Vagabender

So here it is, the beginning.

This idea has been around for maybe ten years or so; the road trip, the new cultural movement, empowering people to empower people to empower people. I think on some level we have a conception of our selves which is heroic, and I think this is good. We want to be saviors in our time, folk heroes of a sort. There's the threatening possibility of hubris in this, yes, but I believe our aspirations are noble and true.

The dream idea of the road trip was in it's most nacent form an adolescent fantasy. Summer vacation forever. This innocent (if somewhat impractical) dream has had various brushes with reality. For me discovering far-out social projects like Oregon Country Fair and Burning Man lent a level of credibility to the notion that such things are possible. The growth and inevitable branchings out of our core social groups have variously boosted and diminished my hopes for something to actually happen and for that something to be good. Over the past two years I spent a good portion of my time hunkered down in a cubicle trying to affect the outcome of elections, and in truth during that time, I lost touch with a lot of this.

But somewhere in that time, Luke and Mark decided that it was time. Mark would be emerging from HSU and Luke would be putting an end to his duties as a GSI. There was (and is) a great need in the zeitgeist for something to take our lives to the next level. So the idea of the trip emerged again, and they started discussing it seriously.

When I fist got wind of it I was still in the trenches of the election, I think, and my response was somewhat noncommittal. At the time I had room for very little beyond my work, but the seed was planted in my mind and soon I was hinting at friends and co-workers that I would be off the map for the summer of '05. After the darkness of November 2nd passed and I found myself breaking free of my job, the trip began to take on very real and exciting proportions.

At present we are less than a month from takeoff. Luke and Mark are in Westhaven and I am bouncing about the East coast and getting ready to head back to California for two final weeks of work before joining them to get on the road. This website is just beginning to take shape, but I expect some great things from it.

More soon. Sign up for our mailing list to get major updates.

I spoke briefly with Luke and Mark today. They're up in Westhaven without much in the way of net access and they've got a job doing some carpentry up there to work up the money to get a new oxygen sensor put into the truck. With any luck this will be the last repair needed.

Everything seems to be cruising towards a June 14th launch date. I'm making some more improvements to the website -- yes, I know the header image is busted at the moment -- and I hope to do a soft launch after Memorial Day weekend.

Upcoming content/functionality:

• Google-Map integration to relate content and geography
• Various donation-pushing things to help finance our lifestyles of bohemian excess
• A suggestion form for places you think we would enjoy visiting
• The ability for people like you to sign up and post your own vagabenderish ramblings
• More backstory, bio and manafestoesque "about this journey" stuff
• Photo galleries, duh
• Podcasts -- cause you know this joint is buzzword compliant
• Wicked bawls shots

I'm looking forward to it. Hope you are too.

As many of you may have heard in email form, we're officially off. We're also officially bogged down with our first (and probably not last) mechanical problem.

The automatic transmission stopped working right as we were coming down over the Richmond bridge on the 580. It would stick in the lowest gear, meaning top speed was 30mph with the engine fired up to 5,000+ rpms. Luckily pulling off and putting it in Park for a minute seemed to reset it and we were not forced to drive the back roads of Richmond at high volume and low speed. So, in the intersts of not being stranded down the line, we're going to have it looked at here in the Bay where we know some mechanics and have places to crash.

(there's more)

This is the first variation we've made of the prototype logo sketch. It has a kind of psychadellic feel which is cool.

This is the first good photoshop sketch I made of mark's pen and ink. There were a number of embarassingly poor earlier attempts.

Josh asked me to make a Vagabender logo. This is what I came up with after playing around with some old bus driver's union graphics from Chile. I was looking for an image that would visually convey some of our concepts like America, travel, vagabond and bender.

These are my observations looking back on the first week of staging and the first day of travel.

Goodbye San Francisco

I was pretty much knocked out there in San Francisco for a while; sick like hell for a week solid, and then totally pushed under with work. There have been ominous rumblings around the money situation for the trip so I'd been picking up all sorts of freelance gigs and just basically knuckling it down for the past four months. When it came time to head up to Humboldt, I finished what I could early downstairs at Common Grounds and took the afternoon off from work; packed for an hour and caught a city bus down to the Transbay terminal.

I thought I left myself enough time, but I missed a limited-stop bus, which got me thinking about how slow the #14 Mission bus in SF really is on a Friday afternoon. So I tensed up on the way down, thinking the thoughts I often think on that bus -- how I catch myself being self-congratulatory because I'm cool riding a hot city bus in the Mission being the only white person on... you know, sort of getting up and then knocking myself off my high horse. And of course rolling along in the sun, saying goodbye to the Mission, and listening in on other people's cell phone conversations, and wondering how all the old ladies with canes get by in this crowded fucked up world. Anyway, I'm still starting to stress the time, and when I get to the terminal there's maybe 15 minutes until the bus is set to leave. In fact I pass the bus driver (who I recognize from other trips) on my way up the stairs, and it turns out there's a long-ass line at the ticket counter, and the time stress kicks into high gear, getting upset at how slow the old people in front of me in line are, a ticket lady #2 for leaving her post for five minutes. Who's the manager here? You get the picture.

Turns out the bus is sold out. Can't go Greyhound. Nothing until tomorrow.

So that's a defeat. But as I walk out of the Transbay terminal into the modest friday afternoon hustle of downtown SF, starting to think about where I should stay tonight and about calling up to the guys and telling them I'd be delayed again, I don't want to be waiting another night and day away. And it hits me that there are other ways to get to Humboldt county. Fuck it. I'm not staying here. It's a beautiful day and I'm on the road.

(there's more)

We're getting ready to head out of the bay. I'm staying behind to work on the site a little more while Luke and Mark take the recently repaired truck out for some errands. Brian's going to lend his identity to a CostCo run, and there's some hardware to pick up in richmond so we can effectively lock our canopy.

I don't know how much I'll be able to finish before we take off, but I'm hoping by the time we leave LA we can have enough content piled up and organized to justify a mass email.

Until then... Update: The mechanics fixed NOTHING! Well, they may have fixed something. The hard shifting phenomena is gone, but the truck still sometimes doesn't shift at all.

We're thinking about just getting out on the road with it anyway. You'll be informed.