Out and About

So, after battening down the hatches, we moved the bus out of what we have lovingly called "the hole."

This is a view from the hole...looking down the 90 degree bend in the driveway and out onto the street, where we have temporarily parked the bus.


As some of you know, this is what happened last time I tried to drive up this driveway:




(Note: Our fellow bus friend, Spencer, deserves a shout-out for his heroic manuevering skills that got us out of the hole in one piece this time around. Thanks Spencer!)

After taking her out of the hole, we went straight to Green Eye Automotive in Eugene, OR to have them give us an estimate for doing the veggie conversion. Spent the night. Turns out the dude who owns it sucks. Not only was he trying to rip us off ($3,900?!?!?!?!?????) but he made a point of being a flaming asshole to us while he did it. It was very disappointing to see so little respect for the ladies at such a "progressive" and "enviornmentally friendly" local business. F you, Clark! We're keeping our money and we decided to do it our own goddamn selves. And speaking of bullshit: before we drive it down to CA, we are going to need a new vent cap for the composting toilet. We discovered the hard way that driving with a vent open in 360 degrees causes a back draft. Imagine that...

So yeah, the new plan is to get new wheels and tires ($2200...yikes!) tomorrow at Wyatt's and leave Eugene and make it to CA on regular old evil diesel. It's not ideal. Truth is, we don't have the time or place to convert it here and we've got friends who are interested in helping down in CA so that would make it more fun/educational.

In other news, turns out the stovepipe industry is trying to poison you. After spending a lot of time last winter wondering "what's that other smell?" when I lit up my wood stove, a family friend (thanks, Greg!) let us know that they've recently started painting black stove pipe with nasty paint that releases noxious fumes when it gets hot. Real intelligent. When Greg was installing his wood stove, he spent a day calling around to find what he called "blue pipe" (the old school, non-noxious stuff that got replaced with black pipe) and was unable to find it anywhere. He settled for black pipe and spent an afternoon going over his new pipe with his propane torch to try to do its nasty thing before he put it in his house. After that, the smell went away.

We didn't think we could have enough patience to go over every inch with our torch so we decided to have a bonfire.




We left the pipes in there for a couple hours and made sure that every part of them glowed red by moving them around with sticks every now and then. Boonie, our spiritual leader/kitty also participated.


In still other news, the water mains up the street broke and created a river for a couple hours underneath our bus. Thank goodness for wheel chocks. Never thought I would see water move an asphalt street up 5 inches in the air or see an asphalt water volcano. It was pretty awesome. We also got to see a pageant of the city's International trucks in action. Very exciting.



Tomorrow: new wheels and tires! Bye-bye split rims.