What a trip

As many of you know, I recently decided to move to New Orleans. Everyone's asking me why and what I'm going to do here, and all of the obvious questions, so I thought I'd summarize, before I give an account of my voyage down. 

In mid-January, I traveled down to New Orleans with my friend Erik from high school and his coworker Aiden, just for fun. Here we are taking pictures of each other:

During that trip to New Orleans, I visited a wood shop where my friend Kaitlyn was doing an internship during her fieldwork semester at Bennington College. I met her teacher, Heinz, and he showed me around his shop and told me a little bit about his business and the apprentice program he is running. Here's an a link to Kaitlyn's section of the blog that Heinz has his apprentices keep. There's also some information about the apprenticeship if you're interested: http://blog.holzworks.com/p/blog-page_10.html. Also here is a link to an article about Heinz. http://www.nola.com/homegarden/index.ssf/2010/09/swiss_woodworker_found_his_cal.html 

When I got home to Maine, I didn't have a job or any goals, and I felt like I wasn't sure what was next in my life, so I started to get it in my head that I needed to move to a new place where I didn't know anyone, because I've never done that and it just seems like something that everyone should do at some point. So I emailed Heinz, and talked to a friend who used to live in New Orleans, who set me up with his old friend and landlord, Stanley, and within a couple days we had it arranged that I would travel down after Mardi Gras.

So now that I've explained that, I'll tell you about my trip down. On Sunday, March 9th, I set out in this cute little thing, driving to Providence to spend that night with some friends from college.

The next morning I set out for DC where I was hoping to spend Monday night. I had just gotten onto the New Jersey Turnpike, and was feeling good after getting out of a 2 hour traffic jam, when my accelerator all of a sudden stopped making my car accelerate. I pulled over and found that I could no longer start my car. I got it towed to this joint,

and took the bus into New York City to stay at my friend Hannah's apartment in Brooklyn.

I was hoping it would be a quick (cheap) fix, but it turns out that this is what happened:

That's a broken timing belt (and chain, apparently), and it would have cost $700 to fix. Sooo I borrowed another friend's car, got everything out of my car, and handed over the title to the garage, receiving exactly zero dollars in return. (That solution may seem drastic, but there were so many other things that could have gone wrong even after fixing that, that it just couldn't possibly have been worth it to fix.) When I got back to Hannah's, I opened the Craigslist NY rideshare page and saw that amazingly, a certain Sasha from the Upper East Side was planning to travel down to New Orleans for the St Paddy's day festivities, leaving on Wednesday or Thursday in his Mercedes Airstream camper van!

So Thursday at 3 pm, having consolidated my stuff as much as possible and leaving the un-essentials at Hannah's, I arrived in Manhattan on the subway. Hannah and I sat in a fried chicken joint imagining what Sasha might look like and how old he might be. He and his girlfriend Svetlana arrived sometime towards 4, and he looked like this:

At exactly 4 we were waiting in line to get into the Holland tunnel. The GPS said something like 19 hours till arrival. "This is going to be easy," I thought.

Well the van didn't really go over 60 mph, and the turbo was dying, so it slowed down to 35 or 40 going up longer hills. Watching the GPS when you are going considerably under the speed limit is a strange experience. It would say 17:50 till arrival, then 20 minutes later, it would say 17:34 till arrival. So then I would try to figure out, if we are losing 2 minutes every 10 minutes, then that means we lose 2 hours on every 10 hours, and then Svetlana would tell me to pull over at the next stop and Sasha would drive and I would go try to sleep and then 45 minutes later, I would feel the van stop. And we would be stopped for what seemed like infinity minutes, and then I would have to add that we were losing 1 hour every 4 hours for breaks. There were some points in the journey where I started to think, "maybe I just won't get there after all,"

And although there was a nice comfy bed up above where I was invited to take naps while Sasha drove, it was a little nerve-racking being up there when the wind would catch the van and it would jerk to the side, or Sasha would look at his phone and veer off course a little bit, and of course the radio had to be really loud so he wouldn't fall asleep.

There was a good stretch in there when I was driving from around 4 am to 8 am and they were asleep and I got to listen to podcasts on my ipod, munch on pretzels, and do things like this:

And finally, yesterday, at 8:15 EST, 28 hours, 15 minutes after our departure, we arrived. I didn't sleep a wink the whole way, which made it all the more miraculous to arrive at Stanley and Luis's apartment and be greeted by unfamiliar, but very friendly faces and be ushered into here for wine, food and sleep:

 It was an exciting trip, for sure. I got to practice my Russian with Svetlana, who spoke almost no English, and I got to listen to Sasha talk about things, and he even invited me to paint faces with him at the St Patrick's day Block party and parades, since that was the purpose of his trip. (I said maybe, then told him today I would do it, but he flaked out. We'll see, maybe tomorrow.)

I'm now in Stan and Luis's apartment while they are away in Mississippi for the weekend. Some vacation renters are downstairs in my apartment-to-be for St Paddy's, but I'll move down there on Monday. I will also head down to Heinz's shop then, and I'll get to really see what's in store for me. 

Missing everyone very much, but excited to see what happens next!