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.