the first month on the road (FINALLY!!!)

yes, yes i know.... all the build up about our upcoming travels only to leave you with NOTHING for the past month. hopefully, this has served to build up your anticipation. we are still in the exparimental stage of our vegimatic travels with our living quarters in a relatively primative state. hence the dilema: when we are camped at a friends home, we have access to electricity and clean running water (hallelujah!) but we are also busy catching up with those friends as well as cleaning clothes, dishes and bodies. conversely, when we are camped in the woods, more down time but no electricity. what to do? my short term plan is scheduling writing times in town where i can get wi-fi. (i am NOT a scheduler by nature, but i am learning to acquiesce when important things are not flowing.) the longer term plan is investing in a solar panel so i can write under the canopies of pine trees. ok business meeting over, thanks for indulging me.

my plan for bringing you up to speed on our travels is to give you an overview followed by some story telling just down the road. buckle your seatbelt, here we go! just kidding, if you know me at all you know i like to take my time with details. this will be more of a country drive rather than a roller coaster ride.

over all the past month has been an absolute blast! the kids have adjusted beautifully to traveling. i was most concerned for hava, my 4 year old. she would constantly ask who we were going to see and what we were going to do at regular intervals throughout the day. every day. i assumed that she had a great need for structure. how would she cope with all the unpredictability that traveling lends to? much to my surprise, what she truly needed all a long was not structure but stimulation. life on the road provides plenty of this for her so she is a happy camper. big big sigh of releif!

Abe on the other hand is my 2 year old fearless adventurer. i had many moments of anxiety about this before hitting the road. how would i keep him alive and myself relatively sane without completely stifling his unending curriousity? At our house i knew and he clearly knew the boundaries for exploration. before i could come up with a viable solution, i guess you could say, the solution found me. heres how it happened: we parked in a corner garden lot in portland in a fairly high traffic neighborhood. i watched abe like a hawk. a while later, i noticed keith taking him on a little tour of the garden's perimeter. for the next hour or so the kids played happily amongst the vegitation and mediterranean trees. my man came in to the bus and told me that he walked with abe and talked with him plainly about where he could play and what was off limits. he quizzed him on it and was confident he understood. further, abe actually seemed relieved to know the limits. dont you love it when you worry think and pray about something that seems so gigantic and the answer shows up so unassuminly? if it matters to us,it matters to god.

another major surprise for me was how s-l-o-w veggie travels can be. i understood that traveling on a bus means going slower. this i gladly embraced. however, up to this point our travels on the bus had been fueled by diesel. when we moved onto our bus and started this trip, it would be our maiden voyage running on recycled veggie. some people would do trial runs when doing something they have never done before. we are just not those those people, whoever they are. it does sound responsible. maybe i will give it a try some day.

veggie oil may be free, but you will work hard for it in most cases. for those who may not be familiar with the process it looks something like this: step 1. drive in alleys behind resturants and locate the recipticle that used oil is disposed in. 2. check it out--it must be a fairly full vat that is not overly junky you will typically spend most of the morning oil dumpster crusing to find a good supply. in some small towns you may find nothing. 3. once good looking oil is found you pump it into your 50 galon drum holding tank. 4. trasport tank to bus and send it through the filtering system in the bus' fuel tank. 5. heat up the oil and test drive your new supply. 5. if your enginine is running rough,(you might have water in your supply ) pull over and drain veg oil from tank, properly dispose, and start the process over. sometimes you may spend days in one town unexpectedly to filter oil. other times, you may need to really step on it to get some where and decide to bite the bullet and use diesel instead.

there is something indescribably blissfull about stepping into your destiny. we have always been destined to travel. it is who we are. it is just one of those things god put a lot of in our DNAs. i love being able to connect with friends we have made over the years scattered all over the map. i love making new friends, meeting fellow travelers (wow! there are some really fancinating resourceful folks out there) and those without homes. the bus seves as an easy conversation piece as well as a convient way to offer a meal a ride or simply conversation. keith often says "there are two kinds of people, those who like to travel and those who like the notion of traveling". you know which kind we are. which kind are you? do you know your destiny? do you know how it can be discovered?

i hope you'll travel along with me the next several days and weeks as i revisit seattle, portland, eugene, grants pass and redding. i will share more pictures and tell some outrageous stories you wont want to miss!

written by

firebynite on October 21, 2010 from Redding, United States

from the travel blog: super vegi-matic bus travels

tagged Slow, VegOil and Destiny

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you have me intrigued tiff!!! c'mon! i wanna hear the stories again....probably some that i didn't hear!!!

great pics too! you are a natural at this and am brainstorming at how to make it easier for you!

written by tam on November 5, 2010

thanks tam! fire away...i am working on my next entry this morning.

written by tiffany chetta on November 6, 2010

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