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.

June 4

Departure day !


The crew was initially composed of:

Jeremy:

a 27 years old white male from Berkeley born in Seattle and raised in Southern California. Although he would describe himself as ridiculously good looking and culturally refined, Jeremy is essentially a confused human being with a very strong sense of adventure and fairly good amount of energy. Jeremy studies philosophy at Berkeley and his main belief is that if you cannot define your philosophy, your philosophy will define yourself. Indeed, as Jeremy has become increasingly obsessed with his own philosophy, his life has turned into a philosophical journey towards the exploration of conflicts. Jeremy does in fact believe that everything that is likely to turn into a good story is necessarily worth doing, regardless of the fact that it is often likely to result into a series of completely unforeseable consequences. This is probably the main reason why he has eventually agreed to engage into this dangerous adventure on the road with his very own car and his very own house at the same time. As the official owner of pigpen, Jeremy was the main person responsible for driving the RV, although he did not even own a valid driving license at the time. Jeremy also declared himself as the official mechanic for pigpen, a role which he successfully accomplished in spite of his limited knowledge on the matter, for he is more stubborn than most.

Trietly:

a 21 years old girl from Vietnam and currently studying at UC Berkeley, who was brave enough to voluntarily engage into this adventure on the road. The name Trietly, which translates into Philosophy in Vietnamese, is however not her real name, although nobody from the crew has ever called her otherwise. The name had been given to her a few months earlier by Jeremy while he was tripping on acid, and it has since then been acknowledged as her actual name. Nobody really understands her philosophy though, because Trietly is not a human, she is a dancer. Indeed, Trietly spends her all life dancing, even when she is not supposed to. But she is an excellent dancer, so she can be forgiven. She also has never been seen wearing shoes, as she believes walking barefoot is much more comfortable, regardless of the circumstances and weather conditions. Trietly can generally be seen wearing a mohawk, which is sometimes combined with the ying and the yang. As a member of the pigpen team, Trietly assumed the role of physical trainer and instructed every member of the crew on the techniques of stretching and the wonders of dancing.

Tomatha:

a 2 years old pitbull that Jeremy adopted a few weeks before the departure. She had been given to him by her former owner who had to leave somewhere and we thought it would be a good idea to bring her along in the road trip. It turned out not to be a good idea, but we could not know at that time, although she had already given demonstration of her aggressive behaviour whenever she would come too close to another quadruped. Tomatha is however extremely friendly with human beings, but only to the extent that they are taller than her, because Tomatha hates babies. Tomatha was an invaluable component of the crew, whose main role was that of guarding pigpen and maintaining the RV into a state of permanent chaos.

Christie:

a 23 years old girl from Berkeley who has been enticed by Jeremy to engage into this dangerous adventure on the road, in order to celebrate her recent graduation from UC Berkeley, where she was majoring in psychology. Because of her intrinsic qualities, Christie has been identified as the most responsible person of the crew, and since she is now working as an accountant, she has been put in charge of taking account of the pigpen funds. Christie was also the main person in charge of taking pictures in order to document the trip, not only because of her artistic skills, but mainly because every one was either too lazy to take pictures or too poor to afford a decent digital camera.

Lyyli:

a french or italian girl from France or Italy who thought working on her phd in Florence was somewhat boring and a road trip to discover the wonders of the USA would probably be more fun. Lyyli purchased pigpen together with Jeremy while she was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, and subsequently sold her share to Jeremy before going back to Italy. It is common general knowledge that she still owns a 1% share of pigpen, although Jeremy sometimes tends to disagree. Lyyli is generally understood to be a nihilist, mainly because she doesnt care about anything except for her beautiful computer. As long as there is Internet somewhere, Lyyli can be easily kept under control. In spite of her nihilism, Lyyli also loves brownies, perhaps more than anything else in the world, although she is absolutely unable to cook them, even if she may pretend otherwise. Lyyli was at first the only other member of the crew who actually knew how to drive pigpen, although as a result of her chaotic approach to driving, she was often prevented from driving pigpen if not under thorough surveillance. Lyyli therefore declared herself as the official co-pilot and henceforth became an essential component of the crew because pigpen cannot be driven by only one person.

So here we are, all together with pigpen, getting ready to leave for this long adventure accross the USA.

June 4th 2009 was a great day for all of us..

The morning was spent fixing pigpen and packing things up, the goal being to depart in the early afternoon, even though we knew by then that pigpen was far from ready and that according to jeremy's frantic mechanic work and exclamtions of problems under the hood, yet for some reason we were okay with that.

On the way, we stop by Kyle and Briana's to say good bye. They give us some recording equipement to keep track of our adventures, as well as a map of the USA with all the interesting locations from Wikipedia's unusual articles that we are supposed to stop by. These are by far the sweetest possible gifts one can get and yet... they never seemed to be used...

After some last minute repairs and good byes Pigpen, predictably breaks down after a few miles, and Jeremy inaugurates the long tradition of disposable fixes by reparing a broken throttle cable with a series of coat hangers and a some connective tissue( duct tape). An ingenious idea which of course does not last very long, as the coat hangers keep melting away.

And so begins the first stage of the odyssey towards Yosemite. While it is a wonderful route into the sierras on a beautiful summer evening it is not quite so wonderful a drive. The driving process can only be described as nerve wracking and bastardly test to prove the endurance of both driver and the driven. The idle, due to some particularly bad mechanic work has, at this point has descended into the depths of non-existence. Which is to say that in order to keep pigpen from shutting off the gas pedal has to to be held down at all times if ever so slightly. This isn't really a problem when headed down freeways but becomes a minor and embarrassing inconvenience when at stoplights and serious, rather alarming crisis when headed down hills. Just try to imagine plummeting down a steep sierra valley when at roughly 70 mph your engine cuts out on you right at the moment you were attempting to take 11000 pounds around a corner. You see the powersteering is powered by the engine and the only way to keep the engine going without an idle is to continue pressing the gas regardless of the terrain one is traversing. In short the excursion of a lifetime began with some life/trip threating danger and some engine/brake destroying driving and that's about as foreshadowy as one can be if you consider the rest of this ridiculous story.

though Jeremy (driving at this point) seems to be loving every minute of this insanity Pigpen doesn't seem to share the sentiment. As the alititude increases pigpen's the average speed descends down into the 25 mph range and the average milleage is seems to be 6 gallons per mile or less. The climb is slow, tumultuous and rather ridiculous. The crew at this point is entertaining the notion of running out of gas on a mountain side and failing to even achieve the modest goal of Yosemite (3 hrs and 180 miles by google's account) and just as the empty line has been straddled for what seemed like far to long, a gas station sign begins to rise above the mountainous road we were ascending advertising redemption, hope and 4.00$/gallon gas. The bastards know they can charge whatever they damn well please up these parts.

Trietly is very happy. She smokes her daily dose of weed and start dancing in the RV. However, the combination of Jeremy's driving skills, particularly bad suspension and mountain roads lead to an upset stomach and triet ly proceeds to to puke out the side of pigpen (twice) marking pigpen with a bile stain that would stay with us for many states to come.

We somehow managed to arrive in Yosemite, granted in the middle of the night, and spend a rather dumbfounded moment staring at an incomprehensible map that refused to show us where we were or what direction was what. After a preliminary investigation of the map, we decide to give up on understanding it just randomly drive far enough to pull over at the French camp next to what we thought were the food containers, where people store their food so that it doesnt get eaten by bears. We were pretty excited about the prospect of free food and were promptly disappointed when we found out that they actually were trashcans.

Before going to bed, Jeremy, Tomatha and Trietly depart for a short excursion in order to explore our new site. Trietly was essentially running down the street doing cart wheels while Jeremy was running after her with Tomatha. They come back to reporting that the full moon's only completion was the full forest, full of wild animals that tomatha had despretaly yearned to attack.

So every one goes to sleep in the comfort of pigpen's bed, except for Trietly who was so thrilled by the beauty and the tallness of the trees that she decided to sleep on the roof of the RV. And it was well that she did. In the middle of the night a storm had decided to kick up and without triet ly's unsolicted watch we would have all been soaked as the sky portal installed in the roof of pigpen can be rather terrible when sky decides to shed it's water. The tarp goes up and we all go to sleep looking forward to a beautiful day in the mountains.