My Hippy Dream Home!

The Spring & Summer of '96

In 1991 I went to my first Grateful Dead show, and one of the many things I fell in love with that summer was the Idea of getting a school bus. At that time I was travelling alone on my motorcycle, with the exception of the occasional hitchhiker. I decided that if I ever found someone who shared my gypsy soul, I would buy a school bus so we could travel in comfort and I could still take the bike with us.

Five years and thousands of miles later I finally met someone who seemed to share my gypsy yen. After years of travelling alone, I was positively in love. I set out to find us a bus...

Thanks to the extremely kind people at the Clearwater YMCA in Florida, I weas able to find a reliable bus an amazing price. (Thanks also to DataFlex for doing such a bad job configuring the YMCA's new Compaq computers. If it were not for you, I would have never gotten to know the cool people who work at the YMCA.)

Here I am trying to get the bus road worthy before our migration to Georgia. It's a good thing I wasn't getting paid to be at the Largo Faire, since I was working on the bus during the entire last weekend. New battery, plugs, wiring problems... And getting rid of 16 bus seats.

I'd like to thank Goodwill in Largo Florida. I doubt they would have taken the seats had we shown up during business hours, but thanks just the same!

While on the road, I wasn't just slaving away at the faires earning pathetic wages; I was also trying to keep myself active selling web sites to crafters. This required staying on-line, of course. Info Haus in Tampa Florida was not only one of the coolest coffee houses I have been to outside of the San Francisco Bay Area, it is definitely my ideal for a non-office workplace. It's got all the essentials of the perfect work environment:

Our first visit was so I could find a place from which to work. Nearly every visit after that was to hang out, talk, and even sometimes work. If you lived or vacationed near Tampa and had not been to Info Haus, you missed out. I found the most valuable thing in the Universe there: Family.

Marietta, Larry, Jennifer, Christa and I are taking a moment so I can get my bearings. I'm somewhere in the smoky mountains, and only Marietta knows the way out of here. Marietta and Jennifer are showing off their new piercings. I'd put up pictures of Christa's new piercings, but I really can't afford that kind of traffic through my site. :)

We moved to California right about the same time Bristol Faire started in 1996. Given what my friends have told me about working at Bristol, I know I made the right move. Unfortunately, I didn't have the money to bring the bus with me when I moved. The idea at the time was to get to California, stockpile some money, and pick up the bus when I flew out for my high school reunion.

Unfortunately, that didn't work out.

One of my neighbors back in Griffith Indiana, Dan Burks, called the police and complained about my bus. I still wonder exactly what was his problem. The bus was parked in my mother's driveway, off the street. He doesn't have his house for sale, so his complaint to the cops about "property values" seems like the ravings of a man who measures his self worth by his possessions. Because of this, he will always be the poorest person on my block.

The worst part is that because I had to fly out earlier than expected, I missed my high school reunion and I wasn't able to afford to go back and get my furniture before I moved into my new place in August of 1996. Ah well, I guess having my bus on the block was just ruining the contrast of his flowers.

The bus is safe, though it no longer travels with me. It lives with the folk of Dancing Rabbit, a sustainable farming co-op in Missouri.

Thora, the gypsy lass, and I parted company years ago. Some say she still dances at the drum circle at UC Berkeley on Friday nights.