We drove straight from San Francisco to Sacramento. In Sacramento, Ali and John dropped Peter and me off at the airport so we could fly back to Connecticut.
We both wanted to stay longer, but it was time for us to go back to engaging with the real world again. Peter had mandatory training for his job as an RA at Easter Connecticut State, and I needed to go apartment hunting and find a job of my own before the school year began.
Unfortunately, Ali and John’s journey on the bus ended shortly after Peter and I left. Just a week after our departure, the bus broke down again in Elko, Nevada. A tow truck took her to the town of Wells, where John and Ali learned that the repairs would cost nearly as much as the bus itself. The flew back to Connecticut. Anne Marie stayed behind–at least for now.
But just because the trip came to an early end doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth it. Any single moment of the trip was better than anything else I could have been doing with my summer. As trite as it is to say that I “discovered myself,” there’s no questioning that I’m more comfortable with who I am now. I’ve seen a lot of America, and I’ve figured out where I belong in it, at least for now. I’ve learned how I deal with stresses I would never have been subjected to otherwise, and I’ve experienced types of joy that I’ve never felt before. I know the euphoria of coming out of a sweat lodge, the rush of seeing the entire Grand Canyon laid out beneath you, and the relief of a shower after a week straight of marinating in blinding heat. I don’t know if it’s made me a better person, but I think so. At the very least, it’s made me better at being okay with myself.
Young people of America: travel. Do it before you have kids and a mortgage, or a career that you absolutely can’t take two months off from. You don’t need a school bus to do it. Just one or two very close friends and something with wheels. You can even convert it to run on vegetable oil, like ours; I’m told it’s not hard, and a friend of the bus from back in our hometown just did that with his own VW bus.
Don’t just go to one place and stay in a hotel. Couchsurf. Get a rail pass. Talk to strangers. Sleep in bus stations. Just get out there, and stay out there for as long as you can.
It may be uncomfortable, at times. You might not get much sleep, and you’ll probably smell bad. But the things you’ll see and feel, the people you’ll talk to, and the camaraderie you’ll experience with other travelers will more than make up for it.
One more thing: Thanks to the Center for American Progress and the wonderful Kay Steiger for giving me the opportunity to write about this trip, and supporting me. I was extraordinarily lucky to have their confidence, and I wouldn’t have had the resources to spend those nine weeks on the trip without them.
We had to cross the Blue Ridge Mountains in order to get from Virginia to North Carolina. I’m not sure I can do the experience justice — we departed in the early afternoon, and by around midnight we were still traveling down what seemed to be an endless, twisting road through what seemed to be the middle of nowhere in every meaningful sense. There were scattered houses and farms, but they were all scattered apart from each other so that each resident or family lived in isolation. Once we got high enough, when we looked up at the sky we saw clouds so close it seemed you could capture one with nothing more than a jar and a step ladder.
Everything about the mountains, particularly at sunset, was absolutely stunning. It wasn’t hard to see why there are a thousand folk songs about them.
Speaking of which, here’s a video of Ali and I performing one of our favorite old traditional tunes, “My Home’s Across the Blue Ridge Mountains,” while in the Blue Ridge Mountains. We’re more than a little rusty, so it’s not exactly the Doc Watson/Clarence Ashley version, but it was a blast to record.
Ali “Tycho Williams” Telmesani is an English major with a poetry concentration at UCONN, but his main focus these days is on writing and songcraft. In addition to writing a lot of poetry, he also writes and performs folk music under the guise “Tycho Williams.” Samples of his music and information about upcoming gigs can be found at http://tychowilliams.com/
[Editor's note: This is the last post in a serialized story about traveling from Connecticut to Minnesota to get the bus for the Juan Way tour. Read posts one, two, three, and four.]
On the afternoon of March 12, John and Ali finally arrived in Rochester, Minnesota. Kim’s brother picked them up in a car that practically resembled a golf cart, and drove them to Kim’s parking lot in Dexter, Minnesota, where the bus had been waiting for John for a month. To say that the lot was in the middle of nowhere does injustice to just how desolate its surroundings were. They could see it on the horizon from miles and miles away, and once they arrived, it seemed like barren infinity surrounded it on all sides. Despite its barren surroundings, the lot itself held hundreds of cars, in all shapes and sizes. John realized why it wasn’t a big deal for Kim to hold onto the bus for a month; in a lot of this size, another old school bus was nothing.
Kim, his wife, and his employee Brandon gave Ali and John a brief tour of the place, including the office with the famous hot tub. Kim seemed to love his job. He served them both screwdrivers. It was the first time Ali had ever seen John drink. Kim and his wife treated the two travelers to dinner at a sparsely populated, plain little local bar that night. Ali, drunk and exuberant, staggered back and forth on the steps to the door of the bus and called his sister, me, and his friends Peter and Melissa to tell them the good news.
Kim offered to let the two of them spend the night at his place, and Ali, yearning for a warm bed, wanted to accept. John, however, demurred for the both of them. After the seven-day trip to Minnesota, he just wanted to get back to Connecticut as soon as possible. What had started as a pipe dream to occupy John’s boredom was well on its way to becoming a reality. But the bus was still just a bus; John had a year and a lot of hard work ahead of him to convert the bus to burn biofuel, add cots, and prep it for a summer across America. It turns out the trip to Minnesota was the easy part.
[Editor's note: This is the fourth part of the journey from Connecticut to Minnesota to pick up the bus for the Juan Way tour. Read parts one, two, and three.]
The next morning, on March 10, the snow finally lifted. The three weary travelers were ecstatic. Laughing and joking among themselves, they hopped a bus to their next stop, Cleveland. They made it to the Cleveland Greyhound Station late in afternoon, with eight hours to kill before the next bus to Chicago. With not much else to do, they charged their cell phones and struck up a conversation with another guy waiting for a bus. He was about their age.
They didn’t catch his name, but he had a hell of a story: At barely twenty years old, he already had a wife, two children, and a third one on the way. He was an Army man and had recently returned from a tour of duty in Iraq, where he had earned scars on the neck, foot, and wrist. The young soldier said he had six more years of service ahead of him, with more deployments to war zones virtually guaranteed. Ali’s antiwar instincts took over. He told the soldier that he had too much to lose, and that his children didn’t deserve to grow up without a father. Instead, he said, the soldier should go AWOL, take his family to Puerto Rico and never return. He was persuasive enough that the soldier called his wife. She said it was a good idea, but before long they parted ways. Ali was never sure if he had truly convinced the soldier to cut out on his duty; but it wasn’t impossible.
The bus to Chicago arrived around 6:30 in the morning. John and Ali bid an emotional farewell to Jae before they hopped on another bus to Wisconsin. He told them he liked the song Ali had performed for him so much that he wanted him to come up to a recording studio in Canada sometime so they could record it together. Ali said that sounded like a great idea, but he wasn’t sure when he would be able to make it that far North. They exchanged contact info before Jae boarded his bus to Minneapolis. Ali has yet to catch up with him.
[Editor's note: This is the third part of a serialized story about the journey from Connecticut to Minnesota to get the bus for the Juan Way tour. Read parts one and two.]
They hit their first major roadblock when their bus pulled into Pittsburgh around 9:30 a.m. on March 7. The Pittsburgh Intermodal Station had temporarily closed, so the Greyhound bus instead stopped at a claustrophobic little building on the outskirts of town. Bus stations are rarely comfortable places, but this place was worst than most. It was directly under the highway, pressed up against a large brick wall on one side. On the other side, across the black Ohio River, they could see the silhouettes of abandoned factories, shadows of faded industry. As if to make their surroundings even more depressing, the makeshift station was right near a prison.
John, Ali, Max, and Jae were all eager to get out of Pittsburgh as soon as possible. But no sooner had they stepped into the station the local television station warned of a massive snowstorm that had blanketed the Midwest. Greyhound employees told the assembled passengers in the station that there would be no buses headed west for three to four days. They were stranded Pittsburgh.
As the night wore on, the station became even more crowded as more people came off buses from the east and found themselves at a dead end. Max, realizing that there was virtually no chance of him getting to Minnesota and back before midterm exams, reluctantly took the next bus headed back toward New York. Ali, John, and Jae, meanwhile, hunkered down for a very long stay.
Ali was particularly mortified by what he saw during his stay in Pittsburgh. Most of the people stranded in that station were extremely poor and couldn’t afford hotel rooms. Bus station employees provided cots, but they didn’t have enough for everyone. Eventually, they provided free cups of water as well, but no food. Ali, John, and Jae helped set up the cots, but practically everyone in the station came to the unanimous conclusion that women and children should have access to the cots first, and the adult men could sleep on the floor if none were left over.
For two nights, Ali, John, and Jae slept on the floor of the station. To pass the time, Ali began writing stream-of-consciousness observations in the Moleskine notebook he had brought with him. At one point, he wrote:
lonesome faces. you can tell they too have the pittsburgh
city blues. lou’s not here to sing us no tunes
but then again, pigs feet are very hard to come by round
these parts. us vegetarians don’t have a chance
It was his first experiment with poetry. When he later returned to UCONN, he changed his major from political science to English so he could study poetry.
On the third day, March 9, the three ragged travelers wandered Pittsburgh in search of something, anything, to pass the time. Jae and Ali bought some Captain Morgan, poured it into a half-empty bottle of Arizona iced tea, and took surreptitious swigs of it in a local diner. John, never much of a drinker, came along but declined a drink.
They didn’t go back to the temporary Greyhound station that night. Ali and Jae, sick of sleeping on cold tile, convinced John that they should split the cost of a room at the Holiday Inn Express. For the first, and only, time on that trip, John and Ali spent the night in a place with beds and showers.
[Editor's note: This is the second part in a serialized story about they journey from Connecticut to Minnesota to pick up the bus for the Juan Way tour. Read the first part here.]
On March 6, about a month after John had purchased the bus on eBay, the trio began their journey to Minnesota. Ali and John took a late-night Greyhound from Hartford to New York City, where Max met them at the station. So far, they were making good time; it seemed like they would be able to get to Minnesota and back in under a week, before spring break ended. They boarded a bus to Pittsburgh, feeling good about their efficiency.
On the way to Pittsburgh, Ali noticed that the stranger he sat next to was writing with intense focus into a notebook. Ali discovered that the man, Jae, was writing lyrics. He was a rapper, tall, handsome, and fashionably dressed; he stuck out among the mostly impoverished and disheveled bus passengers. He said he was originally from Nigeria, and spoke English with a thick accent. Jae was studying at Boston University and was on his way to Minneapolis to visit his girlfriend. Ali, a guitar player and singer that wrote folk songs in his spare time at UCONN, was eager to spitball with a fellow musician. Ali rapped some of his own lyrics for Jae. Impressed, Jae agreed to travel with the three friends as far as Chicago.
[Editor's note: The following is a the beginning of a serialized story about traveling from Connecticut to Minnesota to pick up the bus for the Juan Way tour.]
Flickr user somjuan
In January 2008, John Paganetti, a Zen-like senior at the University of Connecticut and a friend of mine from high school, started trolling eBay for decommissioned school buses. His plan, hatched partially out of boredom, was to buy an old school bus, convert it to a more affordable biodiesel engine, and grab some buddies for a summer road trip. The market for old school buses, it turned out, was surprisingly competitive. John was outbid for weeks. Finally on Feb. 4 he entered the winning bid of about $2,000 for a 1989 Blue Bird Conventional with an International chassis resting in a lot up in Dexter, Minnesota.
A couple days after John placed his winning bid, he talked on the phone the seller, a mechanic named Kim Wilson. Kim owned a massive used vehicle lot. He and his small staff would work on the cars that came in, negotiate the sales, and relax in the hot tub he had installed in his office at the end of the day.
Winning the online auction had been the easy part: Now John had to go halfway across the country and actually pick up the bus. But he had midterms looming and wasn’t sure that he would have the time to make the journey 1,400 miles west and back until spring break, in mid-March. Kim said it wasn’t a problem and promised he would hold onto the bus for as long as John needed.
Ali Telmesani and Max Wareham agreed to make the trip with him. The three of us had attended Middletown High School in Connecticut with John. Ali, a year younger than John, had followed him to UCONN. Max and I had both ended up in New York City; I study philosophy at New York University, and Max studies jazz guitar at the New School. I found out that they were going to be accompanying John to Minnesota when Ali was visiting Max and me in early February. I desperately wanted to go with them. The trip had always seemed like a distant pipe dream to me, but John’s purchase of the bus suddenly presented a road trip across America as a reality.
I am, first and foremost, a writer, and this seemed like the opportunity to tell the story of a lifetime. It was an adventure, perhaps the most ambitious one I would ever have an opportunity to participate in. Not only that, but it would give me an opportunity to travel more and see more of the United States in a few months than most people will ever have the opportunity to see. So when John asked, I told him without reservation that he could sign me up for the entire road trip.
But as much as I wanted to be part of the first leg of the journey to get the bus, my spring break didn’t line up with UCONN’s, and I had midterms to contend with. So John, Ali and Max would have to make the journey on their own, and I extracted a promise from them to tell me every last detail of the journey. That is what you are about to read about.
I'm Ned Resnikoff, a writer for Campus Progress. I, along with some of my high school buddies, will be driving a school bus turned veggie oil-fueled makeshift RV across the continental United States over the summer. We'll keep you updated on our trip and what we see along the way.
Pretty amazing that whoever wrote my FOL textbook doesn't understand the difference between "as large as" and "at least as large as."
about 3 hours ago from Brizzly
Someone good at that sort of thing should remake Nosferatu, package it as a Twilight ripoff, and traumatize a generation of filmgoers.
about 6 hours ago from Brizzly
