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.


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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.

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.

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!

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:

I have been told on good authority that Gary, Indiana, is a place to be avoided at all costs.

This would have prevented us from making a perfectly good detour to St. Louis, by all accounts a much nicer place.

Your quicker route would also have us going through Iowa. I don't know if that's any worse than Missouri--but it SOUNDS like it should be worse.

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.