Frank, who lives a 20-minute walk down the road, arrived during dinner preparations and displayed a newly-acquired black widow bite. "Did you go to a doctor?" "No?" Well, uh, okay dude, but that looks pretty unpleasant.
Dinner was amazingly delicious, conversation was nice, and everyone seemed pretty fabulous. Frank showed us the caravan where we are staying--small room with electricity, lights, and a space heater that only kind of works, but about twice as good as sleeping in a tent. (We may be sleeping in a tent later when more WWOOFers show up, since they pre-arranged and therefore "called" it... although maybe Paul will let us sleep in his Westy? Endless possibilities I am sure.)
In the morning, we learned the morning feeding routine for the animals: half a bale of hay and two buckets of barley with added minerals for the goats (about 15-20), half a Folger's can of Llama Tex for the llama, more barley for the sheep (5 of them), water and chicken feed for the laying chickens (about 80), special baby chicken food for the three-week old chicklets (swarming everywhere in their heated coop, numbers unknown). Eggs are collected and washed.
Then our activity for the day was getting two large Douglas fir trees worth of logs from where they had been cut down to the wood shed where Remy could split them with the gasoline-powered splitting machine. This involved getting into the goat/sheep/llama pen (which covers enough area that I can't see far enough to tell you how big it is), throwing them down the hill until they hit the fence (or careen off and roll somewhere further down the hill where you don't want them to be, dammit), then unhooking part of the fence that connected to the garden, pushing them through one-by-one, and then walking backwards to roll them carefully down the garden path without smashing the tomatoes. There are many tomatoes.
We were amazing and then had lunch followed by delicious baked apples with walnuts and vanilla ice cream. Mmmmm yeah.
Shower was a general fiasco (dropping my magic soap in the hallway, spending a lot of time diluting it enough to mop it up) and the manager just said to shove our key under the office door and make sure the main door was locked on our way out. Thanks, awesome manager boy! Their British WWOOFer hostel-monkeys were also very nice. A++, Cona.
When I arrived from the shower, Tomko had two sort-of successes: A woman from Pender Island and a man from Quadra Island had both said, "Maybe, I need to check my computer to see what other WWOOFers are coming by." When Tomko named the farm that the man came from, I recognized it on two counts: (1) they're friends of the Parkers (from Refuge Cove) and (2) their profile says no smoking on the property. (Most profiles pick the "on the property but not in house" option.) I did not think that option appealed to Tomko, so I called the other person.
Ellen said that it would be fine, but she had two WWOOFers already... oh, and a third one just walked into the door. Paul, who we met later, had just landed on Pender Island the day before, bought a Westphalia, logged onto the internet from the library a mile from Ellen's house, saw her profile, drove up to her gate and called to see if she wanted extra WWOOFers. Sure, why not!
So we packed up from the hostel and headed south for our next ferry from Sidney.
View Larger Map
I indulged in sushi to improve our day, and we made it to the ferry with two hours to spare. I spent those two hours sitting in the ferry lane, pulling everything out of Byzantium and re-packing, since things had become pretty discombobulated with all our moving around and I hadn't re-packed properly since crossing the border. Now everything has a place and is where it goes.
Once off the ferry, Ellen's house was just as easy to find as she said it was. We pulled up to the gate around dusk and I called the house, where Ellen's partner, Rob, explained how to open the gate. He called it a cougar gate. Apparently there are cougars around these parts. (We had been warned of cougars before. If you see one, look big, spread out your jacket, and don't make direct eye contact, they say.)
Ellen and Rob had a couple over as guests for dinner, in addition to the rest of the WWOOFers--Paul, who I mentioned before; Remy, a boy from France, and a Quebecouis girl whose name I haven't quite figured out. Frank, who lives a 20-minute walk down the road, arrived during dinner preparations and displayed a newly-acquired black widow bite. "Did you go to a doctor?" "No?" Well, uh, okay dude, but that looks pretty unpleasant.
Dinner was amazingly delicious, conversation was nice, and everyone seemed pretty fabulous. Frank showed us the caravan where we are staying--small room with electricity, lights, and a space heater that only kind of works, but about twice as good as sleeping in a tent. (We may be sleeping in a tent later when more WWOOFers show up, since they pre-arranged and therefore "called" it... although maybe Paul will let us sleep in his Westy? Endless possibilities I am sure.)
In the morning, we learned the morning feeding routine for the animals: half a bale of hay and two buckets of barley with added minerals for the goats (about 15-20), half a Folger's can of Llama Tex for the llama, more barley for the sheep (5 of them), water and chicken feed for the laying chickens (about 80), special baby chicken food for the three-week old chicklets (swarming everywhere in their heated coop, numbers unknown). Eggs are collected and washed.
Then our activity for the day was getting two large Douglas fir trees worth of logs from where they had been cut down to the wood shed where Remy could split them with the gasoline-powered splitting machine. This involved getting into the goat/sheep/llama pen (which covers enough area that I can't see far enough to tell you how big it is), throwing them down the hill until they hit the fence (or careen off and roll somewhere further down the hill where you don't want them to be, dammit), then unhooking part of the fence that connected to the garden, pushing them through one-by-one, and then walking backwards to roll them carefully down the garden path without smashing the tomatoes. There are many tomatoes.
We were amazing and then had lunch followed by delicious baked apples with walnuts and vanilla ice cream. Mmmmm yeah.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Refuge Cove
When we left Herbwise, this involved a bunch of ferries. We drove north up the coast to the town of Campbell River, and took a ferry to Quadra Island, drove across it, took a second ferry to Cortes Island, drove across it, and parked at a government dock called Squirrel Cove.
Squirrel Cove has a dock and a general store. The general store is very general, containing a liquor store, laundromat, shower facilities, and so on. When we parked, we went to its parking lot since the dock is not exactly something I felt I should be driving on. We were opening up the car and looking at its contents and wondering what we should bring with us when someone walked up to us.
"I can't see your license plate," he said.
"Oh, sorry," I said without thinking, and pulled my trunk down so you could see the back license plate.
"Kylara? I'm Jim Parker."
Oh! That was why he wanted to know. No-one else would have Maryland tags. He explained that I should, in fact, drive my car down the dock and then we could unload into his sailboat and then we could be off. We did so, and then I had an adventure trying to turn my car around in the narrow dock without killing myself or running into anything at all rather than just trying to back up very very straight for 150 feet.
Eventually we got underway. After a few minutes, he handed the tiller to Tomko and told him to figure out how it worked. When he did (hint: It is opposite of how non-boat-thinking people may think), they gave it to me. It was explained that we should know this for just in case there was an emergency, as there is no such thing as a hospital or fire department or, in fact, roads on West Redonda Island.
Actually there is one road. Jim made it. It goes from the beach right next to their dock up to their house. There are trails and other things, but that is the only one that you can drive a normal vehicle on. Jim uses it for his excavator and four-wheeler since I don't think the rest of the vehicles are workable.
The area they live in, Refuge Cove, is 183 acres owned by 18 shareholders of a co-op. Sherry is one of them, and has lived there for pretty much her adult life. Jim has been there more than 20 years. They have a pretty awesome house and a number of out-buildings: the outhouse, of course; and also the triangle-shaped barbecue hut for cooking over a fire in the rain; the hot tub and deck where Jim watches the boats and smokes cigarettes; the washhouse where the laundry, shower, and sauna live; the wood shop; the metal working shop; the bathhouse which is more like a processing place for the graywater from the house to be used for watering plants. I am probably missing something. But basically that is it.
While we were there, we did many things! Mostly we pulled up infinite plants from the ground. We cleared out the entire orchard perimeter so that a new fence could be put up, and also the ditch on the side of the road. (The road used to be a dry river bed so it wants to flood every time it rains.) Also some other places. It was an impressive feat and I learned about some of the fauna but I think I destroyed a lot more than I can identify. There are outrageous amounts of moss. All sorts of different kinds of moss. Fuzzy moss, spikey moss, furry moss, and so on. Fern-like moss. Moss that probably has its own time-share in some other appropriately wet, moss-inhabited place.
I may describe more of this later but really, I am tired from today. Today, Jim had to go to a doctor in town (a boat ride and two ferries away) so he dropped us off at our car in Squirrel Cove before jumping into his own van and leaving. We realize: Tomko left our keys sitting on a nail in the bathhouse, back on Refuge Cove.
I run into a guy, Tom, that we had met a few days before while helping another resident of Refuge Cove move. He was heading back and gave me a ride. I walked up to the house and got my keys. Sherry walked me over to "downtown Refuge Cove", which includes a general store and some floathouses (like, maybe five) and a dock. I was told that some people were going around 2:30pm, tried to fiangle some other rides, then gave up and waited. Now there is no way we can make the ferry to our next destination today. However, if we want to make the ferry off this island, we need to leave in about ten minutes. So I'll have some more internet later.
Squirrel Cove has a dock and a general store. The general store is very general, containing a liquor store, laundromat, shower facilities, and so on. When we parked, we went to its parking lot since the dock is not exactly something I felt I should be driving on. We were opening up the car and looking at its contents and wondering what we should bring with us when someone walked up to us.
"I can't see your license plate," he said.
"Oh, sorry," I said without thinking, and pulled my trunk down so you could see the back license plate.
"Kylara? I'm Jim Parker."
Oh! That was why he wanted to know. No-one else would have Maryland tags. He explained that I should, in fact, drive my car down the dock and then we could unload into his sailboat and then we could be off. We did so, and then I had an adventure trying to turn my car around in the narrow dock without killing myself or running into anything at all rather than just trying to back up very very straight for 150 feet.
Eventually we got underway. After a few minutes, he handed the tiller to Tomko and told him to figure out how it worked. When he did (hint: It is opposite of how non-boat-thinking people may think), they gave it to me. It was explained that we should know this for just in case there was an emergency, as there is no such thing as a hospital or fire department or, in fact, roads on West Redonda Island.
Actually there is one road. Jim made it. It goes from the beach right next to their dock up to their house. There are trails and other things, but that is the only one that you can drive a normal vehicle on. Jim uses it for his excavator and four-wheeler since I don't think the rest of the vehicles are workable.
The area they live in, Refuge Cove, is 183 acres owned by 18 shareholders of a co-op. Sherry is one of them, and has lived there for pretty much her adult life. Jim has been there more than 20 years. They have a pretty awesome house and a number of out-buildings: the outhouse, of course; and also the triangle-shaped barbecue hut for cooking over a fire in the rain; the hot tub and deck where Jim watches the boats and smokes cigarettes; the washhouse where the laundry, shower, and sauna live; the wood shop; the metal working shop; the bathhouse which is more like a processing place for the graywater from the house to be used for watering plants. I am probably missing something. But basically that is it.
While we were there, we did many things! Mostly we pulled up infinite plants from the ground. We cleared out the entire orchard perimeter so that a new fence could be put up, and also the ditch on the side of the road. (The road used to be a dry river bed so it wants to flood every time it rains.) Also some other places. It was an impressive feat and I learned about some of the fauna but I think I destroyed a lot more than I can identify. There are outrageous amounts of moss. All sorts of different kinds of moss. Fuzzy moss, spikey moss, furry moss, and so on. Fern-like moss. Moss that probably has its own time-share in some other appropriately wet, moss-inhabited place.
I may describe more of this later but really, I am tired from today. Today, Jim had to go to a doctor in town (a boat ride and two ferries away) so he dropped us off at our car in Squirrel Cove before jumping into his own van and leaving. We realize: Tomko left our keys sitting on a nail in the bathhouse, back on Refuge Cove.
I run into a guy, Tom, that we had met a few days before while helping another resident of Refuge Cove move. He was heading back and gave me a ride. I walked up to the house and got my keys. Sherry walked me over to "downtown Refuge Cove", which includes a general store and some floathouses (like, maybe five) and a dock. I was told that some people were going around 2:30pm, tried to fiangle some other rides, then gave up and waited. Now there is no way we can make the ferry to our next destination today. However, if we want to make the ferry off this island, we need to leave in about ten minutes. So I'll have some more internet later.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
Herbwise Farm
We've been here for a few days.
Routine as such: We wake up in the morning and water all of the plants. Everything in the greenhouse, every potted plant around the property, and about a million tomatoes. Water the tomatoes again because after the first time it just doesn't seem like you watered them properly. Get a basket from the kitchen; harvest green beans. Check everything else. Turn on the sprinkler in the small garden. Move to the bigger garden. Add more beans to the basket; add cucumbers; add zucchini. Water lettuce, water tomatoes, water potatoes, and remember to water the other tomatoes. Get another basket from the kitchen, use it to pick strawberries. Pick blueberries and raspberries; take all the baskets to the kitchen and leave them there for Karla to deal with. Turn on the sprinkler in the larger garden.
Then we hang out and ask Karla what to do. Two days a week, Carmen takes off work and so we get to monitor the chickens, steal their eggs, and shovel out the sheep barn. We set up solar lights around the garden shed and garden. We move things and do dishes and cook. I am sure we will do other things too.
We hang out with Sam, Karla's nineteen-year old nephew who has endless stories to tell. There were two Brits staying here, but they left this morning. We took over their cabin. Our cabin that we were first put in was a single room with a roof, no weatherproofing, but a cute covered porch with a sunburst railing. Now we will be somewhat warmer because the wind can't reach us, and this cabin adjoins the camp kitchen so we are right next to the food all of the time. Sam has a nice two-story cabin weatherproofed properly for year-round residency. Carmen has a trailer a little further out in the woods than all the rest of us.
We can walk down to the creek, which is very nice.
Also we have internet access, apparently! If we go up near the house, at least; not around the camp. I am currently sitting in the woodshop in what is now the dark. I should be getting back to the cabin so that Tomko, Sam and I can watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Routine as such: We wake up in the morning and water all of the plants. Everything in the greenhouse, every potted plant around the property, and about a million tomatoes. Water the tomatoes again because after the first time it just doesn't seem like you watered them properly. Get a basket from the kitchen; harvest green beans. Check everything else. Turn on the sprinkler in the small garden. Move to the bigger garden. Add more beans to the basket; add cucumbers; add zucchini. Water lettuce, water tomatoes, water potatoes, and remember to water the other tomatoes. Get another basket from the kitchen, use it to pick strawberries. Pick blueberries and raspberries; take all the baskets to the kitchen and leave them there for Karla to deal with. Turn on the sprinkler in the larger garden.
Then we hang out and ask Karla what to do. Two days a week, Carmen takes off work and so we get to monitor the chickens, steal their eggs, and shovel out the sheep barn. We set up solar lights around the garden shed and garden. We move things and do dishes and cook. I am sure we will do other things too.
We hang out with Sam, Karla's nineteen-year old nephew who has endless stories to tell. There were two Brits staying here, but they left this morning. We took over their cabin. Our cabin that we were first put in was a single room with a roof, no weatherproofing, but a cute covered porch with a sunburst railing. Now we will be somewhat warmer because the wind can't reach us, and this cabin adjoins the camp kitchen so we are right next to the food all of the time. Sam has a nice two-story cabin weatherproofed properly for year-round residency. Carmen has a trailer a little further out in the woods than all the rest of us.
We can walk down to the creek, which is very nice.
Also we have internet access, apparently! If we go up near the house, at least; not around the camp. I am currently sitting in the woodshop in what is now the dark. I should be getting back to the cabin so that Tomko, Sam and I can watch It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
Monday, August 23, 2010
Olympia to Herbwise Farm means a ferry!
I make plans to do things early in the morning but lately that hasn't been working out. My phone alarms went off at 7:15am, 7:17am and 7:18am, and then every five minutes after that until I managed to become conscious enough to disable all three of them. By then, it was about 8:20am. Alarms are worthless.
Furthermore, I was planning on picking Tomko up from Fort Zarpaws around 10am, but that wasn't really happening either. Mish ended up bringing him over to the Nuthouse sometime before noon. I packed things, lost things, found things, ate breakfast, jumped on Brian's bed with Davi, and tetrised Byzantium into some semblance of order. We left Olympia by one in the afternoon.
We drove up the Olympia Peninsula towards Port Angeles. Here are some things you may or may not know: The Olympia Peninsula is formed by Puget Sound, which is a body of water that Seattle is on the east side of. On the west, we drove up a main highway that did not seem to enjoy this status (signs warned that "back-ups of more than five cars are ILLEGAL" and gave copious turn-arounds in an attempt to make us speed up).
This is also where the Twilight books take place. The main character lives in Forks, but the nearest real town is Port Angeles. Port Angeles seems to enjoy this status. We saw a store called "Dazzled by Twilight" that appeared to have nothing but Twilight-themed knickknacks.
We wandered Port Angeles because it did not occur to us that ferries fill up. When we arrived, the sign said "5:15 FULL, tickets available for 9:15." So we went to watch a movie across from the Twilight store. We could have gone to see TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE, but instead we saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (?). It started out like it would have made sense, but by the end I think everyone was just staring at the screen in confusion. And by everyone, I mean all six people that were going to see this movie at 5pm on a Monday in Port Angeles.
After the movie, we were bored, cold, and had three more hours to kill. I had been trying to call Herbwise Farm, but both numbers I had weren't working. I called up a friend and had her log into my e-mail, in which Karla had e-mailed us to say that her phone wasn't working, and my friend e-mailed her back saying that we were going to be later than expected, sorry. Then Tomko and I went into the building on the water that was some sort of visitor's center/art gallery/ferry routing/bathrooms collection and went to the restaurant on the second floor, ordered a pitcher of beer, and drank it. By the time we were done, it was 8:30pm and reasonable to go back to our car in anticipation of ferrying.
I have never seen or ridden on a ferry before.
When we bought our ticket, we drove through this little... drive-through place, paid $70, and then were told to park our car in Lane 11 and return before 9pm, when they load the ferry. So we came back and sat around in our car for about half an hour, while other people returned to their cars. We were all immobilized by the other cars around us, waiting for the cars ahead of us to go so that we might one day. Some guy came around and collected tickets from each of the cars. There were signs telling us not to bring gasoline onto the ferry. Eventually, the cars in front of us started moving and we followed them. Dudes with flags directed us to park in a certain area. I got out and looked around: We were at the bottom of a ship. It was like a parking garage, except that instead of doors there were hatches to escape. Ferries are kind of cute. We left the car as directed and went up. There was an area of chairs, an area of benches and tables against the walls, an area where food existed, and we could go outside but who would want to? It is cold outside. We went out and watched Port Angeles lights receeding and the water churning out from behind the ferry, then hustled back inside, where we pulled out
our laptop and watched an episode of True Blood.
We didn't get to finish the episode when an announcement came on telling us to go back to our car. Then we waited for a long while until eventually our line of cars drove away. The "customs checkpoint" was a little toll booth, except instead of making us pay a toll they looked at our passports and then asked us a few questions and waved us through. Now we are in Canada!
The ferry drops us in a city called Victoria, which is a very cute city, but Herbwise Farm is about 50 miles north of it, so we didn't stop anywhere and headed off. We didn't have any difficulty finding the farm and luckily I remembered the street number because it wasn't labelled with its name.
We parked in a gravel driveway among some other cars, all which were from "Beautiful British Columbia" according to their license plates. Then we looked around. There was a light on in a window, and some other mysterious buildings in the dark. We walked toward the window, and a very bright security light came on. Some guy appeared in the window.
Me: "Hi, I'm Kylara?"
Tomko: "Is this Herbwise Farm?"
Scott: "Yeah. Do you sleep in your truck or do you need a place?"
Me: "Uhmm, we could pitch a tent?"
Scott: "I'll be down."
We waited for ten minutes or so. Scott had a flashlight and told us to grab our sleeping bags and things, and led us along a path, around a pile of gravel and tractor, through some trees and to a little cottage. It had an adorable porch and electric lights, which we turned on. It also had a bed and two little tables. It's like a real place.
Scott waved his flashlight further down the path and said that's the outhouse, then left. I checked out the outhouse: A very traditional-type outhouse, with a half-moon on the door, a handle made out of the jawbone of some animal (the teeth wiggle a little like they want to come out when you grab it), and latches made out of sticks that rotate to block the door.
I made the bed and then went to sleep, for it was late.
Furthermore, I was planning on picking Tomko up from Fort Zarpaws around 10am, but that wasn't really happening either. Mish ended up bringing him over to the Nuthouse sometime before noon. I packed things, lost things, found things, ate breakfast, jumped on Brian's bed with Davi, and tetrised Byzantium into some semblance of order. We left Olympia by one in the afternoon.
We drove up the Olympia Peninsula towards Port Angeles. Here are some things you may or may not know: The Olympia Peninsula is formed by Puget Sound, which is a body of water that Seattle is on the east side of. On the west, we drove up a main highway that did not seem to enjoy this status (signs warned that "back-ups of more than five cars are ILLEGAL" and gave copious turn-arounds in an attempt to make us speed up).
This is also where the Twilight books take place. The main character lives in Forks, but the nearest real town is Port Angeles. Port Angeles seems to enjoy this status. We saw a store called "Dazzled by Twilight" that appeared to have nothing but Twilight-themed knickknacks.
We wandered Port Angeles because it did not occur to us that ferries fill up. When we arrived, the sign said "5:15 FULL, tickets available for 9:15." So we went to watch a movie across from the Twilight store. We could have gone to see TWILIGHT: ECLIPSE, but instead we saw Scott Pilgrim vs. The World (?). It started out like it would have made sense, but by the end I think everyone was just staring at the screen in confusion. And by everyone, I mean all six people that were going to see this movie at 5pm on a Monday in Port Angeles.
After the movie, we were bored, cold, and had three more hours to kill. I had been trying to call Herbwise Farm, but both numbers I had weren't working. I called up a friend and had her log into my e-mail, in which Karla had e-mailed us to say that her phone wasn't working, and my friend e-mailed her back saying that we were going to be later than expected, sorry. Then Tomko and I went into the building on the water that was some sort of visitor's center/art gallery/ferry routing/bathrooms collection and went to the restaurant on the second floor, ordered a pitcher of beer, and drank it. By the time we were done, it was 8:30pm and reasonable to go back to our car in anticipation of ferrying.
I have never seen or ridden on a ferry before.
When we bought our ticket, we drove through this little... drive-through place, paid $70, and then were told to park our car in Lane 11 and return before 9pm, when they load the ferry. So we came back and sat around in our car for about half an hour, while other people returned to their cars. We were all immobilized by the other cars around us, waiting for the cars ahead of us to go so that we might one day. Some guy came around and collected tickets from each of the cars. There were signs telling us not to bring gasoline onto the ferry. Eventually, the cars in front of us started moving and we followed them. Dudes with flags directed us to park in a certain area. I got out and looked around: We were at the bottom of a ship. It was like a parking garage, except that instead of doors there were hatches to escape. Ferries are kind of cute. We left the car as directed and went up. There was an area of chairs, an area of benches and tables against the walls, an area where food existed, and we could go outside but who would want to? It is cold outside. We went out and watched Port Angeles lights receeding and the water churning out from behind the ferry, then hustled back inside, where we pulled out
our laptop and watched an episode of True Blood.
We didn't get to finish the episode when an announcement came on telling us to go back to our car. Then we waited for a long while until eventually our line of cars drove away. The "customs checkpoint" was a little toll booth, except instead of making us pay a toll they looked at our passports and then asked us a few questions and waved us through. Now we are in Canada!
The ferry drops us in a city called Victoria, which is a very cute city, but Herbwise Farm is about 50 miles north of it, so we didn't stop anywhere and headed off. We didn't have any difficulty finding the farm and luckily I remembered the street number because it wasn't labelled with its name.
We parked in a gravel driveway among some other cars, all which were from "Beautiful British Columbia" according to their license plates. Then we looked around. There was a light on in a window, and some other mysterious buildings in the dark. We walked toward the window, and a very bright security light came on. Some guy appeared in the window.
Me: "Hi, I'm Kylara?"
Tomko: "Is this Herbwise Farm?"
Scott: "Yeah. Do you sleep in your truck or do you need a place?"
Me: "Uhmm, we could pitch a tent?"
Scott: "I'll be down."
We waited for ten minutes or so. Scott had a flashlight and told us to grab our sleeping bags and things, and led us along a path, around a pile of gravel and tractor, through some trees and to a little cottage. It had an adorable porch and electric lights, which we turned on. It also had a bed and two little tables. It's like a real place.
Scott waved his flashlight further down the path and said that's the outhouse, then left. I checked out the outhouse: A very traditional-type outhouse, with a half-moon on the door, a handle made out of the jawbone of some animal (the teeth wiggle a little like they want to come out when you grab it), and latches made out of sticks that rotate to block the door.
I made the bed and then went to sleep, for it was late.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Helsing Junction
When we arrived at Olympia, Davi explained that she was planning to spend the weekend at a farm nearby called Helsing Junction, which was having an organic music festival fundraiser something something, and that we could get free admission if we spent at least 4 hours volunteering.
She had a meeting on Friday that went a little long, and by the time she got home I had pretty much packed everything we needed into the car, and off we went! We got only a little lost and had to call her brother Brian for re-direction. (The street signs were turned, we discovered.) We parked Byzantium in a field and went up to where all the people were.
We went straight to the kitchen and were put to work. I was shanghaied into making stir-fry. Initially, I was told to fry tempeh, which I do not know how to do. (Tempeh, for those of you who don't hang out with vegans, is some sort of fermented soybean product.) I was recommended by various other people in the kitchen that "it's like cooking bacon except it doesn't make its own grease" and "you can't screw it up" and "don't burn it." Then someone responsible came by and said, "How about you just make the stir-fry and it'll cook in there."
The stir-fry involved two coolers full of pre-prepped vegetables and stuff, including: minced garlic, chopped onions, yellow squash rounds, green squash quarters, marinated tempeh, yellow and orange sliced carrots, broccoli, bok choy, chard, shiitake mushrooms, olive oil, soy sauce, and a collection of spices. There was a frying pan and a large wok, a metal spatula, a pink plastic spatula, and two propane ranges. There was usually one other person with me, which is good because I spent about two hours making the same thing over and over, often times forgetting about the mushrooms or the tempeh or other ingredients. I left the plastic spatula leaning against the frying pan, then picked it up and burnt the hell out of my finger by getting pink plastic stuck all over it.
I spent most of the weekend in the kitchen. I liked the people and the endless supply of delicious tiny yellow tomatoes. The kitchen was very close to the stage, and so you could always hear the music that was going on.
If I left the kitchen and went to the music, the best part of the music was the giant stack of straw bales from which one could watch the stage. It was a roughly pyramid-like structure, with nooks and crannies that became less and less defined as the weekend went on and people kept jumping around on it.
At one point, I slept on the straw pile inside a sleeping bag. I got two people to make nuclear paper cranes and met a boy who made an amazing orgami eagle in like fifteen minutes. There was a backrub circle around the campfire on Saturday night. I got to wear my blue and yellow hair all weekend, and I got a Helsing Junction Farm t-shirt for helpfulness. Davi picked the same shirt color, so we matched.
We were some of the last people out of the farm on Sunday. We did a lot of dishes and packed things up and then realized that we hadn't packed up our tent and camp stuff yet, so by the time we got back to the Nuthouse it was already six o'clock on Sunday night. Davi ran off for dance class with seemingly infinite energy; I decided to laze around the house. I hung out with Brian, who I don't really know--I met him once during Davi's 21st birthday party--but who is a thoroughly enjoyable human person.
She had a meeting on Friday that went a little long, and by the time she got home I had pretty much packed everything we needed into the car, and off we went! We got only a little lost and had to call her brother Brian for re-direction. (The street signs were turned, we discovered.) We parked Byzantium in a field and went up to where all the people were.
We went straight to the kitchen and were put to work. I was shanghaied into making stir-fry. Initially, I was told to fry tempeh, which I do not know how to do. (Tempeh, for those of you who don't hang out with vegans, is some sort of fermented soybean product.) I was recommended by various other people in the kitchen that "it's like cooking bacon except it doesn't make its own grease" and "you can't screw it up" and "don't burn it." Then someone responsible came by and said, "How about you just make the stir-fry and it'll cook in there."
The stir-fry involved two coolers full of pre-prepped vegetables and stuff, including: minced garlic, chopped onions, yellow squash rounds, green squash quarters, marinated tempeh, yellow and orange sliced carrots, broccoli, bok choy, chard, shiitake mushrooms, olive oil, soy sauce, and a collection of spices. There was a frying pan and a large wok, a metal spatula, a pink plastic spatula, and two propane ranges. There was usually one other person with me, which is good because I spent about two hours making the same thing over and over, often times forgetting about the mushrooms or the tempeh or other ingredients. I left the plastic spatula leaning against the frying pan, then picked it up and burnt the hell out of my finger by getting pink plastic stuck all over it.
I spent most of the weekend in the kitchen. I liked the people and the endless supply of delicious tiny yellow tomatoes. The kitchen was very close to the stage, and so you could always hear the music that was going on.
If I left the kitchen and went to the music, the best part of the music was the giant stack of straw bales from which one could watch the stage. It was a roughly pyramid-like structure, with nooks and crannies that became less and less defined as the weekend went on and people kept jumping around on it.
At one point, I slept on the straw pile inside a sleeping bag. I got two people to make nuclear paper cranes and met a boy who made an amazing orgami eagle in like fifteen minutes. There was a backrub circle around the campfire on Saturday night. I got to wear my blue and yellow hair all weekend, and I got a Helsing Junction Farm t-shirt for helpfulness. Davi picked the same shirt color, so we matched.
We were some of the last people out of the farm on Sunday. We did a lot of dishes and packed things up and then realized that we hadn't packed up our tent and camp stuff yet, so by the time we got back to the Nuthouse it was already six o'clock on Sunday night. Davi ran off for dance class with seemingly infinite energy; I decided to laze around the house. I hung out with Brian, who I don't really know--I met him once during Davi's 21st birthday party--but who is a thoroughly enjoyable human person.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Salt Lake City to Olympia
The drive seems like a blur that includes about 16 hours and 900 miles.
View Larger Map
Shortly after getting out of the SLC metropolitan area, we passed into the state of Idaho.
Neither Tomko nor I had a very good idea of what the upper, leafy part of the potato plant looks like. At the beginning of Idaho, we saw a lot of corn and occasional hay, but nothing else: Particularly, we expected to see fields and fields of unidentified crops, which we could quickly assume to be potatoes.
By observation, Tomko and I determined that potatoes have above-ground parts that are kind of like soybeans in height and greenitude. We have not yet checked with the internet to verify this one way or another.
We were ahead of schedule--we were going to Portland and then leaving for Olympia at 2am--so we were somewhat leisurely about our drive. We decided to stop in Boise, since who doesn't want to be able to say that they went to Boise? Also, it was about 4pm and I figured that if we wanted to hang out at a public library, then we better do it sooner than later (before all libraries close).
There are many reasons that you will find homeless punk kids hanging out around a library. We ran into several when be pulled into the library, asking Tomko for cigarettes. Libraries are great places because they have: climate-control, electrical outlets, computers and internet access, potable water and sanitary facilities, and because you don't need to justify being at a library. You can hang out and that's just what you're supposed to be doing. If you have no money but want to hang around a nice place for a while, libraries are where it is at.
After we chatted with the punk kids for a while, we went inside. The first thing I remembered to do was to call VW parts places to see if they had headlights that would fit my car. The first place said yes. $62 each, including bulbs and orange plastic bits and so on. Great. Fine.
I am shocked that I managed to get from Baltimore to Boise without front turn signals, without being pulled over a single time.
We went to the place and got the new turn signals. I got someone to come outside with me to see if I was attaching them correctly, and as I was putting in the driver's-side one (the one that simply disappeared and I never got to see the inside workings of), I realized exactly where the hook on the spring was supposed to go. I made sure everything else was lined up and the light was plugged in, then yanked the spring into place. Horray!
The passenger's side one (the one that fell out because I had not placed the spring correctly) was a lot harder and took a lot more time, because unlike the driver's side, this had pieces of the engine blocking most access to the place where you wanted to put the spring. After I repeatedly bruised the top of my hand and knuckles shoving against gravity and springs, and then using miscellaneous silverware from the car as levers, Tomko managed to place the spring onto a piece of metal. It was not the correct piece of metal, but this isn't relevant. I yanked on it and couldn't get it loose, proclaimed Byzantium healed, and we got on our way.
Boise has adoooorable rush-hour traffic wherein we were stationary for about thirty seconds.
Oh, also we got a sleeping bag in Boise. Apparently, my mother reports to me, there were like three sleeping bags in the garage that I could have taken from Maryland but no one checked the garage to find this out.
On and on we drove. We hit Portland around 1am, and then hung out at a gay bar waiting for our friend Davi to get off work an hour later. Then he jumped into our car and directed us to his house in Olympia, Washington, where we quickly fell asleep.
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Shortly after getting out of the SLC metropolitan area, we passed into the state of Idaho.
Neither Tomko nor I had a very good idea of what the upper, leafy part of the potato plant looks like. At the beginning of Idaho, we saw a lot of corn and occasional hay, but nothing else: Particularly, we expected to see fields and fields of unidentified crops, which we could quickly assume to be potatoes.
By observation, Tomko and I determined that potatoes have above-ground parts that are kind of like soybeans in height and greenitude. We have not yet checked with the internet to verify this one way or another.
We were ahead of schedule--we were going to Portland and then leaving for Olympia at 2am--so we were somewhat leisurely about our drive. We decided to stop in Boise, since who doesn't want to be able to say that they went to Boise? Also, it was about 4pm and I figured that if we wanted to hang out at a public library, then we better do it sooner than later (before all libraries close).
There are many reasons that you will find homeless punk kids hanging out around a library. We ran into several when be pulled into the library, asking Tomko for cigarettes. Libraries are great places because they have: climate-control, electrical outlets, computers and internet access, potable water and sanitary facilities, and because you don't need to justify being at a library. You can hang out and that's just what you're supposed to be doing. If you have no money but want to hang around a nice place for a while, libraries are where it is at.
After we chatted with the punk kids for a while, we went inside. The first thing I remembered to do was to call VW parts places to see if they had headlights that would fit my car. The first place said yes. $62 each, including bulbs and orange plastic bits and so on. Great. Fine.
I am shocked that I managed to get from Baltimore to Boise without front turn signals, without being pulled over a single time.
We went to the place and got the new turn signals. I got someone to come outside with me to see if I was attaching them correctly, and as I was putting in the driver's-side one (the one that simply disappeared and I never got to see the inside workings of), I realized exactly where the hook on the spring was supposed to go. I made sure everything else was lined up and the light was plugged in, then yanked the spring into place. Horray!
The passenger's side one (the one that fell out because I had not placed the spring correctly) was a lot harder and took a lot more time, because unlike the driver's side, this had pieces of the engine blocking most access to the place where you wanted to put the spring. After I repeatedly bruised the top of my hand and knuckles shoving against gravity and springs, and then using miscellaneous silverware from the car as levers, Tomko managed to place the spring onto a piece of metal. It was not the correct piece of metal, but this isn't relevant. I yanked on it and couldn't get it loose, proclaimed Byzantium healed, and we got on our way.
Boise has adoooorable rush-hour traffic wherein we were stationary for about thirty seconds.
Oh, also we got a sleeping bag in Boise. Apparently, my mother reports to me, there were like three sleeping bags in the garage that I could have taken from Maryland but no one checked the garage to find this out.
On and on we drove. We hit Portland around 1am, and then hung out at a gay bar waiting for our friend Davi to get off work an hour later. Then he jumped into our car and directed us to his house in Olympia, Washington, where we quickly fell asleep.
Saturday, August 14, 2010
Adventuring with Mary and Patience
Since Mary was with us and had her camera, we actually took a lot of pictures of these things that don't have the horrible resolution of my phone camera. You can see our pictures here.
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Our first mission for the day was to drive to Antelope Island. There isn't a lot to say about that that isn't contained in the pictures: We drove about, we saw buffalo and an antelope and various other wildlife and it was terribly exciting. The island is surprisingly large and we spent a few hours there.
When we left, we headed for a thrift store. (First we detoured to Chipotle and ate burritos. Mmmm.) In Utah, thrift stores means Deseret Industries, the Mormon version of the Salvation Army. It was actually an awesome thrift store. We got some cool stuff, like:
- Pillows! We left our pillows at my mother's house.
- A camp set of nesting cookware that screws together nicely including a pan, pot, and cup
- Books to read
- Bags to organize our things so that we can have easier time keeping track of where our stuff is
- Boots for Tomko!
- Small plastic bin to use for laundry and other washing-type uses
And then we went to Temple Square, just for fun. Mary started conversations with a number of missionaries, and they tried to explain Mormonism, although the placards on Mormonism are funny as anything. And Mary brought us back to Clay's, although Clay and Lisa are at some soccer game, so we are watching TV and hanging out for the rest of the night. Perhaps early sleep.
View Larger Map
Our first mission for the day was to drive to Antelope Island. There isn't a lot to say about that that isn't contained in the pictures: We drove about, we saw buffalo and an antelope and various other wildlife and it was terribly exciting. The island is surprisingly large and we spent a few hours there.
When we left, we headed for a thrift store. (First we detoured to Chipotle and ate burritos. Mmmm.) In Utah, thrift stores means Deseret Industries, the Mormon version of the Salvation Army. It was actually an awesome thrift store. We got some cool stuff, like:
- Pillows! We left our pillows at my mother's house.
- A camp set of nesting cookware that screws together nicely including a pan, pot, and cup
- Books to read
- Bags to organize our things so that we can have easier time keeping track of where our stuff is
- Boots for Tomko!
- Small plastic bin to use for laundry and other washing-type uses
And then we went to Temple Square, just for fun. Mary started conversations with a number of missionaries, and they tried to explain Mormonism, although the placards on Mormonism are funny as anything. And Mary brought us back to Clay's, although Clay and Lisa are at some soccer game, so we are watching TV and hanging out for the rest of the night. Perhaps early sleep.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Fueling Patience
Patience had been running off of diesel since Mary had gotten to SLC. We needed to find a place to obtain waste vegetable oil and take it. Here are some complications in this, for those of you who aren't familiar with veggie oil cars:
- you want to use waste oil, but you don't want to use really awful oil like that at McDonalds. No fast food sorts of places at all. I think it's also the wrong kind of oil, hydrogenated, partially-hyd... I don't know, but you can look this stuff up if you're that interested.
- the best places to get this waste vegetable oil is at Asian restaurants. Ideally, you want to get oil that has been used with minimal meat products and that was not used to deep-fry or fry many things. Japanese restaurants are rumored to most often be a success.
- the oil is filtered when it's pumped into the tank, so you don't have to worry about some contamination, but if the oil is black or, uh, generally ucky, it will overwork the filters and require them to be replaced or maybe clog them. All of this is obviously bad.
- at restaurants, waste oil is placed in the back alley just like the dumpster. It's generally right next to said dumpster. They're large metal barrels with lids. You want one that doesn't have a grate on top (you can't stick your suction tube into it) and that doesn't have a lock.
- it is technically illegal to take this from most places because (a) even trash belongs to the restaurant and (b) many restaurants have an agreement with biodiesel-producing companies who buy the waste oil from them, and they are contractually obligated to not let us take it from them.
Anyway, Mary repeatedly told her GPS to find "Food -> Asian" and hitting any random thing that popped up. We would scope out the alleys. If we saw a barrel, we would jump out and inspect. Most didn't have enough oil in them. Two of them were actually bone-dry, which Mary found unusual. But eventually we found some sort of Thai Noodle House that had more than half a barrel full of oil that was definitely not ideal, but it wasn't quite black, so Mary was willing to change out the filters in exchange for actually having fuel again.
We took 30 gallons: 14 gallons into Patience's veggie oil tank, and 16 gallons into three large red gas cans that Mary could use to refill later.
The green bin there contains the pump. The pump is powered off the van battery, in the sense that you pull up the back panel to show the engine (at the back of the van) and hook on little clamps like miniature versions of jumper cables. Then there is a tube flowing in and flowing out. I'm holding the intake tube in the first picture: All I have to do is make sure that the tube remains below the level of the oil in the barrel, and it sucks it up through a series of filters. It passes through more filter in the pump, and then is pushed out into a dispenser nozzle just like a normal gas pump.
After this, we celebrated with a success lunch and went back to Clay and Lisa's house.
- you want to use waste oil, but you don't want to use really awful oil like that at McDonalds. No fast food sorts of places at all. I think it's also the wrong kind of oil, hydrogenated, partially-hyd... I don't know, but you can look this stuff up if you're that interested.
- the best places to get this waste vegetable oil is at Asian restaurants. Ideally, you want to get oil that has been used with minimal meat products and that was not used to deep-fry or fry many things. Japanese restaurants are rumored to most often be a success.
- the oil is filtered when it's pumped into the tank, so you don't have to worry about some contamination, but if the oil is black or, uh, generally ucky, it will overwork the filters and require them to be replaced or maybe clog them. All of this is obviously bad.
- at restaurants, waste oil is placed in the back alley just like the dumpster. It's generally right next to said dumpster. They're large metal barrels with lids. You want one that doesn't have a grate on top (you can't stick your suction tube into it) and that doesn't have a lock.
- it is technically illegal to take this from most places because (a) even trash belongs to the restaurant and (b) many restaurants have an agreement with biodiesel-producing companies who buy the waste oil from them, and they are contractually obligated to not let us take it from them.
Anyway, Mary repeatedly told her GPS to find "Food -> Asian" and hitting any random thing that popped up. We would scope out the alleys. If we saw a barrel, we would jump out and inspect. Most didn't have enough oil in them. Two of them were actually bone-dry, which Mary found unusual. But eventually we found some sort of Thai Noodle House that had more than half a barrel full of oil that was definitely not ideal, but it wasn't quite black, so Mary was willing to change out the filters in exchange for actually having fuel again.
 |
| I siphoned while Mary operated the pump and nozzle. |
 |
| Mary regulates the flow of waste vegetable oil. |
After this, we celebrated with a success lunch and went back to Clay and Lisa's house.
Perseids meteor shower in the mountains
Clay's parents recommended that we go up the canyon to watch the meteor shower instead of the salt flats. Mary and her orange 1982 VW Vanagon, Patience, arrived in the late afternoon. We all piled into Patience and then picked up Chris, and the four (five?) of us sped off at a strong forty miles an hour up the mountain to our viewing location.
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It took forever for poor Patience to make it up the hill, and the cars behind us were frequently frustrated into passing us over solid double yellow lines. So that was interesting. We passed ski lodges and kept trying to get to somewhere that was more isolated, less lights, higher location, better viewing, whatever.
Eventually we were like, "Okay, we've climbed high enough, let's park the van on this shoulder here," and then noticed a few cars ahead of us and a sign that said [P] for parking. They weren't making a lot of light, and apparently were also here to see the meteor shower. So we pulled up, taking in the last spot available, and set up shop.
Mary made us all dinner with ingredients from Patience's fridge and using Patience's stove. It involved ghetto thai peanut sauce, broccoli, and peanuts. I am not entirely sure what else was involved. (It was dark.) It got seriously cold during the night, and I put on my green peace hoodie and huddled in the front seat of the van, where the wind mostly couldn't get me, and tried to peer out from the passenger window. I could see the lower end of the sky, where the Big Dipper and Cassiopia were, but I couldn't actually see Perseus or Andromeda, so it was not an ideal viewing location. Eventually, Mary convinced me to get one of her sleeping bags from the van and huddle in that while sitting outside with her, eating our food. I pulled my boots off and instantly climbed into the sleeping bag before my feet had the chance to get cold(er). We sat there for a while and just watched the sky.
View Larger Map
It took forever for poor Patience to make it up the hill, and the cars behind us were frequently frustrated into passing us over solid double yellow lines. So that was interesting. We passed ski lodges and kept trying to get to somewhere that was more isolated, less lights, higher location, better viewing, whatever.
Eventually we were like, "Okay, we've climbed high enough, let's park the van on this shoulder here," and then noticed a few cars ahead of us and a sign that said [P] for parking. They weren't making a lot of light, and apparently were also here to see the meteor shower. So we pulled up, taking in the last spot available, and set up shop.
Mary made us all dinner with ingredients from Patience's fridge and using Patience's stove. It involved ghetto thai peanut sauce, broccoli, and peanuts. I am not entirely sure what else was involved. (It was dark.) It got seriously cold during the night, and I put on my green peace hoodie and huddled in the front seat of the van, where the wind mostly couldn't get me, and tried to peer out from the passenger window. I could see the lower end of the sky, where the Big Dipper and Cassiopia were, but I couldn't actually see Perseus or Andromeda, so it was not an ideal viewing location. Eventually, Mary convinced me to get one of her sleeping bags from the van and huddle in that while sitting outside with her, eating our food. I pulled my boots off and instantly climbed into the sleeping bag before my feet had the chance to get cold(er). We sat there for a while and just watched the sky.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Chilling in SLC
Since arriving in Salt Lake, we have been hanging out at Clay and Lisa's house. It is a cute house with internet access and beer, and we are tired and appreciative of such. This was all going quite well. Tomko was making some sort of dinner concoction of potatoes, fish, and seasoning, and I was arriving home from the pharmacy with the medicine that I hadn't been able to get when we were in Maryland, and Lisa was straightening up while Clay was in the shower.
Suddenly, I noticed that water was coming from near the water heater, where water shouldn't be, and I started shouting for Lisa and Clay and hung up my phone. The sewage pipe had backed up and was leaking all over the laundry room floor. Lisa and I found a wet-vac in the garage and mostly fixed the immediate problem, but we officially could no longer use any water in the house. Clay had some technical discussion with his uncle and they determined that it could be fixed... but Lisa refused to stay in the house, so we all went over to Clay's parents' place, taking Tomko's dish of food with us.
They have the cutest new dog ever. Shadow is small and black and sleek and partially spaniel and partially something black and sleek. (I do not claim to be a dog expert.)
One thing that is interesting about Salt Lake is that it is a DESERT. This nice green grass that Shadow is rolling around in needs to be watered at least once or preferably twice a day. People have built-in sprinklers or ones on timers. Clay's neighbor had one of the ones that waaaaves baaack and fooorth, which is the only kind I remember from sprinklers to run through as a child. Sprinklers. Everywhere.
Clay's father, Jeff, works with water management and told us a lot about how Nevada was trying to take water from aquifers in Utah and how Nevada was screwed out of the Colorado River water from before Las Vegas existed and so on and so on. I never think this much about water. I usually think about "can I drink it?" and "will it make me ill?"
Tomorrow night, there's going to be a meteor shower, and we're going to go somewhere to watch it. Maybe a mountain, maybe the salt flats. Mary and Patience are supposed to arrive here tomorrow evening, so maybe we can camp out in Patience somewhere. We'll find a good spot.
Suddenly, I noticed that water was coming from near the water heater, where water shouldn't be, and I started shouting for Lisa and Clay and hung up my phone. The sewage pipe had backed up and was leaking all over the laundry room floor. Lisa and I found a wet-vac in the garage and mostly fixed the immediate problem, but we officially could no longer use any water in the house. Clay had some technical discussion with his uncle and they determined that it could be fixed... but Lisa refused to stay in the house, so we all went over to Clay's parents' place, taking Tomko's dish of food with us.
They have the cutest new dog ever. Shadow is small and black and sleek and partially spaniel and partially something black and sleek. (I do not claim to be a dog expert.)
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| Shadow rolling around the backyard |
Clay's father, Jeff, works with water management and told us a lot about how Nevada was trying to take water from aquifers in Utah and how Nevada was screwed out of the Colorado River water from before Las Vegas existed and so on and so on. I never think this much about water. I usually think about "can I drink it?" and "will it make me ill?"
Tomorrow night, there's going to be a meteor shower, and we're going to go somewhere to watch it. Maybe a mountain, maybe the salt flats. Mary and Patience are supposed to arrive here tomorrow evening, so maybe we can camp out in Patience somewhere. We'll find a good spot.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Trying Not to Get Lost in Utah
Unlike previous maps, this map does not exactly show the route that we took during our trip.
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This is because we're not entirely sure where we went. When we hit point B (Neola, UT) our map seemed to think that we would be able to go straight and continue on that road. We were confronted with a T intersection and picked the right, whereupon we got lost in the middle of the Indian Reservation, where apparently people are not inclined to include street signs or other important markers that might let us have some idea as to where we were going.
Eventually, we got lost again, ended up in Roosevelt, and made a much more reasonable journey from there. (It's sort of a straight shot down Rt. 40 to I-80.)
Driving into SLC on I-80 is pretty fun. It goes zoooooom up and then zooooom down. All the cars know what they are doing and don't want to go careening off the highway, so they're all perfectly reasonable and polite.
We were on our way to Clay and Lisa's new house. It was only a few blocks from the highway, but I got lost again and was required to call Clay. (This usually doesn't happen to me! I have my Google map directions; I don't understand why it's been happening at almost every new city we've arrived in.)
We found it eventually because you can't fail to find things in Salt Lake City due to the SLC grid system. It's amazing, while incredibly confusing to outsiders since it simply sounds like a list of numbers and cardinal directions. We marveled at the house (which has been extensively remodeled) and hung out with Clay's parents and uncle. We ate pizza and chatted and then once the adults left we took some showers and went to sleep on the side room futon.
View Larger Map
This is because we're not entirely sure where we went. When we hit point B (Neola, UT) our map seemed to think that we would be able to go straight and continue on that road. We were confronted with a T intersection and picked the right, whereupon we got lost in the middle of the Indian Reservation, where apparently people are not inclined to include street signs or other important markers that might let us have some idea as to where we were going.
Eventually, we got lost again, ended up in Roosevelt, and made a much more reasonable journey from there. (It's sort of a straight shot down Rt. 40 to I-80.)
Driving into SLC on I-80 is pretty fun. It goes zoooooom up and then zooooom down. All the cars know what they are doing and don't want to go careening off the highway, so they're all perfectly reasonable and polite.
We were on our way to Clay and Lisa's new house. It was only a few blocks from the highway, but I got lost again and was required to call Clay. (This usually doesn't happen to me! I have my Google map directions; I don't understand why it's been happening at almost every new city we've arrived in.)
We found it eventually because you can't fail to find things in Salt Lake City due to the SLC grid system. It's amazing, while incredibly confusing to outsiders since it simply sounds like a list of numbers and cardinal directions. We marveled at the house (which has been extensively remodeled) and hung out with Clay's parents and uncle. We ate pizza and chatted and then once the adults left we took some showers and went to sleep on the side room futon.
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Mostly Wyoming, with a dash of Nebraska and a pinch of Utah
We woke up still in Nebraska, but only an hour or two from the Wyoming border. I was excited to get to Wyoming. Originally, we had planned to camp in Medicine Bow National Forest, but this was now only a few hours away and we could get considerably further. Rather than making a plan, we just started driving with a pretty good idea of what detours we could take along the way.
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Did I mention that we decided not to go to Denver, or that we were planning on it? You would think that a place with a reputation like Denver would have millions of eager couchsurfing members. However, between me and Chris, we got a dozen no's and one maybe. The maybe called me, and when I said that I would be okay with just camping in Wyoming, he texted me back a few hours later saying that he had some people who really wanted a place and he told them okay so hopefully that was fine. It was, and we probably wouldn't've even made it to Denver in anything approaching a reasonable time. So I have to see Denver some other day. I'll get over it, I promise.
We continued on Route 30 until we exited Nebraska, just because the less time spent on the highway is better (even if it takes longer). 30 basically ends at the Wyoming border, so we joined back up with I-80 while entering Wyoming.
The land had begun getting hills yesterday, but now it has things that I want to call bluffs and mesas and other landforms that I am entirely unfamiliar with. In Laramie, we turn off the highway and take Route 130 through Medicine Bow National Forest. It might've been the prettiest place I've ever been, with the many lakes and snows and random cows and green green grasses and forests and marshlands, streams and ponds.
At one point, we jumped from the car and I ran down a hill in an attempt to get to a river I could see from the top of the hill. At the bottom, I could hear it but not see it. When I tried to move across the field, I was hindered by the fact that the really tall grass was not just really tall grass, but grass in a marshy bed of squelchy mud. So I failed to actually arrive at the stream. The boys and I went walking back up the hill, whereupon we began to realize that we had not yet adjusted to altitude. Walking up a hill should not have been nearly so difficult.
And then we emerged from the national forest and zoomed across the Wyoming landscape, mountains growing in the distance and hills appearing and now there are actually trees, even if they are mostly short and stubby and in small copses.
We veered south at the beginning of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. This was our bridge from Wyoming to Utah. Half-way through, we entered Utah and then we got to drive over the actual Flaming Gorge dam, which was pretty awesome. At this point, we're driving along cliffs looking down into canyons and valleys constantly, slowly gaining altitude through the ups and downs.
We exited Flaming Gorge after checking out two campsites--both which required $16/night and did not appear to have much going for them--and realized that we had about an hour or two before we would be dark. So we continued down Rt. 191 towards Ashley National Forest.
We zoomed through and found a campsite, which also required $16, but at least it was a place that we could fill up our water bottles with some iron-tinged water from a hand pump outside the camp area. Then we left and drove to a random area marked "byway turnaround" or "bypass turnabout" or something like that. It was just an area where a truck could turn around, a little area unmarked but possible for parking, and a "bathroom" that did not involve any running water.
We grabbed our stuff, hiked down the trail a bit, and set our tents up as the sun went down. We went the requisite 100 paces from our campsite and made a fire so that we could cook ramen and baked potatoes. Mmmmm. And then we tried to get our stuff together to go to sleep.
View Larger Map
Did I mention that we decided not to go to Denver, or that we were planning on it? You would think that a place with a reputation like Denver would have millions of eager couchsurfing members. However, between me and Chris, we got a dozen no's and one maybe. The maybe called me, and when I said that I would be okay with just camping in Wyoming, he texted me back a few hours later saying that he had some people who really wanted a place and he told them okay so hopefully that was fine. It was, and we probably wouldn't've even made it to Denver in anything approaching a reasonable time. So I have to see Denver some other day. I'll get over it, I promise.
We continued on Route 30 until we exited Nebraska, just because the less time spent on the highway is better (even if it takes longer). 30 basically ends at the Wyoming border, so we joined back up with I-80 while entering Wyoming.
The land had begun getting hills yesterday, but now it has things that I want to call bluffs and mesas and other landforms that I am entirely unfamiliar with. In Laramie, we turn off the highway and take Route 130 through Medicine Bow National Forest. It might've been the prettiest place I've ever been, with the many lakes and snows and random cows and green green grasses and forests and marshlands, streams and ponds.
At one point, we jumped from the car and I ran down a hill in an attempt to get to a river I could see from the top of the hill. At the bottom, I could hear it but not see it. When I tried to move across the field, I was hindered by the fact that the really tall grass was not just really tall grass, but grass in a marshy bed of squelchy mud. So I failed to actually arrive at the stream. The boys and I went walking back up the hill, whereupon we began to realize that we had not yet adjusted to altitude. Walking up a hill should not have been nearly so difficult.
And then we emerged from the national forest and zoomed across the Wyoming landscape, mountains growing in the distance and hills appearing and now there are actually trees, even if they are mostly short and stubby and in small copses.
We veered south at the beginning of Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area. This was our bridge from Wyoming to Utah. Half-way through, we entered Utah and then we got to drive over the actual Flaming Gorge dam, which was pretty awesome. At this point, we're driving along cliffs looking down into canyons and valleys constantly, slowly gaining altitude through the ups and downs.
We exited Flaming Gorge after checking out two campsites--both which required $16/night and did not appear to have much going for them--and realized that we had about an hour or two before we would be dark. So we continued down Rt. 191 towards Ashley National Forest.
We zoomed through and found a campsite, which also required $16, but at least it was a place that we could fill up our water bottles with some iron-tinged water from a hand pump outside the camp area. Then we left and drove to a random area marked "byway turnaround" or "bypass turnabout" or something like that. It was just an area where a truck could turn around, a little area unmarked but possible for parking, and a "bathroom" that did not involve any running water.
We grabbed our stuff, hiked down the trail a bit, and set our tents up as the sun went down. We went the requisite 100 paces from our campsite and made a fire so that we could cook ramen and baked potatoes. Mmmmm. And then we tried to get our stuff together to go to sleep.
Saturday, August 7, 2010
Unceasing Corn: The Nebraskan Odyssey
Our intended route was from Omaha to Medicine Bow National Park, Wyoming, but this is not what happened to us.
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Upon leaving Omaha, we were made part of a gang war with automatic weapons at a Texaco. I believe the dispute was over the grade of their meth-corn. Wait, no, that's not right. We left in usually-trusty Byzantium, but her "Check Engine!" light came on. This was alarming, because it could mean roughly four hundred things, major or minor. Luckily, right off the highway was a huge Volkswagen dealership and repair shop. We pulled in there and they ran diagnostics. The sum of the troubles is that the car is old and could use some new widgets and wiring, but still runs good. While waiting for a while, we enjoyed free wireless internet and coffee. I abused the hell out of the free infinite coffee part, let me tell y'all. Eventually we left and got back on the highway, and the next several hours are a fugue-like dream that involves nothing but corn. Nothing. Endless fields and flatlands. I thought Indiana was bad! You readers are lucky.
TOMKO: Every time I see one of those little side streets, I want to drive down it until I get to a house, knock on the door, and demand WHYYYY.
CHRIS: There is land beyond the corn.
TOMKO: What, you mean like soybeans?
The sun began to set and weariness fell upon the drivers after the exhausting sojourn through corn-based nihilism. We saw a sign on the highway for a campground, which turned out to be just a bunch of acres owned by a single guy who rents it out as a camping stopover. He only wanted twelve dollars and change for taking up a spot and pitching a tent for the night. Not a bad deal, I'd say! Especially including the fact that the place had a (questionably up-kept) putt-putt course and a merry-go-round. Also, potable water, bathrooms and hot showers. The night was not offensively cold; sleep came easily, and we broke camp and hit the road early in the morning to finish the last of our trek through one of the most boring--and deceptively expansive--states in our union.
After an indeterminate time and at an indistinguishable place, the land began to slowly elevate and rise up, continuing to gradually do so as we crossed the continental divide. I was relieved to see rocks and hills once again, which I continued to see as we made our way to Salt Lake City, Utah, sleeping a night in a national forest in the interim.
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Upon leaving Omaha, we were made part of a gang war with automatic weapons at a Texaco. I believe the dispute was over the grade of their meth-corn. Wait, no, that's not right. We left in usually-trusty Byzantium, but her "Check Engine!" light came on. This was alarming, because it could mean roughly four hundred things, major or minor. Luckily, right off the highway was a huge Volkswagen dealership and repair shop. We pulled in there and they ran diagnostics. The sum of the troubles is that the car is old and could use some new widgets and wiring, but still runs good. While waiting for a while, we enjoyed free wireless internet and coffee. I abused the hell out of the free infinite coffee part, let me tell y'all. Eventually we left and got back on the highway, and the next several hours are a fugue-like dream that involves nothing but corn. Nothing. Endless fields and flatlands. I thought Indiana was bad! You readers are lucky.
TOMKO: Every time I see one of those little side streets, I want to drive down it until I get to a house, knock on the door, and demand WHYYYY.
CHRIS: There is land beyond the corn.
TOMKO: What, you mean like soybeans?
The sun began to set and weariness fell upon the drivers after the exhausting sojourn through corn-based nihilism. We saw a sign on the highway for a campground, which turned out to be just a bunch of acres owned by a single guy who rents it out as a camping stopover. He only wanted twelve dollars and change for taking up a spot and pitching a tent for the night. Not a bad deal, I'd say! Especially including the fact that the place had a (questionably up-kept) putt-putt course and a merry-go-round. Also, potable water, bathrooms and hot showers. The night was not offensively cold; sleep came easily, and we broke camp and hit the road early in the morning to finish the last of our trek through one of the most boring--and deceptively expansive--states in our union.
 |
| Our surprise campsite even had WiFi! |
After an indeterminate time and at an indistinguishable place, the land began to slowly elevate and rise up, continuing to gradually do so as we crossed the continental divide. I was relieved to see rocks and hills once again, which I continued to see as we made our way to Salt Lake City, Utah, sleeping a night in a national forest in the interim.
Friday, August 6, 2010
A Day in Omaha
We spent one full day just hanging around in Omaha. J and C had to go to work, so Chris, Tomko and I were just hanging around and vegging out on the internet for a while. Eventually, Tomko and I got hungry and we went on a walking expedition to Indian place with take-out that C had recommended. The directions that C had left for us on the kitchen counter were probably entirely correct, but we somehow got lost several times and had to ask a wandering meth-head where we were going.
We ordered tasty food from an adorable south Asian girl who couldn't've been more than thirteen. She warned Tomko that his meal would be spicy. Tomko has epic spicy tolerance, so this was not concerning. (Even I could eat the resultant meal without flinching, so it couldn't be that hot.
We hung around outside the restaurant, even though it was pretty hot, because it seemed to be pretty crowded inside. Tomko brought me a mango lassi from inside the place for us to drink while we were waiting. Sure enough, shortly after I had sucked the final dregs of mango, the girl appeared again for us to give her money so she could bring us our food. We ate some food in the park, then went back to J and C's house and hung around until they got back.
We tried to watch some TV options. Hell's Kitchen was regarded quite skeptically by C and Chris, and then we put on Jurassic Park - Rifftrax Version. This was more successful, except that J found World of Warcraft more interesting than us, then C went to bed, and then Mary Tully gave me a call with the disasterous news that Patience had broken down!
Mary and I talked until well after the movie was over. The boys went to bed, and then so did I, too. There is driving to be done!
We ordered tasty food from an adorable south Asian girl who couldn't've been more than thirteen. She warned Tomko that his meal would be spicy. Tomko has epic spicy tolerance, so this was not concerning. (Even I could eat the resultant meal without flinching, so it couldn't be that hot.
We hung around outside the restaurant, even though it was pretty hot, because it seemed to be pretty crowded inside. Tomko brought me a mango lassi from inside the place for us to drink while we were waiting. Sure enough, shortly after I had sucked the final dregs of mango, the girl appeared again for us to give her money so she could bring us our food. We ate some food in the park, then went back to J and C's house and hung around until they got back.
We tried to watch some TV options. Hell's Kitchen was regarded quite skeptically by C and Chris, and then we put on Jurassic Park - Rifftrax Version. This was more successful, except that J found World of Warcraft more interesting than us, then C went to bed, and then Mary Tully gave me a call with the disasterous news that Patience had broken down!
Mary and I talked until well after the movie was over. The boys went to bed, and then so did I, too. There is driving to be done!
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Indianapolis to Omaha, with stopover in St. Louis
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Our next day's drive was for us to arrive in Omaha, Nebraska, where our friends J and C have been living. J was moved to the wilds of Nebraska due to his unfortunate involvement with the Air Force.
"But Kylara," you may say, "Why did you take such a silly route? It would have made much more sense to detour up to Gary, Indiana and then take I-80 West instead of curling down around with I-70 West and then having to go south up I-29 in order to reach back to Omaha."
Well, yes. You are correct geographically, but you are wrong on two, no, three counts:
This means that we picked Chris back up at the Trader Joe's and bought some food with a gift card given to Tomko by my aunt Julie about two years ago. It was like magical, free money that I found while moving out of my house. We had hummus and pita and ginger beer: This could get us through any road trip.
In the car, we discovered that the three cans of soda that Laura had given us from her house had exploded when we left them overnight in the car in Lafayette. The car was miraculously saved from being sticky-coated by the other contents of the milk crate they were in: a pair of my pants and Tomko's jacket. Tomko's black zip-up hoodie is the same one that he has always had, yes, I'm sure you've seen him wearing it before.
Unfortunately, when we went into Trader Joe's I put the wet hoodie on top of the car. I thought that Tomko would get it when we went back in the car; Tomko either didn't see it or thought that I was getting it--at any rate, Tomko's hoodie now lies sadly in the parking lot of a Trader Joe's or somewhere near it. Rest in peace, little hoodie.
Dan Hunter guided us into St. Louis by cell phone and then showed up excited to introduce us to his roommate (and their dog, who inexplicably found itself very upset at my presence but seemed to like Tomko and Chris just fine). We went to eat at a diner place, the type with a dozen jukeboxes hanging on the walls as decoration, and saw bits and pieces of St. Louis on our walk.
Then we were off for Omaha! It's a loooong, boring stretch of Missouri west to Kansas City, and then a loooong, boring but somewhat curvy stretch of the Missouri/Iowa-Nebraska border along the river. Perhaps it is the Missouri River. Rivers are so terribly named on maps and infrequently identified when they're anything bigger than a sign next to a tiny bridge labelled "Mountain Lake Stream", so I really don't know. [Mountain Lake Stream: An actual sign and location found in Virginia. True story.]
At any rate, we got into Cedar Rapids, Iowa and crossed the river into Omaha, Nebraska. Then the highway flung us north and east and back into Cedar Rapids. I turned us around and we were teleported to another location without any of the proper exits, and ended up horribly lost and had to have J direct us there.
(A note to my friends: So far, you all have been really good at giving directions. Laura gave precise driving directions down to the second telling me what hills I'm passing over and when the road forks; Hunter prevented us from actually having to pay for parking somehow, and J managed to get me from the opposite end of town to his house in a city whose layout makes positively no sense.)
At J's house, we came in and were greeted by the two cutest Maine Coon/Siamese cats and then we were all like "welll... it's midnight," and then we all fell asleep.
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Frederick, MD to Indianapolis, IN
We woke up at the house of our friends, Laura and Noah, in Middletown right outside of Frederick. Being in Frederick cut at least an hour off of our day's drive, and besides we hadn't had the chance to see them for a while.
So our first day of driving didn't actually start at my parents' house, but we let late enough Tuesday evening that it seemed like we might as well stick it into this map.
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When we left Laura's house in Middletown, we had to backtrack a few miles east to Frederick, MD in order to pick up some prescription medication and meet up with Chris at a Rite-Aid. Chris's friends dropped him off and we wandered the store and eventually left en-route to Indianapolis!
A bit about Chris. He's a guy from the Baltimore suburbs. He responded to a post I made on Craigslist Rideshare offering a ride from Baltimore to Indianpolis, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver Island. His plan is to get to Portland, stay there for a few weeks with some friends, and then get a ride up to Alaska, his intended final destination. He buys every third tank of gas and shares driving duties with me so that neither of us fall asleep on the road. Good deal.
Since he had friends in Frederick, he had no problem meeting up with us that morning, and we got underway.
The drive to Indianapolis was largely uneventful. It is a drive that I have taken many times before, because our end destination (in Lafayette) is the house of Penny, Tomko's mother.
On our way, we dropped Chris off at a Trader Joe's near the house of his friend Rachel and planned to meet back up there the morning of Thursday, the fifth.
It was pretty late when we arrived at Penny's house, maybe 10pm, and we crashed out asleep soon after arriving. The following day was full of missions and visitations. We saw Penny's parents and two of Tomko's four siblings, along with a niece and nephew who dropped by. We missed seeing a third sister, Maria, because we fell asleep again before she got off of work. But we did manage to see a good many people before we set off the next day.
So our first day of driving didn't actually start at my parents' house, but we let late enough Tuesday evening that it seemed like we might as well stick it into this map.
View Larger Map
When we left Laura's house in Middletown, we had to backtrack a few miles east to Frederick, MD in order to pick up some prescription medication and meet up with Chris at a Rite-Aid. Chris's friends dropped him off and we wandered the store and eventually left en-route to Indianapolis!
A bit about Chris. He's a guy from the Baltimore suburbs. He responded to a post I made on Craigslist Rideshare offering a ride from Baltimore to Indianpolis, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, or Vancouver Island. His plan is to get to Portland, stay there for a few weeks with some friends, and then get a ride up to Alaska, his intended final destination. He buys every third tank of gas and shares driving duties with me so that neither of us fall asleep on the road. Good deal.
Since he had friends in Frederick, he had no problem meeting up with us that morning, and we got underway.
The drive to Indianapolis was largely uneventful. It is a drive that I have taken many times before, because our end destination (in Lafayette) is the house of Penny, Tomko's mother.
On our way, we dropped Chris off at a Trader Joe's near the house of his friend Rachel and planned to meet back up there the morning of Thursday, the fifth.
It was pretty late when we arrived at Penny's house, maybe 10pm, and we crashed out asleep soon after arriving. The following day was full of missions and visitations. We saw Penny's parents and two of Tomko's four siblings, along with a niece and nephew who dropped by. We missed seeing a third sister, Maria, because we fell asleep again before she got off of work. But we did manage to see a good many people before we set off the next day.
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