On The Auditory Road

After these relaxing days sitting by the beach, listening to music and a little paddling (a great British past time) I set off for Los Angeles, that city at the edge of America where all and sundry flock to become Actors, Musicians, Porn stars and much much more, all you could ever dream of is right there including crack, meth, guns and of course, what LA does best, plasticity.

Now of course not everybody there is that bad, really, they’re not, it’s just like with anywhere it’s those who stand out the most that you take the most notice of (naturally) but there is a nice normal population there who enjoy the sun and grow a lot of fruit and veggies.

After an agonizingly long train journey along the coastline (seriously, AMTRAK is shit, I’ll never bitch about British public transport again [for at least a week after arriving home]) I finally got to union station and had to try and navigate my way to Erica’s cousin’s house near Venice Beach (yet more time relaxing.) The bus took just over an hour and I finally arrived and was ready to do absolutely nothing for a little while longer.

I could go on and on about how wonderful Jo and her family were (which, of course, they are) and how it was wonderful to be mothered for a few days and actually have some home cooked food and actually eat some fruit and veg… but I won’t suffice it to say that it was brilliant being looked after, if only for a little while.

The only real event that happened other than hitting the beach and wandering around downtown (no i didn’t go to hollywood I’ve been there and it’s hell on earth) was go to the Museum of Jurassic History. This is the most bizarre museum I have ever been to in my entire life. It had no theme and it was only $3 to get into (which was actually a donation, i didn’t have to pay anything.) It’s worth looking into if only for it’s bizarre nature.

That was Los Angeles… relaxing and peaceful. O, and In ‘N’ Out burger is fucking sweet, if you can get to one, go to one.

So after all the excitement of Big Sur I needed to relax and relax I did, I spent four lovely nights doing absolutely nothing in sunny Santa B, well, mostly sunny… After the first night of being there I awoke to the usual hubbub that occurs around the breakfast table and hostels only to find that the hot topic of conversation is that there had been an earthquake in Chile and a tsunami was coming my way, and so, like any other sensible person I headed to the beach to await the oncoming destruction.

At the beach (barefooted and dangling a maddening array of beads - o what I hippy I’ve become) a few of the other residents and I watched the waves come in and nothing particularly fun happened. The highlight of the morning was talking to a crazy old surfer pot salesman who kept going on about when he was young.

I got a little high and walked to the pier with a different new found friend from the Bay Area and then it started to absolutely piss down - serious torrential downpour shit and so we sort of hurried for cover under a canopy at the end of the pier only to find that the surfer pot salesman had driven up (after offering us a lift and us declining) there already and greeted us again.

The tsunami came and there was a weird whirlpool for about 10 minutes and the waves did some pretty strange stuff and to me there were small sparkly rays of light coming from the water and I felt completely at peace for a little while but there were no giant waves or endless destruction and so in my daze I wandered back to the hostel (still barefooted [and now soaking wet]) to put on some shoes and hit the town for beer and a burrito.

In the afterglow of this disaster the only real thing we could do is get drunk to overcome the shock. I had made friends with a guy called Bridger from Las Vegas but he was only 20 so couldn’t hit the bars. We went to the local offy (sort of, America doesn’t have quite the same things) ran by a lovely Korean man who cared about as much for his age and I care for polenta. It actually made me smile inanely when he used my favourite form of age verification that I’ve not seen in England for a few years now.

“You over 21?”

“Yeah, I’m 22.”

“Okay.”

After a few beers and a long conversation about electronic music (something still in its infancy in America) and watching an hispanic looking man from northern California make a pipe out of a beer can and talk about how he was training to me a forest warden in Colorado we went to bed to sleep sweet dreams after our exhausting day.

So ends the wondrous tale of “The Tsunami of Santa Barbara.”

So there we were in the middle of nowhere with nowhere to stay, there was no way I could afford one of the nearby (without 20 miles that is) hotels or motels for myself let alone for Conan as well so one of the first things I did was go to the little grocery store that was there and buy some tarp with which we could at least lay on the forest floor so we didn’t get totally wet with dew.

We spent the afternoon with the locals and were offered a couple of tabs, we both took one each and had to wait for an hour for the effects to kick in. There were a few locals there that said they had done LSD before and would look after us and make sure we didn’t do anything too stupid (why I thought I was safe with a woman who hadn’t changed her trousers for an entire year I’ve no idea.)

The experience was amazingly intense, I thought nothing was happening at all for the longest time but then the giggles came… and the giggles didn’t go away for a good two or three hours, everything Conan and I talked about was the funniest thing in the world. After about two hours the guy who had given us the drugs asked if we were ok which, by that time, we most definitely were.

I knew that there was a possibility that I’d hallucinate but I was prepared and after a while I started to see a lot of random geometric shapes as the backdrop for everything I saw in flashing neon colours then everything started to just be more colourful in general and I understood for the first time why hippies like tye-dye clothes and the like, they are the colours I saw a lot of that day.

Aside from the normal stupid things you do when high which basically just involve talking absolute tripe and laughing your head off I also went to go and talk to the rosemary bush, it felt like she was connecting with me and offered me her little purple flowers which I was then “told” to eat, and so i did, they tasted of rosemary.

After about 6 hours of this we were both ready to go and relax in the woods wherever we could find to rest our weary little heads and after being given an entire pack of tobacco and a small bag of weed from a visitor who said he’d traveled through big sur once and understood what we needed to get by we hiked for about 20 minutes into the woods to find a secluded spot to put our tarp.

After sorting ourselves out and I watched the stars twinkle a million different colours above me (for I was still in the afterglow) we decided neither of us would sleep well as it was a little cold and we were still too hyped up and so we should smoke a little weed. We were both too far gone to roll anything and thankfully Conan remembered he had a little pipe made from half a corn cob and we filled the bowl up; one drag each and we were both back to where we began on the acid!

After about another 2 hours of various hallucinations and discussing them (you can see some weird stuff in the forest if you look hard enough/are high enough) we finally fell asleep only to awake the next morning completely freezing my arse off.

That day we decided to find the hot springs buried deep in big sur, it was about a ten mile hike and we’d already walked about 5 miles that morning getting to the start of the trail and buying supplies etc etc. We made it about 4 miles into the trail and realised we were both ridiculously tired and couldn’t continue so we just stopped. I had the best nap of my life on the top of that mountain in the lovely sunshine and the views were magnificent but the 9 mile walk back to camp was one of the worst moment of my life, I was fed up and wanted to go home but we couldn’t even get out of big sur let alone the country! We had originally planned to camp at the hot springs but we were told it was going to rain and if it rained too much the river would rise and we wouldn’t be able to get back across it and we only had enough food to be camped out one night. I felt like such a failure!

We slept behind a motel that night with our tarp, it was actually even colder than it was up in the hills as their were no trees for protection and we decided the next day we’d get the hell out of this place and we’d hitch hike the 200 miles down to santa barbara, we were both skeptical but would try our best.

When we woke up we had a boiled egg (the local shop sold hard boiled eggs for 50c each [random]) and a bagel and started our hitchhiking journey with our new made sign.

We got a couple of rides only a short distance each and were just outside one of the many camp sites down route 1 on the coast and a lovely lady picked us up very quickly and said she’d take the both of us down to Santa Barbara (about 130 at this point) and she even fed up peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch.

I would also like to make it clear taking LSD is not a sensible idea, don’t do drugs kids.

So after being driven up to San Fran all day I booked into a different hostel to last time so I could stay in the same place as my wonderful new friend was staying. That night we played some Foosball (she lost every time [badly]) and went to bed fairly early as I was shattered.

The next day Adiba and I went to the golden gate bridge which I didn’t bother going to either of the last two times I was in San Francisco and it was actually amazingly beautiful! We both walked over it as well as taking a drive up the nearby mountains to get some amazing picturesque views before heading back into San Fran proper.

I showed her around the Haight and Ashbury area, grabbed some pizza and met up with my homeless friend Conan again; Adiba didn’t feel comfortable around him so I didn’t stay long but planned to return again the next day to have a proper conversation with him. For dinner that night I had lamb’s brain curry, it was yum yum.

I woke up the next day with a new found mission to rescue Conan from the grip of San Francisco and all the ridiculous amount of drugs it had to offer; the amount of smack that was floating around the park was a bit scary and I knew he wasn’t into it and was a bit disheartened by the whole thing.

I found him, in the park, as usual and met some of his new (nicer) friends; the rest had skipped town and headed north because they owed some drug money to a dealer in the park. I asked Conan if he wanted to head south to big sur with me, he instantly agreed and we left within 5 minutes of it being mentioned.

We got the BART to San Jose (after wrongfully getting on a muni train and ending up God knows where) and while found direction to Santa Cruz, Conan spent 10 minutes panhandling for money for the bus which he got and off we went on another little bus ride.

In Santa Cruz we didn’t waste any time trying to get to the next destination, it was a horrible day and there isn’t really that much to do there anyway, in our ignorant bliss we decided we would walk to Big Sur not knowing that it was over 100 miles away. We managed to walk about 5 miles barefooted and in the rain to the next town of Capitola.

It was now dark and we were exhausted, to add to all this it was still pissing it down with rain and we didn’t have even a tiny bit of shelter. We asked in a deli whether there were any cheap motel’s around that were remotely affordable, there weren’t. I asked the deli worker if they simply threw away all their day old food at the end of the day (which they did) and he made both Conan and I big doggy bags of food to take away which i stuffed down as quickly as I possibly could. Conan ate his a bit slower given the fact he has a problem where he cannot swallow properly all the time and it makes him pretty sick.

We finally found shelter in a local toilet which for some reason locked from the inside (it was not just a cubicle but a proper room as well) and we spent the night sleeping on the freezing cold toilet floor trying as best we could to stay warm and failing miserable, we were completely soaked and there was no heat, Conan was actually warmer after taking off his soaking wet jeans and sleeping in his boxer shorts.

The next morning we awoke around 5am and let ourselves out of the toilet to make sure we weren’t caught by whoever owned the building (they were not public toilets) and started off our walk to the next town (still not knowing how far Big Sur was) and ended up in Soquel after a couple of hours walk.

After receiving directions from the gas station clerks we now knew the position we were in and how ridiculous it was that we were going to walk it and so walked off with our large coffee’s and got the bus to Watsonville where we got the bus to Monterey where we got the bus to some crossroads near Carmel where we went to CVS Pharmacy bought some card and a Sharpie and wrote ourselves a nice hitch-hiking sign simply saying BIG SUR and a nice smiley face. After doing this and eating some croissants we found on the floor (in a box with one missing) we tried flagging down our first car.

The very first car I showed the sign to picked us up and drove us both about 6 miles down the road where he apologised he wasn’t going any further but that where we were was a good spot to be picked up. It was about another 45 minutes until our next ride which was with an old school hippy in his old school jeep and took up just past Bixby Canyon Bridge where we waited about 5 minutes until our last ride.

the last guy that picked us up didn’t talk much and had to move over some chicken coops he had in the back so Conan could fit in, as soon as he started driving he smoke very little and simply turned up the volume on the country music he was listening to, very old style country music which fit the situation perfectly, the whole ride was just amazing.

He dropped us off in Big Sur village (which was about 10x as small as I thought it would be) and said his goodbyes and there we were, in the middle of nowhere with no way out other than to hitch-hike 80 miles to the nearest village (we sure as hell weren’t going backwards!) and we were greeted whole heartedly by a few locals who lived in the woods and looked forward to out time sleeping in Big Sur…

So I took the ride on Craigslist for $20 and headed on down south for some warmer weather and a bit more of a relaxing time. I turned up at the hostel (which I stayed at last year) and got myself a bed and got a nice little discount on the side as well.

I spent the day doing not that much and spent the evening getting extremely merry, dancing with a beautiful girl from Ecuador and then being pulled out of the bar by my new found english friend Ian because I was being eyed up and talked about by her hispanic friends.

the next morning started with a hangover (shockingly) so I did equally little that day and in fact did absolutely nothing that evening as well, I had a nice long philosophical discussion with some of the others that were staying there and that’s about it.

I spoke for a little while with a very pretty girl from Birmingham (yes I realise this is usually an oxymoron) who offered me a lift back up the San Fran the next day for free and so I took it and back north I went…

So after finally arriving, not before the longest and most dull bus journey of my entire life I headed to the Green Tortoise hostel to see if they had a room, they did, I went and dumped my stuff in my room.

I wasn’t really feeling San Francisco at all, i don’t know why, maybe it was because of everything that happened in Denver and the fact that I didn’t really want to leave in the first place but whatever the reason I knew I wouldn’t make the most of it. I spent the evening helping the hostel to cook dinner for everybody and made a few new friends (surprisingly all British) and got offered to buy some weed from the paid cook there to which I declined.

After getting fed and what not I really couldn’t be bothered to do much so I headed to Specs, a bar that Jack Kerouac used to go to opposite Versuvio’s (another one Jack Kerouac used to go to) and had a couple of pints to ease my sorrow, after getting tipsy enough I went back to my less than comfortable bed and slept for a few hours.

The next day I decided to see if I could find Conan the boy from the bus in Kansas in Haight and Ashbury which is where he said he’d be sleeping rough. I walked the however many miles it is from the hostel and after initially having no luck found him on the outskirts of golden gate park sitting inside a planter.

I said hello and was giving a funny squinty eyed look before his face changed for the better and he was seemingly excited to see me (he looked a lot worse for ware than when I last saw him) and introduced me to his street kid friend TJ. It turned out that TJ was selling weed and using the money to look after both himself and Conan and they were to head north on Monday to Eureka by whatever means possible.

I spent the day with these two and a female street kid and drank cheap red wine in the beautiful beuno vista park while I caught up with Conan and she smoked opium (from which I stayed well away from.) It seemed quite obvious that Conan didn’t find what he was looking for here at the end of the world as I suspected he wouldn’t and I genuinely felt bad for him. It seemed both him and I would have to continue looking for whatever the hell it is we’re trying to find.

After this exhaustive day I returned home after promising them I would return tomorrow and sleep with them in the park that night; this wasn’t to be though as I found an offer of a ride for $20 on Craigslist down to sunny Santa Barbara early the following morning…

The bus ride between Salina, Kansas and Denver, Colorado was not even in the least remarkable. It took around 8 hours and my ticket wasn’t even checked which actually annoyed me a little bit because had i just not bothered to buy one I would be $85 better off right now which I could spend on a wide variety of things ranging from alcohol to booze.

As I arrived i was thoroughly disappointed, I expected to see huge mountains and snow capped peaks with a sense of awe and admiration not equaled since travelling through the alps at age 5 but alas, it was dark and all I saw was suburban street lights and passing cars.

I stepped off the bus and into the cool evening. It was around 7pm; I had a place to stay with a girl called Delia and I had the directions to her house, and, being in and American city it was easy to follow as everything’s in grids (practical and charmless all in one fell swoop.)

As usual I had no idea what to expect as I was in a city I didn’t know meeting up and staying with a girl I did not know and in a different time zone; mountain time. As I traversed the long straight streets of Denver I came to the sudden realisation I was literally the only person about, it is a huge city and I was the only person in sight; either nobody came out at this time of night on a Sunday which in itself it highly probably or I was about to get stabbed, erring on the side of non-caution I sort of frolicked through the streets singing to myself for about 15 minutes before seeing my first stranger and continued my walk in a regular fashion.

As I arrived at my destination I phoned Delia and she picked up not knowing who on earth was calling (but twigging in fairly swift fashion) because I had text earlier but it had not gone through and I was using my new American cell (as my blackberry died [this means I have no camera either.]) She came to the door in all her loveliness and lead me up to her apartment where she was cooking and her friend was slumping on the couch.

We ate a bizarre mix of old goats cheese, pasta, spinach and tamarind sauce and then smoked some “tea” and put some of the world to rights before heading to the bar to have a couple of drinks. Drinks were drunk and we headed back to smoke more tea and i listened to some of her wonderful poetry (of course accentuated by my current high) before eventually passing out on her bed, getting woken up and being told my sofa bed was ready to sleep on (damn!)

Morning came and breakfast was made, eggs and fakon (not a type, work it out) and we decided to go to Boulder which is a little town outside Denver itself. We got the bus and I said I had no money to shop and she didn’t either so we started walking and kept walking until we found ourselves part way up a mountain, my this of course I mean a very small way up a mountain… possibly a hill, either way, it was part of the Rockies (which i finally saw properly on the way out on the bus and by God they are remarkable!)

We plonked our weary souls down on a tree trunk, it was the most beautiful tree which had obviously died not too long ago and was still huge and powerful but without it’s life, just a reminder of its 100’s of years of life. We smoked more tea and everything seemed completely perfect, the setting was beautiful and we were both talking and talking and that’s so important and so rarely done with any importance nowadays and yes, I did want to make her under that tree but I didn’t, we went for pizza instead.

We headed home after filling our bellies (always home to me, I always feel at home even though right now I really don’t have one, maybe I am my own home?) and listened to music, Bon Iver to be precise we also briefly went to a bar with her flatmate but headed home quickly as the music was shit and she was killing the vibe, she was a nice enough girl but a polar opposite to Delia and I. In the smoky room we listened and listened and talked and talked and explained to each other ourselves and our wants and everything was talked about, she lay down and said I could lay next to her if I wished, I didn’t need to be asked twice.

I held her close and just lay there talking, still, quieter now, so that the esses seemed sweeter and all others less harsh. Having spent more time than ever before by myself in the past 3 weeks just having somebody to hold was the greatest possible feeling at that time; no matter how happy or content someone can be by themselves the soft touch of a woman (or man) cannot be beaten. I kissed her on the ear then we kissed on the lips… I held her tight and went to sleep only to wake up in the same place… happy… and now? Now I am at the end of the world 27 hours away by bus, alone… large lonely unforgiving San Francisco.

It’s been quite a while since my last post things have just been ridiculously hectic so I will try to explain all that happened in Kansas in as few words possible before moving onto more recent events.

The first thing that happened was that my cousin fed, watered and washed (not literally) me. Then came the great debate as to what to do with my nigh-on week in Kansas; my blood cousin was away on business so I was going to wait until he got back until I moved on.

The kids were really excited to see me and a fair chunk of my time there was spent playing a wide variety of card games and then relaxing in the evenings by drinking margarita’s (that’s really not a bad way to live life.)

I was shown all around the local area as well as the local university which is K-state and tried some of the ice cream made by the students there who do dairy studies (or something equally bizarre.) I then bought a new notebook and other very exciting things like consuming enough mountain dew in a week for an entire family.

The house was just a small “house on the prairie” deal which was in the middle of construction which simply added to the fun, it was so cosy and family like and my cousins even gave up their bed so I could have some decent sleep after staying on couches for so long.

I went to the daughter’s 4H meeting (which was previously unknown to me) and it was basically a farming version of boy scouts or brownies and the whole thing was just a little bit bizarre but it was certainly an experience and I managed to get a couple of games of solitaire out on my I-pod.

I was taken for lunch on Taco Tuesday to a bar called Kite’s by my cousin with some of her friends who were at the 4H meeting last night. The taco’s were terrible but the conversation was amazingly interesting and it ranged from shooting things to squirrel Auschwich and ended up getting invited to one of their houses for breakfast the next day to see their farm and again later in the evening to shoot guns with the husband.

Later that day we went out for a drive and my cousin suddenly stopped the car and told me to change seats and that I was driving. I had never driven in my entire life let alone drive an SUV with a family in it down dirt tracks! I did ok though.

So I arrived the next morning with my cousins and we ate a lovely but strange combination of French toast, sausage, fried potatoes and strawberries; apparently there is no differentiation between sweet and savory in this country! After this I went to see the little baby goats and the chickens and the pigs and the cows.

We all went home and did not a lot for the afternoon then returned in the evening and I was presented with a 9mm pistol, a rifle and a shotgun and was told I could try shooting them all, so I did. This was crazy and scarily fun; I was only shooting at an old piece of wood but it was still exciting and the shotgun especially had a hell of a lot of power in it, so much so that I nearly fell over!

I also went to a cheese factory and was given free cheese purely because I was English and went to a wine making place where they made pretty disgusting wine, apparently their speciality was elderberry wine but in reality their speciality was bad wine, the jalapeno jam was ok though.

When my other cousin Phillip arrived home we spent the evening catching up from the last 7 years and decided the next day we’d do really touristy things. That evening I ate a good 2lbs of Rib Eye steak which was quite possibly the best in my life, all locally raised of course.

So the next day comes and we drives for hours upon hours, I have my first ever Dairy Queen and visited not only the geographical centre of the United States of America but also the world’s largest ball of twine; it was quite a day.

By the time the evening came I was dropped off in Aggieville which is the student nightclubby kind of area to have a good last night in Kansas, shockingly I got very drunk. I started off drinking beer which turned into drinking margarita’s which turned into eating a Burdogcon (a hotdog wrapped in burgermeat wrapped in bacon) which turned into getting called a liar because my accent was obviously put on (Wtf?) which turned into getting a lift home, buying eggs for the following breakfast then passing out on the bed.

By morning I was fairly hungover this was completely remedied by Phillip making breakfast burritos which were absolutely delicious and I was all set for my next adventurous greyhound ride which was lead me to Denver.

After sulking inside the bus station for a good hour and a half the bus finally arrived (late) and started its way out of Chicago headed towards St. Louis. The bus driver was your typical Greyhound jerk; talking was as good as forbidden and your life was in their hands so help you God if you did anything out of place.

St. Louis was my home for another 2 hours as the bus we were originally on was broken so we had to change buses but there wasn’t another one right away, or so they said. It all seemed a little bit odd as the bus we finally got on was the one that had been sitting outside the station the whole time anyway. I didn’t feel too bad about this as a guy i got talking to called Conan had been stuck inside one of the buses for 15 hours going nowhere 2 days previously and had to sleep in the terminal the night before. Apparently there was a scattering of military cots for some of the stranded to sleep in but they were all taken  before most people got there and there was no security so lots of people ended up getting robbed.

This bus finally got going and it was another four hours (it had already been six hours to St. Louis) until Kansas City. I sat by the window and was shortly followed by my new friend Conan. It turned out this kid was crazier than I was. He had spent the previous winter months working on  mushroom farm in Vermont trying to save enough money to buy a bus ticket to the west coast; San Francisco primarily. This kid was one of thousands of young Americans who will give up anything for a dream, the hope of something better at the other side of the country.

He had absolutely nowhere to stay when he got to San Fran nd only about $60 left in his wallet but was one of the most opitimstic people I’ve ever met, he simply knew he was going to be ok and if it wasn’t, well, that didn’t matter anyway it was worth it for trying. I really hope he finds what he’s looking for on that coast just like I hope I do.

I finally arrived at Kansas City and i started to worry about where I was actually going. The bus left and a nice lady bus driver took over from the cranky man and the last two hours to Junction City were actually pleasant. The view got more and more rural as the city turned into slightly populated suburbs (they weren’t really populous to be called ‘burbs) and then into nothingness just snow covered prairies.

The bus turned off of the highway and inside a gas station and Conan and I laughed about this being my stop in the middle of nowhere; it was literally just a gas station! This all became a bit less funny when the bus driver called out “Junction City! Nobody get off the bus except the one guy for Junction City!”

I quickly grabbed my bag and made my way off the bus with every other passenger staring at me as if I was some kind of crazy man and there I was in the middle of nowhere. My cousin waved to me and I hopped up into her SUV and thus begun a bizarre but wonderful series of events…