Mariposa Grove / Willow House

So, in case you haven't figured it out yet, we're settling in the San Francisco Bay area for a while. We found a co-housing community focused on permaculture gardening called Mariposa Grove (In case you're wondering it is not a commune, just a place where people have torn down the fences between their yards and started gardening together. They have a small communal space for shared meals, meetings and socializing and many of them are in the process of buying their individual apartments as condos). We are parked in the driveway of the "Willow House" (there's a large willow in the backyard) and use their bathroom and kitchen, while continuing to use the bus as our bedroom. It's pretty warm here now, so its not a bad arrangement. Mariposa Grove is located in North Oakland (near Berkeley, where people don't get shot as much) and an easy 20 minute BART ride (the BART is like the "T" or "metro") and goes under the bay to San Francisco.

Wine Country and San Francisco

Once back in good old Fairfield we were surprised to find that my Uncle Bob and Aunt Karen had turned into our own personal resident tour guides. Over the course of a few weeks we went to both Sonoma and Napa to taste at the finest vineyards, we toured great Fairfield establishments such as the Jelly-Belly and Annheiser-Busch factories (both providing free samples of their latest products). We checked out art galleries and sculptures, enjoyed fine dining (Bob's specialties of course), and were given a tour of Oakland, Berkeley, San Francisco and the Marin area. When they brought us up for a view of the bridge, Betsy and I both had the feeling of wow, we finally made it, we're in San Francisco, since this had been a major goal of the trip.





Karen and Bob have been the most wonderful, hospitable, and generous people. Letting us stay in their house for at least a month all together, and even offering up their condo for whenever we want to use it, including when Betsy's mom and sister come in to visit. Not only all that, but they are really fun people to hang out with too. We've already been back to visit since "moving out" and I'm sure we'll be back often. It's been fun to hang out with my cousin Chris and his girlfriend Katie as well. They took the ferry over to visit us in the city last weekend and we checked out Fisherman's Wharf and Haight Ashbury with them. It was alot of fun. Hopefully we'll be able to go out camping with them some time soon too, and try out Chris' new motor bike. . . if he lets us.

Whoo. So we're almost caught up with the blog. Next post, we'll tell you about the place we found to live out here and the job hunt. We need to download some pics first though. Until then, keep those comments coming. We love to read them

Mommy Nic, Daddy James, and Baby Oona

After Tahoe, my Aunt and Uncle were nice enough to drop Betsy and I off at Betsy's friend, Nicole's house so we could visit with her, her husband James, and their one year old daughter, Oona, who is very, very cute and a pretty mellow baby. She's mastered crawling and is beginning to stand up. She loves hanging out at the park, playing with toys, walks in strollers, and long car rides. Thus, we did a lot of these things and generally hung out with the baby. We also got to spend alot of time with Nic and James and did fun things like go to a local brewery for beer sampling (I liked the stout), walked around a lake at a state park up in the mountains, and had lots of picnics. We spent about a week with them in Placerville before heading back to Karen and Bob's. Here are bunch of pictures of Oona and friends.

Family Fun in Snow and Sun

The trip from Joshua Tree up to my Aunt Karen and Uncle Bob's house in Fairfield, CA was not very interesting or fun. We hopped from parking lot to road side rest stop for four days as I came down with the flu. Most of the time I spent huddled under the covers shivering and blowing my nose, or when we had to drive for a while, I wrapped up in Betsy's warm sleeping bag and sat in the copilots seat, trying to sleep. The most interesting part was coming through the passes in the sierras and seeing all the windmils. There were thousands of them. See, Californians are smart, they think, hmm. . . wind makes power, wind is free, wind is clean, wind doesn't cause cancer, we should have windmills and they do. Lots of 'em. The picture on the right is just one little section. When we finally arrived at Karen and Bob's it was very nice to have a non-moving bedroom in which to recover. That's pretty much all we did for the first few days we spent with them, for Betsy had come down with the dreaded Joshua Tree campers disease as well. Thus, there aren't really any pictures, cause we mostly layed around and watched golf. In the evenings we mustered up enough energy to eat one of the fabulous meals that Chef Bob created.

By the time Saturday rolled around, Betsy and I were on our feet again. Though still a bit sniffly, we were ready for the much anticipated trip up to Tahoe to meet my parents and brother for a week of skiing in the Sierras. We decided to do this trip instead of christmas presents this year, and none of us had ever skiied anywhere but New England before, so this was a special treat.

When Karen, Bob, Betsy and I arrived in Truckee in a very tightly packed car, it was beginning to lightly snow. By the time we had picked up my cousin Chris and his girlfriend Katie at the train station, gone grocery shopping, and waited for the house we were renting to be ready, there was at least a foot of white powder. Fortunately we only did one 180, and did not go off the road in the process. By the time my parents arrived in the Reno airport that night, a good three feet of snow had fallen. They wisely decided to stay in the airport motel until the next day. The next day it snowed all day as well and by the time the storm blew clear, I think four to five feet had come down. In Tahoe, they don't have plows, they have giant snowblowers.

So after the family all arrived safely and we weathered the storm, of course there was only one thing to do. . . hit the slopes. The mountains here are pretty awesome. I've never skiied places that are just so open, easily going across an entire mountain and back again before hitting the base. And that's just one mountain face out of nine at that resort. There were also a lot of bowls, which were alot of fun, and of course glade skiing is cool. Even the intermediate trails incorporated alot more trees to give you a more woodsy feel below the tree line. My only complaint was the sticky snow. It warmed up to the fifties after the storm and became quite sunny, so sometimes it was a little mash potatoey, and on one occasion, when jumping into powder, my skis stuck and I did a complete summersault, landing on my feet again. That is not an experience I've ever had in freezing cold New England. We also got to meet up with some more family. My cousin Mike just moved to Reno for a job as a resperitory therapist, and his folks were out for a visit at the same time as us, so we managed to catch up with them and do a few runs as well. Mike is a pretty extreme dude, having his own parachute and claiming domination of the mountains around him by saying, "I've done every chute here." FYI, chutes are scary, and if you mess up, you crash into rocks and then slide down a steep, icy cliff. I did one very mellow chute while in Tahoe, it was scary, but fun and I went very slow.

When we weren't skiing, because our legs would have fallen off if we skiied every day, we were finding other ways to play in the snow. Betsy, Kevin and I dug a twenty foot snow tunnel that doubled as an ice slide. Bob built snow sculptures and Chris, Dad and Kevin went on a very scenic snowmobiling trip. (does anyone else think hybrid snowmobiles are a good idea? very quiet so you don't scare wild life and fuel efficient for longer range in the woods). Anyways, I think it's safe to say we all had a blast and will remember this trip for a long time, plus we don't have a bunch of christmas junk to throw away now, and it was nice to see Kevin and the parents again. Here's some more pictures.

Hot and Cold Deserts

Ahhhh Phoenix. Phoenix was nice and sunny and warm. We got to see Mary, who kindly let us park the bus and sleep in her cozy apartment, which is actually in Mesa, just outside of Phoenix. We enjoyed meals together, played cards, and generally hung out and talked. Mary was also nice enough to let us ship a new veggie oil pump to her house, which was neccesary since our old one, designed for diesel fuel, was getting warn out by all the cold, thick veggie oil we had been pumping through it.

Mary gave us a bunch of good ideas for things to do. We went hiking out in some state parks, and for a drive down a very scenic and twisty road through the Superstition Mountains, outside of Phoenix. We also went to a ghost town and of course, saw lots and lots of cactii. One day we went out looking for veggie oil and drove all the way from Mesa to downtown Phoenix, checking out all the promising restaurants along the way and back. What we found: lots of disgusting and empty veggie oil dumpsters, and several with locks on them and signs that said, "If you touch our veggie oil we'll hunt you down and kill you and your family." I guess the rendering companies are feeling the crunch of veggie oil and biodiesel fuel. So, needless to say we gots no veggie. But we did get to see a boat show, and some wakeboarders doing jumps in an elongated kiddie-pool, using a tow rope. By the way, Phoenix is the most boring city ever. Almost everything in downtown is open from Monday to Friday, and thus, it being a Saturday, eerthing was closed. The city was so dead, you didn't even need to look both ways before j-walking across a five lane road. I'm serious, and this was in their downtown district. The only thing going on was the boat show, and I've seen bigger crowds at the garden show in Durham. So for your reference. . . warm + boring = Phoenix. Eventually, our pump came and we bid a fond and grateful farewell to Mary after filtering some warm veggie oil in our new (super heavy duty hard to fit in the veggie oil cabinet, needs it's own trunk-size plastic container, but could suck a donut through a burlap sack) pump.

We drove from Phoenix and spent the night in a rest stop on our way to Joshua Tree National park in California. When we arrived at Joshua tree, we were again running pretty low on veggie oil, and thereby stalling the vehicle. (For those of you who don't care about engines / veggie oil, don't read the rest of this paragraph. For those of you who do, and peraps know diesels and are wondering, how are you getting so much air in your system and not having problems? The answer is that if we suck air up from the veggie oil tank, we can purge diesel back to the veggie oil tank for a while, thus pushing any air bubbles out of the engine and fuel lines into the veggie oil tank, and simultaneously flushing our vegie oil filter with diesel, which dissolves waxes and makes it last longer). Anyways, when we got to our campsite we had to filter more veggie oil as it was getting dark, but what's this. Our super-heavy duty, expensive pump isn't working half as well as our old worn out one. Oh no! But the next day we called the guy we bought the pump from and got the okay to put the filter on the more powerfully pressurized side of the pump (to push the oil through the filter, instead of suck it through), and low and behold, our pump rocks as much as a super heavy duty cast iron pump with a 1/2 horsepower electric engine should rock.

Anyways, Joshua tree was really neat, and a place with one of the most unique landscapes I've ever scene. We don't have any really good pictures. But the place just had all these crazy rock formations and boulders stacked on top of eachother, just randomly sticking out of he desert. And of course, Joshua trees everywhere, which we do have a picture of. It was a fun place to walk around, even though it was pretty cold and snowed one day. We also met some interesting people. The first night we had dinner with a hippy couple travelling around in an old Dolphin RV. They were nice but it was a bit strange as the girl was about twenty and the guy was about fifty. They seemed happy though, so to each his own I guess. We also hung out with a triple (as opposed to a couple) from San Diego. We had a lot of fun with them, and they were nice enough to share some drinks, food, and a campfire with us. Unfortunately they shared their germs too and got us miserably sick.

So Where Were We. . .

. . . Ah yes, Santa Fe. Santa Fe is cold. We arrived in the mountainous city just in time, as we stalled the bus pulling into Beth's neighborhood. We had depleted our filtered veggie oil down too low, due to the difficulty of filtering veggie oil in the cold, and sucked up some air into the veggie oil lines. Lucky for us, the bus also runs on diesel so we switched over for the last half mile and pulled into the driveway weary and cold. Santa Fe is cold.

<--Santa Fe

Beth-->

While in Santa Fe we did many fun and adventurous things, almost all of them indoors, because Santa Fe is cold. We went indoor rockclimbing, watched Beth (remember Beth, she's Betsy's roommate from Scotland, we mentioned her several months ago in the last blog). Anyways we watched her play indoor ultimate frisby, she's very good, she can make frisbies do majical things, and she was nice enough to let us stay in her house, which was warm. Thus, we were able to filter veggie oil, because we put in her house, which was warm, and then in her bathub filled with hot water from our showers, which was very warm. So we were able to filter veggie oil, kind of, because our pump was dying, because it pumped too much veggie oil in the high dessert, which was cold. We also went hiking and it snowed pretty hard while we hiked, because we were in Santa Fe, and Santa Fe is cold. It was the bus's firs experience in the snow, I'm not sure how much it liked it. We also found some more veggie oil in Santa Fe after looking very hard all day and almost giving up and getting very cold, because, well, Santa Fe is cold.

Betsy in the snow & The bus's first snow.

By the way, Santa Fe is in the desert, in the south, in New Mexico. I don't know about you, but when I think desert of New Mexico, cold is not the first thing that comes to mind, neither is snow, which it did alot. In fact, it snowed so much, that we had to stay at Beths for an extra couple of days and her grandmother was late for her own funeral, due to the fact that it was also snowing in Chicago, where her funeral was. In addition to this unfortunate event, Betsy and I could not go to the Grand Canyon, as planned, since the Grand Canyon was officially covered in 3 feet of friggin snow, thus making it cold, and unsuitable for camping in a bus, not to mention a tiny tent.

On the Way to Phoenix (crossing the continental divide).

So we went to Phoenix, which is warm. First though, we had to cross the continental divide, which is cold, and very high, and snowy. So we did that, and the bus protested, because it doesn't like to start when it was -10 the night before, and the filter clogged and we were once again running low on filtered veggie oil, due to the fact that we were in the friggin high desert, which is cold. So we saw some cool canyons, and drove on some treacherous snowy roads and stalled several times, and eventually got to my family's friend, Mary's house, just outside of Phenix, which is warm. And it was very nice to finally be warm.