Our Volksvegan Adventure

Here’s wishing everyone who has been following our adventures a Happy Holiday season! I procrastinated on my annual Holiday e-card, as usual, but of course I had to use a photo from our trip. The tree is a giant sequoia called General Grant, which was named “The Nation’s Christmas Tree” by President Coolidge. General Grant is the second largest tree (by mass) in the world, and is simply breathtaking. It’s obviously too big to hang lights on or even take a picture of in one frame!

We also visited the world’s largest tree nearby, General Sherman. These and many other giant sequoias only grow on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevadas – you can see them in Yosemite, King’s Canyon, and Sequoia National Parks, all of which we visited this year. They are truly amazing trees, able to withstand year after year of fires as long as some portion of them from top to bottom is left intact. As a result, many are hollowed out inside or have huge tunnels through them, making them a lot of fun to explore!

Seneca and I are on separate sides of the country this holiday season (our first time apart since we started our adventure in June), but we’ll be back together for New Year’s Eve, just in time to pack up and move down to California. Here’s hoping that mudslide season can wait a few more days until after our big move!

To all our family and friends who have made this trip possible: thank you for giving us a place to park or stay on our journey, letting us use your showers and kitchens (and even your beds), praying for our safe travels, and in some cases storing our stuff for six months while we were on the road. We are so grateful to have so many wonderful people in our lives all over the place! Now once we’re settled in a new place, we’ll be ready to return the favor and give our friends and family a place to stay while we play tour guide in our new home town. You’re all invited (just not all at once)!

Happy Holidays!

We spent a wonderful week or so in the gorgeous Mendocino and Anderson Valley areas. It rained on our way in, but every day after that was mild and sunny. In addition to looking for rentals in the newspaper and at rental agencies, we got to watch sunsets on the Mendocino Headlands and drive along the winding coastal roads and through majestic redwood forests. We hung out with friends in Mendocino and Boonville and even got a little disc golf and beer sippin’ in at Anderson Valley Brewing in Boonville.

The Mendocino coast is an amazing place, and we are happy to report that we will be moving to the area in January! We found a place to rent outside of Fort Bragg, a town north of Mendocino Village. It is on over two acres of redwood forest (shared with the land owner) with two bedrooms and a big open living room/kitchen. It will definitely be a step up from our bus! We hope to start collecting grease and processing it there, since we’ve discovered that it’s much easier to use waste veg oil if you have a place to store it, settle it, and filter it.

The climate and ecology of the area will certainly be a change for us Idahoans. The California coast is moist and foggy, although the sunshine seems more prevalent than in the more Northern Pacific coastline. Since we’re only a few miles from the ocean, we’ll have a milder climate and probably no snow during the winter, which is rainy instead. We’ll miss the snow, but we can always head east to the Tahoe area to snowboard or hike in the Sierra Nevadas. Change is good, and we’re ready to be settled somewhere that’s a little more laid back, conscious, and organic. Mendocino county recently banned GMOs (genetically modified organisms), which means most food is local and organic. We hope to eventually buy land in a place we can live a bit closer to the earth: grow our organic food, set up sustainable energy, and work from home. So moving to NorCal will put us a step closer to that direction, especially because there are many intentional and sustainable communities in the area that we hope to check out.

We will be moving everything from Idaho to Fort Bragg in early January. So while this will be the end of the epic volksvegan adventure of 2007, there will be many more journeys ahead, and there’s still much work to be done to our veg-powered VW.

We finally arrived in California after way too many days traveling. We made the mistake of going the long way, through Portland, and on our first day we were stuck in LaGrande, Oregon, due to a blizzard that closed the freeway. We left for Portland the next day and arrived at my cousin’s house in the late afternoon. We visited Roots Brewery, Portland’s organic brewery, with my sister, and left for California the next day. After stopping in Eugene for some Cozmic Pizza, we arrived in the Golden State, heading deeper into the coastal fog. The fog was so thick that we decided to camp at Patrick’s Point, and stopped in Arcata the next day.

In Arcata we discovered to our dismay that the bus’s temperature was rising, and found a leak in another coolant hose (those things are getting old, after all). We went back into town to replace the hose, and after Sen the grease monkey fixed ‘er up, we were on our way again. Once again stopping at one of our favorite spots from this summer, we had lunch and a beer at Lost Coast Brewery in Eureka. Then we were on the fast track to the Mendocino area, where we hoped to start looking for a place.

Last night we arrived at our friends’ house to a big veggie dinner (yay for cool friends!) and slept in the bus. We picked up the newspapers and scoured them last night, so we’ve been calling around, looking for rentals, and visiting them. Hopefully we can find one soon, although we’ve heard it can take a while to find a place down here. I guess we’re hoping for a miracle, and we’re prepared to do a lot of hard work to get it. Keep your fingers crossed for us and think happy thoughts!