We took a day trip to Providence, RI yesterday. First off, sorry to Kate’s cousin for not getting in touch with you there: we simply dign’t have the phone number and the whole trip was not premeditated in any way, very last minute. Kate really wanted to find a way to say hello, but… alas.

Secondly, Providence was very nice. We went primarily to check out RISD, (Rhode Island School of Design) a highly reputable school for artists and designers. It sits adjacent to Brown University which is also very pleasant, very Ivy League.

We didn’t really have time to check out much more than the general campus area of RISD, and the museum there, but it was a great day, a nice excursion, and, despite previous grudges toward the state of Rhode Island in general, a fine way to spend a day.

In the evening upon our return to Sandwich we stopped by the Hoxie House, one of the oldest buildings on Cape Cod. We sat on the dock below it while the turtles peeked up from reflections of sunset in the water. Some of the pictures I took are some of the best I’ve ever taken I think.

I’ve always had a side of myself that tended to get sappy unreasonably. I would get furiously angry at my parents for rearranging the furniture, let alone moving to a new town.

This morning I woke up and realized that we only have one more full day, tomorrow, in Sandwich, and then it is off on the road again Monday. I’m feeling all cramped up because of it, as if it was an impossible task, to leave Sandwich. I feel like its like, leaving childhood, again.

We’re lucky to be so free, so untied, so lucky. We’re lucky to be lucky. And we appreciate it.

Soon enough and no matter how far it seems, ‘reality’ beckons. in fact, I would venture to say that the farther you get from it, the louder the bellows of the real world become. This has been a focus of my thoughts and energy while in Sandwich, trying to get and take the time to resolve ongoing and stomach wrenching ideas of what it means to live the life you want to live, careers, planning for the future, ambition, resolution of dreams and the satisfaction of relationships. You know, the little things.

Somehow I came to a conclusion, perhaps out of necessity for my troubled mind about it… but I think really out of just being honest: I wouldn’t want to live my life any other way.

Yes, I could have worked for a degree in business or health care, and be steadily employed and paying mortgage on a suburban house. Yes, I think that’s great and all. Yes I could have a dog and a yard and even dinner parties with friends, a high credit limit and a television show that I recorded every week. And I miss those things strangely, I think they are great, but I don’t have those things. But I have a road trip with a woman who I was lucky enough to meet because, simply put, she is right there with me in it, sharing the same kind of excitement and hope and anxiety. I have the contentment of knowing that my fingers have callouses from playing music, and that my camera is full of amazing pictures. That this trip isn’t the first or last trip.

I’m just saying that finally, after weeks of really struggling with this, I finally feel that I am on the right track.

I do hope to find a place to live that really works for me. I hope that Kate and I can find a place that works for us. I want to have a decent job, play lots of gigs, make new music, work with new people, have a social life, meet new people, learn new things, build new stuff… et cetera. And all of those things seem really far away right now, and I have no way to control whether or not they will arrive intact from dreamstate to reality. And that’s fine.

Anyways, we’re leaving Sandwich, and this has been the best summer of my life. This time in Sandwich has been the most Summer of Summers I’ve had since I was probably 12 years old, having towel fights with Pete and Tyler around the swimming pool, jumping from shady spot to shady spot down Cromwell Drive.

And I’ve always wanted that, to have that again, I think we all should have another summer like that.

Yesterday around 3:30 pm I was sitting in on eof the seats on top of the green monster, the legendary backdrop for Red Sox games since 1911. I had seen Fenway Park hundreds of times in my life, from reruns of “Field Of Dreams” to baseball highlights all summer long, to compulsive Red Sox watching whenever the chance arrived. So much of it had to do with the field, this oddly magical place full of legends and gravity and basically a time capsule of boyhood.

And so I was there looking out over the empty infield (I was on a tour and there wasn’t a game going on) and it was good.

We drove up to Boston yesterday, it being a surprising only an hour from Sandwich, arriving early enough in the morning. We parted from the truck on a sidestreet in the financial district and headed out into the biggish city. Boston’s financial district reminded me a bit of San Francisco, imposing buildings, rich history, and yet eerily calm, quiet and nearly empty. The size of the cities must be pretty similar, by my highly inaccurate gauge, but the feel is different, of course. The immediate thing once we got out of the financial district was the distinct feeling that all the kids there, and there are many, are doing college type things, recovering from hangovers, on drugs, enraptured by thesis ideas, professing, anything really, everyone in that town seems like the are affiliated with a school in some way, and they probably are. But its loose, not too academic. We sat on a bench in the Boston Commons, we saw Paul Revere’s tomb. We caught the oldest subway in the country and had greasy pizza in the Boston Market. It was a fast day, ending with a past sunset sweep out of town on the interstate, glad to be heading back to the closest thing to home we have.

Time is as usual kind of crawling by in a speedy way, like a stealthy baby through a house with no furniture. The air has noticeably changed even in the time that we have been here, now the evenings carry a hint of bite, and the air moves real confused like, with leaves not knowing whether to fall or not.

We’ve been on Cape Cod for a good long time, and here’s why, as if an explanation is needed.

Because in the months before we set out on this trip, this tiny town of Sandwich was marked on our map. It was a detination in itself, and at the time it was unearthly, as if getting there would be akin to crossing into a different dimension entirely. And yet it was there, waiting for us to make it there. The whole country was in between, and the whole of time and weeks was in between, and money spent, but what really awaited us was congratulatory post cards and a sense of accomplishment, of relief.

Another reason is because when you have the privilege of staying in a beautiful house with a big back porch within walking distance to the tiny village center in the most quaint and untainted town you’ve ever been in, you tend to try and relish it. It doesn’t happen often. The simpleness of riding a bike underneath old reaching trees along bumpy sidewalks in front of classic old victorians is like being a chance to be 10 years old again, racing to see what it feels like to go fast, that’s it, no other reason.

And yes, it sounds trumped up but believe me its not.

The other reason may be that you are suddenly across the continent from everything you’ve known, and the goal in your life that had been there for a while, a long while, to cross the united states in a goofy and nonchalant manner, with no timeline and no destination and not even enough money really and to just say you did it. You needed to see the whole of the country as a promise to yourself and to the person inside you who may make it someday to live to be 79 or older, and to tell yourself that you did it.

It may be now that everything is too big to really rationalize and that it simply takes a few weeks to begin to break it down: you are in your twenties, you have no career necessarily, you may or may not want to go to grad school, it depends on how much deeper in to debt you go, the road trip will end at some point anyways, so no reason to rush it because it will feel sad enough when it does, et cetera. In other words: you have your whole life to figure out, and you had better do it soon, lest you should end up another sad minded person whose dreams never quite materialized, whose mind kind of got keener and colder and more closed.

The last revelation is that sometimes its ok, important, critical to shut your mind up and say “OK, I think that I can handle this, I deserve this. i’ve waited my whole life for this, worked shit jobs for this, struggled through the lean times for this, gambled on this: my life now. In Sandwich. Sitting outside the library on a perfect calm Sunday, hushed conversations hanging on the air, cars filing by towards the weekend destinations, not much else really.

Yes, I know, we are still here, and it has been a long time.

However, I just completely adore Sandwich. Its a great, magical place.

And so, we are enjoying every last minute of it to the fullest extent possible.

And then we head west.

We arrived in Sandwich sometime last week, Thursday it was.

There is this exclusivity that sticks to the tongue after uttering the words “I’m going to Cape Cod” that now seems funny after being here a while. The Cape feels surprisingly down to earth, and the lifestyle traditional and informal.

Kate’s family has been on the Cape for a while. Her Grandpa moved here long before it became the tourist hot spot that it is now. He had a studio on the rural highway where he carved wood into startlingly alive renditions of local birds. Kate’s mom grew up in an adorable old New England style house that sits literally on Main Street. After Grandpa Peltz passed away the family decided to sell the old house. Kate’s uncle Pete and her Mom (Shawnee) now have separate places in Sandwich, small, manageable and adorable vacation type places that they can rent to pay for their cost, and that they can use for the family as a base and an escape back in time. That’s the short story.

The first day we arrived in Sandwich I almost felt like I had entered a movie set. In the middle of town there is a peaceful pond stocked naturally with geese, ducks and flowering water lilies, which runs off into a grist mill with a giant water wheel, and then down into a babbling brook that cuts through the town to the ocean. Near the pond there is a drinking fountain, always on, that supplies the most delicious water directly from the spring beneath the town. The old church steeples proudly weather above the meticulously maintained houses whose thresholds bear unthinkable dates like “c. 1680”. A mile from the downtown is a boardwalk path that cuts over a sea of green marshland on its way straight to the flat sandy beach that stretches for miles either direction. Down at the marina the fishing boats deliver their goods direct to the fish stores, and fishermen work intently on their vessels. The train sounds its blaring yet calming whistle twice a day or so, and there is a pond just outside of town, Hoxie Pond, where we can go swim under summery skies.

Its pretty perfect. I really love Sandwich already and am going to miss it when we go.

Kate’s sister Tess (whom we stayed with in Austin), her one year old son Gabriel, and her dad Phil made it in that first evening. The week since has been packed full of family time for Kate’s mom’s side of the family. Every night its been a gathering at one of the two family houses, barbecuing fish, drinking wine, talking, being family. We’ve been swimming in the ocean, in the ponds, and walking along the sides of canals that wind through the marshlands. We’ve been playing tennis and doing yard work.

And now I’m trying to spend as much time as I can in the library, thinking, reflecting, figuring out what exactly to do with my life next.

In the meantime, Sandwich is a good place to do exactly that.

08)27(05 its 1112am

The woods of Massachusetts are thick and vine-y, with dense underbrush and spindly, clumpy trees. The thickets of trees created this dense shadowy motion, where the sunlight kind of dances calmly in the breeze.

I’m looking out the windows of the Sandwich public library into a patch of thick Massachusetts forest. The library has come to be and is becoming more of a refuge for me everyday. These books, the silence, and most importantly the extent of resources feel comforting to me now as I put together the pieces of my life from the past four months. Its a good time for me to, though I hate to say it, come up with a plan.

It feels good to have a plan, and it seems essential to me now to have a purpose.

It seems that all my friends have a purpose, whether they know it or not, and I am slightly offended with myself that my purpose is so vague. My friends are getting married, building decks, starting businesses and becoming immersed in fields that will lead to careers. I’m still on the same track: obsessive compulsive about my music, the production thereof, the potential for success thereof. And I feel that I need more purpose.

When we are on the road and the truck is moving there is a purpose, a blind and young and potentially ridiculous purpose. Being on the road and in the truck is also an important, difficult to attain, harder still to write about, harder even still to convey purpose. I would venture into cliche and utter the word freedom, but that doesn’t sum it up. Mostly because I don’t truly understand what that word means to anyone else, let alone myself. But being on the road… it makes me feel, (in relationship to the word and idea of purpose) as if I am stocking up on firewood for the winter, even though it is the middle of summer. It makes me feel as though I am completing something that is imperative to my mental and physical well being.

Being on the road, with Kate by my side makes me feel as though we are deciphering a sacred text, reading simple instructions for life that truly tell the obvious: how to live, how to live well, what it takes.

08)16(05 its 138pm

Kate is boiling the coffee on the propane stove, and now pouring it into our black and white specked camp mugs, the indestructable kind that could be hanging from a hook in our ne house for years and years. Yesterday we nearly lost the mugs and everything else in the back of the truck when we drove from our campsite to Lowell, MA, about a thirty minute drive, with the tailgate open. It had fallen open somewhere right as we were exiting the campground, and almost everything fell out along the road, our oil lantern (flattened), our candle lantern (in the middle of the freeway), our cooler (disappeared), our food container with all the spices and a stock of wine (disappeared, someone’s lucky day I imagine) all flopped out the back of the truck. Of all the cars behind us, only one, person, all the way in the town of lowell, bothered to try and signal to us in some way that we were fast losing everything we owned. Thanks to that man, very much. When I pulled into the new car lot and walked around to the back of the truck, our two chairs, propane stove and sleeping bags, not to mention fishing poles, ropes, guitar and other lanterns (propane and electric) were hanging close to the edge.

We retraced our steps and managed to thankfully, so good really, recover the laundry basket that housed all of our utensils, pots, pans, plates, soap, sponges, et cetera. So not having lost that was a lifesaver, that would have been the kicker, rendered us somewhat archaic on our trip, and made it so that we would have to restock everything all over again, as we reluctantly shelled out to do at the beginning of the trip.

And so we are still outside of Lowell, camping on the banks of a quiet Massachusetts pond, with lily pads and flowers in bloom. Its our first week back from theinsanity of our lives that was Portland and New York and two weddings, back into the swing of camping out.

We’ve been camped purposefully or not on the edge of ponds the entire time we’ve been in Mass, there seems to be no end to the abundance of pond life here, something I wasn’t aware of. Ponds are ideal in many ways, warm, peaceful, fed by creeks, not full of things like alligators and generally tranquil. Which makes Massachusetts generally tranquil, and indeed, a nice state.

To track back what feels like an eternity, but in reality is only a week ago, we left Portland on a jet plane. The week and a few days was, to say the least, packed full.

When we arrived on a Thursday, I was just in time to make it to my friend Mark’s bachelor party. Our 6am departure of New York left us in awe to be striding down the purple and green corridors of Portland’s airport in any kind of shape whatsoever. Portland feels so very tranquil after New York City, it feels, at first glance, like the ideal small city, and everyone Oregonian seems deflated of pressure, utterly calm. The skyline is clean, and so are the streets. The hot air is dry, and a breeze blows over everything in a fresh pine scent kind of way.

So I got a ride over to Mark’s bachelor party that night, we had parked our posessions in my friend Keith’s apartment, where we would be staying for the week. That night went by fast and blurry, the way that bachelor parties seem like they should, but not awful or raunchy, not worty of regret. In fact, the crew of six or so dudes ended up at a newish rock club in Portland (every club in Portland can be designated as newish, as they all close soon enough) and saw some amazing live music. The new deco architecture cooled by full blast air conditioning and a smokeless room of 20 somethings wearing raggedy clothes and bored like nodding their heads felt so like countless nights past for me, save for the air conditioning and smoke free ness. Every once in a while one person in the crowd of 50 or 60 would actually kind of dance timidly, and it matched the energy of the musicians on stage, fiery, potent, and yet, reserved in a insecure/cool kind of way. Typical my generatioin music, but exciting nonetheless, and perfect for Mark, who kind of just wanted a simple night out, with the passion of a good band or two behind it. Speaking of Mark, I spent the evening with Maker’s mark and ended up walking three or four miles home in the early early morning, not because I was so bachelor that I couldn’t possibly be expected to procure a more intelligent way of getting home, but simply because I had no idea how far Keith’s apartment was from everything, and stubbornly pushed myself home, to collapse at 3:45 am. The day had started almost 24 hours earlier, waking in Sarah and Richelle’s apartment, to catch a cab to the airport.

The week in our former home base kind of followed this theme of unplanned drunkenness mixed in with more formal get togethers such as weddings. It was surreal for both of us I think to be back in the city that we met in, watching our best friends get married and settle down.

Mark and (his wife, not my Kate, obviously) Kate’s wedding was on a Saturday, in a wooded setting, an intimate affair that was really affirming, everything about the two of them and the life they were setting out on seemed set and right. Following that, the preparations for Tyler and Katie’s wedding kind of enveloped the whole week. I practiced cello for hours on end, working out the many kinks in Pachelbel’s Canon in D Major and eventually collaborating with Tyler’s uncle Jerry for a processional performance. I spent some time riding around in a limo in the wine growing region of Oregon with Tyler and a bunch of Bud Light chugging bachelors, touring wineries, sampling wines, and eventually pouring wine on Tyler. I spent time at rehearsal dinners and pre rehearsal dinners again drinking and chatting and seeing old friends. I spent a lot of time with my best friends and I spent a lot of time on busses, getting to and fro to all these events, and mooching rides off of everyone. It was hard to not have any real freedom, no place to call my own, no truck, which was stranded in New Jersey, no sense of being somewhere for very long. It was good and bad that way. But the week was amazing, topping itself off with Tyler and Katie’s well planned and emotional wedding, where everyone, including grandmas and aunts and kids dancing to hip hop at a rooftop bar in downtown Portland. At then end of that night, our sober driver piled seven non sober people into her tiny car (thank you Mari) and drove us all home, in our now wrinkled suits, to settle back into the somewhat ordinary existence.

I had the pleasure of catching up with Mark for a good long while at a bar around the corner from his house, where a former cello student friend worked and supplied us with still more beer. We talked of change and love and life, and it was very good indeed, no time to be tired out by it all, just time to experience the joy of being in my twenties, with my girl, across the continent again.

We caught a ride with Mark and Kate the next day to the Portland airport, and boarded a 6:30pm flight to Salt Lake City, sat in Utah for an hour or two, and boarded another plane to New York, where after sleepless turning in a miniature seat we were again in the sultry heat of the east coast. The flight ended up in NYC at 5:30am, and we were exhausted. We tried sleeping on the concrete benches that sit around the food courts to no avail, and eventually abandoned the airport at around 8:30, having passed time over coffee and staring blankly into space. The airport train connected to the subway, which connected to Brooklyn, where we hiked around with our heavy load of stuff bearing down on our backs. Whatever hostility is present in the city’s harsh environs is eventually smoothed over by the sometimes overwhelming niceness, which is unexpected, of its citizens. When we were lost it was as if people could sense it, and they would approach us unsolicited, asking where we needed to go. We were the only white people on our subway car, burdened with huge backpacks and looking haggard, and no one seemed to notice. Anything goes in New York, and its ok by everyone.

We stumbled over to Kate’s cousin Suzannah’s apartment, where she graciously invited us to sleep right then and there on the futon in her spare room. I have never felt so relieved to not be invited to go out to eat or go to museums or do all that fun visiting stuff. We just slept, until 4pm, and groggily entered reality again. We had dinner in Brooklyn and talked the night away atop their brownstone’s rooftop, watching as the Empire State Building turned its lights off at precisely midnight. Suzannah’s husband Rolando regaled us with tales of New York’s old school gangs, the mafia, and life in general in NYC. It was brilliant, and it was stark contrast to the life we had just left in Portland the night before.

And it was time for us to go again. We’ve spent so much time in the protection and comfort of our friends’ and families’ homes that we were basically needing to set off on our own again, rebelliously exploring the US of A.

We said goodbye to Richel and Sarah, gathered the truck from New Jersey, (Stephanie’s family was so cool and so welcoming to us when they were doing us a huge favor, so many thanks to them), and headed out of the city as it prepared for another day of barely reasonable heat and humidity.

We wound up having one of the worst nights of the trip that first night, when it turned out that the entire states of Connecticut and Rhode Island were booked up for camping, leaving us stranded. At one park, we were rudely told by disgruntled and testosterone fueled Rhode Island folks that we had to pay for a campsite before we could look at it. And that there were no refunds. And that there was a $6 surcharge for non Rhode Island residents. So we went and looked at the campsites anyway, and then were told that we couldn’t stay there. It was embarassingly dumb on all sides. No one was feeling compassionate or even understanding, and on top of it all, Kate had come down with a terrible cold/fever she apparently caught on the airplane back east. It was such a wretched feeling to be driving across the tiny state of Rhode Island into the deep not real friendly looking woods without a place to stay, unable to find tiny campsites marked on the map but apparently not in reality existing, while my sweet girlfriend is utterly sick and in a terrible state. But she’s tough, and we finally found a private campsite in Connecticut, where we paid $31 to stay in an RV park next to limpid ponds. She is amazingly tough in fact, and never complained once, lifting my spirits when the whole ordeal just seemed too much to handle. So I can’t say I enjoyed Connecticut and Rhode Island, and I have a feeling this sentiment may be shared by more than a few people.

But the past few nights in Massachussetts have been wonderful, save for Kate still slowly getting over her sickness. We’ve had good luch with gorgeous campsites by waters edge, and again are living the dream, whatever it is.

August 14th is and was Kate’s Birthday, and I felt dumb because I really truly haven’t had a second apart from her during which to find her a suitable, deserving present. So I bought a whole bunch of flowers, spread them all around the campsite, and made her french toast and mimosas when she awoke. We went swimming in the pond just by our campsite, and settled in for the evening when this tremendous lightning storm rumbled in all around us. We sat on the tailgate of the truck underneath our screen house while the sky literally lit up with lightning at least 20 times a minute at its peak. The strikes were ridiculously close to us, and the ground was overcome with water, creating rushing streams underneath our feet and all over everything. It was strangely beautiful and appropriate, and we opened up a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, telling stories into the night while the rain kept hammering down. Late late into the night Kate dared me to go swimming with her in the pond, and I went, although freezing and not quite as resilient as her… nonetheless, I’ll always remember that night as monumental some how, and fitting for Kate.

I’m starting to put new photos at the flickr site I’ve started. You should click on the funny moving picture thing on the right, or click here:

flickr.com/photos/lukejanela

Still catching up, still in motion. I’ve started to write about Portland, but haven’t even gotten to the good part yet…

08)08(05 its 915pm

We are in Salt Lake City, UT, the second time I’ve knowingly been here. Its not all that tremendous, especially considering I am sitting outside of a closed Pizza Hut in the confines of a crowded airport waiting gate. C6, Delta Airlines. Departs in over an hour.

This week marked the accumulation of many things, most importantly the marriages of two of my best and most trusted friends. I saw their lives reach this important stage of completion and commitment that I’ve yet to witness from any of my peers, and I watched them do it confident that it was completely right and fine.

We flew out from JFK airport in New York City at about 6:30 on Friday morning, the 30th. We woke at 4am and made some half decent coffee, grabbed our pile of possessions from the corner of Sarah and Richel’s living room, otherwise known as home for the previous week, and headed out into the pre dawn Brooklyn air, strangely quiet and nearly peaceful. Our cab driver silently and passively raced through the empty streets while truckloads of produce and livestock unloaded, stragglers roamed the projects, and inexplicably, a crew of about 10 guys played basketball outside the window of the jet black cab. We got to the airport in due time, but spent ten minutes trying to find change for our cab driver, who insisted that he didn’t have change for the $40 I handed him to cover the insane enough $30 cab fare. I scraped change from my pockets. $27. Good enough. The airport was packed. Here it was 5:15am and for no rational reason the check in area for Delta is crammed with groggy confused New Yorkers, which is not a terribly pleasant scene to be in the middle of. Everything felt like we were being punished for being bad school children, rush this way, rush that way, get on the plane dammit we’ve got to get the right runway time, no time for coffee, no time to chat, just sit down and shut up and enjoy your flight.

A woman from Kentucky chatted with me for the duration of the 3 hour flight. Her husband hauls cargo to the Mississippi, she teaches junior college. Her town lies between four rivers. Life is interesting, they have a house in southern France, where they summer for a month or so. Everyone is courteous as I explain “Yes, I’m a musician, no, I don’t know what that means.”

Stopover in Atlanta, five minutes to run across the airport. Groggy flight, nothing to really, pay attention to, you know.

Portland. The hills are green, the interstates even are quaint, and the air is dry and hot. It already feels familiar, newbie hippies camped out on the airport floor with guitars and piles of luggage all around. Sportswear wearing yuppies nurture their kids into Volkswagon station wagons. Once again I’m in the airport in Portland, and yet this time there is Kate there with me, and we’re free to do what we want to do. We don’t even have to head home, because there is no home to go to.

We packed all our stuff clumsily on our backs and climbed onto the MAX train headed into downtown, skimming past the highway exits I used to turn onto to make it home, those mornings after having coffee at Kate’s downtown apartment. The advertisements, still the same, the glittery dry air. It seemed like such a tiny city compared to NY, and it was. Everything was quaint, and manageable, everything one could desire in a city that way, even traffic felt innocent enough.

We climbed off the train in the middle of downtown and straight into a million memories. Over to Stumptown, the downtown coffee shop where I’d played a couple of shows and where we’d meet friends or just end up so many times that the baristas recognized me even then, a year and a half later. I recognized faces, and it was OK, it didn’t feellike they were stuck, it felt like they had grown, experienced things, enjoyed Portland and its easy going lifestyle, and it was good.

07)27(05 its 1107pm

Since I have been so occupied and or so far from the orbit of the laptop and writing I want to do a quicker, if not less artful summary of where we are, and where we are going. Sometimes it can be simple!

Basically we landed in New York last week (read next post) and it was overwhelming and magnificent and exciting. We headed to Philadelphia around July 14th, where we got the one night run through with Kate’s cousin, Alex, who was wonderful and put us up in his splendid apartment.

The rest of the time in New York, and I know this sounds sad, but, the rest of the time we were looking for suits and gifts and tying down last minute details for exactly how we would be flying to Portland this Friday, the 29th to attend two (2) weddings of two of my best friends.

We took a break from the city and headed to upstate New York, where we explored the Catskills, Ithaca, Baldwinsville, and the Adirondacks for a week, before returning this evening to Brooklyn.

Its been a beautiful week, its been an amazing month really, and I have a lot to say, but sometimes I get long winded and right now I just wanted to sum it up for those of you who are following the travels.

Plus, I have a feeling I may have trouble writing it all down while flying to Portland and all that craziness. But I DO look forward to it immensely, and aim to write epic accounts of it all.

Thanks for stopping by, there are more pictures up on the pics page.

TAKE CARE AND LOVE FROM ACROSS AMERICA!

Luke & Kate
–
Professional Campers

07)23(05 its 536pm

As if held away by the persistent wind, the thought of New York City and its grandeur is finally passive. For days in anticipation and in all of the minutes inside of its rusty stomach, and in shell shocked exit from its fingertips my thoughts have been captured by this amazing place, the only place of its kind, anywhere that I have seen.

We rolled down the New Jersey turnpike in perfect summer traveling families in minivan weather, stopping to tell toll booth attendants that we didn’t have any cash to pay the tolls with every ten minutes or so. We were still warm and glowing and excited and rested from our stay in DC, all of its museums, the comfort of Marilyn’s apartment, the rediscovery of the runaway kitty. I felt oddly at home on the east coast, and its cities, as if it was an accident that I had lived my whole life never seeing them. Baltimore, Philadelphia, DC, Boston, Chicago, all of these places had identities to me, strong ideas because of the endless hours of rapturous baseball watching I did growing up.

Also, we were out of the SOUTH. The south still in retrospect is so different and vivid from anything that the West or East coasts can even offer, and yet, I was happy to leave again, to not be stuck deep down there with the swamps and alligators and fried food and evangelicals and baptists and humidity. I think Kate and I began to feel that its embrace from New Mexico to Georgia had become an accepted part of our lives. While we were in the south we got used to the big deep darkness that sits around there waiting to awake, and we got used to the warm pie crust of friendliness that sits on its windows daring you to enjoy, and any Metropolitan sense of us was becoming obscured, nearly forgotten.

And then one night, mid July, we paid the last toll (or rather, couldn’t pay) on the New Jersey Turnpike and saw a massive and eery glow to the left of us, somewhere out over the water, the island of Manhattan, more grand and glorious than I would have ventured to guess or place in my mind.

New York City. Enough has been said about it being the capitol of the world, and yet, from my perspective, growing up in the peace and grooviness of Northern California, I want to be redundant a bit.

First off, as I walked the streets of Manhattan, whose skyscrapers really do tower over you like some holy and profane anomaly of beauty and power, I couldn’t think of a single idol or person I admired, artist or not, who hadn’t experienced or been experienced by New York City. When I say been experienced by, i mean that this city is an influence, sometimes THE influence for many a serious novelist, artist, musician, businessman, anything you want to name, the city is influential on the heart because it promises so much. It promises that someday you will turn a corner and walk right into your fate, your inspiration, your answers. It seems to cast a spell over what seems possible, and it wakes you up how much of it is real.

I know that I am venturing into newagespeak here, but that is fair, because that is how New York affected me.

Sarah and Richel, our friends from Portland and beyond, live in Brooklyn and they agreed to put up with us for a little while sleeping on our mattress on their floor. I might add that they very graciously agreed to put up with us and in fact made us feel very welcome. Its good because I was excited to see them too, to see how their lives are going in New York and to live it with them for a bit. Its good because they were instrumental in our having any sense of sanity attached to our exploration of the city, setting us up with maps, books, bookmaps, itineraries, and then on top of it all, taking the time to walk us around in their sparse free time. They would call us during our day from work to see how we were doing, wandering around the neighborhoods, and then meet with us in the evenings to take us to amazing cheap restaurants in cool neighborhoods that we never would have found on our own.

The day after we arrived Kate, Richel and myself walked through Central Park, which is on a sunny Sunday, a spectacle unto itself. In one field, the size of maybe two softball fields in a normal crowded city, five, I kid you not, five softball games were going on, when someone hit a fly ball into the infield of the other game it was no big thing. Any section of the park that was open to the sun was crammed tight with all shades of skin as New Yorkers rushed out to lie down in the grass, relishing the little patch of earth they were on as country folk would relish an acre or two. Merry go rounds sang ’40’s jazz tunes and street performers flipped down flights of stairs, musicians played top notch jazz in echoey bridge underpasses and miniature sailboats brushed past eachother serious and competitive, artists painted people staring at the lily ponds, lines of overheated underclothed folks waited for a chance to buy ice cream, and all the while the towers of Manhattan peeked over the trees like a mischievous school kid playing peeping tom. All of this reverence for simple things, all of this humanity, playing itself out in simple elegance and profundity, simply a sunny day but not so simple in New York, I felt that I was feeling what every person felt in some way, because we were connected to this city.

Now I know why Henry Miller’s paragraphs go on for four or five pages at a time, sometimes more. He is my favorite New York writer and a secret ally when walking down the streets of Manhattan, and he seems ready to burst every time he describes the city. So do I in a way. It shook me awake in some ways.

07)08(05 its 337pm

Suffice to say we never planned on being anywhere, let alone Washington, DC for as long as we have. We’ve shattered our record of four straight nights in Austin, TX by staying a whopping 14 nights. Wow. I didn’t even expect it to add up to that much.

I think we were really tired. I think we had to have been so tired to stay in one place for so long. Thanks go endlessly to Marilyn for the use of the apartment. We feel whole, rested and inspired again.

I think that this part of the trip was a completely anonymous fog to us, and now we are here, entering it blindly. We were supposed to know where to live by now, supposed to be working somewhere by now, supposed to, basically, have it ALL figured out.

We don’t. But you know, I feel that there is something of a revelation on its way for me. I really do.

Also, the realization that we had these two weddings, two of my best friends are getting married within a week of each other in Portland, OR, we had to get to these weddings and we kind of freaked out. Right in the middle of the trip, granted, we were supposed to be long back to the west coast by then, but we had to really change plans, or at least a way around the whole concept. So its ended up being, see our friends and the places to be on the East Coast, fly back to Portland, fly back to East Coast, find temporary work, live happily ever after.

It sounds pretty crazy, I know.

Well, the time spent in Washington has been fast for us, flowing by way too fast, but to sum it up in a way I will say that we’ve seen so many pieces of art, exhibitions, galleries, historical monuments and sites that it is as if we didn’t stop traveling at all.

We’re heading to New York tomorrow, it turns out, we will be skipping Philadelphia for the moment.

We are here in Washington, at the end of an extended break here. It has been nice to be in one place, to do normal things, make dinners indoors, take showers, walk to a coffee shop that is ours. It has been really exciting to be in DC, an amazing city, doing so many things. I have a lot of pictures and a lot of writing to put up soon, but for now I just wanted to check in. Tomorrow we will be heading for Philadelphia, assuming all goes well. We will be definitely sad to go…

06)28(05 its 915pm

The humid air of Maryland has cooled a bit, and a gentle breeze blows through the screen porch I’m sitting in, nicely appointed, in Rockville, about 30 minutes North of Washington D.C.

Almost by accident, our sails were allowed to deflate, and the urgency that we had been feeling since the pushy rainstorms in the Smoky Mountains has begun to let up a bit. In fact, today I haven’t accomplished much or seen much at all, and it is a welcome relief.

We left the grand old south and its sturdy cities of Savannah and Charleston in a hurry and immediately met the frustrations of camping out head on. All of our gear was still soaking wet and beginning to carry questionable odors, so we pulled into a campsite north of Charleston to air it out and stay for the night, but only 45 minutes into unpacking everything, the camp hosts approached us and told us that the site was taken, even though it wasn’t reserved and there was no-one currently there. This was strange, but some things you can’t fight, so we headed off on a search for a place to stay that took us through three more extremely grungy campsites that we opted out of and a fourth, almost worse, that caught us as the Summer night was setting in. And so we stayed, in Myrtle Beach, at a horrendous and overpriced state park. This area of the Carolinas is almost shamefully overdeveloped and tacky, lined with mile after mile of oceanfront junk stores, fast food places and overweight vacationers toting golf clubs and oily suntan lotion. The ocean is of course, pleasant and beautiful, but looming cryptically over it there are decidedly socialist housing project style ‘resort’ hotels.

And so, when the morning came, we jetted out of there en route to anywhere but there.

True story: back in the mountains of Asheville we became disconcerted with all the hard times and went out of our way to find a way to entertain ourselves in the back of the truck while the rain sloshed about everything. We decided that it was important to find a dvd of “The Dark Crystal” an epic Lord Of The Rings style movie done with muppets. We scoured every video store we could find, and out of some strange chance found it buried away in an Asheville mall. We also found “Big”, and “Big Fish” for real cheap, and so we grabbed those. Anyways, it has felt sometimes silly, but for a few nights we’ve been able to huddle over my computer (which has a dvd player in it) in the middle of nowhere watching silly movies and loving every minute of it, the convenience and comforts of home so far away, but somehow available to us in a small way.

We found a campsite that sat near a pristine swampland, and sat on a rickety old dock while a crazy songbird attested its territory and a lightning storm slowly rumbled towards us. That night we watched “Big” inside the confines of our screen house while the rain fell all around us.

Our route has taken many twists and turns, and we were having a tough time deciding which way to head up to DC; were we to go through the potentially cool and pleasant Appalachians, or were we to head toward the mysterious, pirate plagued islands of the Outer Banks, off the coast of North Carolina? It was a tough decision, but by this time we decided that adventure was more along our lines than safe. So we drove up to meet the ferry which took us sleepily towards the island of Hatteras, and deposited us and a few seagulls and tourists there to enjoy the salty air.

Since the very first explorers arrived in America, the sandy reefs of the outer banks have spelt trouble for big ships, and yet the currents that wash along them were apparently strong enough to make the risk worth it, were it successful. Not only that, but pirates abounded between coves, and there were very few places to hide from them. In the end, the tiny strip of land that makes up the outer banks is riddled with hundreds of shipwrecks, lots of pretty lighthouses, hearty island types and neat pirate stories.

As we walked over the sandy dunes on the way from our second camp spot to the dazzling bright and wind swept beach, we imagined we had shipwrecked, looking for food and water. In a way we felt that way too, somewhat exhausted, but somewhat free in that, worn and smoothed by the months of travel, able to deal with the passing storms, able to find what we needed, and able to have a really good time doing so.

That second night in our campsite, as the wind blew steadily and littered sand over every single piece of equipment we had anywhere in or out of the truck, we grilled fresh caught tuna over a charcoal fire, and washed it down with cheap beer. It was a perfect kind of moment, the kind of moment that becomes giant in memory, though at the time it just tasted right, with bits of sand in our teeth. We were regaining our health and our happiness, and the ocean and the strangeness of place, and the coolness of the air were all welcome to us again, as the sediments and dust piled up in layers on our clothing and on our truck and on our skin. I remember feeling that easy laugh resurface, we were out of the south, out of everything we had felt or known again, and it was easy to be pretty alright with it all.

Even though there is uncertainty, and yes, the uncertainty hangs over us now more than ever. Where are we to live? What are we to do for a living? Was this trip all a big experiment that would do little more than leave us dangling over a cliff while our future sat on some other route? Were we supposed to be in grad school or in the city or getting married or working in a coffee shop or running errands or making epic albums or making connections and planning retirement funds while we sat there in the dunes under the moonlight and the remnants of a perfect meal sat in our stomachs? What exactly is it that we are supposed to be doing? Is it ok not to know? These are the kind of thoughts that we talk about often, always ending in an optimistic “this is right. THIS is what we’re supposed to be doing.”.

We rolled down sunny gray asphalt between the salty dunes back to the mainland of America, back to land it seemed, and up to a campsite outside of Virginia Beach.

To make a long sad story short, we unpacked a bit at the campsite and left my guitar there and headed into town, saw Norfolk Virginia, and I never saw my guitar again. Someone very cursed now stole it, and though we spent the rest of the night and all the next day looking for it and them, filing police reports and launching our own detective style investigations while trudging the beach in search of any clue, peeking into every single campsite there, judging campers by their looks, trying to decide what we would do when we found it. And yet it disappeared. That guitar that I played hundreds of gigs with, wrote thousands of songs on, worked all summer in a factory for, elated myself anytime with, it is gone for good.

Its been a theme that repeated itself here in Rockville. Kate’s aunt and uncle, as I was saying, very graciously welcomed us into their house. They had just got a little kitty, sweet and timid and quiet. The first night we were here, chatting over wine on the outside porch, the kitty jumped off, escaped through a hole in the screen porch, and has yet to be seen again. I guess I can’t really measure or express the disappointment I feel at this, and I don’t have a place for the loss in my mind or body. It makes me feel a bit numb, and strangely, makes me want to: get a better guitar, save some abandoned kitties, more forward, become brighter, burn brighter, find good things, roll over and get up, and get going again and not let it seem like a wayward curse that settled onto us. I can’t feel sorry for us, and I don’t. But I do feel bad for Andy and Marilyn, and wish I could do more to answer for the loss.

From the trouble of Virginia Beach we headed to a beautiful, perfect start of the summer, green leaves and cool swimming pool, pretty river and lots of deer campground called Westmoreland State Park, about 10 minutes away from the place that George Washington was born. We spent four nights there reading through two books a piece, eating nice food, communing with the foxes, huge and colorful moths, lightning bugs, bald eagles, deer and even a few stray dogs. It was a perfect start to the summer, June 21st feeling long and precious. We baked ourselves by the poolside while kids in bathing suits splashed and played and ran all around us, concentrating on our books and on the sweet smell of the air, the warmth of our skin. We woke up in the mornings and had coffee while listening to NPR and in the evenings east coast baseball games. It was a nice interlude to where we are now, in the orbit of DC.

06)18(05 its 406pm

The gray choppy waters of the Atlantic splash and and splish as the truck rides smoothly over the white horizon. We are on a ferry between North Carolina’s mainland and the Outer Banks, and Kate is napping while I lean the laptop against her in the back of the truck.

The week has ben good and full, back on track you could say, from the pitiful small setbacks we had experienced in Asheville. After the remnants of the hurricane and the last night in a Super 8 I hope to spend in a very long time, we finally were able to remove the dead mouse from the air conditioning and head into the humid south again.

As we headed north, as far up as central Kentucky, we both agreed that there was something about the south that we hated to leave so soon… something about the people, the allure, the feeling and pace of life. Something about the south, the Louisiana, Mississippi part of the trip had embraced us in a friendly way, and so we were really looking forward to getting down to Savannah, Georgia, for a last glimpse of the steamy south, at least for this summer.

We pulled into the most perfect of Charleston afternoons, almost shocked to find ourselves looking straight at the unthought of and (in my case) rare Atlantic Ocean. It came as a surprise that we could now look at a map and trace a line from Mendocino to Charleston and cut the country in half along our trip’s jagged lines. The breeze was blowing, joggers were jogging by the handful, and the statues and palm trees and civil war cannons were glowing in the warm afternoon sun.

It was nice to be there, to have made it, but unfortunately the reality of needing a place to stay is never far behind us on this trip, especially a place that we can afford. We kind of had to face the reality, finally, that it was summer, and that summer means tourism, and that we no longer are the only people out poking around other people’s towns. And so motel prices skyrocket, and availability dries up, and we find ourselves staying 20 minutes out of town to the north, in the ghetto of Charleston, in a STILL overpriced Best Value Motel. But Kate was still a little sick, and it was worth it to not have to struggle so much for the day.

We threw our backpacks on the grey blue carpet, turned on the rattling a/c and headed back out into a Charleston evening.

Charleston is renowned and loveable for its amazing clusters of historic buildings and its arched cobblestone streets. At night the alleys glow amid the humidity with history, and the way the wrap around in that European way makes you feel like you could explore them for hours just enjoying the view as you turn each new corner.

And did I mention that the days are hot? The next morning we set out with no real determined end and found ourselves gasping and bickering in the intense heat reflected between the bricks and stones and the sponge like air. At 11:30 we found ourselves in a bar for lack of a better place to go and ordered ice water as the sweat evaporated from every inch of our body. It was somewhere in that moment of lightheadedness that we decided to just trek to Savannah that day, it was only an hour and a half away, and we had been waiting so long to see it.

We accepted that with the campgrounds being full and or as expensive nearly as a cheap motel room that we would spend the night outside of the city and head in. The drive through South Carolina’s lowlands was hot and slow, but soon enough we crossed the Georgia border and immediately had Ray Charles singing “Georgia On My Mind” stuck in my head. We found another Best Value Motel amid an oasis of McDonalds, Subway, every other fast food chain and several other motels. It was becoming normal to be staying in places like this and after a short nap we were almost comfortable with its dingy interior. And again we headed off into a Savannah Night.

Savannah’s historic district is pretty large and pretty amazing. There are 22 separate but geometrically equally distributed park/courtyards, often with creepy gothic fountains and statues in the middle and pleasant park benches spread out underneath the moss draped live oaks. So you can be in one of these plazas, walk a few blocks in and be in another, they are like their own little worlds, and they are a godsend in the brutal humidity and heat. And so walking Savannah is amazingly pleasant, even with the air sticking to you and making your brain nearly inoperable. We passed the evening walking along the riverfront, where once slaveships and cotton bundles were shipped in enormous quantities to and from the old world. Savannah’s strategic port clearly made it a major power in the boat dominated industries of the past.

For now Savannah is enjoying its place among travelers as being one of the more exotic American cities, and rightfully so. It is clear that the successes of “Forrest Gump” and “Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil” has attracted a great number of tourists to the musty allure of its streets. But for us it was simply the feel of the place, the idea that mystery and shady secrets lurked along the quiet waterfront, in the strangely silent statues, below the ever hanging spanish moss.

Some of the shady secrets are buried even deeper into Savannah’s unconscious. We visited the civil rights museum there that detailed the influential and monumental fight for basic respect and rights for the cities huge African-American population. The underbelly of the city , the sad reality of the place is that brutal racism has not fully gone away, and didn’t even come close to not being the status quo all the way up to the 1960’s and 70’s. It was only through the courage, perseverance and effectiveness of black boycotts on white business, sit ins in “white only” restaurants and stores, and integration of schools that progress was made. To imagine the brutality of racism before some changes were made is impossible to imagine, and perhaps for many, to forget.

We spent our day in Savannah taking pictures and slouching through the heat. At first I was ready to get somewhere, anywhere just to avoid the intensity of humidity and hazy weather, but by the end of the day I was truly sad to go. Its such an amazing city that in one city I had fallen in love with its simple pleasures, its lusty feeling, its gorgeous ghosts.

Now, almost by accident we are headed to the outer banks, being lulled by the Atlantic’s quiet pull, ready to spend some crystalline days on gusty dunes.

06)12(05 its 443pm

The interesting thing about the week after Natchez, even the two weeks after Natchez, is that we were suddenly restless. Or at least, we weren’t comfortable staying in any place for a very long time.

Following our thunderstormy night outside of Natchez, we headed up north through Mississippi, along its muddy river. The Delta region of Mississippi is absolutely astounding when it comes to its feel, its contribution to America, and its brooding undercurrent. We really only passed through, as opposed to relished, The Birthplace of The Blues, and yet the feeling of the place slung to our skin like smoke from a crowded juke joint.

The towns that edge the Mississippi as you head north along its banks are gritty, worn, revolving around the abandoned city centers of 40’s and 50’s glitz no more. When we headed into most of these places it was obvious, so obvious that we were the only white kids to be cruising through town in a long time. Faces turned towards us out of curiosity, as curious what we were doing there as we were. Despite any initial trepidation, I was again amazed by how friendly people were, with a genuine concern and politeness that I’ve only seen in the South.

The rain drops are sticking hesitantly to the Super 8 Motel window which looks out at the lush green hills of Asheville, North Carolina. Kate is sprawled out on the tacky bedcover, sick from some sort of quick flu. Her sickness set in this morning unexpectedly as we were lying in the back of the truck listening to the storm that had been pushing and pulling all night. We hoped that finally for once the rain would let up, but it was in vain. I knew when she said she was feeling sick that we needed to abandon our ridiculously soaked camp and head for civilization. Our tarps that had been set up were ragged, our equipment completely muddy and soaked. In the pouring rain I pulled it all down and cramped it into the back of the poor beat up truck.

Its been a rough week, the weather unrelenting, and the small mishaps piling up. It peaked for me as I backed the truck into the front bumper of a ’75 Chevy, smashed the taillight and crunched the rear panel. It broke my heart that the truck should be looking as beat as we were feeling. Too many one night camp outs in haphazard locations, too few complete night sleeps, and too much worry about money and timing. And still the weather charts for the week ahead picture five straight lightning bolts poling out of dark gray clouds. How perfect then that I’m listening to Bob Dylan sing “Hard Travel”, wailing on his harmonica, ‘carrying a load on my worried mind, looking for a woman that is hard to find…’.

In Leland Mississippi we stopped into the Jim Henson museum and browsed through the nostalgic shelves full of Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy memorabilia. It was sweet to be there, where Jim Henson was born a poor creative boy in the heart of Mississippi, feeling parts of my childhood resurface and remind me that they were there. It made me think of my brother Pete, of us sitting on Saturday mornings making forts out of blankets and camping out in front of the cartoons for innocent hours on end. Kermit was our friend, and it was good to hang out with him again.

We headed west towards Clarksdale, where Robert Johnson was born and lived. Robert Johnson was in many ways the predecessor to rock and roll as we know it, his fingerstyle playing and dark lyrics, together with the voodoo mysticism that he has come to embody make him live as a legend to this day. The story goes that Mr. Johnson took his guitar one night to the crossroads of Clarksdale. He sat down to play and a large figure approached him, dark like a shadow. The figure took the guitar and retuned it, and then played the most amazing music. He handed the guitar back to Robert Johnson, and to his amazement he was able to play with the same grace. Its interesting that most people refer to this shadowy character as the devil, it could be a voodoo God, or in my mind, it could be the artist accepting his self, the part of him that was genius.

So the town of Clarksdale was old, felt old. Old traditions, old ways, old buildings, old streets, worn and rubbed down. The feeling of poverty cracked the sidewalks, and the isolation of the delta, its limited opportunities, weighed heavily on my mind. I felt that this was a part of the world that was hard to escape. i felt that this black America was suffering the weight of a brutal and strange past. I felt that this was a place that should be worshiped by all Americans, for the legacy that it holds in its broken neon signs. But I was only passing through. We stayed in a $29 hotel in the heart of downtown, and walked through the warm evening streets peacefully as groups of people met and passed by on foot. It could have been 1956, 1975, or 2005, it was so specific of a place and feel.

Oxford, Mississippi, home of William Faulkner and Ole Miss U. was a stark contrast to Clarksdale. Shimmering clean sidewalks and a renovated downtown was filled with hopeful Mississippi college kids, mostly white. Coffee shops and book stores overflowed with tradition and vitality, there was a definite sense of pride in the town. We sat down in the early afternoon to a good hearty southern meal, fried catfish, collard greens, sweet potatoes and eggplant and felt too full for words. Weather again was a factor, but we decided to tough it out. Even at $29 a night, motels were stressing our budget, so we were going to camp out, and nothing was going to stop us, not even the rain, or the fact that the only campsite available to us was 30 minutes away into the woods and empty save for us. We set up a screenhouse on the misty shores of a beautiful lake and drank bourbon into the night to tide away the strange lonely feeling of the campsite. We talked about life and friends and laughed and recalled the trip until we were far too detached to care about how strange it felt to be so far from civilization that we knew. It kept raining through the night but we both slept sound until a groggy wake up.

We both had Memphis, Tennessee on our minds. The allure of rock and roll, and the home of Elvis Presley was just too strong for us to miss. We had basically come this far north to see the city on the Mississippi that was as vital as New Orleans. So many musicians had earned their place on its famous Beale St. Strip, so many battle for civil rights had found a center there.

Asheville, NC

Here in the coffee shop. OK, so my excuse for being out of touch is the whirlwind of destinations all packed together into one week. Memphis to Land Between The Lakes, KY to Bardstown, KY to Lexington, KY to Big South Fork, TN, to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN and here, to Asheville. No time to write, or should say, having to keep the laptop out of the thundrestorms we’ve had. And the constant setting up and taking down a major factor. Unfortunately, the weather isn’t really giving us a break anytime soon, so we have to keep on our toes, and be prepared for more of the same for at least a little while. Next stop is Savannah, GA and from there up the East Coast. The Atlantic Ocean! We are approaching 2 months on the road and we both feel like road warriors… it would be great to take a break soon, and breathe in a little, but until then the motion continues.

I will, of course, post the latest entry on the actual stories as I have a chance. Take Care!

06)02(05 its 620pm

Memphis. Elvis. BB King. Sultry Mississippi river blues clubs. Memphis, Tennessee.

Its one of those place that is nice to say out loud. It makes you feel good to know that you are in Memphis though you don’t know why. Here we are in a Super 8 motel, exhausted from the flurry of a week, relaxing before we head out to Beale Street for a bit of music.

In short, this week we headed from New Orleans to Memphis, roughly following the Mississippi River as it winded up and up. That in itself is poetic somehow.

New Orleans was difficult to let go of, hard to say goodbye to. It filled us both with sort of passionate feelings and a sense of place that was something like home, and made us want to unravel the knot of southern culture just a little bit, enough for us to squeeze through. New Orleans made me think of jazz and vampires, music, history and beauty through the ages. New Orleans introduced us to this swath of the earth that is so fertile and laden with a heavy and sometimes bitter past.

We drove across the shallow and vast Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans to a state park that sat on the opposite side, once the site of a sugar mill and plantation. We landed at Fountainebleu State Park on the eve of Memorial Day weekend and already the park was swarming with masses of Louisiana tourists all barbequeing and unloading their RV palaces. Our campsite was minimal and buzzing with mosquitoes but the nights we sat on the white sanded shore of the Lake were peaceful and made us talkative as the warm wind from across the lake blew steadily against us. The Louisiana sunsets were slow and mellow and we ate grilled shrimp and vegetables for dinner. The massive Live Oak trees that once shaded the plantation still drooped sadly in the pink rays of the evening sun, and in the days we walked around farmers markets in the tiny towns nearby and waded in the almost hot water amongst the hundreds of happy kids and parents, the never getting deep enough to actually swim in, even as we walked hundreds of feet off shore. The nights were so hot and the mornings humid too, and it was hard to wake and shake off the heavy feeling of sleep while already sweating in the morning sunshine.

Both my Dad and Kate’s Dad had off the cuff told us before the trip that Natchez, MS would be a great place to see. Its antebellum houses and old cobbled downtown sit on the banks of the Mississippi with a guilty grandeur that has worn just enough with time. Natchez was the first permanent settlement by Europeans along the Mississippi River, and its importance as the main trading port along the Mississippi from Saint Louis to New Orleans made it a powerhouse economically and politically in the days of slave trading and cotton exports. It was held by the Union toward the end of the Civil War, and Grant made his temporary home there in one of the many old and ridiculously grandiose Mansions that overlooked the river.

As we drove out to the Natchez Trace State Park, our radio broadcast was interrupted by the emergency broadcast system, which told us in a sort of frantic way that a tremendous and potentially dangerous thunderstorm was headed directly our way, in about 25 minutes time. We stood on the dock of a nice little Mississippi Lake while the fishermen out for the day obliviously cast their lines into the evening water, somehow the epitomy of Mississippi living to us. The sky above us was blackening steadily and the massive rumbles of thunder slowly echoed our way across the Lake. We decided that camping out wouldn’t do, albeit reluctantly, but as we headed back into Natchez it became clear that this was no subtle sprinkling of a storm. The sky quickly became a wall of water, with so much rain falling so quickly that it was nearly impossible to see the road through the thick film of rainfall that covered it in a matter of seconds. Lightning crashed all around us and the thunder rocked the truck with its intensity. We would be checking into a hotel it was decided, we would be checking into a hotel or be blown away by this storm. We were really fortunate to be in town on a Sunday, and out of desperation I checked with the downtown hotel, you know the grand old style hotel that sits prominently in most old American small towns with gold lettering and brick walls, and somehow the price was just low enough for us to take it. We had come really close to staying in the “Scottish Inn”, out on the freeway a few miles outside of town, whose parking lot was lined with drug dealer looking cars and whose neighborhood was less than pleasant. But now here we were checking into this enormously posh Hotel with marble statues, fountains lit by fire and painted gilded ceilings. I pushed it a little bit further and asked if we could have a room with a view, and the receptionist kindly upgraded us at no extra cost to a 6th floor suite with a balcony that looked out over the Mississippi. It was a grand feeling being up there on that deck with its little table and Southern Style outdoor fan, looking out over the fading light of the glorious river and peaceful Louisiana farmlands across it while thunderstorm after thunderstorm raced by, lighting up the horizon irregularly with streaks of lightning.

We wanted to at least catch a peek at one of the insides of the Mansions that dominated the history of Natchez, and so we shelled out for a guided tour of the Rosalie House, where Grant had holed up while the union controlled the Mississippi River traffic. The opulence was almost over the top, but it was a good departure point from which to view the troubled past of the region. This is the place where Southern women became Ladies, and men became Gentlemen, and black people became slaves. The almost strange part of all of the revery given nowadays toward the architecture of the area by tourists is that the whole issue of slavery, that the houses themselves were often built by slaves, is barely mentioned at all, almost succinctly avoided.

We just returned from Beale St., the heart of Memphis. This is the proclaimed birthplace of rock and roll, and it revels in its roots, even though the tourist aspect of the whole party is hard to miss. Live music streams out from every bar of the three block neon lit stretch that is the modern Beale Street. Musicians work their fingers to the bone on the sidewalk and in the bars, while folks of all ages and races meander around and through the spirit of it with legal beers in hand, partying while the cops surround it all. It all felt very safe, very easy, very clean, and it was a nice experience even so. I don’t even begin to think that anything we saw was ‘authentic’, as in, where it really all comes from, the blues, rock and roll…. but somewhere behind the facade is the birth, somewhere many years back is the root of the music that shaped my life so profoundly. Sometime way back then, in the heyday of the blues, in the 30’s and 40’s, underpaid working class musicians made music to make music, and they made music that felt right and felt good and made people dance and somehow changed the course of history. It makes me really humbled, the respect that I have for those musicians and the whatever it was that made it happened, and I don’t even claim to know what it was that made it… the depths of poverty? the struggle of being black in America? the honesty of good souls with no purpose, no cause, no bullshit reason, just music. I think that that is what it comes down to, just music, no rules, no reason. Now, its kind of recycled. Its music for the sanitized sake of the tourists that want to see it sans poverty, sans struggle, sans passion really. But that was me, the tourist, passing through, and I’m glad, I’m glad we’re in Memphis and that we saw it, whatever it was. I feel that as a musician it gives me something to live up to, and it forces me to remember, as hard as it is to put in to words, what its all about.

We left Natchez determined to camp, even though the weather was still looking pretty miserable. We headed Northeast up the Natchez Trace, which is, in short, one of the oldest roads in America, that was used by Native American tribes, traders and was the most important road in the pre civil war America up until the advent of the steamboat up and down the Mississippi. Parts of the trace are still walkable, and we ended up stomping along it quite by accident that night. The terrain was so swampy and dense, with vines hanging down over the ancient road, and we were walking as the sun was setting, out in the middle of nowhere while the rain started to fall. It was not the kind of place I would feel comfortable getting stuck in, and it was good to finally find our way back to our campsite. The rain was coming in strong, and we were forced to put up the tarps and set up a screen house around the truck. We sat underneath the brown and green tarp for hours that night while the fierce wind and thick rain pounded the landscape around us. It was strange to be sitting outside in such ferocious weather, but it was nice to say that we were in Mississippi, in a Mississippi storm, drinking cheap beer on the oldest road we’d ever been on.

05)25(05, its 745pm

New Orleans combines all its energy into everyday, and works the senses till you think it would implode, but it is a hardy, reckless city, old and vibrant and inexhaustible.

Yesterday we crossed over the Mississippi River south of New Orleans, and yes it is a big river. I have had this vision of myself seeing the Mississippi for some time now, a romantic vision of the huge body of water singing its way down to the Gulf Of Mexico with tugboats and steamships pushing by, the wild call of the Deep south all around me. I wasn’t let down in any way really, the vastness of the moment, of my life coming around to being somewhere so exotic and American was heavy on me. The only thing I needed was more of a knowledge of what went on on this river, what battles had been fought on it, what lives spent working in some way or another this magnificent stream of deep currents and history.

Little towns stand in the shadow of the giant levee along its banks, heavily weathered and barely standing in the humid heat, signs from the 1930’s through the 1980’s advertising long forgotten brands of beer and ice, restaurants promising pool tables and live entertainment all wrapped in vines and forgotten by the roadside. It doesn’t take long to realize when you are there that there is no economic influx to be found, nor will there be for some time, but it seems strange to not have pictured that poverty stricken reality until driving through, only allowed to be a tourist, too high on opportunity to really stop and take part in a life that is not your own.

The Mississippi winds its way down through New Orleans methodically and slowly, and when it hits the city it seems to overflow the essence of all its miles and time and silt into the bloodstream of the life here. I had expected New Orleans to be comprised of the cute little French Quarter and old mansions of the Garden District, but its a true Metropolis, with skyscrapers jutting out between the two touristed parts of town, and sprawling suburbs reaching out all around it. In fact, the parts of town where people live outside of the famous districts are somewhat ragged, old buildings everywhere there too, but no such preservation and influx of old money.

The crux of New Orleans tourist and history life lies in the French Quarter, a narrow streets and cast iron balcony section of town that is for the overwhelming part preserved in its brilliant original state. Gas lanterns hang over cobbled sidewalks, and bar after bar after antique shop after gallery after apartment after bed and breakfast cram the streets in that oh so European way. The atmosphere is lively and unique, to say the very least. The ornamentation and exotic feeling of a 19th century neighborhood, French and Spanish and Black and White and old is enough to send the mind drifting into different periods of time and history. At night last night I got the feeling that there were indeed ghosts and spirits roaming around the street, if not with us, then perfectly encapsulated in the past we were walking through.

I find myself frustrated even because New Orleans, like Venice, or Prague, or even the Old Growth Redwood forests of California, is a place that defies a suitable description with words. Its fantastic.

And it has a darker side too that is obvious to the corners of the eye. As we were walking down into the French Quarter last night we were passed by four different police cars within five minutes, followed by a team of four policemen on horses patrolling. As we wandered the night away I probably spotted at least 15 more cop cars on patrol. Its not that I’ve never seen excessive cops before, but this was in a way unprecedented for me, and it made me wonder what would pull a necessary police presence down into the streets. The answers come when you mix the elements of New Orleans all together. Poverty, availability of drugs, excess of alcohol (you can drink liquor on the street as long as it’s not in a glass container), combined with the swarms of tourists and their pocketbooks all make for a charged atmosphere. And so you feel safe, but you are weary, and you are not sure why so many cops but you are kind of glad to see them rolling around so regularly. I realize too that New Orleans and its Mardi Gras are synonymous with over the top rowdiness and antics, and that the city must employ a huge police squad just for the week long festival every year. Like New York and San Francisco, and every other major American city, there are places that you shouldn’t really venture alone, but the warnings of avoiding the public cemeteries especially gives New Orleans this gothic threat. There is a vampire like quality to the underbelly of the city, and a feeling that all the voodoo mixes into the modern translation of junkies and drunken tourists walking all over the footsteps of the past.

Newest pics are here!

05)22(05 its 735pm

Kate’s watercolor in varying greens and golden brown is beginning to take shape. We’re sitting on the dock at our campsite, on top of the waters that are mainly still save for the frequent jumping of catfish, slow quiet swimming of alligators, and skimming of huge dragonflies. The air is warm and sweaty, my shirt that was clean and fresh as of noon today is gross and limp, and the skin on my face feels like a light layer of butter was smeared evenly over it.

The light is beautiful end of the day light, cranes cross the pale blue and orange sky above us, and birds sing exotic calls to eachother out over the bayou.

This is one of the more interesting places I’ve ever been, and its a good thing I’m more or less tolerant of the natural world and all of its strange almost threatening existence, otherwise I would be scared immobile by the immensity and abundance of life of all forms flying and slithering and swimming and buzzing and moaning.

Two nights ago was our first experience of the dense bayou environment. We pulled into camp at Sam Houston Jones State Park, 15 minutes north of Lake Charles, LA. It still hasn’t quite settled in how thick and pervading the ambience is here, and it is difficult for me to get used to how much wildlife there is, how much humidity there is, how much water there is. Right now I’m particularly affected, as we just abandoned our perch on our little dock because these enormous wasps were hovering around and walking into the wood bannisters, as if it were home to them, and definitely not to us. Lots of things I can deal with in a sane way, wasps, however, are another story. I just don’t react in a rational manner, I freeze up, and if anything even remotely seems to come near me I writhe in a manic way and close my eyes. Wasps are not really my friends. And man are they big here. Really really big wasps.

But this is not to say that I am not thoroughly enjoying the scenery and experience… I like it. I love that we are sitting on a bayou right now, and that we are in the heart of cajun country. It was Sunday today, and all day long we passed fisherman after fisherman and encountered the friendliest people everywhere. I mean genuinely friendly, friendly like our neighbors at the campsite, whom we had not spoken to yet, offering to get us anything we needed from town because they were making a run for supplies. And further proceeding to walk over to our site and chat with us about life, travel, family and Louisiana. This same neighbor, who truly just genuinely was being friendly, insisted that we take an oscillating fan, brand new, so that we could have some relief from the humid Louisiana nights while camping. It was amazing, and based on our experience thus far, not uncommon at all.

We found ourselves in a fantastic vacant museum yesterday in Lake Charles. Its few rooms were filled with civil war artifacts and recreations of early to mid century pharmacies and stores. The gallery adjacent to it was filled with remarkable 5′ by 5′ charcoal drawings of people, insects and dogs done with intricate detail. And out back this magnificent 300 year old white oak sprawled wider than I’ve seen a tree reach before, with limbs over 100 feet long with the bottom of the limbs sometimes resting on the ground because of the enormous weight.

Now the light has faded a bit, and it is still warm, and suddenly very peaceful. An ideal time for sitting and sipping the ice tea we made. We’ve seen scores of immaculate southern mansions standing guard over well huge and well kept front yards, and I can just imagine the feeling of this country, sitting on a screened porch and watching the night finally settle in. Its nearly impossible to sleep in the heat that lingers in the jungle like night, and so we’ve been crawling out of bed in the middle of the night to just sit and talk until a cool breeze settled in. It becomes a pace of life, this blanket of heat and languidness. Its as slow as possible.

We left Austin with our head replaced on our shoulders, refreshed and ready for the traveler’s life again. East Texas was a long easy drive, save for Houston, whose massive oil company skyscrapers reach out of the hazy polluted sky. From roadside appearances it is a huge city, that kind of reaches for miles in every direction. East of there, there are a few spotted tiny towns, mostly based around the traffic of Interstate 10. As soon as we crossed into Louisiana it felt like a whole different world, the thick swamp atmosphere taking over everything. The highway becomes a blanket of 20 to 30 foot high trees and dense undergrowth, and the bridges over fingers of water begin to mark the path regularly.

As we explored the sprawled city of Lake Charles the population became different as well, a heavily mixed community with black and white folks generally being very friendly, polite and helpful. Crawfish and seafood shacks lined the roads, pointed at often by rusted and hastily arranged lettered signs, the most common and charming being the big red arrow with yellow lightbulbs pointing off the road with the plastic letters often falling and misplaced. The accents begin to change as well, with a sort of heavy drawl gracefully finishing words in interesting ways, usually with a casual sort of tone. I feel very obvious in my ignorance of what Louisiana is all about, but it is beginning to set in and rest over me like the humid, almost edible air.

The humidity doesn’t let up for today, but that’s ok, we’ve had a great time anyway. Tess and Arnold (and Gabriel too) have done such a magnificent job of hosting us that I’m truly sad to go… we feel so at home here it will be tough. But tomorrow morning we head out for Louisianna. We’ve decided to bypass East Texas entirely as it seems to be riddled with meth addicts and satan worshippers and corporations such as Enron and Halliburton. Which is worse is questionable. We want to hang out in swamps and eat cajun food so we’re heading farther east.

South Congress is the district that Tess and Arnold live in. The atmosphere is lively and upbeat, even in the sweltering heat, and the coffee shops are cool and plenty. We’ve been treated to great food and good hang out time and gosh just overwhelming generosity and kindness. We did a last stock up stop at the giant Austin Whole Foods, where we got soy milk, granola, black beans, road food in short.

Below is the next installment of Luke and Kate’s fascinating trip adventures and fantastic accounts thereof:

Tucson, Arizona

The red mud splattered Toyota cruisd out from Beaver Creek into the Spring dryness of central arizona. The plan of action was to avoid too much desert, and or too much Phoenix, which by all accounts had been described as treacherous, bad and foreboding, to say the least. So we decided that Tucson was the place to be.

But its interesting to note here that even the idea of going to Tucson was not in our original plan… its just that as we arrived in Flagstaff just a few nights before, it was snowing heavily and it was cold. So the next day or two I kind of gazed obsessively at weather predictions for the Taos Santa Fe area, where by all accounts there would be thunderstorms and highs in the 40s. It was hard for us to let go of the idea of going to and through Santa Fe, but at the same time we felt that happiness and sunny weather go hand in hand, especially when camping and traveling. So we headed south intentionally, and somewhat reluctantly.

But as it turns out of course it was the ‘right’ decision.

Phoenix was avoidable, even from the safe distance of the Freeway around the edge of it. We stopped a couple of times at various spots, once at this supposedly interesting artists commune type place in the middle of the desert called Arcosanti. The idea of the place is to, was to create ‘an ideal urban living space’, where art and architecture intermingled with people living harmoniously and using less natural resources. The only problem was that people weren’t nice. Or happy apparently, and I know that we got a superficial glimpse of the whole deal, but wow, just unfriendly kind of aging hippies, surrounded by this cracking concrete style architecture that was quite faded and funky. I was disappointed because I thought the idea was fantastic, that architecture should lend heavily to a more utopian method of living, wherein community and creativity and resourcefulness are much more strongly encouraged than in the typical worldwide city. But it wasn’t to be for us that day at least. Arcosanti was lame.

So we got into Tucson in the very warm afternoon. Though the weather reports said 80, the real temperatures were in the high nineties, warm even for Tucson in early May. We checked into the Flamingo Hotel, a faded budget locale that glorified the glamorous years of Tucson’s movie boom, apparently the area outside of Tucson was where Westerns were filmed in their early conception. John Wayne, Paul Newman “Hombre”, and many forgotten others are displayed on movie posters outside of each of the rooms. Palm trees surround a modest swimming pool, and aside from the obvious faded glory it was an interesting place to stay.

We were surprised as we wandered around downtown Tucson that NO ONE was out and about, it was a perfect evening, it was tuesday but still, it was quiet, more quiet than most small towns. We ambled over to the Congress Cafe, which I had heard of through searching for places to play around the country, and had a sidewalk Boca Burger in the perfect warm spring air. The colors of a desert sunset linger for a really long time and it was nice to see them fade over the quiet city.

The next day we realized that we had kind of missed the exciting part of town by only a few blocks. Tucson has this mysteriously large collection of young people, college age and up, who have opened coffee shops and art galleries and thrift stores and places like that and have done it with a lot of color and flair. It was great to be among so many creative types and in the bright colors of the desert city streets, wandering through endless vintage clothes and muraled walls of health food co-ops. It was hot though, really truly hot, in a dry way, and I wondered how I or anyone could make it through the summers there. They have got to be absolutely brutal, and nothing subtle about it.

I’m back in Silver Springs, NM, in many ways a perfect small town in SW New Mexico. The weather is great, the people charming, and the atmosphere very relaxed. There is a fantastic river front city park, and just a lot of interesting ness. It reminds me of the tv show Northern Exposure, the way that things feel here, very innocent.

We spend that past couple of days and nights up in the pristine Gila National Forest, camping in a canopy under willow trees alongside the Gila River. The days were slow and the nights warm, we had everything we needed, right down to my homemade fishing pole that I made from a stick.

We made the very worthwhile trek up to the Gila Cliff Dwellings, and observed in a kind of ecstatic awe the left over civilization markers, far removed by time and history. These homes were built over 800 years ago deep into enormous caves situated 200 feet or so above a year round creek, and a five minute walk from a trout healthy river and plenty of flat fertile land. It must have been paradise then, it still is in many ways.

I’m liking New Mexico, the relaxed atmosphere. In that spirit, I am off and out of this coffeeshop (its so hard to do these updates while travelling, its such a break from the action but well worth it…).

I updated the pictures page, check it out, take care…

L & K

We had such a good time at our last campsite at Rose Canyon Lake that I was actually sad to leave it this morning. It was a nice short temporary home, and the pine trees were soothing with the wind rustling through them. We spent the day at the lake while the fishermen tried their luck at the many many fish that appeared in the shallow clear waters. At night we played uno and had huge bonfires, enjoying the warm evenings and the solitude.

I don’t have any pictures to post right now, but Will have some of tucson soon.

We are headed toward Silver City, New Mexico today, to camp out by some Gila Cliff Dwellings. Should be interesting. Very intersting, and then in a couple of days, carlsbad caverns, roswell? and onto Austin.

Hey there. I’m in a cafe called Epic Cafe in Tucson, near the University here. It is eery how similar this town’s kids and art scene seems to be to Portland, ambitious, driven, and yet still a small city. But its nice. The weather is nice too… SUN SUN SUN. Today we’re heading out to find some neat thrift stores, take pictures of Airplane Graveyards, and find a campsite in the mountains nearby.

Last night we found ourselves staying at the fabulous 😉 Flamingo Hotel on the strip outside of town. NEat sign, nice old movie theme, each room had old movie posters all around it and a theme, a LOT of westerns apparently were filmed here back when Cowboy and Indian flix were the big new thing. My favorite quote from the poster on the way to our room was “Hombre means man, and Paul Newman is Hombre”.

So I’m still catching up obviously, but I hope that this brings you closer to us in our travels. We are full of life and having a great time. Our next stop is… uh, Roswell ? New Mexico, and then, uh, Austin? We’re not sure right now. The sun is getting to my head, in a good way. Encourages a slow down certainly.

So anyways, I am still writing out the larger panorama of the trip which you can read below, the next part. I hope to repolish all of this writing and pictures and put it into an interesting book. I admit, its rough right now, but with some time I will be able to hopefully make the trip live up to what it feels like… to some extent.

Also, I have more pics HERE, enjoy!

In short San Luis Obispo, while charming, kind of left us with something to be desired. Or probably more precisely, we had some really high expectations for it. It is more or less a peaceful college town, with prevailing frat party atmosphere. The time we spent at our campsite was ideal, long afternoons on the beach, making mobiles and painting, eating grilled salmon off the campfire. We spent two nights at a simple but tantalizingly close to the ocean site called Montana De Oro. And then we headed south again.

Our initial impression of Santa Barbara was fantastic, wide streets with people walking everywhere, our first palm trees, and sun everywhere. It doesn’t take long there to realize how well off the general population is. Grandparents dye their hair and wear designer jeans, and the fancy shmancy restaurants line State St, the main strip of the town. There is plenty to check out on foot in the area, my favorite city park so far being the coy ponds there. Its a fantastically landscaped small park with a living pool, surrounded by palm trees, grassy areas and native plants. We sat on the edge of it and watched the turtles bask in the sun and even approach us, hungry for treats from human friends. The coy fish in the pond are huge and peaceful. We could have stayed there for hours.

Our home-base was about 25 minutes northeast of town at a charming 50’s style county campground called Lake Cachuma. It sits around a dammed lake, with hundreds of oak tree lined simple campsites. There is a general store there, and a marina, and its the kind of place that feels like it has had its heyday, a kind of destination for RV living, with plenty of family campsites. Our site sat just at a spot where you could watch the sun set over the placid lake, with a tiny little trail winding down to some good sitting rocks. The only hindrance was the wind, in the time we were there it was constant, strong and persistent. We cooked and talked and set up tarps in the wind, anticipating rain at any moment, but it passed us by. We stayed a record three nights there, just kind of taking in the area and slowing down a bit. We didn’t want to hit LA during the weekend, when hotel rates were considerably higher. So on Sunday morning we set off, down 101, and the Pacific Coast highway, cruising in California traffic past surfers setting off into the crystal blue waves, and into the jungle that is the outskirts of LA.

Both Kate and I had pretty much negative preconceptions of what LA was all about. We both kind of saw it as a gigantic parking lot, swarming with crime and superficiality. We were wrong, thankfully. LA is not as ugly as Northern Californians would like to think it is, the burghs that we saw, Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Venice are all shaded with trees.

The biggest surprise for me personally was Beverly Hills. I half expected to see bleach blonde plastic surgery victims walking chihuahuas and talking on cell phones, but there was none of that to be seen, though it may go on behind the massive gates of the massive houses in that rightfully famous neighborhood. We drove our ever modest camping mobile around the winding hills looking in awe at not only the ridiculous mansions, but kind of reveling in how actually pretty it was, and how, hey, if we had a spare ten million dollars to spend on a small house, that would be a good place to do it.

In the evening we found ourselves in Santa Monica, and walked the busy pier their, while the ever bustling crowds swarmed everywhere around us. It was sunny and 74 degrees outside, the breeze was light, and it was gorgeous. It was living up to the stereotypes, but in a good way. We spent the late evening in an outdoor seating bar named Bugsy’s along the 3rd St. Promenade, a really nice pedestrian walk area where extremely talented street musicians entertain the wildly diverse crowds walking around the warm night air.

Hey there. Update: In Flagstaff, Northern Arizona. I got sick while carousing in Las Vegas, and am still recovering, bitter that I have to take it so slow. We’re staying an extra night in a budget hotel here, in hopes that I’ll be feeling peppy again. Its just as well in a way, it was snowing in Flagstaff as we got in, and we thought we were going to be camping.

I’ve got some new pics, that I’m about to post, and a lot of stories to tell.

Since the last update, wow, so much has happened, breezed down through Santa Barbara, L.A., Joshua Tree Natl. Park, Las Vegas, and now Flagstaff. I’m trying to write it in this interesting manner, but geez somehow I just can’t write when ill, which is too bad, because Hotels are great for that kind of thing. Perhaps I’ll try again tonight.

The weather is looking bad all the way through next week for any semi northern route at all, mainly to Santa Fe, Taos area, which we were both looking forward to seeing very much, so we may have to cut south, through tucson. Its too bad really, we’ve actually had a rough week, in terms of the small details, travel wise. Otherwise, everything is great.

link to pics:

http://www.lukejanela.com/images/trip photos/trip photos.html

I’ve figured an easy enough way to post new pics from the road. Check out for updates here, and go direct to my site. lukejanela.com

04212005 its 902pm

Yosemite got to be getting full just as we darted out of there. We snapped the last tourist pictures and bid goodbye, just as, at the entrance station to the park, a line of 50 or so cars waited to get in for the quick weekend in Yosemite, the first real campable weekend of the spring.

We were heading back to familiar territory, the Bay Area, where my brother and a few friends I know are stationed, and where I had spent a few weekends over the winter showing up to play shows in little cafes. We had vowed to do the tourist thing though, North Beach and Chinatown, maybe even Fisherman’s Wharf, snapping pictures gleefully the whole time and compiling footage for our great road trip movie.

The heart of San Francisco is so vagrant and eclectic, it is impossible to sum it up in a few descriptions. North Beach is such a genuine if touristy neighborhood proud of its Italian heritage and beatnik heyday. And Chinatown is its own universe of swirling colors and neighborhood type ancient Asian men leaning over vegetables as little kids wind their way around.

It was brilliant, but we kind of hit a shrill note when we realized that staying at my brother’s apartment in the Mission District of the city was not as easy as letting him know we were in town and ok, great, here is a place to stay. We decided not to burden him with our young roadtrip and headed out of the city south, determined to find camping along the coast, between SF and Santa Cruz.

We were optimistic, but the evening shadows grew longer, and our plans got less and less ambitious, the first two (and only on the map) campgrounds were packed full of the weekenders, and there was not a single site to be had. We sat on the hood of the truck in the now darkening sky and discusses our options, and decided to push East to one last option, which turned out to be the only, a county park also nearly full and compensating for any empty spaces by the amount of rowdy partying going on around us, all night. The highlight of the campground was pulling into our site, and promptly witnessing the neighboring campers attempting to get their fire going by pouring white gas on their smoldering coals. Of course the line of gas lit up in the drunk young man’s hands, and in fear he threw the can onto the ground. They then attempted to put the fire out with water, and by hovering around the now ready to blow gas can. I kind of grabbed my blanket from the truck in a reluctant haze and walked quickly over.

“Smother it, you’ve got to smother it.” I said, frustrated. I threw the blanket over it and walked away. “You can bring it back to me in a while. DON’T lift it off anytime soon” I was very tired, it had been a long day. 7.5 hours of driving. 10 hours on the road.

***

The plan for a place to stay the next day was clear, and we were exc ited, for we would be staying in a friend’s house, and friend’s houses have showers (and of course, dear friends).

Our luck had kind of faltered with the whole of the evening before, but we were determined, in our sleeplessness, to make the day a full one.

Santa Cruz was familiar territory for me, I spent my formative college years there, grand and crazy, busy and alive. I had left it with sour memories of a relationship gone south, but I had let go of that by the time we rolled into town, and as we cruised past all my old houses and dorm rooms on the tour of my past I kind of felt a nonchalant detachment from it all, which was refreshing. I just knew where the streets went, and the cool places to get coffee, and where to sit and watch the sunset.

We spent the afternoon taking in a concert by friends of friends which happened to take place in the UCSC hall that I had played many concerts before. It was interesting, very interesting in fact to see that quite a few of my former classmates were there at the concert, still hanging out. Its very easy to do that in Santa Cruz, and its a good life there, which, though its hard to explain, is why I had to leave there in the first place. Seeing all these people in the same place made me feel at peace about the whole thing, no matter which path you take in life, perhaps its just happiness that should be the guide. I was glad to say that I had lived a different life, in Europe, Portland and Mendocino, and that coming back was like coming back to a new world again.

Our idealistic visions of the extended bathing sessions were kind of smashed by the reality of college roommates partying with 24 packs of Pabst (ah college) and blasting punk rock from the paper thin walls right by our temporary bed. The encore was drunken audible sex , extended showers and lights left on, windows left open. Again, we were nearly sleepless.

In the morning, with the Santa Cruz light streaming through the window, we groaned out of bed and packed resolutely and quickly, out the door in less than ten minutes, off to greener pastures, on with the adventure.

We zoomed down Highway 1 to Monterey, towards the Aquarium there, which we had been planning to see and talking about going to for months. We finally made it, and shelled out $20 bucks to wander around the sharks and jellyfish in a meditative state broken up by the throngs of children, even more captivated then we were.

In the early afternoon we grabbed the compulsory tourist Clam Chowder from the bustling fisherman’s wharf, and then headed south, looking for the perfect campsite to call home for the night.

BTW –

its the 20th of April now, and we are finding ourselves in San Luis Obispo, downtown, camping out near the beach. I’ve got some catching up to do in my story telling, hopefully it will all be up here soon. Until then, the plan is tomorrow to head to Santa Barbara, and then LA, for a day, and then up to Joshua Tree National Park.

Wish us luck

Kate Painting At Mirror Lake

Vernal Falls From Above

Yosemite Falls From Afar

Kate With New Friend

we woke early enough and had a modest breakfast of leftover hummus from the night before, the portion that the bears didn’t get to, and some coffee. Coffee is always magical on camping mornings. I talked to the ranger about getting a better campsite, but realized it was such a busy weekend it wasn’t even worth trying. It was to be a hectic day for the rangers, and by the time we hit the trail towards vernal falls, you could see why, the modest trail was like a pedestrian freeway. I had never seen so many people on a hike before, and the crowds only increased. This is definitely a par tof the modern spectacle that is yosemite.

The rivers flowed around us with a spring rush and roar to them, and the hike uphill was accented by stretches of warm sun, not unbearably hot but smooth and even sun.

The hike was much more extreme than we had expected, and still the crowds were there. It was well worth it though, up past the misty rocks, up and up and up steep stairways in the stone with railings holding you from falling a couple hundred feet, cool mist nice on the skin. At the top, the smooth rocks melted toward vernal falls, where the vista down into the valleys, ancient and glacial, was incredible. It was a relief and satisfaction to be standing there at one of those spots you peered in awe at from the Valley floor. We found a perfect flat rock to hang out at, next to a very shallow run of the river, where it rolled steadily into Emerald Lake. Another waterfall fed the smooth shallow run from above. When I hiked up to that one, to the bridge that ran across it, I took some pictures of Kate painting on the rocks. Zooming in as far as the camera would go, i captured her in the viewfinder, and then as I zoomed out and took more pictures, I realized the complete and confounding immensity of the little scene we had found so humble and pleasing.

We spent a good couple of hours up there, where Yosemite breaks you heart in its beauty. I napped warmly on the smooth rocks, and daydreamed with little else but a certain peacefulness to caress my senses. At this point up, I began to admire my fellow Yosemite crashers, and the endurance they had shown to appreciate the place from where we were, caravans of little kids, old and young alike, appreciating the grandeur that makes all the Yosemite hype worth it.

We blissfully skipped down the trail, much easier going down of course, brushing past other hikers and kind of enjoying our youthful abundance and freedom.

When we got back to the campground, it was clear that it was to be a full house, and a busy weekend indeed on the valley floor. But we didn’t stay there long. We made a bit of coffee, rested a little and then embarked on another, shorter hike back up to Mirror Lake. The night before had filled me with a certain reverence for the place, and I wanted to spend more time by it.

We sat on the river bed beneath Half Dome and just let the time slip away, Kate painting some more and me reading my books, and trotting about taking pictures.

The pinnacle of the camping experience may be for some the complete absorbtion into nature while sipping ice cold canned beer and eating canned chili. For me it is different, and I don’t know yet what it is… but I felt a great thrill last night to be sitting on top of a giant boulder overlooking Mirror Lake, truly the only humans in the world, Kate and I out there and awake at all.

Kate was finishing her beer and suggested that we walk unarmed and unaware of where we were going by the faint moonlight of a setting quarter moon. “Great” I of course said.

So we walked a bit trotted some throguh the almost sickly thin pines of the campground, over a ghostly quiet bridge, and a long the rushing roaring Tenaya Creek. Eventually the roar hushed down, and we were left to sit in solitude above the water so still that the stars were reflecting. Above us, Half dome mightily caught every last drop of moonshine, and the snow on its rim sparkled pure white.

Yesterday was of course, The Day. My birthday. And so symbolically we had been planning to take off on this epic trip for two months now. And its been all waiting.

And in the final days it was all packing. Pack the bags, the lanterns, the towels, the stove, the mattresses, the jackets socks shirts the flashlights batteries. And then take them all out and repack since they dont fit all that well. And then get all stressed out about it becaues you are subconsciously thinkking the whole trip will be a disaster inevitably because you will die in the woods attempting to camp. from a truck.

Yesterday I woke up, showered, made coffee and packed. As opposed to the previous three days where I woke up and packed. Its just finding places for things. Kate rearranged food boxes, containers were shed, and a certain sense of ‘fuck it’ just kind of creeped in. And I went with it. We’d be alright. Its a camping trip not the end of the world.

The leaving is the best part of driving. Cruising down 80 East going 75mph just to keep up with the big rigs riding your tail is a glorious feeling.

Wow. Last day of being 26. Day of departure for road trip. All in all, things are pretty surreral for me right now, I’m anxious.

The truck is all packed. Everything from velcro to batteries to tylenol to long johns.

today I leave Hopland, and head for Auburn, and then tomorrow, Kate and I leave for Yosemite, where we have reservations for a couple of nights.

At this point, having the last two weeks at home with my parents has probably been the best thing, I’ve spent every single day of it preparing for some aspect or another of the trip. Yesterday I made mosquito netting and curtains for the back of the truck where we will sleep. Today before I leave for the road I am going to polish and shine the truck.

O dang I forgot to back up my hard drive… and, o, I have to call the insurance company… o, all these things before leaving. I had better get off the computer and get serious.

This is our home for the next many weeks:

I think that my mind is going through pages and pages of code trying to decipher something that may or may not be anything… I’m frazzled lately, unable to focus in many ways, and, as the potential cure, unable to sleep very well at all. I awaken at the very first sign of light in the morning, and then I struggle to get enough sleep (having gone to bed at o, 230 the earliest). So that’s that.

Last night, Blue Danube, once again, but kind of highly affirming in many ways. Had a great conversation there about kind of not only sticking with the music, but also not allowing yourself to discount the talent and reality of it, which I have been doing too much of lately.

That is why a refreshing change of scene would be ideal.

And that is why I’m having agreat time at my parent’s house, relaxing, not thinking about much… scarily, at all.

I’m sitting in the blessedly awful Coffee Critic of all the stupid places in the world, catching a Giants game on the TV after driving from Auburn to Ukiah High, in a dire effort to get my brother Sam his tennis racket, for a match that was cancelled. So all in all, pretty classic, in a NorCal way.

Ukiah has this magnetism, a strange backwards magnetism that creates a vortex of strange crossings and paths. And wow the town is the same, the random alterna loner, the smitterings of just like, S L O W E d down 40 + men and women, and of course the bubbly high schoolers just sort of eternally killing time.

And the Giants are winning, which redeems everything in a small way.

In news, the show on Sunday was, well, to say the least, akward… I had broke a cello string and my whole set was based around my newer cello songs, but of course, it being Sunday afternoon I was unable to find a string anywhere in Northern California. So I get to the Edinburgh Cstle, which is this danky bar, the best diver bars that there are, dirty loud, packed with hipsters who haven’t showered for the weekend. I had an awful set personally, but I have to thank everyone that was there, because they didn’t make me feel it that way… They were super supportive and appreciative, even when my guitar strap broke mid song and the sound was all off and everything. I’m not even mentioning yet the best part of the gig for me, which was Ayla Davila sitting in, learning three songs in like, three seconds, and making them sound a lot better than I would have that night on my own.

The rest of the night was kind of beautiful in my kind of way… A 3 hour drive North leaving at midnight, to Auburn, CA, where my girl Kate is temporarily staying with her parents, who are fantastically good to me. I love driving 8 lane freeways when i’m the only one on them at 230am. Its a beautiful feeling of freedom. I listened to M.I.A.‘s new album, John Vanderslice, and just slowly careened along happily… Happier still to see Kate, whom I have missed a lot these few days that we’ve been apart… its interesting how in depth you get with a person living with them very closely for a year. I think its a good sign that after all that closeness and time, we didn’t get tired of eachother… we still miss eachother. This trip we are taking is going to be brilliant.

So that’s that for now… in short, a lot of things going on in the past few days. I’m getting ready for a show in SF on Thursday night, at the Blue Danube. I’ll have to go find a cello string now…

You all should check out my brother’s photography sites… the work is great, and its updated regularly. His work amazes me, he manages to make it look easy.

petegeniella.com

I’m sitting in a corner in the cabin with a bare bulb lightling the now empty room. This is the last night in the cabin, our Eden for the year, my perfect little home for the perfect amount of time. Its of course bittersweet. I am thankful for how satisfying this place has been for us. I hope that the next place I live is as cool and cooler than this. I am thankful for Kate, so many amazing days and nights just living the right way.

I’ve spent all day clearing the corners and packing the camping gear. Last minute details. Its been hard, truly, listening to loud music all day to help me get through. Catching the sunset in Mendocino the wind on the headlands was so strong that I couldn’t stand up against it. To see a year go by, and pass, like a single day. I have this feeling that I am onto better and bigger things, and so I’m not worried about it in the end… this trip is the kind of spark you need to ignite things in your life I think.

And so I won’t miss it… and I mean that I won’t miss it in the sense that, of course I will think fondly on the people and the setting, and will urge myself to always live in a way that is similar to what we started out here… but you can’t spend your life missing things. Its better sometimes to pick up, let the bridges fall behind you and accept that it is not your responsibility to nurture the sanctity of your cherished places and times…

‘the falling of the past, the raising of your mast. Its all right’.

Moving as you may know, is not fun

But nonetheless, I take part in it everyday for the last week or so, sweeping, moving, being sad, being glad et cetera. At this point its just super surreal and I wouldn’t mind getting it over with.

Its making me tired.

Plus Kate is leaving tomorrow and its all too huge to even really think about. So at this point I just pretend like I’m busy and push forward. Like most people.

I met up with my brother Nate today in Montgomery Woods, which is approximately halfway between where I’m living and Ukiah, where I was living. Its too bad I haven’t visited it much since living here, it is still astounding, and for me a great source of peace and quiet.

When I was in High School and College I would go up to Montgomery Woods every week or so, sometimes with friends in the middle of the night at the full moon, sometimes by myself when I needed to think. It was like church to me, or the only true church I’ve had since that age. It is an amazing place, that no matter what was troubling me I could walk out of there feeling enlightened and ready to take it all on.

I talked with Nate alot about college and the future and whatnot, jobs… the stuff you think of all the time but never quite have answers for. Nate is doing really well and I think he is on the right path: working really hard and creating opportunities for himself by pursuing adamantly his goals. Me, well, I hope the same can be said for me. Anyone who knows me well knows that music, and hopefully MY music is the key and the goal to future prospects. And anyone even those who don’t know me know that it is tough to make a living as a musician. I know this. I am aware, nonetheless, I keep pulling for it, and I keep trying to make a more amazing album than the last, and to push it as much as I can. Could something happen there…? Yes, and it will on some level.

Anyways, the trees in the main grove of Montgomery Woods look like this:

and there were so many wildflowers out, one orchid looking one looked like this:

it was nice. I feel peaceful now. Thanks Nate.

Up at our house it is bright and light again, for the first time in months not soggy and dank… Its nice. In the evening a couple of nights ago it looked like this:

and the view towards the ocean through the trees was like this:

So, yes, it is hard too be letting go of this place when it is getting to be SO beautiful again, but at the same time its amazingly exciting.

I fixed up the back of my truck with a bed and storage cupboards for our roadtrip. next is to rig a tarp tent set up that will reach from the back of the truck outward, so that we have some privacy to change clothes and whatnot, and a place to hang out in the rain. Its pretty neat. I’m loving my truck right now.

Online, well, not a whole lot of action out there. Pitchfork is a decent place to look at some music info for indie type bands if you are into it. I’ve been listening to and enjoying Enon lately, just ingenuitive and somehow not trite and boring like too many ‘alternative’ bands these days. Still too, AFI is well, what it is is that everytime their music comes on I want to listen to it… unlike most other music, I just flip through so easily.

Back from another show in the city, this one at a small little place with excellent ambience called Epic Arts. A few of my friends that I haven’t seen in years and was really happy to see showed up and that was good. The sound was great, the other performers were on it, and all in all it was a good gig. I feel like I’m reaching a peak with my performance, especially with the whole cello/singing thing. Its coming together, finally able to get the sounds out of my cello that I want, and to be able to sing marginally in tune is nice too.

The day though yesterday was LONG, and in the longest kind of way. Scissors my kitty decided to wake me up and keep me awake at 430am, and of course knowing that I had a show that night I kind of did this non reverse psychology to get myself to sleep which didn’t work. I kind of had one of those nights that is similar to a fever dream, where you incessantly think about your life and where it is all going et cetera et cetera. And all these thoughts just seemed so much… leaving on the road trip, leaving everything again, needing change… not knowing what comes next. Not wanting to serve tables, yada yada the same old thing that everyone knows about.

Today we cruised around Berkeley a little bit and had a nice time of it, being in college land and then up through Napa, which I imagined to be a lot better that it actually is… kind of disappointed, I had no idea how bloated Napa has become, whatever charm it is supposed to have I feel has been swallowed by an odd mall culture. O well.

Geyserville and a few of the other stops along that amazing road 29North and 128West are still charming and the scenery is just fantastic this time of year, with all the trees starting to come alive again.

It was such a long drive, but again, nice to come back to Mendocino and call it home… for now. I think we still want to live here if we can find a decent place to live that is more connected to community. To be able to walk to the grocery store, and the post office and the ocean would be fantastic. But we’ll see, we’ll see what else is out there in America for us.

So that’s not all that interesting, and I don’t have any cool links to sites or anything right now, except the lastsoundofsummer which made note of my instrumental album being up and sent a bunch of people to the site, which made me kind of gleeful. In one day 400 songs were downloaded from my site, which is a lot, to me at least.

Or something along those lines. I don’t know what it is that would cause an epiphany but I believe there is a cause for one out there.

I’ve been down the past couple of days, just the blues, the mid February, the change, the uncertainty, the dwindling funds, the feeling of stuck…

I’m having such a hard time booking shows which is what I think saps my confidence the most right now… I want obviously to do my music for a living, and if I can’t even get some live shows lined up, how am I to effectively promote? I wish that my CD would land in the right hands or whatever, or that I had that insight into what I need to be doing better, more effectively. I know that I am working hard, but perhaps not efficient enough.

SO, big news for us is that the road trip is absolutely on. We will not be moving into the house that I mentioned earlier, last post, because of a lot of reasons, mainly that it was too temporary, and too much money to pay for a temporary house for a month that we won’t even be there. And we’ve given notice to our current landlord. And I’ve told my job I’ll be gone for a month at least.

So if I can get some gigs for at least the West Coast part of the trip, I think i will feel very good about the whole thing.

Its not a question of IF, I will dammit.

O, and I should be raving about this, that my instrumental album “You Are The Driver” is mixed masterd and done.

Tomorrow I will be posting the whole thing on my site for a week or so of free downloads. And then when I’m done with the trip and whatnot, I’ll get it on iTunes and print a few CDs. I’m listening to it right now and I’m really happy with it, I’ve never heard an album like it… in the sense that it is blending these worlds of classical and electronic pretty well… taking acoustic sounds and manipulating them into a new thing… its neat. Its like Godspeed You Black Emperor on E and Red Bull, but not as lame.

Or something.

And sometimes you just go for it. I’m thinking we’re moving out of our cabin here soon… Staying in Mendocino, but looking for another place to live, more light, closer to the ocean.

We’ve actually found this really nice place for the Summer, and I think that after much debate we are looking to move there… It has a view of the ocean from high above Mendocino, is about 3 minutes from town, has a huge yard, lots of light, two decks…

Pretty nice actually.

It makes me sad in some way and is actually even hard to admit in this format on the blog, because everything up to now has been about how perfect life is in that little cabin.

But your desires and needs change, and the reality of a situation changes in a New York minute.

Can one pay for happiness? I think honestly, in a sense yes. Especially in this country. And if you can, you should.

Nothing is more important than health and happiness (?)

What do you think?

after wading through the crazies and battling for parking spots, things we dont do in mendocino, we are off to go home.

The show was beatiful, a warm night, my brother and his friends and my friends some driving all the way from ukiah.

And tonight we’ll be in the woods. Giving scissors some company, who we left all locked up with a lot of food for company.

We got to see the aquarium, thanks to T, and all the little ants in the ant display. Maybe pics later, I sure feel like a tourist, espcecially sitting here again in Caffe Trieste.

Onto the road again, into another phase…

No we haven’t found Walnut yet. We’ve hiked in a mile radius around the property, whistelled with different whistles, peered up trees with binoculars, put up flyers, put an ad on the radio and no go.

Its a loss because it means Walnut is hurt or was hurt or is at very least afraid and lost. Its a loss because I miss her every day and night. Its a loss because she was really representative of our new idyllic life… happy, sweet. I’ve never had something so precious and to have her just disappear… it makes me scared.

On the homefront we are both trying not to be ridiculously obsessed with it. I just finishd the mixes for You Are The Driver. Which I am considering calling something else. “Eskimo” maybe. or something like that. I think that I will release it under a moniker, “Drama Club” is to be the name of my electronic ‘band’. Or whatever. Who cares.

I do. I’m thinking so much on my music career. I hope I have the guts to do everything possible to get my stuff out there. Its hard to do… and its a lot if not everything about confidence, and the vision you have of yourself. Sometimes I get this hint of a vision of myself as this brilliant electronic/rock/songwriter/classical/composer/artist/photographer/carpenter person who is a visionary and held to his path and never waivered. Sometimes I feel like another dumb 20 something trying to not waste his time. I mean, is everyone like this to some extent? Is this stuff I’m creating, putting more hours of my life into than ANYTHING else, is it good enough? Et cetera. Thoughts like this on and on in the winter. on and on.

So I’m going to watch Harry Potter movie tonight. and drink Makers. next… next is next.

so here i am at the blue danube again, kinda numb really. Excited about playing again, and seeing my brother.

but recently I experienced a loss that hit home and that I kind of want to write about later, but in short, Walnut is missing. And it has been really sad for Kate and I. So send vibes to Walnut to come home.

Just kind of doing a lot of things, making it through the January. I got some stickers from cafepress today and I’m into to giving them at my show next Thursday the 27th. I love having packaged copies of Blue Star available to send out to the world, and am trying to maximize my efforts there.

I’ve never been the type (for some stupid reason, modesty, insecurity?) to just mail out my CD to everyone in the world and hope that someone cares. I know its not the most practical strategy, but it always seems like that is how it happens for some people, the initial connections at least. I can’t for the life of me really think of any record labels nowadays that consistently put out music that is along my lines. Maybe you have some ideas there.

The interesting world of Mendocino moves along. All is well and not well, change hangs in the air. I would certainly hope that I get it all together to go on our much anticipated tour/road trip this April. I know that we are needing a dose of both inspiration and the real world. (whatever that is)

ESA Portal – New images from Titan

I’ve been watching ‘From The Earth To The Moon’ for the past few nights, and it is amazing to think about how inspired we can become by the exploration of the world. This kind of thing is so exciting to me. Check out the audio samples of what it sounds like to fly through Titan’s atmosphere. Its not very wow inspiring, but you can imagine being there and realize that humans sent a spaceship there and feel pretty neat about the whole thing.