Life for me in Granada

Anything can be had, simply by wanting it.  When more than one being want the same thing, it goes to the one that wants it most.

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The ant-head sized black pepper looks larger than usual on the potatoes.  They are cubed to the size of Travel Yatze dice.  Still glistening from the hot oil, the color is not too white, not too brown.  Not a crunch but not a mush either -more of a subtle resistance to my enamelic demand.  No hint of salt, although much was used in cooking.

The bread is a little on the dark side.  Pre and post butter proves crucial.  The freshly cut bakery creation disappears too quickly to be thoroughly documented.

The fluffy, folded egg doesn’t need to be spiced; the insides carry the flavor like a good vodka cocktail.  Hot Mexican sausage slipping through creamy cheese accompanied by chopped bell peppers, jalepenos, onion, garlic, and salted tomato cubes.  Himalayan pink salt and crushed peppercorn are hidden along with the cumin and basil.  Or maybe I am just too hungry to notice.  It’s our loaded omelette and it’s tasty.

The restaurant is just for fun.  That’s all it really can be, because it doesn’t bring in enough cash to be a good investment.  Just enough to keep my belly full and give me plenty of practice cooking.  I enjoy it.  The designated food cost used by most restaurants is 35%.  Our food cost is more like 65%, but the only overhead is a 10% commission to the hostel manager, and because it’s easy to live on $5/day in Nicaragua, we keep cooking.

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Bad Day Bias (The drawer came up short 1800 Cordobas when I was working last night, I couldn´t prove who stole it, and I take responsibility for my mistakes)

The culture really takes life day by day, and I believe one reason is the weather.  With no natural predators and no seasonal natural disasters (they don’t get hit by hurricanes, which only leaves volcanoes and earthquakes), the next necessary cause for planning would be inclement weather.  The only seasons here are wet and dry.  Buy an umbrella.  Done.  A long time ago some Scandinavians said, “I really don’t want to lose half of my family again next winter, let’s prepare a little.”  Today they have pretty much the highest standard of living.  Maybe the constant loom of a random volcanic eruption feeds into the Nica’s “what’s the point” attitude.

In Nicaragua, people are lazy because they can be.  There are no reprocussions except to continue their seemingly comfortable existence.  This laziness feeds into their general lack of morals.  If someone can grab a smart phone and put it in their pocket, then they actually believe it belongs to them.  If a smart phone is chained to the ground, and they can cut the chain and put it in their pocket, it’s their smart phone and chain.  The funny thing is how it is so nonchalantly accepted in their society.  Here are some everyday examples of being laid back to a fault:

- Two guys were hired to do work on the bathrooms throughout the night, when the toilets are not being used much.  Instead of getting started, they hang out in the lobby drinking and watching YouTube videos for the next 8 hours.  Around 7am, when people start waking up, they remember why they came to the hostel and hurry to work on the bathrooms.  The workers occupy 4 of the 5 stalls for the next 2 hours, while the 40+ travelers start their day.

- A wild 9 or 10 year old in the audience at a baseball game is running amuck, throwing food, kicking strangers, fighting with other kids, and just being an eyesore, but I guess only to me.  The security guard standing next to the boy doesn’t even notice.

- Kids are playing tag and hiding under shelves at the grocery store.  No one seems bothered.

- One of the employees at The Bearded Monkey has a box with trash on top.  My boss asks her what’s inside.  She says, “Trash.”  My boss lifts the trash and there are 4 new rolls of toilet paper underneath.  She does nothing.  This is actually reasonable, because firing an employee for any reason means you will get sued by the ex-employee.  Everytime she gets rid of one of her thieves (a quick look at the books will show they steal twice their wage nightly), she goes to court and spends hundreds of dollars, which here is quite a bit.

There are some wild attempts to use the judicial system to enforce anti-laziness.  I’m not sure how the Nica’s managed to leapfrog us on ass-backwards policies, but check out this 1984 parallel.  My boss has a dog on her back porch.  She is at work a lot and the dog can’t always go out to drop a deuce.  There is a Department of Heath official that goes into her backyard, peeks through her window, and writes her a ticket for her unclean back porch.  This is the same neighborhood where houses are made of fence posts, chicken wire, and whatever scrap wood was laying around.

The people seem beaten and down.  I noticed this throughout Central America by the lack of eye contact.  It is a little depressing and the only conclusion I can derive is that “rich” tourists have been showing them how “poor” they are for the last few decades. 

If this information seems scattered and hard to follow, it means I have succumb to the random, grabasstic, moving-target ways of the Nicas.  There are no systems.  There are no schedules.   As I write this, I don’t know if I have to go to work in an hour and a half.  I’ll find out in an hour and a half.  Everyday the policies of the hostel change, along with the prices.  The mood of the manager dictates the level of service given to her customers.  I have seen this all over town.  At the ticket booth for a ferry, the clerk looked at me and pointed to her sandwich.  I stood in front of the wndow, waited no less than 5 minutes for her to set her clean plate aside and say, “Hola!”  It is funny, ridiculous, exhausting, and sad.

My mind races looking for the answer to the question, “Where is the incentive for these people to change their ways?”  Another question: why should they?  They´re the ones laughing and smiling all the time.

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A Good (typical) Day

Knock, knock, knock, knock.  Eyes open, cover up with my sheet.  Teal; there is no color coordination in Nicaragua, which keeps your eyes pleasantly busy.  The door is forced open from its wedged position.  The night watchman tells me in Spanish that a guest ordered breakfast and hands me a ticket.  My voice cracks and the frog in my throat is made of sand.  ¿Que hora es?  ¨8:30,¨ he replies and walks out.  The restaurant opens at 8:00, but last night was a good one and the watch I bought last week for an alarm keeps resetting to midnight.  

Burrito.  I go take a long leak first, wash up, and turn on the light in the kitchen/my bedroom.  I tri-fold my mattress and slide it under the pancake table.  One burner on low for the wrap.  One on high for the filling.  Sausage and potatoes sizzle for a minute.  A handful of chopped green peppers, onions, and garlic are added and sprinkled with salt, pepper, and cumin.  Some oil helps cook it evenly.  I grab a plate out of the unplugged refrigerator (our dry storage) and prep cheese.  The peppers start melting, tomato chunks are added and spiced (salt breaks down and softens), plus garlic and chili powder.  Refried red beans glue the cooked cubes into a rolling pan shape as I scoot the pan to toss the temporary colloid.  Three eggs and a heavy splash of milk are samurai diced by fork and my twitchy wrist oscillation.  The cheese stats melting as I tuck the corner like a tightly fitted bed sheet.

Orders trickle in.  Chopping veggies and practicing guitar fill in the rest of my waking mind´s limited focus.  510C$ leaves me about 150C$ after groceries and commission.  This is enough for food, but I´m gonna eat cheap so I can better enjoy my birthday.

The only time I put on shoes and socks is to run.  This week I got Montezumo´s revenge and haven´t exercised my heart in a health focused way for 5 days.  My chest cavity feels small as I soak up the mixture of fresh lake breeze and rusty burnt fuel particles.  It´s possible that the grassless neighborhood inhabitants recognize the dreadlocked jogger.  The sun is pushed back by enough clouds so my shorts aren´t soaked when I reach the supermercado.

Temperature change glistens my skin and the metal basket handles slide on my my under forearm as I separate two bags from the roll.  Two tomatoes and a green bell pepper.  Buying two half cartons of eggs is cheaper than a whole one.  You always have to pay attention to price per quantity.  Bobbing and weaving across the shiny white floor, I circle through savory aisles in search of a pouch of refried beans.  The quickness with which my replenishment routine is completed suprises me.  Aloe vera drink and yogurt are my treats.  Including sausage, bread, and cheese, the total comes to 312.33C$.  A hundred cords in my pocket (the treats were 40) after 4 hours of work.  I´ll make another C$50 working the desk for 5 hours.  With a free place in which I like to live, I don´t complain often.

                

The walk home has a perfect record of reminding me why I remain in Granada.  The sky is uniquely clear around the top section of Mombacho today and the overlooking volcano must be saying the same of this town.  Nodding to some elders carrying random straw-woven sacks of common goods on their backs, I hold my plastic bags at my sides and turn the corner.  My favorite bakery is full of transactions.  I decide to grab a snack from the pulperia across from the hostel for lunch.  Tod is cooking me a curry chicken dinner with variables undetermined.  Crossing the street is a 360º observation game.  Granada, and much of Central America that I´ve seen, is about flowing around, over, and through moving obstacles.  A decaying Japanese sedan-turned-taxi breezes past the back of my t-shirt while I wait for the horse pulling a man above the waist-high axels to pass.  On the last left turn, I slip through two opposite moving bikes, one motorized, to get the full view of my favorite building portion in the city.  The feeling of a small sack of gold coins landing on the floor of my stomach is always welcome.  Darkly outlined, rounded, red bricks missing mortar beg the question: will the wall last another 5 minutes or centuries?  Below, the sparsely grassed earth dives swiftly to the river bottom some 35 feet below.  Colorful plastic, paper, and styrofoam give a pleasantly appropriate accent to the scene.  It lets me know I´m in someone else´s homeland though sometimes I want to believe I´m not.

Nicaragua and The Bearded Monkey

San Juan del Sur sits on the Southwestern corner of Nicaragua.  The steep walls of the quarter-mile circular bay nearly close off a cluster of sailboats from the Pacific.  The grid system of narrow paved roads and colorful, aged bed & breakfasts are connected to the bay by 30 yards of sand and smooth, two-foot waves that are as long as the beach.  I have the dumb idea to sell pancaces by the beach somewhere.  I run energetically around town checking prices of propane stoves, and ingredients. Sunset beers every night.  The town is kind of a run-down tourist trap.  Not much soul.  After a few days, we head for Omatepe.

Twin volcanoes in the largest freshwater lake of the Americas after the Great Lakes.  We´ve been traveling too fast, so its 99.9% local population (this is the only place I´ve been, since the Himalayas, without pizza) is sure to chill us out.  We chill.  We hike a volcano.  We chill.  We ride bikes to the beach.  The locals go all out for Inmaculada Concepcion and I feel the wrath of a $1 bottle of rum.  We chill more and talk about pancakes.  Next to my hotel apears a shelf of various propane stoves.  Accross the street, more propane stoves.  (Alright, I get it! I´ll buy one.)  I buy one.  Boat, taxi, bus, Granada.

First Look at a Central American jewel

Five-hundred year-old colonial architecture and every house has an interior courtyard like you used to make on The Sims.  Tile sidewalks and vibrant, randomly colored buildings.  From the bell tower of La Merced Iglesia, you can see palm trees poking through the middle roofs all over the city.  Beautiful city.  We go to a ballgame.  Granada vs. Leon is like Chicago vs. LA for Nicaragua.  We refuse to pay the $1.78 and are the only gringos in the away section, which sets us back $0.85.  Weird ballgame food.  Half cooked potatoes, unchewable cabbage, and ketchup in a big green banana leaf.  Beer is cold and the home team loses 4-1.  Half of the stadium leaves between the 8th and 9th, because it will take seconds, if not minutes, to get out of the parking lot.  Seriously, there might be 200 fans at the game.  Afterwards there is a crowd of Gringos at a local bar.  We play a long game of ¨Oh, you´re buying me a drink?  Well here´s two.¨  I promise two pancake deliveries por la mañana.  At 7:44AM I walk to the Super Mercado for Nutella, PB, mix, eggs (one order is crepes), and chocolate chips.  Next door goes 5 walkin-rolls of various flavors.  Across town I run over a Nutella and a pineapple-coconut crepe.

A guy who is part of the first group, passed out at the second group´s apartment.  He woke up to one of my crepes, winded his way across town back to his hostel and ate one of my pancake wraps.  Comprende?  Weird.  Lesson: if you cook it, they will come.

A Second Chance

A bee landed on my beer at dinner.  I reprimanded him as he tried to fly back up the neck.  Not enough pitch; if I tilt the neck, he will get swamped.  He denies the knife ladder I offer and ends up floating in my beer.  I finish drinking the beer about 15 minutes later, careful not to touch the bee.  I dump him and the last few drops on the table.  He lays there motionless for what seems like seconds.  He twitches his legs.  The drunk finds his feet and tries to dry his wings, but is too intoxicated to fly and stumbles around instead.  I share the miraculous tale with our server, who, in turn, tells other members of the bar´s staff.  His story was probably about a different drunk at my table.

-Places don´t matter.  Only the states our minds are in.-tmf

The Bearded Monkey

It´s hard to find a bad hostel, because the people staying and the owners are usually all travelers.  I´ve stayed at 50 or more hostels throughout Europe, Asia, Central America, and one in Georgia.  In my experience, every 10th hostel is not just another hostel.  I look for setting, vibe, and people.  Some travelers are just looking for bag storage, and expediently devour all of the regional offerings.  Some expect their $5 accommodation to include hot water, breakfast, and unlimited wifi bandwidth.  The vibe at the first hostel in Granada sucked.  This could have been solely due to the unfriendly travelers, but I believe it stems from something deeper.  Maybe long developed structural vibrations still echoing through the walls.  Nobody is happy.  Hilary and I are ¨left hanging¨ by a total of 6 guests with our attempts to strike up conversation or simply say good morning.  I cook pancakes at the community kitchen using some oil, which is often provided by hostels to preserve their pans and improve cleaning.  A girl snatches up the bottle and storms off.  When she returns I explain the confusion and offer to pay for the oil that I stole.  She just looks at me like I am an idiot.  Hilary and I walk around to find a new place to stay.

A week and a half ago, Hills and I decided to split up in Granada.  Today, we walk up and down streets, looking at half a dozen hostels around the city.  She likes Entre Amigos.  I like The Bearded Monkey, which is next door.  I could have chosen any one of the city´s 30 hostels, but this one seems right.  We hang out for another day and a half and she leaves for Leon.  I decide to give her a few days head start to avoid paranoia of an awkward accidental meeting in another city.  We were traveling together for a month and each need to regain our independence.

Inside Bearded Monkey is a 25´x25´open-air section of dirt, plants, and stone protected by 6 hammocks, 2 single-rope woven swing chairs hanging between twelve 16´ wooden columns supporting the edge of the inward-sloping, tiled roof.  Beyond the hammock fence is another 15´ deep perimeter of rustic red and white tile floor, covered with tables, leading to the 25´ tall walls.  The walls divide the open space from four 12-bunk dormitories, 5 privados, and the back half (kitchen, baños, 2nd courtyard) of the hostel.  Spending an afternoon in a hammock here has caused many travelers to extend their stay beyond original plans.  

I don´t love Granada.  I mention to Tod, the Texan ex-pat working the counter, that he has a cool job.  The next morning, Yolanda (Nica manager) tells me I can get a free room if I work the desk 4 days a week.  With my mind on track to reach Caribbean islands and an end-of-the-world party at some Mayan ruins, I don´t want to commit a lot of time to Granada.  I ask her for how long.  Four days is her reply.  Great.  I want the experience of working in a hostel and will be free for parties on the 21st.  Training takes 10 minutes and Tod says they want to re-open the kitchen for breakfast.  I write a menu on the chalk board and sell some pancakes and crepes the following mornings.  On the fourth day, I tell Yolanda I´m gonna leave for 4 days and then come back and work some more.  With a smile, she says, ¨Si.¨  Her reaction is my first glimpse into the laidback mindset of Nicaraguans.

Back to Omatepe I go with a very, very cool French chick called Sarah.  We camp near the hotel in the town of Chaco Verde, which lies on the southeastern foot of the north volcano, with 20 or so other festival tenters.  Two days of electronic music on the beach to celebrate the western contortion of the Mayan calendar.  The 25lb, yellow propane tank hanging from a blue nylon rope around my shoulder is not welcomed by the two Nicas running the festival.  They put it into storage and I put my stove in the tent, relieved that I can just enjoy the festivities.  The pancake nomad will have to revise his methods in the future. On day 3, I reclaim my tank and ride on the roof of a van back to the port town of Mayagalpa.  Boat, taxi, bus, and I´m back in Granada.  The day after Christmas, I ask Tod if he wants to take the restaurant seriously.  He does, so I decide to stay through the busy season.  I´ve made thousands of Cordobas selling omelettes, huevos rancheros, pancakes, and french toast.  The exchange rate from $ to C$ is 1 to 24.  After the cost of food, I´ve pocketed $60.  I spent $100 on a new mini fridge for the kitchen.  The busy season goes from the beginning of January to the end of March.

The characters that stay at and travel through the hostel make the place.  Bobby Love plays piano in the corner when he´s not arguing in his old school New York accent with some young backpacker.  We exchange light, philosophical comments and he extends his culinary knowledge from days of chefdom.  He is a riot and occasionally sleeps on tables around the hostel as a result of demasiado mucho cervezas.  After 4 months of living here, the only piece of information about his past that has been extracted is that he is from East Timor.

Tod and I have some pretty intense jam sessions when we aren´t riding around town on the bouncy roads in a truck with virtually no suspension.  Instruments sound great reverberating off concrete walls.

Mauricio takes me on his boat tour for the free through islets with a group of backpackers. He´s a local pool shark with smirking white teeth and eyes of a bandito admiring the fruits of his latest heist.  He and his Scandinavian girlfriend, Marion, teach me Spanish as we barbeque in the back courtyard.  

Yolanda´s oldest son, Francisco trades me Spanish for martial arts lessons.  I cook her youngest, Kevin, breakfast most days, and we stay up past our bed-times watching Hollywood movies in Spanish.

For Christmas, we made a pot-luck dinner for 10 and put tables together under the stars.  By New Years, Tod´s ribs are perfected and there are 7 tables lined end on end.  Even Bobby Love makes his self-proclaimed potato salad.  Primo.

We are a temporary family and this is my current home.

Costa Rica

They call it Rich Coast for a reason.  ´´This is the expensive country, so just skip it and keep traveling in Nicaragua.´´  That's what we heard from EVVVVVVVERYone.  It's not that bad and the beauty should not be missed.  We make it cheap by cooking a lot and renting a house for $100/week.

First, we have a proper 7-course Turkey Day meal in Alajuela, outside of San Jose.  (San Jose feels and looks like neighborhoods in eastern Brooklyn.  It is extremely affluent and westernized in terms of restaurants, shops, and advertisements.)  The meal is 7 courses because we only have one propane burner.  Pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes, fresh bread (from a bakery down the street), stuffing, green bean casserole (this is nowhere close to the correct recipe, but still satisfies), oreo creme pie, and banana pudding.  Mostly firsts for Hilary, the food blows her Kiwi mind.  Banana pudding is her favorite, and being from the deep south of her country, leads me to believe that southerners are similar in lots of countries (I know this works for Germany).  Good choice, Hills.

At the last second, I decide to go with Hilary to Montezuma for silent treatment on the south shore of Costa Rica.  Every six weeks or so she has a completely silent weekend where she does as little as possible.  Since I was born, the only time I stop moving and doing stuff is when I am unconscious.  Even then I am quite talkative and have had a couple of adventures around the house.  On the ferry to the Nicoya Peninsula, Hilary has a cheap-boxed-wine connection (called Clos. It's not wine, but it's Clos) with Maisie and Michelle.  We follow them to Santa Teresa for a night.  I play bodyguard with a big stick on the supposedly dangerous beach while the girls play in the moonlit ocean.  No banditos in sight so I play a little bit, too.  We meet Gregory around 2am on the shore, and he invites us to his Bungalow.  The next night we take him up on his offer.  I was concerned he might be interested in the chicks because they are hot and much younger than him but he makes not one creepy move and is just a cool, fun loving guy.  He lives in Switzerland, originally from upstate NY, and works around his skiing schedule.  We walk down to the semi-rave club by the water, shoot pool, and quote the good Jimmy Buffet songs.  I have to add the following detail because some reader will recognize the genius in it.  He travels everywhere with a little stuffed monkey named Afika or Afi for short.  After his 365th photo with Afi, he´s gonna start a second calendar with Big Mama, Afi´s mom.  He found them in thrift stores in two different European countries about 5 years apart.  Afi has a basket, sleeping bag, and surfboard.  Hilary asks Gregory, ¨Does he have some little skis?¨  Gregory replies, ¨Of course, but we´re in Central America!¨  Afi was made in 1920, which makes him over 90 years old.  Gregory gives us a ride to the adjacent town of Mal Pais where we will rent the house.

It´s quiet with the exception of some dirt bikes and a family of howling monkeys that live in the surrounding trees.  You can vaguely hear the surf.  For the next two days, Hilary and I interact as little as possible, using hand gestures and writing notes to communicate.  The first day, I take it pretty well and stay still in the hammock on our porch from about 8am until noon.  It´s interesting watching plants reach up to the morning sun.  I spend the rest of the day lying around, sitting in a chair, and looking out the window.  Occasionally I cook.  I thought about conflicts that haven´t crossed my mind for well over 10 years.  On the second day, I am not happy and become very restless.  I discover that over the last couple of years I have become angry with people that I am close with because I have developed a habit of making excuses.  I didn´t always do this, but towards the end of college, I started to undergo psychological changes.  It´s a wonder I had enough momentum to make it through grad school.  Anyway, I realized that I need to stop making excuses and re-assume responsibility for my disposition and life.

After silent time, Hilary and I explore secret beaches, a tiny fish market, and cooking bread without an oven. A bakery quality loaf resulted from a fragment of cinder block we found in the yard, which was heated inside of a foil-lined pot atop the propane stove.  If you do ever create an oven from these materials, use a smooth stone or line it with foil, otherwise the bottom of your loaf will be gritty.  Trial and error taught us bagels should only be flash-boiled for a couple of minutes.  The longer we cooked them, the more they shrank and the more they seemed uncooked.  Like all ¨arts¨ cooking remains profitable through fear mongering and the general public's lack of confidence.  The vast majority of eaters are afraid it is overly complex to make meals.  Add things that you know you like the taste of.  Heat is often optional.  For bread, mix flour and water until you can shape it.   Yeast and heat are for texture.  Other ingredients are for flavor.  If you add an ingredient with a really strong flavor or pH imbalance, such as baking soda, you have to balance it with something like vinegar or another acid in this case.  You´ll know by the flavor.  Ten bucks at the grocery store and a couple of hours of trial and error will teach you the basics.  After some struggling and some ´Ahhhh, I see!´ moments, then it would be effective to look at recipes and continue experimenting.  The reason there are so many variations of the same dishes is that most of the ingredients aren´t crucial.  Grow some balls and cook.  There´s not a person on Earth who doesn´t want to know how to feed themselves.

Final notes on Costa Rican beaches, de Pacifico.  Big rocks, frozen lava looks really cool and is everywhere, great seashells, pick your wave size, and walk on completely undeveloped postcard beaches until you die of starvation.  If you are too cheap to stay in $10 hostels, walk for 20 min and build a campfire with the abundance of dry driftwood.

Instead of going back to Montezuma to ride horses to waterfalls on the beach, we decide to walk 90k´s along the beach to Samara.  There are no buses  not even a dotted line on the map.  There is a road, and we get lucky with two hitches, one of which takes us though the country for about 3 hours all the way to Samara.  I wonder how much hitching karma I have left.  The couple that picks us up are from Detroit and run a composite-veneer furniture company called Context Furniture.  We drive on the beach, through tidal creeks and waist deep rivers, off and on roads, and see various facets of CR countryside, occasionally stopping to enjoy fresh coconuts and beer at world renowned beaches.  Thank you Brice and Keryn!

The first person we meet in Samara is the mayor, who moved to CR 18 years ago and likes that he doesn´t have to wear shoes to work.  I may return to open a dive company.  Smooth intoxicating energy in this town.  

We wake up in the sand at daybreak, and, after a brisk morning swim, grab our stuff and take a morning bus to Liberia (lee-berry-uh).

In the heart of the cowboy district, Hills and I are greeted by old cattle ropers sporting boots and rodeo hats.  The bustling, yet quaint, streets forming a grid system are adorned with rustic saddles and ropes (not the polished, stained decor at Longhorn Steakhouse), jumbo electronics and grocery stores, and is the 3rd largest city in the country.  Hilary didn´t sleep on the beach, and sweaty, sandy, bug-bitten, with a sinus aggravation wants a swimming pool for our last night in CR.  I´m on board.  Steak and red wine at the hotel restaurant.  WacArnold´s for breakfast.  I mention the night before it would be cool to arrive at the desayuno-almorzado (breakfast-lunch) cusp.  I walk next door and order consado (rice y beans) con huevos and a coffee.  Before the meal is served, the menus flip and I order a Big Mac and a coke.  The orders come out at the same time.  Einstein said, ¨There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.¨

--Controversial Tangent:  Anyone who disses McD´s can suck an egg.  Affordable food, millions of jobs worldwide, and go wikipedia "Ronald McDonald House Charities".  After you get past the sad, failed attempt of hippies trying to find faults with the article, you can read how big the benefactor ballers at WacArnolds are.  EVERYONE has craved some greasy hangover food at some point.  I´m not too worried about the battle between the arches and their arch nemesis though.  Some claim that people have a right to eat healthy.  I say people have a right to choose.  I like to enjoy some ¨poison¨ every once and again.  I´ll do some extra pushups today to make up for it.  I´m not real big on people telling other people what they can and can´t have.  Furthermore, the fuel we consume is insignificant compared to what we do to burn it.  I have not come across any form of food that gives you a cardio or skeletal muscle workout.  Proof of this theory is in Usain Bolt´s interview after setting the new world record for 100m in 2009.  ¨I woke around 11am and decided to watch some TV and had some nuggets.  Then I slept for a couple of hours more.  Then I got some more nuggets and came to the track.¨  He is a legend and doesn´t need the endorsement.  Briefly study  how the guy lives and you´ll realize he wasn´t bribed to say this.  The ¨unpopular¨ giants don´t need my defense, but I like to hit folks in the face with a bucket of reason sometimes.--

The bus for the border town of Peñas Blancas is exceptionally nice.

Connect the dots - Panama

People come and go in life.  Listening as often as possible to the little voice inside (Mama would say, 'deiner stimme') has taken me here.  Some say fate, some say luck.  It doesn't matter; I'm here now.  Here's how I got here:

In a new country without the funds to make it to my return flight (I came with around $1300 in November and my flight leaves in late April) I was nervous.  My plan was to really chill and stay put for a while.  That plan lasted about 5 days.  I'm not diggin' Panama City and start rationalizing why I need to stay here and learn to like it.  Liam (rock star) and Hilary (bamf) help me to realize that it doesn't make sense to stay somewhere I'm not excited about.  I have some money, Central America is cheap, so back on the road I go.

I take a night bus to Bocas del Toro with Hilary.  She's a sweet New Zealand chick that's worked in more countries than I've stepped foot in.  Bocas is a fun, loud party town on the north coast of Panama.  Lots of cool day trips and activities available by water taxi.  Hundreds of backpackers coming and going kill the local vibe, but a 2-day festival/parade for the city's foundation give us a chance to feel the culture a bit.  We saw children practicing late into the afternoon as we walked past schools upon arriving to the town.  Kids as young as 6, in groups of 30 or 40, are wailing on snare drums with the timing and intensity of a Tool concert.  OK, Tool cover band.  The conductor signals for the rest and not a single off-beat.  I can see him grinning a foot wide on the inside.  The obnoxious drumming we have been hearing from our hostel is now an entrancing spectacle which we indulge along with some kickass street food.  This is the first time I feel a pride connection (and a little less confused) with a Hispanic culture.
--Being from the United States of America (only saying 'America' aggravates most people down here because it references 2 continents and 36 countries), I am greatly distanced from the idea that there are other people with passions comparable to US citizens and college football or classic rock.--
Bocas is great.  Avoid the wet season.

We jump on a bus for the mountains.  La Fortuna has a hostel all by itself in a cloud forest (like a rain forest, but higher).  Serene, but empty vibe.  Hilary gets the scoop and it seems some of the volunteers are dying to get out of their one month contract.  I meet the owner one night, who gets extremely drunk and reveals his bigoted, shallow insides to everyone.  Since everything in the hostel has a sexual innuendo I can deduce his motives for opening a hostel.  Creepy.  He leaves the next day and some cool backpackers arrive.  Full day of hiking jungle trails, fording wide, waist-deep rivers and walking through cold waterfalls feels like you are wearing a lead backpack.  I cook some weird stuff.  The critics seem happy and encourage my experimentation.  Rocky Cloud Pie (named after a white-faced capuchin and a kinkajou that also live here) is made of cornbread minus baking soda, Vienna sausage, topped with spaghetti sauce and red beans.  Sounds gross.  It's in a standard 10" rectangular baking pan and disappears faster than a plate of Outback cheese fries.  We watch The Watch (great slapstick, left-field humor).  Shane, ex-lobbyist who instigated the waterfall excursion, has a moustache that Sean Connery would commend and we even have matching heart tattoos.  Instant bros (just add beer).  We DOMINATE foosball all night.  In case you missed the emphasis, we won 15 straight games, while barely maintaining balance from laughing so hard.  And I'm barely average at this game.  Our opponents are laughing just as hard at the phenomenon that is taking place.  GREAT night.

Four days in the cloud and we gain Elyna and hitch a ride toward the border.  Some central american guys have eyes that look like they are wearing makeup.  The dude that picks us up has eyes like this.  With high-heels on the passenger floorboard, I have to check the Buffalo Bill possibility.  My Spanish sucks, and he speaks no English, so I struggle to keep up polite conversation and find out if this guy is cool.  (There's always a few moments of tension on the onset.  If you think about it in terms of incentives, only cool people stop for hitch-hikers, so you're probably fine, but I try to be smart and do my best to read people, situations, and formulate a plan B.) They are his wife's shoes.  He's 31 years old and has been a priest for the last 13 years.  We drop off his car at his church and take a bus to the border.  He gets off the bus and helps us get on the correct bus and then quickly pays the fare and says bye.  We are a little stunned and joke about how badly he wanted us out of his country.  Really cool dude.

To bum or not to bum - San Diego and beyond

We drive across CA, do LA and Malibu, and then head south to San Diego.  After about a week of living my childhood dream of being a legitimate beach bum, Scott, Tim, and I start getting antsy.  If you're traveling, you can wear tattered clothes, omit deodorant, and eat anything your enzymes will digest.  The moment you stop moving, you immediately feel like, are treated like, because you actually are a bum.

"Hobo becomes you!" is the threat that haunts Scott and Tim as they are often slinging a hammock where they might not be supposed to.  Scott walks to the bathroom one morning to clean peanut butter off of his pocket knife before he closes it.  With a 2 month beard, hair past his shoulders, and pretty rough clothes, a stereotypical California housewife sees him and freaks.  She sends a guy over to check us out and make sure we are mentally stable.  He tells us that we might want to change locations because she just called the cops.  Thanks dude, later.  I temporarily sympathize with the mother (there are plenty of children at the beach this morning) until I see the blade is all of two and a half inches long.  Maybe if it had ketchup on it, I would understand drawing conclusions.  It's peanut butter.  The next time I see someone carrying a bottle, I'm just going to assume it's a Molotov cocktail and shoot them on site.  Amazing how influential hair can be.

We hang out with bums a lot at night, partially because we like the fire pits the city has provided on the beach and partially because we are also bums.  They aren't scary when you dress like them, use the beach showers for bathing and drinking water, and eat Ramen noodles every night.  After our usual nightcap by the fire, I take my sleeping bag down by the waves.  I can't sleep.  Instead, I rack my brain and run through my self-help playbook.  I start putting together a plan to learn 5 languages at the same time using the gifted Rosetta Stones on my laptop.  I start getting excited and remember it was learning that made me want to quit my job and start traveling in the first place.  As Tim Ferris explains in The 4-hour Work Week, it's not about trying to be happy, it's about doing things that get you excited.  You just have to ask the right questions.  Where do I want to go?  Brazil.  I'm stoked, tell Jeff and Scott, and we all run butt-ass naked through the moonlight into the freezing Pacific.  I feel alive again.

After looking through the Visa requirements, it seems I can't do it this year and basically puss out.

We take a bus to L.A. and then to Santa Barbara, all the while feeling trapped because deep down I know I don't want to live in the States right now.  The A/C goes out on the bus shortly after leaving the L.A. downtown station.  The bus turns around, as do the wheels in my head.  This is my chance.  "Tim, Scott, it was fun.  Here's the ticket to get my guitar under the bus.  I'm taking a cab to the airport and moving to Panama."  I'm scared shitless.  After being conned into buying a return flight by the airline (you can just show them a bus ticket out of the country), I withdraw the last 80 bones from my account.  I still have 40 silver coins, so I hope they exchange.  

They do and I have $ for about 6 weeks, living on $25/day.

The rest of the desert

GRAND CANYON
(for great pictures, check out Jeff´s Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/undercountry?fref=ts)

We ride up to the big hole in the ground from the east.  East Rim Drive.  It’s the middle of the night and we are wired.  This has been a big X on our map since the get-go.  We drink beer and play guitar until day break because my buddy Scott told us that is the best time to see it.  We find a cool spot to walk out to the edge, which is an obstacle course in itself and just keeps going down.  There really isn’t a distinct edge at all.  Sleep deprived and drunk, this is not a real wise move, but here I am to tell the tale.  The first time you look at the canyon (the only word I can find to accurately name it) it looks like a cheesy post card.  Then you blink a few times and say well there it is. Next.  Then you realize that you can’t look away.  For hours.  It feels like it is the biggest thing I have ever looked at.  Maybe because the ocean is somewhat uniform in texture and color, or maybe because I’ve seen it so many times.  Either way, the Grand Canyon is one of those over-played scenes that loses all meaning until you are standing in front of it.

After a few hours and the light is evenly distributed from the sun’s tall angle, we go back to the van.  The breakfast crowd is flooding the village as we draw the black curtains.
The rest of the day and next are spent struggling with wifi to post pictures and story.  At night on the second day, I am finishing up my blog post when one of two dudes 16 feet away from me reads from a grocery bag, “Don’t take rides from strangers.”  Then he says, “Strangers are sometimes the nicest people you’ve ever met.”  I looked up and said, “Hell yea!”  Two hours later, Tim and Scott grab their backpacks and jump in the van with us Vegas bound.

The Hoover Dam is not worth seeing in the middle of the night.  Mega weak sauce.  We park in the garage at Treasure Island around 4am.  With little time to spare, Tim (red) and I (blue) each down a bottle of MD 20/20 for $3 a pop as a means to save money.  After all it’s Vegas.  If I get out of here without spending $400 it’s a win.  If you want to understand how a bum thinks, chug malt liquor.  It seemed perfectly reasonable to join the group of morning runners in blue jeans and flip-flops while holding a cigarette and spilling my coffee all over my shaman looking Thai shirt.  It wasn’t our idea.  The runners egged us on and cheered the whole half mile down the strip.

After some more hunting for the illusive $5 black-jack table and an almost endless search for our parking garage, we finally got to sleep around bright:30.  Tim got some rest during the drive from GC to LV, which must have been the enabling factor for him to not go to sleep at all.  When the 3 of us rose at almost the same time, Tim is walking to the van.  Food.  The four of us now walk and think as one on our quest to find a buffet.  After talking to some locals, the buffet turns into China Town with such simple directions as, “Next light, turn right.”  Not simple.  The road turns into a freeway which ties the streets into knots, runs out of side walk, drops 4 levels via stairs, and stars off into at least 4 different directions.  Two miles later with damp jeans from a crisp sun, we find an oriental looking multi-tiered shogun roof.  It’s Quizno’s.  Luckily, across the street is Kung Fu, a Thai-Chinese restaurant.  It is LEGIT.  It’s even built the same way as my buddy James’ house in Bangkok.  We tell the waiter to just leave the water pitcher on the table.  Pot-stickers, Thai iced coffee, and all kinds of num-nums.  We walk quickly after paying to avoid becoming epoxied to the leather booth.  During the walking conversation I realized we picked up the right backpackers.

You know how sometimes new groups of people meet and naturally break off into mini-herds where the conversation is so intense you look forward to listening to the other person chime in just so you can take a breath?  It was like that.  Scott and I couldn’t wait to hear what was going to be said next.  Hive minding vocalized.  (Hive minding is the subconscious interaction that I think is always going on between people.)  We talked about traveling and living in the U.S. versus abroad and whatnot.  In America, we kind of grow up believing that this is the only place to live.  People have been living in various locations around the globe for a long time.  It’s possible that there is a place more pleasant to live in than where each of us grow up.  I can get my teeth cleaned in Thailand for $40.  I don’t have to apply for an insurance policy, make monthly payments, and add tension to my shoulders and dreams about who is gonna jerk their lawsuit pistol first.  I’m not saying it’s right or wrong, I’m just saying this is the reality of today’s world.  And guess what, Thai people read the same dental hygiene books as us.  One thing that I really appreciated him saying was, “When I get to my place, my home, I’ll know as soon as I feel the dirt.”

The dirt in Death Valley has a strange energy.  It feels empty.  Nothing lives here.  Nothing can.  We weren’t worried about scorpions or snakes because there weren’t even plants and it was hot at night, so they wouldn’t need to get warm in our sleeping bags.  We parked at Golden Canyon and walked neatly through the dark between the closely spaced oven-dried clay hills.  The air is still hot, blowing through the narrow valley at 9PM.  After a mile and a half of weaving between these life-sized ant hills, we reach the end of the wash, which is also the foot of a giant dirt mountain.  The ground is faintly lit by the bright stars and for the most part it is dead silent.  The tops of the hills occasionally crumble and it sounds like something is following us.

The first time I try to climb a low cliff, the “rock” I’m holding onto comes off the wall in a chunk about the size of a trash can.  I fall a foot onto an incline and slide 5 or 6 feet to the bottom again.  This stuff is crumbling all around us.  We are basically in a huge kiln climbing on nature’s fired clay statues.  Scott and I decide we are going to camp on top of a big hill so we’ll have a good first desert sunrise.  We climb to the top of our hill and then seeing that it’s connected to a taller hill.  This repeats for about an hour, balancing on the collapsing ridge of the never-ending dirt mountain range.  We finally reach a peak, that is clearly too steep and fragile to climb.  We name this place The End of the Earth and get make our beds.  Our beds are slight bowls scraped into the ridge with our feet so we won’t tend to roll off into the abyss so easily .  We are very comfortable and wake up at first light.  The air is still warm, but not hot so we hit our own snooze buttons a few times.  A couple hours later it starts warming up and we finally get up to join meet up with the others who look like ants at the bottom of the next hill.  A few war bird cries are echoed back and forth through the cracks.  The panorama view is sick.

Most of the day is spent driving around the desert and hanging out at an oasis.  At before driving to deeper into California (gas prices are $6.20/gal) we drive 30 miles east to fill up ($3.79/gal) in the small, old gold mining town of Beatty (pronounced Bait-ee).  The wings at Sour Dough Saloon were almost too tender to pick up.  I walked up to 3 strangers next to us to find out what the locals like and dislike about their part of the country.  They are all seasonal workers at the park from various reaches of the country.  Almost everyone in the town is from somewhere else.  We finish a game of pool and follow our new friends to the town brothel.  They aren’t regular customers, it’s just a small town dive that’s entertaining to tour.

On the way out the door of Sour Dough’s, a skinny man, appearing to be in his early 60’s, with a Canadian tuxedo, suspenders, cowboy hat, white beard and twinkly eyes marches in.  There’s a warm vibe emitting from The Prospector and he says, “Everyday is a holiday and every meal’s a feast!” Jeff tells him he’s coming with us to the strip club.  Without hesitation he says, “Ok, but I’m bringing my truck because I don’t want to get stuck there.”  The Prospector is a cartoon character.  He has a catch phrase for every situation and we are folded in half laughing most of the night.  I bought shots, Moxy gave us a tour of the facilities, Scott did his spot-on Mikey Jackson dance moves on stage and showed Moxy a couple moves on the pole.  We go to leave the bar and The Prospector invites us for an after party at his place.  After 20 years of working in the National Parks system, he retired and moved to the ghost town of Ryolite, NV.  He’s the only resident.  Our other friends told us not to go, but how many chances do we get to hang out with a real prospector?

Nothing too strange happens, but we all have the feeling we´ll wake up in the middle of the road and there will only be a placard of ¨The Prospector¨ from the 1860´s.  This guy can´t be real.  After The Prospector shows us around the ghost town and with a flashlight and fails to summon his neighbor through the floorboards, we sing around the fire for a couple hours.  We wake up and he and his house are still there.  After breakfast, we clean up and take off before we wear out our welcome.  A couple of confused tourists visiting the ghost town ask us questions to which we can only say, ¨You gotta ask The Prospector.¨

WY, UT & CO

GRAND TETONS (pictures on Facebook - Thomas Michael Foote.  Instead of taking 2 hours to upload 21 pictures, Facebook can do 39 in about 10 minutes)

Monday.  We just drive down and out of Yellowstone all day.  The Tetons are a National Park, and everything is closed except Signal Mountain, so we don’t have to pay to get in.  The views begin changing as we approach the jagged, snow covered peaks of the Teton Range.  Dark teal colored lakes dip down in the valleys between the forest of barren, white Lodge Pole Pines.  They look like pickup sticks up and down the sides of mountains, perfect size and straightness for teepee poles.  It’s $20 to park and have a fire, which kind of sucks, but it was our only option.  The area had a convenience store for beer, a gas pump, and a bar with a sick view for more beer.  The bartender tells us some free places to camp and has an epic beard. 

After a big spaghetti dinner, I search for a bathroom, where we also heard lots of laughing and singing.  From the looks of it, there was a camp up the hill on the other side.  I wander through the bushes and yearlings in the dark towards the exterior orange light of the building.  The first door is unlocked.  The second door is unlocked.  I access a hallway to my surprise that looks like a college dorm.  One gaunt snowboarder looking guy with a really good Indian face paintjob tells me this is where the camp employees live and laughs hysterically.  I get directions for a bathroom back at our campsite and tell Jeff about my findings.  Armed with only 4 beers, we charge the hill looking for cool people.  The first dude we see outside tells us to go inside to the first dorm on the left.  Stu, the crazy face paint kid is in there and laughs some more.

We end up listening to music and playing a Midwest drinking game which is a bit like beer pong except you use only four cups in each corner and bounce a dice.  The residents are really excited about us being able to have a fire, because the entire season was on too high of a fire risk.  Stu comes back to the fire and we laugh all night about the ridiculous beauty of the area.  Stu spent only 20 nights sleeping indoors from now back to May, when the season started.  At the end of the night, he took off into the dark wearing only Chockas (sp?) on his feet.  It was about 38 degrees.  He goes to a place in the woods by a lake a few miles away where his hammock and sleeping bag are.  The only times he met some wildlife was one day in the early summer when he woke up to a couple of teenager black bears.  It freaked him out a little, but he clapped them away and went back to sleep.  This dude has got it going on.  A little misunderstood by his outrageous, drawn out laugh, but if you can pick the words out of his strong surfer accent and nomenclature, his descriptions of the mountains is brilliant poetry.  “Your standin by a lake, alright, and you look to the left and this slab of shale just shoots up right next to you, seven thousand feet into the sky.  You turn to your right and boom!  Another straight up ramp of rock just launches straight the f^@& up.   AAAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAAAAA!”

Tuesday.  Jeff destroyed his shin on a wooden, knee-high piling that was driven into the ground next to the parking space.  They have these all over the park.  Jeff wakes up in a bad mood after finding a warning for leaving one beer can out and not fully extinguishing the fire.  I feel blessed that the dude didn’t give us a ticket, but also proud that we cleaned up that well after as long a night as we had.  Jeff decides to get even by posting a note telling the staff that they need to cut down the stumps and that he could have broken his ankle.  This creates a bad element in our relationship that needs to be addressed.  I don’t ever want to be a contributor to our already ridiculous over-regulation.  I believe this is what made our country weak.  

Lawsuits for burning yourself on a cup of coffee.  I like the fact that if I’m stupid at these parks, I can actually kill myself.  That is what makes it an intense experience.  That’s what I liked about living in New York.  They have naked steel bridge columns in the middle of the roads in Brooklyn.  It makes people think and therefore there are no accidents.   I don’t want to wake up in a bubble-wrapped world covered in warning labels.  But I digress.  So I talk to Jeff about my thoughts and he says that he is not the type of person that participates in the frivolous lawsuits.  He just wanted to let them know, and he is probably not the first person to have that problem.  Being a surfer, he is used to taking responsibility for his safety and feels bad about the note.  We go to take it down, but it has already been taken by the campsite attendant.  I’m just happy that Jeff doesn’t follow the safety over freedom ideology.  We hash out the differences and are back on an even keel.  I tell him, anytime he wants to kick me out of the van, I hold no objections and will give him my share of gas money for the rest of the trip.  We laugh about the nature of confrontation and drive to the Teton National 

Forest where camping is free.

Sweet lakes, sweet peaks, and we look at both from our ranch-side highway leading us east.  Between campsites (some wouldn’t allow fires) there is a pull-off for a glacier view.  There is no glacier and the information sign is scratched off.  I think, “Maybe because I’m not influenced by melting ice caps, I don’t feel like climate change is a big deal.  If I had a glacier in my backyard, it might be more alarming.”  Our destination for the day becomes a lakeside campsite off Gros Ventre Road that is closed, but only for collecting payment.  There are a few campers here and there, and we pretty much have the shore to ourselves.  After some Kung Fu and a freezing cold bath in the lake, we invite some neighbors for a drink and some music.  Brian is a dude with a cool black lab named Harley, and we hang out at the fire playing music and looking at the stars.  This will be the first time we’ve stayed somewhere for a day since Kentucky.

Wednesday.   This is our third week on the road. Pancakes in the morning and we wash clothes and dishes by the lake.  I climb the big hill behind our camp, to get a better view of the lake.  Jeff thinks it is a dumb idea, but I’ve been talking about climbing something since South Dakota.  I want to inspire more off the beaten path activities, too.  We did good Kung Fu while the clothes dried.  Brian and Harley came back over for dinner and chill sessions by the fire. 

More gathering wood and burning wood the next day.  That night we go to Jackson Hole, WY.

Friday morning.  The van gets an oil change and tires rotated after hittiing 5,000 miles for the trip.  While we wait for the van, we find a mom’n’pop pizza shop that tastes just like the Hut.  Afterwards, I get my dreads started at a lady hair salon (they started naturally a month and a half ago on the sailboat) and then we drive to Salt Lake City.  Jeff jumped down from the Idaho state border sign and sprained his ankle.  It’s late by the time we get to Salt Lake, so we pass out in a Walmart parking lot.

Saturday.  Jeff grabs a couple ankle braces in the morning.  He tells me people tend to stare when someone in their 20’s scoots around in a Walmart Rascal power chair.  I go downtown and sell some silver coins.  This is how I keep from spending all of my money too fast, otherwise it would have been gone by the end of week 2.  Jeff is having a tough time hobbling around with his bamboo cane, so we jump on Salt Lake trolley lines while Jeff helps me finish my dreads.  Eva’s, a tapas restaurant, was recommended and did not disappoint.  I don’t like Brussels Sprouts (sp?), but they were damn good.  At night we hung out with some wise, young locals at Twilite bar and drank a few Mexican Restaurant sized mugs.  With the van parallel parked right in front of the bar, it was funny to wake up confused yet convenient.

Sunday.  We tried driving to the super salty lake so I could dip my dreads and accelerate the process.  Much of the shoreline is covered by farmland, so I make salt water in a bucket.  We take Utah 191 through Arches Nat’l Park, past Canyonlands Nat’l Park, to Mesa Verde Nat’l Park.  There’s lots and lots of parks out west.  It’s dark when we arrive and we make ramen on the fire.

Monday morning.  Kung Fu and crazy views at Mesa Verde.  There are also ancient ruins from the Pueblos.  I think they sound dumb and am in a bad mood this morning because of how far behind I am on the blog.  (Seriously, I take this thing seriously.  Thanks for reading J)  Alas, they are freaking sweet.  We want to take a closer look, so go to buy tour tickets for 3 bucks a pop.  A young dude with a golden retriever walks into the ticket office.  The lady says, “All dogs must remain in vehicles in the parking lot.”  The dude tells her it’s a therapy dog.  She cuts him off by saying, “All dogs must remain in vehicles in the parking lot” with robot-tone repetitive precision.  Great.  One of these people.  It’s like her logic is so strong, she can’t move forward with new information or processes if something doesn’t line up with her programming.  I can’t take it and buy the dude’s ticket for him.  Aaron is a cool, cool dude and we hang out for the next couple days.  He’s on his way back to Denver to start several grow houses.  Colorado is a little different than Georgia when it comes to the general image of marijuana.  He tells us if he gets an edibles license, his grow capacity increases from 5 plants to 99.  We have an awesome dinner at a Japanese Steakhouse in Durango, CO.  Aaron buys a couple rounds of sake.  It’s a constant game to be more generous than our guest.

After dinner, we head to a nearby campsite where we meet more cool people.  Jenny and Nick are our new camp neighbors.  Jenny is training to become a Shaman.  Nick grew up in Argentina, spoke Russian his whole life and then finally moved to the states and has absolutely no accent.  He’s around 35, works at a ski resort and brewery in the winter and spends the rest of the year bartending, travelling and camping.  Even with his hockey player haircut, he’s so clean-cut, you wonder if he just stepped out of an American Eagle poster.  It’s hard to believe he’s been camping since March.  His power is only exceeded by his mystery-kind of guy.  Doesn’t share anything but good energy and a level demeanor.  Between all of our new friends, I have a waterfall of inspiration and information to work with.  After all, I’m shopping for some lifestyle design changes out west.

Tuesday.  Pancakes on the fire.  Aaron and I talk philosophy and physics until the middle of the afternoon and then he takes off for Denver.  The dude is like my partner in crime from a different time. 

Jeff and I talk about leaving all day and night.  We give the van a thorough cleaning and I teach Jenny some guitar stuff.  Jeff is exhausted and crashes before the sun falls.  I chill with Jenny til Nick gets off work at the brewery.

Wednesday.  Jeff and I finally leave Durango and Colorado.  The state is cool, at least the part we saw.  The residents have got style.  Every house and mailbox is customized, but not in the tacky East Jersey kind of way.  Lots of solar panels, lots of greenhouses.  You don’t have to cut the grass in southwestern CO.  It just doesn’t grow like back east.  My brother, Steve, and I have discussed many times the folly of maintaining grass.  Why would you spend money, time, and anguish on a crop that doesn’t benefit you in any way?  - Back to the story.  Colorado is truly a colorful place.  Blue lakes, glaring leaves (we are moving with the foliage now), and silver mountains jutting and rolling up the walls.  Not to mention all of the hippie inhabitants and classic cars.  It looks like Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder started a brawl in finger painting class. 

The landscape changes steadily to the desert as we head through the 4-corners.  I am not a fan of imaginary lines and see no reason to stand in four imaginary places at once unless I’m doing something noteworthy.  I think borders caused by the natural separation of people due to the landscape are cool.  I think straight lines drawn in the sand to say that sales tax is 7.3% here and 9.4% here is silly.  We don’t have to send troups to fight Santa Anna’s army for silly, meaningless straight line borders.  I guess that’s the West.  Used to cost a nickel an acre out here.  Probably talking out of my ass, but I think I’m on the right track. 

We are back in Indian Country and alcohol is a bit scarce.  We have been told by several people along the journey that Indian reservations are always dry, meaning no alcohol.  Aaron’s deduction is that they were only first introduced to alcohol when the white man came and have not yet adapted.  Europeans have been drinking for millennia.  Jeff is googling whether anyone has ever seen an Indian with facial hair that could hold his liquor.