montucky

oh Montana, you tried to keep us as long as you could… Jake and I left North Dakota with semi-big plans to camp in Montana for the rest of our trip, but just approximately 2.5 miles before the continental divide, at about a million feet of altitude, Champ started to go very very slowly. We thought, let’s pull over and have a rest and collect some sage. So we did, and when we got back in we couldn’t get old champ to move at all. After a few tries we admitted defeat. We needed to hail someone down. And we thought we knew the universal signals for this; flail both arms in the air. That didn’t work and people seemed to look at us funny so Jake improvised one hand to ear like phone, the other hand beckoning, and me laughing at him. After a while this seemed to hit home for one giant 18 wheeler hauling a hell of a lot of bricks. This guy had chops that grew beyond his face and down to straggly ends. He had his 11 year old son with them. Yes, we got to ride a semi! It was like being in the cockpit of an aeroplane. And he even let us drink a mountain dew from the mini fridge.

sneaky shot with the phone

We had no idea what exactly our next steps would be and how far we were from the nearest town so we took the guitar and amp with us and our bag of nectarines and left Champ all alone as we cruised just as slow to the notorious town of Butte. Not butt, more like beaut. Sort of.

To cut a long and boring story about car mechanics short, we ended up staying in Butte for two days, holed up in Eddy’s motel feeling wacky from the high altitude, watching The Graduate and Showgirls and cooking on the camp stove. Butte is the only town in the U.S. where you can walk around drinking your beer (or whiskey) on the street ANYWHERE in the whole town. But this didn’t make it anywhere near as fun of a place to be in as New Orleans. Quite the contrary. The place was bizah. As soon as the new clutch was in we made tracks west, ready to go all the way back to OR in one shot.

mick's wrench house + eddy's motel = butte, MT

But no such luck, about 70 miles down the road, on our first gas stop, we noticed that transmission fluid was being splattered all over the underside of the van. There was a leak, and for those of you who don’t know, no transmission fluid means game over. At this point we were past Missoula and after a whole rigomarole of making collect calls and trying to figure out what the f we were going to do, we decided to backtrack to Missoula, locate a house known as The Laboratory and see if we could stay there for a night to get the transmission checked out the next morning.

impending storm

home chickens

hijacking the www

Luckily the kids at The Lab are great sports (and used to multiple guests out of the blue all the time) and we felt right at home. So we partook in a big pot of chili and I got to making vegan choc chip cranberry cookies with cayenne pepper.

cookies with a kick

Some other house guests were stopping through on a bike trip from WA on their way to the Democratic National Convention in CO. Meanwhile a heated discussion ensued in the living room, as I’m sure they often do, about the privilege of not-voting, parasites posing as anarchists, and community. Some of the concerned, passionate and complicated outbursts of conscientious young Americans today. Or it could have been the cayenne pepper. In the background, screams from the roller coaster rides at the Country Fair could be heard from across the street, and an incoming storm was blowing all the drying plants off the back porch. It was quite a turbulent scene and I’m glad we could partake.

"fuck this war"

We slept in Champ under the lightning that night and got stupendously lucky early the next morning. A nice mechanic hooked us up with what we needed and when he heard our story, took pity and gave us a discount and sent us on our way back to Oregon!!!! Where we lived happily ever after…(To Be Continued)

welcome back to oregon!

this is the face of gratitude