June 12

As soon as we wake up in the morning, Christie starts suffering from an extensive craving for coffee, somethig that we had in fact not seen in a while. Christ indly tells us where is the closest Starbucks located, and after Christie has changed into her jogging outfit, she tries and convince everyone to come along. This is how we finally all decide to go for a healthy run to Starbucks, which, according to Chris' description, was supposed to be very close, although it was actually much further away than we would have ever gone. So we all change into our own jogging outfits and start running, except for Triet-ly who takes a bike and goes scouting the Starbucks by herself. Christie nominates herself as the leader of the crew, and starts running as fast as she can followed by the rest of us. Matt follows her closeby, while Lyyly and Jeremy just run behind, using Tomatha as an excuse for being slowed down. Jeremy in fact had the bad idea to bring Tomatha along, convinced that she would be pretty happy to go for a long walk accross the semi-arid land of New Mexico. Yet, he soon found out that Tomatha is not such a good runner as she is a good attacker. Indeed, as we stop for a little break at some point perhaps about 2 miles away from the point of departure, we notice a long path of blood foot-steps behind us. This is how we realize that Tomatha had been running for a long while without complaining about the fact that her paws were bleeding pretty bad. And Jeremy obviously did not notice a thing until now. So we realize it's probably time to stop for now, and we all gather at some random coffe shop in a shopping center on the way to the Starbucks, except for Triet-ly who had obviously been much faster than us with the bike and was probably already at the Starbucks pretty far away, waiting for us without any idea of what had just happened here.

We take our coffees, and decide to wait for Triet-ly to come back with the bike so that we can bike home and grab pigpen, since Tomatha is obviously unable to walk home in this condition. Triet-ly does not however seem to be found, we call the Starbuck, where the employees reckon seeing her but tell us that she has already disapeared by now. Eventually, Triet-ly comes back to where we are. Lyyli takes her bike and rides back to the house, followed by Christie who runs back after her, in order to grab pigpen and bring it to the coffee shop in order to drive Tomatha back home.

As Lyyli and Christie come back with pigpen, they find Jeremy and Matt playing chess, while Triet-ly is doing her usual stretching exercices on the ground, with Tomatha looking at her with a mixture of envy and disdain. While waiting for Matt and Jeremy to finish their game, Christie and Lyyli join Triet-ly in her stretchnig exercises and realize for the first time that most of Triet-ly's exercises, albeit apparently non-sensical, were actually based on some solid physical constructs.

Then Jeremy and Christie go shopping for some presents for Chris, this very nice girl who was hosting us all in her housing-sitting mansoin. As they didn't find anything that Chris may actually enjoy, they come back with a bunch of groceries with the plan to make her a very nice meal to thank her for her amazing hospitality. So we all get back home to Chris, where we meet the 3 other friends of her with whom she was having a study session. Triet-ly improvises herself as a cook and makes some delicious pasta lunch which everybody loved and ate very very fast, while Jeremy was focusing on the dessert, as he introduces his new specialty: the banana-berry-truffle dessert, an amazing mixture of chocolate, berries and bananas. Then as we get ready to go, Triet-ly realizes that we will never make it in time for her plane from Washington DC on the 14th, and she absolutely has to attend a dancing workshop on the 15th. Jeremy and Lyyli think that we could find her a plane to hitchike, but Triet-ly seems sceptical about that eventuality, so she finally decide to take a rideshare for the next day from Santa Fe to Berkeley.

And we therefore go to Santa Fe. On the way, we encounter one hitchhiker who looks like a mixture between a hippie and a bum. He asks us whether we are going to the National Rainbow gathering in Cuba. We tell him we are not, and that we actually had no idea the Rainbow Gathering was going on anywhere close to where we are. Jeremy starts telling us about this one time he went to a Rainbow Gathering and how cool it was, and how it is a little bit like burning man but in the forrest as opposed to the desert, etc.. and we consequently consider the possibility of going there after we go to Taos.

We keep driving, enjoying the boring landscape on our way, until we arrive to downtown Santa Fe. We kindof wanna go out and party, especially since this is the last day of Triet-ly who is gonna leave us tomorrow, but we don't really have any idea where to go or what to do in Santa Fe. So before going out and enjoying the nightlife, we decide to park somewhere in the center and to have dinner and get drunk inside the RV before adventuring ourselves out. Not only is it much cheaper than going out, but it's also definitely more fun. After a few beers and a gigantic bottle of wine have been successfully ingurgitated, we realize we are all pretty drunk, except for Matt who has given up on alcohol long before the begining of this road trip. We start to feel a little bit claustrophobic inside of pigpen, so we decide to get out of the RV and we start walking around and wandering around randomly into the street of downtown Santa Fe. The city surprise us for having a pretty nice downtown, in spite of the first impression we had when we first drove accross the city. The citiy seems to be very lively for a friday night, and we run into a bunch of potentially cool people, we keep walking down the streets without any precise objetive in mind, patiently waiting for the Tao to decide for our faith and to eventually let us know what should be coming next..

And once again, as is usually the case, Matt decides to create some interaction with random people in the street and consequently engages into an interesting discussion with some random bums who were playing guitar in the middle of the street. One after the other, we eventually all stop there in order to talk with them. Lyyli and Jeremy are very eager to let them know about the fact that they are still unable to play the guitar in spite of their former 3 months-long pact which ultimately consisted of playing 1 hour of guitar everyday, while Matt and Christie, who cannot play any kind of instrument either, were just rambling about music in general. Triet-ly, who really could not care less about any of that, just doesn't give a fuck and keep playing with Tomatha in the street. Then somehow the discussion completely derives into a new topic, something about dogs, and Tomatha obviously becomes the new center of attention. Jeremy starts telling the whole story of Tomatha to our new friends, ranging from the necessary adoption in order to avoid her being killed at the pound, to the recent serial killer tendencies she has been developing along the way. And naturally, the more Jeremy talks about her, the more the bums seems to enjoy the dog, until one of them suddenly asks Jeremy whether he would be willing to give her to him. Jeremy instinctively does not want to give Tomatha away, but circumstances require so. In fact, because of the yes-pact that Jeremy had engaged into, Jeremy has to say yes to everything, no matter what the nature of the question is. Besides, Jeremy was aware that Tomatha would probably never be accepted into any kind of pound and would probably end up being killed or killing another dog, so giving her away to that bum was probably the best thing he could do, both for the well-being of the dog and for our own well-being. We thus bring the bum back with us to the RV. We grab all of Tomatha's stuff and we give everythig away to that lucky bum, who immediately walks away back into the streets of Santa Fe together with his beautiful new dog.

As Tomatha leaves us with her new owner, we stay and we hang out on the bridge just next to where the RV was parked, an interesting bridge where we encounter 6 crazy people in a row, that would all stop and talk to us for some reason, including that angry man that really wanted us to accept his help and was gonna kick our ass if we wouldn't let him give us a place to shower and other stuff.
As we were about to leave in order to find a better parking for the night, Matt finds out that the back tire of the RV is completely fucked, so we start looking for a Wal-mart with a tire service in Santa Fe and we go to the Wal-mart parking lot to go to sleep. We all pass out asleep, except for Jeremy and Triet-ly who decide to take exctasy instead of going to sleep and spend the whole night exploring the beautiful surroundings of the Wal-mart parking lot..

June 11

We wake up and we go get some parts for pigpen at the auto store. Jeremy is convinced that pigpen needs a new carburator and a few other things. So we spend all morning hanging out at the auto part place, once again trying to entertain ourselves while Jeremy tries to take care of the mechanics. Matt tries to help out Jeremy with his limited knowledge of cars, while Lyyli and Christie engage into a more cultural activity, which consists of reading a bunch of books on the ground. Once again, Triet-ly engages into her daily stretching activity, and, once again, she has to deal with the cops which have been called on her by the people next door who complained of the fact that a strange little asian girl with a mohawk was doing strange rituals on their property.

After a few hours of worthless attempts, we decide to go and try to find an actual mechanic because pigpen is still broken and nobody really knows why, and Jeremy finally decided to recognize his own personal little failure. So we start driving extremely slowly through the roads of Flagstaff, desperately trying to find a mechanic before Pigpen would completely break down. This is indeed what happened, as Pigpen decided to die off right in front of Steve’s garage, a nice guy who for some reason seemed very happy about the prospect of working on pigpen. Matt, Lyyli and Christie do not really believe that anything good is gonna happen and therefore decide to leave Jeremy and pigpen alone and go for a walk in the city. Jeremy, conversly, was absolutely convinced that it was the Tao (or pigpen in that case) which had sent him here, and therefore decides to stay there and work on pigpen together with Steve. After only a few minutes, Steve finds out that the actual problem was not the carburator or anything else that Jeremy had tried to fix so far, but only this very small piece of the engine, the joints, which had completely wear off and consequently had to be replaced. After spending more than $300 on useluss pieces of engineering, Jeremy goes and get a new set of joins for a grand total of $16. Steve helps out setting up the whole thing. He finally asks Jeremy to be paid with weed rather than money, probably because pigpen made us look like some Californian hippies, so Jeremy gives him Triet-ly huge reserve of weed.

In the meanwhile, Matt, Lyyli, Christie and Triet-ly went to explore the city. Triet-ly had taken the bike because she couldnt walk any more with her broken ankle, but biking ended up not being that much better since she kept falling down the bike in an average of every 4 minutes. So we slowly go back to the Bagel internet cafe and while Matt gets a delicious red-pesto and cream-cheese bagel, Lyyli, Christie and Triet-ly hang out and check out the Internet. We then decide to go to the thrift store just accross the street from the Bagel shop, while nobody buys anything, except for Lyyli which finally finds a jeans so that she wont have to borrow Christie's anymore, as well as a nice little bag in which she can carry the kitten around. We then realize we are hungry, so we go back to the Bagel shop in order to ask whether they would be willing to give us free bagels, which they reluctantly do, although they really only gave us disgusting and excessively salty pieces of bread rather than actual bagels.

This is when Jeremy join us, together with pigpen who appears to be working very well now. So we immediately head out of Flagstaff towards the new city of Albuquerque. On the road, we found out that Triet-ly had been secretely on mushroms all day, which finally explain her behaviour which was even weirder than usual.

And we suddenly realize that we still havent showered for 3 days now. So on the way out of Flagstaff we decide to stop at the Somona creek, a place which had been described by the locals as the perfect location to take a nice little bath in the wilderness. The water is extremely cold, but Jeremy, Matt and Triet-ly are not so easily impressed. They immediately get naked and jump into the water. They keep swimming in this beautiful natural environment, while Lyyli, Christie and the kitten just hang out on the rocks, a little bit envious but too scared to get into the water, and simply enjoying the show of these 3 crazy naked people reciprocally cleaning themselves in the creek. After this nice little break, we get back on the road and keep driving to Albuquerque. As we are now extremely hungry, we stop at some very big truck stop on the way, in order to get some food. Lyyli and Christie, who were still pretty dirty, decide to try and infiltrate the showers and after using some of their smelly but nonetheless feminine charisma, they successuflly manage to get into the shower for free.

And we go back on the road, clean and happy, ready to keep driving all day and all evening, in order to finally arrive at Albuquerque at 2 am. We call our couchsurfer Chris who is this very nice girl who is house-sitting an amazingly cool house and we all sleep on the ground because we are not used to sleep into a bed anymore, except for Christie who was just so happy to finally get a bed.

June 10

As we wake up in the morning, we stop at the bagel place next to where we parked the RV, a beautiful dog-loving place where we can use Internet for free provided that we bring our own laptops and that we buy something to eat or to drink. Surprisingly as it may sound, Lyyli does not even care about checking out the Internet. She is curious about what is going on under her band-aid, so she tries to remove it from her thumb, but as she does so, she rips of her woun again since the bandaid was pretty much glued to her delicate skin. Apparently, this seems to hurt her a lot, as she starts crying like an idiot because she's worry that her thumb is never gonna heal correctly and that she will eventually have to chop it off. Matt is very simpathetic and tries to take care of Lyyli as he goes and help her to put a new band-aid on her thumb with his secret nursing skills, while Lyyli keeps crying and crying and crying. It is unclear whether or not Jeremy was actually feeling guilty for having suggested to put the superglue on her thumb, but he suddently turns into an asshole and start shouting at Lyyli telling her that her stupid thumb is fine and that she's an idiot to be so worry about it and that she should just shut the fuck up instead of whining about nothing.. as a result of which, Lyyli starts crying even more.

After all the drama is (almost) over and all the Internet research has been (improperly) done, we are finally ready to go. We take pigpen and bring it to Randy’s, a mechanic shop that Jeremy has found on the Internet, with the goal to try and fix up pigpen, so that we can finally get back on the road. Pigpen makes it there at the pace of 1 mile / hour, at the excitement of everyone. Then, after talking with Randy and politely asking him the permission to use his premises without however paying for anything, Jeremy starts working on pigpen, desperately trying to figure out what the problem actually is. A few hours are spent watching Jeremy trying to understand what is wrong with pigpen, a process which as we all know is likely to last for a very long while. As more time passes, everyone is getting more and more bored, until we just cannot stand it anymore. So we all individually decide to leave Jeremy alone with pigpen and to go and entertain ourselves by some other means, instead. This is how we end up engaging into our favorite kind of activity and doing whatever we all love to do the most:

(a) Triet-ly, who is inherently is a dancer, walks across the street from Randy's, she starts doing her daily stretching and/or dancing exercises right next to the railroad. An apparently innocent activity, which however turns into another drama in that it necessarily comes to an end as soon as the firemen come in order to rescue her, as they have been incorrectly instructed of the fact that someone was hurt next to the train tracks.

(b) Christie who is a health-conscious person pretty concerned about her physical forms, although she's not so much into the same kind of exercises at Triet-ly, rapidly changes into her jogging outfit and goes running, wandering around the streets of Flagstaff in the attempt to recover her former physical health.

(c) Matt, who is usually not so much into sports, nonetheless decides to take on some form of exercising as well and goes for a walk with Tomatha, something that allows him to engage into his favorite kind of activity which consists of engaging into random discussions with the random people he encounters in the the street.

(d) Lyyli, who keeps worrying about her thumb but has eventually stopped crying, finally recovers her senses and realizes that it is about time to get onto the Internet. She manages to get access to Randy's wifi and after she rapidly checks her emails, she goes investigate the Internet in order to find out whether or not she actually is eligible for health insurance in the USA and whether the insurance she has would actually cover her medical expenses.

Lyyli then tries to convince Matt to come with her to the clinic in order to check whether her thumb is all right or if it will be necessary to cut it off. At the clinic, the doctor checks out her thumb and eventually affirms that the thumb is okay. He also confirms the fact that putting the superglue was obviously a super-bad idea and that she should have come to the clinic and get stiches instead.. but that it's too late now so all she can do is wait and see whether or not it's gonna heal. He tells her that she should not worry too much since the thumb is probably not infected and prescribe her some stupid pain killers that Lyyli is obviously never gonna take. Lyyli feels a bit better because she now is convinced that her thumb is not gonna fall off, but she's a bit pissed at the doctor because he didn't really gave her anything useful, except for a bunch of cheap alcoholic band-aids. Besides, the clinic is a private one and Lyyli's insurance doesnt cover the expenses so she has to pay by herself for this useless bit of information, but she doesnt mind because at least she knows that her thumb is not gonna rot or fall apart.

As everyone of us comes back to Randy's, we unfortunately find out that pigpen is still in a pretty critical state. Jeremy is however completely fed up with it and doesn't wanna work on pigpen anymore. So we decide to take a break and all go explore the city of Flagstaff together instead. We immediately got caught at some Mexican restaurant which maliciously attracted us with their advertisement for an happy hour with cheap $3 Margaritas, although we eventually ended up spending much more money on the food instead. Then once our bellies are full of greasy mexican food, we decide to take a walk in the city, with the ultimate intention to reach that particular Art museum that Triet-ly really wanted to see. We however soon realize that the museum is way too far from where we are, especially in view of the extremely slow speed at which we are all required to walk considering that Triet-ly ankle does not seem to have gotten any better and her walking skills were very debilitating.

At some point, Jeremy decides to go back to the RV because he starts feeling guilty of the fact that he is leaving it sick and alone while we are enjoying our time in the city. Lyyli, Christie, Triet-ly and Matt, instead, much less considerate for the feelings of pigpen, just keep on exploring the city on their own. They end up into this youth hostel that we had been walking by everyday so far, and decide to go and check it out in order to find out whether or not they would manage to shower there. They refuse us showers and they refuse to let us use the Internet, so we go into the backyard of the hostel and hang out there with some of the hostel staff which tell us about their life in Flagstaff and inform us about some cool things that are going on today, until Jeremy finally joins us there.

We decide to go to the $1 night drink into a bar and/club in downtown, which ends up being pretty lame and full of drunk college students. Jeremy is not in the mood for drinking because he is still pretty worry about little pigpen, so he goes back to the RV, leaving Lyyli, Christie, Matt and Triet-ly by themselves in this unfriendly environment. Triet-ly does not seem to mind and starts dancing herself out, until her ankle starts to hurt too much so she decides to go back to the RV. We let her go by herself, because we want to keep taking advantage of the $1 drinks. Probably a mistake from our part, but we didn't realize how bad her ankle was. So triet-ly heads back to the RV at an extremely slow pace, crawling down the streets with her bad feet in the air, a position which must have attracted the attention of certain people who called the police on her. So Triet-ly got involved with the cops for the second time that day, a new record which we were not so proud of.
In the meanwhile, Matt, Lyyli and Christie decide to leave this stupid bar/club and to go back to Mia's instead, eager to engage into a new adventure. A very cool band was playing live at Mia, but they were all way too exhausted to engage into any kind of dancing activity, so they eventually headed back to the RV in order to pass out asleep.

June 9

In the morning Lyyli, Matt and Christie go for a hike down to the Gran Canyon together with the kitten which travels into the hat of Lyyli's sweater. Matt wants to go all the way down to the bottom of the Canyon but Lyyli and Christie do not really want to go all teh way there, because they think it's pretty boring to just walk down the canyon and they also realize it's gonna be really hard to hike up the way up the canyon on the way back. So they walk down for about 3 miles and then they decide to stop on a little bridge in order to rest and to get some rest as well as to eat something in order to retrieve the forces. They then decide to hike back up, mainly because it is starting to rain and also because it is getting late. Yet, Lyyli does not want to go back through the normal path because she hates hiking and she thinks that it is very boring to just walk the same way up. So they decide to take an alternative route and to just hike straight up regardless of the path. This inevitably involve climbing the way up through a series of rocks which are pretty unstable, as e result of which the almost die a couples of time, but they do nevertheless have a lot of fun doing it.

In the meanwhile, Jeremy and Triet-ly were hanging out at the camp. Jeremy was working on pigpen's engine and kindof managed to convince Triet-ly not to go hiking with the other members of the crew because she obviously shouldnt be using her broken foot. So Jeremy was desperately trying to fix up the carburator of pigpen, even though the carburator was not actually the problem. In fact, at that time Jeremy had no idea about what the real problem could be, and although he successfully fixed the gas leak, he probably made the real problem much worse than he was to start with.
After a few hours of hiking, Lyyli, Christie and Matt come back up and they go shower at the camp site, where they have a set of retarded showers which only allow for a 5 minute shower to be taken for the ridiculous price of $1.50, which can only be paid in coins. As they get back to pigpen, Jeremy and Triet-ly immediately immitate them and they go shower as well in order to get rid of all the grease they had accumulated in the past days.

We take off and start driving down the Gran Canyon, while pigpen starts driving increasingly worse and worse. As we leave the region of the Gran Canyon, we eventually find ourselves driving through this beautiful and desertic landscape, which reminds us of the landscape of the stupid cartoon where the evil coyote runs after the annoying austrich who always does beep-beep. Indeed, we later realize that we were actually driving through Arches National Park, which is in fact the location in which that cartoon is supposed to take place. Lyyli secretely wished that pigpen would just break down there, so that we could hang out in this beautiful settings for a long while. Instead, we decide to stop at some random gas station, in order for pigpen to take a rest and for Jeremy to exercise his mechanic skills in vain. We hang out at the gas station for a while, taking a lot of pictures of the desert and the red rocks formation, while eating a bunch of $1 hotdogs which the kitten gets crazy about. And we keep driving, even though pigpen is still driving like shit and the likelihood to get stuck in the middle of the desert has exponentially increased. And yet, for some unreasonable reason, instead of heading towards the closest town, we actually decide to give pigpen another try and we drive all the way to Flagstaff, where we were ultimately planning to stop.

A very little hill has however to be surpassed before getting into the city of Flagstaff. An extremely difficult task for pigpen who was driving at something like 5 hours a mile and could hardly make it on a flat street. At our complete surprise, we nonetheless make it all the way to Flagstaff and we park pigpen in the middle of downtown in order to go explore the city. We ask some locals about what to do, and they tell us about a place where we can park the RV overnight so we go and park there.

As we walk randomly around the city in order to desperately find a place to feed ourselves, we end up into this cool thai restaurant, which wasnt really that cool but only attracted our attention due to the fact that it was offering kamikaze for the modest price of $1. So we all go in, including the little kitten who was hiding into Lyyli's hand bag, and we order some random thai food, which was not really tasty at all, but it was nevertheless good enough to calm our terrible hunger. In fact, the only thing that really imported us at the time was that the kamikaze were really cheap. We thus decided to abuse this good opportunity to get drunk and we end up drinking a very large number of kamikaze, which were being ordered by Jeremy at a rate of 6 at a time. Jeremy was also the one in charge of drinking most of them and therefore ended up being very drunk, although most of us were drunk as well, except for Matt who doesnt drink any alcoholic beverages.

After we are done with both the food and the alcohol, we keep walking around in the city in search of something funny to do. So we end up into a bar called MIA, where a lot of dogs were running around and a very cool band playing some very nice kind of music. As Triet-ly was dancing like a crazy human on the dance floor, everyone else was just looking at there, and Lyyli eventually fell asleep on the table. After a while, Jeremy and Christie wake her up and the 3 of them go back to the RV in order to get more beers. On the way back to MIA, however, Jeremy attacks Lyyli with his beer bottle. He basically knocks his beer over the top of her beer bottle in order to have her beer to foam over. As is usually the case, Lyyli over-retaliates. But as she knocks her beer bottle over Jeremy's, she hits it so hard that the bottle breaks up into her hand and a huge piece of glass gets stuck into her thumb which starts bleeding a lot. Lyyli is pretty drunk and she doesnt really realize yet that she is about to feel the strongest pain that she has ever felt in her life, although it's mainly mental pain as opposed to physical pain.

And hence begins the super-glue conflict..
As we get back to the bar, everyone is completely drunk and tell Lyyli that she should put superglue on her finger, but Lyyli refuses to do so. Yet, everyone insists, especially this drunk lesbian girl who somehow seemed to know what she was talking about. After 2 hours of endless attempts to convince Lyyli to apply the superglue on the thumb, Lyyli eventually gives up on her stubborness and decides to respect the yes-pact. She therefore accepts to use the superglue although, she intrinsically knew that it was an extremely stupid idea. In fact, while Jeremy applies the superglue on her wound, Lyyli couldnt think about anything else but the fact that Jeremy is a fucking shitiot. We then all go back to sleep in the RV, drunk and somewhat happy to be drunk, although we didnt know that the super-glue conflict was very far from being over..

June 8

We wake up after just a few hours of sleep and we immediately keep going towards the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. Once again, however, we take a wrong turn and we end up at the Indian General Store of some random indian reservation. We stop there to ask for directions on how to get to the Animal Sanctuary and they tell us that the only way to get there is to drive through the Zion national park, which is supposed to be a very beautiful drive. Before getting back on the road, we decide to take a little break in order to explore the Indian General Store. The store contains a lot of weird and probably fake indian items, such as traditional clothes, hats, and extremely expensive wooden carved sticks, which Jeremy challenges Lyyli to break. He bets $10 that she wont be able to berak it, but he then immediately cancel the bet as he realizes that she is actually willing to accept the challenge and that she is even likely to suceed. Later on, as we look into the food section of the general store, we eventually find out about the existence of an actual fruit called Huckleberry, one of Jeremy's nicknames. We also take the time to look at some very interesting embalmed animals, including non-existant ones, such as bunnies with horns, birds with bunny heads and horns, and of course also the infamous werewolf which essentialy consists of the ass of a dear to witch an additional mouth and eyes had been strategically positioned so as to make it look like an ugly scary face.
To our surprise, the Indian General Store also features an extremely small and ridiculous bunch of buildings which somehow tries to replicate a town in the far-west. The town also features a farm in the back, which we could access for an overpriced fee of $3 per person. Although the whole thing was extremely easy to infiltrate, for some unexplicable reasons, we actually decide to pay for it. We get in and check out the animals in the farm, which includes: the oldest, slowest and probably also the smelliest donkey in the world, two extremely cute lamas that we suspect were however completely retarded, a very boring poney which pretended to be a horse, a semi-dead rabbit which was of absolute no intereste to us and a bunch of deers that were just hanging around. So we hang out with the animals for a while, looking at the beautiful deers, shouting at the old donkey, playing with the lamas and feeding them with some carrots, which they wolud only eat if given through the mouth. At some point, however, we get excessively bored about the whole animal thing, and we realize that the time has come for us to leave for Zion National park.

On the way to Zion national park, we stop at another park on the road in order to look at what Jeremy described to be mooses, although we later found out that they were merely elks and some other long horned cattles. Jeremy challenges Lyyli to get into the cage were the animals are being kept. Consistently with the 'yes' pact, Lyyli starts climbing up the fence, although she eventually has to give up as she realizes that the fence is an extremely weak piece of shit and is probably not gonna hold her weight.
Yet, as we are checking out the fake mooses from outside the fences, we run into an old guy who was giving away 3 kittens for free. Lyyli starts to freak out, claiming that we should take one of these kittens along with us. In fact, Lyyli is a convinced cat lover, and as every cat lover, she was an easy prey to the cuteness of these kittens. In addition, Lyyli had recently suffered the loss of Nouche, her former and incredibly amazing cat, so she took it as a sign of the Tao that we ran into these kittens just on the same day in which we were supposed to get rid of Tomatha. Strangely enough, Lyyli's arguments eventually managed to convince us, so we decide to get one of these kittens to guard our RV as a replacement of Tomatha.
And thus comes our new member of the crew: a little black kitten with a very strong sense for freedom but a very bad sense of orientation. As a matter of fact, Lyyli originally wanted to get one of the small stripped kittens, but as soon as she opened the cage, the little black kitten ran away to escape for a better life. This is why we decided to take her instead, because she is a fugitive. As the kitten was completely covered in dirt, we went to clean her in the bathroom, an expericience which most likely amounted to her first encounter with water and as a result of which she once again tried to escape. In order to prevent any further escapades, we thus put the kitten into a cookie box, which kindof played the role of a cage, and which was later positioned next to the passenger seat in the RV, so that Tomatha woudn't notice her being there and will thus not try to kill her right away. What we did not realize by then, however, is that the cookie box was right next to where all the fumes are meant to come out of the RV. As a result of the toxicity of these fumes, the brain of the kitten has probably been strongly and negatively affected, which may or may not be the actual factor leading to the extreme stupidity of this kitten. This notwithstanding, given that she has spent the first months of her life in close contact with an extremely aggressive pitbull who was constantly trying to kill her, the cute little black kitten has eventually turned itself into a feroce beast who does not fear anyone and is always trying to attack anything that comes sufficiently close to her, regardless of the fact that she is too really weak to actually harm anyone.

We keep going and we finally reach Zion national park. At the entrance of the park, they make us pay $40 (as opposed to the standard $20) because they claim that given the width of the RV, they will have to clear out the tunnel in order for pigpen to go through. We subsequently realizes that it was absolutely not neceassary to clear the tunnel because of us, since the tunnel was wide enough for pigpen to go through, and because an actual truck was just in front of us so they wolud have had to cleanr the tunnel anyways. The money was however completely worth it, since Zion is in fact an amazingly beautiful national park, with lots of beautiful sceneries made up of red rocks, white clay, and interesting trees. As we are driving up the hill, however, Jeremy keeps crying like a baby because he doesn't wanna separate from Tomatha which he supposedly loves so much. We eventually start worrying that, if Jeremy keeps crying that much, he's probably gonna have pigpen run into an accident. So we decide to stop in order to explore the park, with the excuse that we saw some cool mountain goats that we wanted to check out from a closer point of view. Jeremy goes by himself and mainly hangs out with Tomatha, as he thought it would be the last time he would ever be able to spend with her. We suspect that he was actually hoping that she would run away into the wilderness, so that he wouldnt have to give her up to the pound, but we actually have no evidence about that. In the meanwhile, Lyyli, Christy, Matt and Triet-ly go explore the surroundings together with the little black cat which travels in the cookie box. Triet-ly is very excited to be in this beautiful and natural landscape and she eventually ends up climbing up a huge rock in spite of her broken ankle. Lyyli just plays with her new kitten, while Matt and Christie act as the official photographers and try to take pictures of the whole thing.

Once again, we keep going and we finally arrive to the Best Friends Animal Sanctuary. The place is really amazing and it seems to be more like a pet's paradise than a pound. They however tell us that they cannot get Tomatha because all their dogs live together and a pitbull such as Tomatha would not be able to get along with any other dog.
We are therefore stuck with both Tomatha and a small little kitten in the RV. So we stop at the closest pet store in order to buy a new leash and a musle for Tomatha and a new leash for the kitten, but only because they didn't have a musle for the kitten. Then we tie the kitten to the cookie box and we tie Tomatha to the other side of the RV. The situation is however extremely dangerous, as Tomatha keeps attempting to kill the kitten who lives in the cookie box while the kitten keeps trying to kill tamata who is tied to the fridge.

As we are getting late on the schedule, we decide to drive straight to our next destination: the Gran Canyon. Matt is in charge of the driving and enjoy driving like a crazy racing car. Pigpen hardly makes it to the top as the points on the carburator are starting to go bad, but Jeremy mainly blames it on Matt terrible pigpen driving skills. We arrive to the Gran Canyon just before sunset. We go and explore a little bit around, trying to take as many pictures as possible of the beautiful sunset, before it gets too dark. We then go and hang out for a while in the lodge, drinking beer while looking at the Gran Canyon in the darkness and desperately trying to warm ourselves up with the fire. Everyone is kindof miserable and wants to leave, except for Jeremy who wants to sleep there in order to be able to explore the Gran Canyon tomorrow during the day. We eventually manage to convince him to leave, so we drive to the next gas station in order to fill up pigpen, but as the gas station was closed, we slowly make it back to the exact same spot as we were before we left, and we fall asleep there.

June 7

We had planned to go to the gay-parade, because we figured out it should be fun to see what kind of gays there are in such a conservative and mormon-oriented city such as Salt Lake City. We also had great plans for Matt who was supposed to dress up as a queer for the fashion show of the parade. Yet, we eventually miss all the interesting events of the gay-parade because we wake up too late, so we decide to go the the mormon temple instead and to take exctasy there while we try and infiltrate it.

On the way, however, Jeremy receive a call from Vince who lets him know that Tomatha has just killed another dog. So we immediately go back home and as Jeremy goes to look for Tomatha, he finds her in a hole chewing on the body of a small dead maltese. The family of the maltese explains that as their were walking their dog, Tomatha jumped out of the open window of the RV and immediately went to attack the dog who was held on the leash by their 3 years old son. The dad was this massive guy from California who was alternating between a friendly and nice conversation and an angry and menacing attitude threatening to kill the dog. He says that he tried to separate Tomatha from the little maltese, beating her on the head as hard as it could, but in vain, Tomatha had already killed the little maltese and was refusing to let grip on it. The mom was crying, claiming that Tomatha could have killed her son just like she killed the dog. Essentially, all the family wanted Tomatha to be killed.
The animal control arrives and say Tomatha should indeed be killed but that they cannot take her if Jeremy doesn’t want to, and obviously Jeremy does not even hesitate about this, as he cannot even conceive the idea of putting Tomatha to death. So Jeremy tries to go and talk with a member of the familiy but no one wants to talk with him. So he writes a letter to the family, while we look for a pound or any place for tamata so that we can get rid of her but nonetheless be sure that she wont get killed. This is how we find out about the Best Friends' Animal Sanctuary in Utah and we decide to go to there as soon as possible, before the animal control changes their mind about Tomatha. So we pack everything up, and we leave with a new member in the crew: Matt Twain what's your name.
We drive there all night, Jeremy wants to get to the Animal Sanctuary as soon as possible, but he somehow takes a wrong turn and we all conclude that he cannot turn around, as most of the talk during the drive was about Jeremy and Matt arguing about the existence or not of wrong-turns, Jeremy claiming that there can be no wrong turns with pigpen and Matt arguing otherwise.

Christie and Jeremy go to sleep, while Triet-ly, Matt and Lyyli decide to prove them that there must have been a reason for pigpen to take that road and consequenly start to walk around in order to explore the place. Since there is pretty much nothing around, they decide to break into the only lightened place in that neighborhood. Triet-ly and Matt try to convince Lyyli to go back to the RV to take the lock-picking tools that Jeremy has given her just after the departure and try to open up the door. Lyyli does not let herself convinced, and just check out the door to find out it was in fact already open. Matt gets scared as he sees a man inside and he starts running away. Triet-ly and Lyyli look at him amuzed, and just get into the door, and Matt follows them after a while, once he realize that running away from the man was just another way of running away from the upcoming adventure.

So we walk into what turned out to be the CHUMS factory, a place where they make really useless items such as keychains and glasses' string-holders. We run into the man that we saw, who is basically the only worker at that time in the morning as he is in charge of turning on all the machines. We start chatting with him, asking him very retarded questions, to which he gladly responds. He start sto explain us all about his work and as he shows us the factory, we propose to help him in his job. So he shows us how to use the machine and we each create a small item of caoutchouc. Then he gives us some random free samples, ie. a series of ugly glasses string-holders and key chains, and then he politely let us know that it is time we leave the premises. So we go back to the RV and we sleep in peace, proud of our little and meaningless adventure.

June 6

In the morning, Lyyli and Jeremy go explore the surroundings in order to find out whethere there are people living around. After a short investigation in the various ranches around, we decide to try out the ranch in front of which pigpen has decided to stop. As we knock on the door of the ranch, a young little girl open us and asks us to wait while she goes and wake up her parents. This is how we meet Darran, an amazing person who immediately offers to drive Jeremy and Lyyli to the next gas station in order for them to fill up the gas tank. We bring our 5 gallons gas tank and he refuses to make us pay for the gas. During the drive, we introduce each others and we swap stories with Darran, who happens to run a boys ranch in Ely, Nevada: Darran tells the story about the grandfather and the kid who says that in the end, everything is as you will it to be.. Jeremy tells the story about the monk in the mountain..

We come back, we wake up Christie and we start looking for Triet-ly who has disapeared from the RV. After some useless minutes of research, we realize that Triet-ly had already gone into Darran's house and was now hanging out with the whole family while getting her ankle checked upon by Darran's wife. They say that her ankle is probably fine and that we should not worry too much because if it were to be broken it would hurt so much more and it would look much worse too. What they did not know is that Triet-ly has an incredible capacity of dealing with pain, and what would seem to be extremely painful for a human barely seem to bother Triet-ly. Anyways, Darran gives Triet-ly a professional crouch that he had kept in storage for many years and repairs it for her, so we eventually decide to give up upon the mission of going to the clinic.

Darran family then invites us for breakfast, which consists of delicious banana & strawberry pancakes that his wife has made. We bring some of the kiwi's that we had in the RV, at the pleasure of Darran's daughter which loves kiwis. So we have breakfast with all the family and we basically share our story with them, which they seem to enjoy. They admit that it can sometimes be very lonely in Ely, Nevada and that it is actually very rare that anyone drops by. Surprinsingly, it seems that the only other people that ever dropped by their ranch were 2 other french people, who had also ran out of gas. They are therefore very happy to hang out with us. After we are done with breakfast, they let us all use their showers, because we probably looked as if we really nedeed it. Finally, Darran offers us to ride their horses, which we all gladly accept, including Triet-ly who has already forgotten about the pain in her ankle and ride the horse just as everyone else.
As a matter of fact, this was probably one of tbest morning of the trip, and definitely an extremely important keystone that contributed to creating our belief that if we follow the Tao, the Tao is gonna be good to us. So we slowly started to accept the idea that pigpen is ultimately a personification of the Tao, which will guide us accross the USA according to its own will and regardless of what our actual plans are.

And we head off towards salt lake city, where we have to meet up with Matt. We stop in the town of Ely in order to buy paint, as we are planning to blog our trip with pictures painted on pigpen. We also go to radio shack in order to get the ac/dc converter fixed. The people in the shop are extremely friendly and helpful and this is when we start to realize that the further east we go, the nicer the people get.

We drive to salt lake city through the salt flats, an immense and desolated surface of land solely made of salt and clay. As we drive by, the particularity of the ground often generates a series of mirages as if we were surrounded by water, although there is nothing but salty clay all over around. As pigpen starts to over-heat, we decide to stop there in order to walk around and to take pictures of the salt flats. We realize that walking on this salty clay is one of the most confortable feeling ever, and we start running and exercising on it. We also go and see the concrete tree, a fake tree which has been purposedly located in the middle of this salty esplanada, and which essentially represents the only vegetation that can be seen for miles around.

We keep driving on the freeway which is surrounded by water. This is extremely scary as there is a lot of wind, and pigpen gets thrown away from one side to the other, always pretending to be almost falling into the water. Lyyli is driving, so everything is even more scary than what it would be otherwise, as Lyyli has this special skill to be completely nihilist about her driving, which often creates the feeling that an accident is about to emerge at any moment, although Lyyli has actually never been into any form of accident, at least until now.

As we finally arrive in Salt Lake City, we park in front of Matt's house and we start drinking our wine and eating our crackers with some very nice cheese inside pigpen while we are waiting for Matt to come back home.
Matt is one of Jeremy's best friends. They used to be flatmate back in the time when they were both living in Orange County, CA and they have since then become very good friends. Although Matt may initially seem to be a very rational and intelligent person, he actually has a very strong drive for random and meaningless adventures, which he however only discloses in some very special occasions. Matt used to own a very successful internet business involving wedding rings and tungsten, but he has eventually sold his share to his brother as a result of internal conflicts and misdeanours from the part of his brother. So Matt is now working in the field of internet marketing and web design, together with his flatmate Vince. One important feature of Matt is that he has a very strong sense of morals, perhaps as a result of his strong religious beliefs, which have however been recently put into question. He believes that most humans are ultimately deemed to be good, and he consequently tries to be a good human himself, which he has always successuflly achieved thus far. Matt is concerned about the well being of humanity, and always tries to help people whenever he believes this is gonna make a difference. Frustrated by these ideals, Lyyli has been trying to convert him into the direction of moral indecency and ethical perversion during the whole period of the trip, but in vain, as she has ultimately failed to disrupt any of his ideals in any definitive manner. Unexplicably renammed as "Matt Twain, what's your name?", Matt is obsessed with engaging into random discussion with random people, to whom he never forgets to mention his name.

We are all a little bit drunk, as we finally meet Matt and his flatmate Vince together with his girlfriend. They invite us to their beautiful home, but as soon as we get into the house, we get distracted by the arrival of the cops, who had just arrived because the neighbors had reported an suspicious and undesiderable vehicle in the neighborhood. This is when Jeremy finds out that the registration had not properly gone through and that pigpen is therefore an illegal vehicule. Surprisingly enough, the cops actually try to help him out rather than taking the car away, perhaps as a result of the fact that they were too lazy to deal with all the paper work that would be required in order to properly incriminate pigpen, or maybe only because they knew that Jeremy would have already enough troubles dealing with the pigpen as such, without the need to add any additional legal struggles. So Jeremy further confirms the theory according to which acting happy to see the cops is always the best way to go (ie. the so-called dualistic theory of authority).

Afterwards, we decide to go to a bar for some more drinks but Lyyli has not brought her ID so she cannot get in. So Lyyli and Jeremy hang out together with Tomatha outside of the bar, where they meet an old guy with another pitbull who explains to them that you can eventually train pitbulls not to attack other dogs if you work on it hard enough.
Since we need more drinks, we decide to go and try another place where we could get in without an ID. Our first succesfull infiltration is achieved, althouh we shortly realize that we just infiltrated into an extremely boring bar full of frat boys, so we decide to move to another place. We end up into this weird place which is basically a sport bar and a disco at the same time. This is pretty boring as well. We nevertheless decide to dance for a bit, mainly because we are pretty drunk, but we get bored pretty fast, since there is really nothing interesting to do, except for the fact that Triet-ly was dancing all the time with just her one working foot, which was kindof funny to look at. So we finally go get our midnight dinner at some nice Mexican restaurant which has a drive-through and we go back home to eat and sleep.

June 5

Waking up was a rather surprising affair. Suprising in the sense that we were actually 200 miles away and 9000+ ft above our starting destination and surprising in the sense that though it was june 5th we were being snowed on. Christy was in fact the one charged with checking the weather and according to the google forecast Yosemite was supposed be sunny and 70 degrees. Either google was wrong, which is extremely unlikely, or Christie did a very bad job of checking, which is equally unlikely. What we didnt know at that point was this was only the begining to what would be acknowledged as the pigpen malediction, which basically brings bad weather and rain everywhere the unlikely contraption roams.

Although it is pretty much summer according to the calender the weather seems to disagree. It is extremely cold and since none of us was actually prepared for this eventuality nobody really brought any warm clothes. Fortunately, Jeremy was too lazy to stop and think about what to pack and had therefore brought most of the clothes in his possession, regardless of whether they were likely to ever be used. So we all borrow some of his clothes and we slowly prepare ourselves for a exciting summer adventure in the snow.
Yet in order to be a perfect adventurer, Triet-ly wants to an additional element in order to properly take on the elements. Though her newly cut mohawk was fashioned the day before departure, Jeremy takes his crappy razor and tries to improve Triet-ly haircut by drawing a ying-yang symbol on the two sides of her head. The result was better than expected but not quite wonderful. It doesn't matter though as we are all very excited about the upcoming adventure.
And so we all go for a long walk in the wilderness of the national park. We start walking down a very long path in order to explore what is considered to be the oldest sequoias in the USA. The landscape is extremely beautifull, and although the snow does not play in our favour for what regards the comfort of our journey, it definitely makes it more interesting. So we forget about how miserable we are and we courageously adventure ourselves into the forrest. Our main consolation is that since it is so fucking cold, most of the bears are likely to be hibernating and we are therefore not in danger of being attacked, at least not until the snow wont melt.

As the snow starts to melt, we focus on climbing on dead sequoias. Climbing is probably not the proper word, since horizontal climbing is inevitably more akin to walking than it is to climbing, but we nevertheless consider it as cool as some alternative sort of climbing. The challenge is ultimately in our minds. Indeed, we essentially walk over the dead bodies of fallen sequoias, while pretending this is as difficult as it would be to actually climb them vertically.
Yet, as we realize this is actually not the case, we decide to attempt to climb the so-called evil twin sequoias: two trees that started as a single tree but that slowly have grown out of each others forming some kind of evil looking tree which seemed at that time very exciting to climb, except for Christie who is too cautious to risk her life so such a mediocre level of adrenaline.
The excitment however only lasts a few minutes, as Jeremy get sstuck inbetween the two trees, thus preventing Lyyli from getting further up while simultaneously preventing Triet-ly to get down. With the ying-yang simbol of her head, Triet-ly cannot accept being stopped by this small inconvenience, so she decide to climb down the tree from the opposite side, although the other side does not have any convenient grip upon which she can rely in order to figure out her way down. This does not stop her from trying, and as a result of her over-confidence, perhaps due to the ying-yang symbol on her head, Triet-ly does not properly assess the danger and ultimately fell down the tree, thereby extensively straining her ankle.
As a consequence, while Jeremy and Triet-ly hang out in the sequoia park, Lyyli and Christie hike all the way back in order to find a ranger and report the accident. After a short period of research, they eventually run into the rangers. They tell them that Triet-ly is injured and they instruct them on where they can find her. The ranger who rescue Triet-ly is a very nice lady which is not really concerned about her ankle but rather about her haircut, which she really likes a lot.

We realize we have to take action in order to rescue Triet-ly, so we drive to the gas station down the mountain and wehang out there while we investigate where is the closest clinic around. Some girl from the gas station who claims to be a doctor offers to check upon jetli ankle. In the meanwhile, Jeremy talks with some guy who tellis him how he once tried to rescue his dog who was about to fall over into a big waterfall, but while he was trying to save it, the dog scratched him all over, so he eventually had to let go. After this meaningless, but nevertheless disturbing story, we therefore decide to go to Mamouth Lakes instead of Reno in order to find a clinic for Triet-ly.

We drive during the night, Triet-ly is asleep as a result of the overdose of pain killers that she has taken, while Jeremy, Christie and Lyyli hang out around the driver seat. This is when Jeremy and Lyyli realize they have not made any pact for this month yet, and Lyyli thus suggests to try out the yes-pact, according to which we are deemed to answer 'yes' to any question or suggestion that is being made to us. We ask Christie and Triet-ly whether tehy would like to join the pact as well, but they wisely refuse the offer.

We keep driving and we get through Death Valley. It is the middle of the night, but the mon is full, so we decide to try and drive without head-lights, using the shadow of the moon to see the street and the surrounding landscape. This is surprisingly easy to see after our eyes get used to the darkness, and this allow us to actually see the desert around us without being blinded by the light coming from the head-lights. A very beautiful scene which we believe most people have missed, as they have never been able to notice the beauty of their surroundings while they were driving along this road.

As we drive through Death Valley, we notice a series of tractors or bulldozers laying around. So after a short discussion about whether or not we should stop, the conclusion is inevitably 'yes'. We therofere stop in the middle of nowhere to check out the desert at night and in order to try and run the tractors and bulldozers with jeremy’s magic key, which supposedly should work on every heavy-work engine. This is obviously not the case, but we nevertheless enjoy ourselves climbing over the engines and exploring the desert in the darkness of the moonlight.

After the exploration is done, we go back into pigpen and keep driving. At some point, we realize that, although we did actually fill up the tank at the former gas station, pigpen is inevitably gonna run out of gas, probably as a result of the terrible milleage we get with this thing. So we keep driving until we completely run out of gas and we therefore stop on the border of the freeway in front of a random house, which was basically the only house that we could se for many miles around. So we park there, hoping that we could go and ask them for some gas or for a ride to the next gas station in the morning.

Once again, Triet-ly does not want to sleep on the bed of pigpen but she would rather sleep on the roof in order to admire the beautiful sky. She asks Jeremy whether he wanna sleep on the roof too, to which Jeremy necessarily has to say 'yes'. Then Jeremy asks Lyyli whether she would like to sleep on the roof as well, and obviously Lyyli says 'yes'. So we end up staying up all night, hanging out on the roof of pigpen, looking at the stars and the weird shaped clouds until the morning comes.