Niagra Falls: Slowly I Turn

After a spending a week w/ Mikey and Sara we headed off for Niagara Falls. We had a bus full of clean laundry and crossed the border into Canada after reassuring them that we weren't harboring any firewood cleverly stashed away in our little blue bus. It was my first visit to "The Falls" and I have to say, they're pretty impressive. We wandered around the waters edge and surrounding sprawl for much of the day and went into the casino to watch the poker and black jack players. We walked back by the falls in the evening to see the lights and caught the first Red Sox vs. Cleveland playoff game in a local bar before driving the bus into a near by nature park to spend the night. We've been spectacularly lucky when looking for places to camp and haven't had any 3 am wake up calls from the local police telling us to move on. Hopefully this trend will continue as we head south.

From Niagara Falls we stopped by the Butterfly Conservatory before driving west through Ontario and spending a few nights on or near Lake Erie. We took some wonderful walks along the shores and had a driftwood fire on the beach one evening. In Port Dover we met Vince Rossi, owner of Rossi's Place and fellow veggie oil-ite. He was kind enough to share some of his already filtered oil as well as some tea, coffee, pie, and conversation with us. We had a bit of delay coming back over the border as the guards brought the dogs aboard the bus to sniff it out. They were even kind enough to leave an abundance of hair scattered about the bus.

We've spent the last several days visiting with Shelia, Dan, Elizabeth, James, and Joey (of the Argue clan) who live in a quiet neighborhood about an hour from Detroit. One of our main activities here has been eating, though we have ventured out to do some bike riding, exploring, and site seeing at the zoo. We're about to pick up some pizza and settle in to watch the Sox game. Tomorrow we'll say hi to Elliot, back from Notre Dame to visit, and then start heading

towards Chicago. Hope all is well for all of you in the non-vagabond world.

Circle B to Mikey's

After leaving Circle B, we finally made it to wine country and tried some tasty organic wines, some of which are flavored with Chuck and Lynn’s pears and apples. We continued down Seneca Lake to Watkins Glenn State Park and actually spent $19.75 on our nights stay. We have been travelling for over two weeks and this was the only time we have had to pay for a place to stay. It’s amazing how hospitable and generous people have been on this trip. Americans really are nice people. The next morning we checked out Watkins Glen Gorge and its many waterfalls, tunnels, and pathways. We had a picnic in the park and then went to a natural food store to get soap and laundry detergent. Jyll, who runs “Good Grocceries,” runs her VW off of veggie oil, so she told us where to get some. We went and sucked up 3-4 gallon, but blew the fuse on our pump a few times because the oil was too cold. Fortunately we had filled up pretty close to capacity at one of the vineyard’s restaurants the day before.



(Betsy on a bridge in Watkin's Glen Gorge)





We left Watkins Glen around 5pm and drove three hours (quite a stint for us given the slow paced tone of our trip thus far) to get to Betsy’s friend Mikey’s house. He lives in Orchard Park, which is right outside of Buffalo. Betsy lived with Mikey in Scotland four years ago when they were both doing a semester abroad at Findhorn, an intentional community in Scottland. Mikey was out celebrating his younger sister’s 21st birthday in Buffalo when we arrived, but encouraged us to make ourselves at home. We made some dinner and drank some wonderful white wine given to us by Ron. Mikey’s friend Dave and his older sister Sarah came home and we had a fire before heading to bed. Mikey lives in a beautiful farm house that overlooks Buffalo, so you can see all the lights of the city from their living room, and on a clear day you can see the mists of Niagra falls.



The next day we went swimming at this really cool waterfall with Sarah and her dog Sasha. The water was surprisingly warm for October and it was a beautiful day (it’s a bit freaky how warm it still is, but it makes traveling much easier and more enjoyable). We jumped off the water fall and slid down the rocks for a while and then dried of in the sun. After we were back home for a while, Mikey arrived with his younger sister Becca and a bunch of food, including lobster. We made some dinner and an exhausted Mikey promptly fell asleep. We feasted on delicious eggplant parmesan and then followed Mikey’s example.

(Betsy going for a slide)


Saturday we awoke early and went with Mikey and Sarah to their friend Dave’s bakery. We helped bag and label the fresh bread he had been cooking all night (we may have eaten a bite or two here and there) and then brought it to the farmer’s market in downtown Buffalo and helped to sell it. It rained for the first time in days while we were at the market, resulting in a small amount of chaos with the bread and what to do with it. We eventually got everything sorted out and headed back home for a nap, a walk, and an awesome dinner, including homemade pumpkin pie made from a pumpkin from the Circle B farm. We went to bed pretty late after a pretty awesome day. (Mikey and Jori enjoying some pumpkin pie)



Today we spent the morning sleeping in a bit, planting ginseng seeds with Mikey, and mowing his field in preparation for the football game we will be having this afternoon. The sun is back out after a wicked thunder and lightning storm last night (which is quite an experience in the bus). Fortunately our roof hatch did not leak very much this time. Hopefully we will have an injury-free football game and everyone will have a good time. We will probably be heading out tomorrow or Tuesday to go to Niagara Falls and head into Ontario on our way to see my Uncle Dan and Aunt Sheila and their kids in Michigan. It’s funny; I told Dan that we’d be there in about a week, nine days ago. We have definitely been taking our time going through NY, but there’s really no need to hurry or anywhere to be. It’s nice to have a flexible schedule, because then you don’t miss out on experiences or meeting cool people, due to feeling pressured by time. Also, we don’t have to try to get veggie oil constantly since we’re not burning ten or twenty gallons each day.



Anyways we want you all to know that we love you and we appreciate so much everything everyone has done to help us before we left and while we travel. All the good wishes have definitely been following us on our travels. I have said it before, and it is still true: if everyone was as blessed to have friends and family like us, world peace would be attainable and brotherhood of mankind would be a reality. Thank you all for everything you have done for us, we are some of the luckiest people on earth. (sorry for the sapiness)


Until next time, lots of love,

-Jori & Betsy

Goshen to Circle B Organic Farm

So here's our first blog entry on the road. We haven't had prolonged Internet access, so we've taken a bit longer than we would have hoped to post it. We started our journey on the first day of fall, heading to Anne and Bill's house in Unity to pick up some veggie oil they had snagged from the dump for us. When we arrived it had been warming up in the sun so we were able to filter about four "cubies" worth (almost 20 gallons), which gave us an 80 gallon supply to leave with on our trip. After some goodbyes, we headed up to the Great North Woods of New Hampshire to meet our good friends Mike and Jen at the Deer Mountain Campground. It was a long drive up in the dark and we almost hit a doe on Route 3 that ran out in front of the bus, but an alert Betsy stomped on or newly fixed breaks (thanks Kevin) and avoided her, literally, by inches. We arrived late at the campground, where Mike and Jen (and fred) awaited with fire lit. After stoking the fire and enjoying some burgers and burnt squash cooked on the coals and some nice company from our fellow campers, we retired to the bus, which has the comfiest bed we've slept on in years.

The next morning we awoke to the brilliant colors of fall in New Hampshire. (Betsy and I were quite excited to enjoy a little bit of early New England foliage in Northern NH, VT, and NY's Adirondacks during the first week of our trip). We bode farewell to our friends, trying to grasp the weirdness of not knowing when we would see them next. We spent the day walking around on the quiet paths and dirt roads around the camping area, hoping to spot a moose (with no luck) and marveling at how small the Connecticut River is up there. After the rain chased us back to our campsite, we cooked dinner on our little camping stove, made a small smoky fire, and went to bed early.

In the morning, after cleaning and packing up, we gathered some water from a nearby spring and headed back down Rte 3. We stopped at one of the Connecticut Lakes and walked around on the rocky shore, admiring the colors of the mountains. After that we headed into Northern Vermont, spent the night at a wayside outside of Newport, and then continued on towards Lake Champlain. We checked out a few potential camp areas and went swimming in the Lake before finding a very peaceful and beautiful spot on Isle LaMotte. We stayed two nights at St. Anne’s Shrine, in their camping area and ended up not having to pay. We volunteered a little the morning we left by helping Louisette (this wonderfully nice French-Canadian woman who gave us some veggies from her garden) chop up a bunch of squash (including a 25lb. Blue Albert from her garden). While on the Island we saw some ancient fossils at a quarry and hung out on the quiet beach near the shrine. We made our first veggie oil score at a golf club just off the island.

The next few days were spent in the Adirondacks of New York. We have spent way more time in NY than we thought we would, but we keep finding cool places to go, and meeting really interesting, nice people. In the Adirondacks, we parked our bus on trail heads at night, and went hiking, checked out the awesome scenery, and gathered veggie oil during the day. So far our pump and filter system works alright as long as the oil is warm. Otherwise the pump will blow its fuse trying to push the viscous oil though the filter. We’ve only had to change the pump filter once, and that was after it filtered about 900 miles worth of veggie oil, and we’re still running on our original primary filter (the one hooked up to the veggie oil tank that’s wrapped in copper piping), which has over 1500 miles on it. Our only problem was when we accidentally overflowed our tank trying to flush out the veggie oil lines with diesel. There was a small geyser coming out of our tank’s vent, but we sopped most of it up, and the bus doesn’t reek of diesel anymore (we had to sleep with the veggie oil door open for a few nights to let it air out). We have talked to quite a few people about the pros and cons associated with veggie oil, and are waiting to hear that Bob and Lynn, who were kind enough to share their campfire with us one night, have purchased their own school bus.

(Our first major veggie oil score):

After the Adirondacks we ended up spending a night out in the country of New York in a rural pub called the Hayloft. We spent the evening chatting with the Hayloft family and managed to sleep through a late night pub brawl. As recommended by the owners of the Hayloft, we headed toward the Seneca Lake wine country the next day. Along the way we stopped at the Circle B Organic Farm in Lyons, New York to buy some apples and eggs. Three nights later we pulled out of the farm’s drivewayafter getting to know Chuck and Lynn Brucato, Lynn’s mother Jeanette, and all their cats, dogs, horse, goats, cows, and chickens. We got a full tour of the farm, ate a bunch of apples and home cooked meals (including seafood chowder with Maine lobster in it), watched a bin of apples get pressed into 62 gallons of cider, Betsy rode Lynn’s horse, we milked a goat, got licked by a bull, picked pints of raspberries, went swimming, collected eggs from the chickens, helped pack apples, and got a sense of the challenges associated with running an organic farm. I think I can safely say that Chuck, Lynn, and Jeanette have shown us the greatest amount of hospitality, kindness, and companionship thus far on the trip. I hope we get to see them again some day.

(Chuck & Lynn w/ us at Circle B Organic Farm):

Moedown

After a lot more working on the bus than we originally thought we'd need to do, we finally took our first voyage on Labor Day weekend. We had a few hitches on the way over while trying to devise a method of getting veggie oil into our veggie tank and eventually ended up in a parking lot in Manchester, VT with a three-foot piece of hose attached to the end of a funnel and a cubie (the large plastic container veggie oil often comes in). Jori especially was relieved to have a full tank. After roughly 330 miles of road and 27 gallons of fry oil we made it to Moedown held in Turin, NY.

Moedown is essentially a big party. Everyone gets together for three days and nights of music, dancing, camping, frisbee playing, etc. Among the bands we heard were: Strangefolk, Medeski,Martin, Wood ,and Schofield, Perry Farrel (formerly of Janes Addiction and a rather interesting character), Meat Puppets, Moon Boot Lover, and of course Moe. We had a great time and were happy to return to our bus and get warm each night after the music.

The trip home was pleasantly uneventful and the route offered exactly the sort of scenic drive that we hope to be doing lots of on our trip. We stopped at a few restaurants along the way in attempt to gather some oil and discovered that they all save it for someone already. This confirmed some of our suspicions that the veggie oil thing may have caught on a bit since we started discussing this trip a couple of years ago. We might have to be a bit more creative and spend a bit more time looking for fuel....or maybe we'll just start selling french fries out the side door of the bus!!

Workin' on the Bus

We're still working!! Converting our bus from a rusty, yellow, student-toting, deisel into a blue camper with a bed, emergency hatch that doesn't leak, and veggie oil fuel system has taken a bit longer than we first expected. This was mainly due to the painting process, though not the actual painting itself, which we did in one long day. It was the rust grinding, fiberglassing, bondoing, sticker pealing and scrubbing, sanding, resanding, washing, masking, removing of grills, lights, mud flaps, reflectors, etc. that occupied us for most of July. We've also been working on a bunch of smaller projects like building and intsalling a bed and cabinets, making screens for the windows, rigging the tank up for the veggie oil, and installing door locks.

We just spent a day and a half with a mechanic who helped us complete the veggie oil conversion and he introduced us to everyone at D'Acres, a beautiful organic farm run by a group of people who were kind enough to share their campfire and sleeping accomodations with us for a night. The conversion was on of the last projects we needed to complete before takingoff. We should be headed out on our voyage within the week.

Check out some of the pictures below.

The bus in it's original form:

Working on the bus:

The Bus ready for traveling: