We have crossed the 6month marker and are preparing to set out for Portland, OR. We have had the most amazing time in San Diego and have met some truly wonderful people. Here's a recap of some of the highlights:
First of all I painted the other side of the bus, you can watch a time lapse of the painting process on my website:
http://www.johnsondaniel.com/News.html Now I just have to figure out what to paint on the back.
Ron & Stephanie have been amazing hosts for us and have not only shared their home with us, but also their friends, family, and a great deal of their time. They took us everywhere from the coast to the desert and even to wine tastings in the countryside (above photo was from the Bel Vino vineyard). We were very lucky to have found them and are sad to leave.
It was pupping season for the seals on the La Jolla coast.
Queen Califa's Magical Circle sculpture in Escondido.
We visited the Maritime Museum near downtown San Diego which included a tour of this Cold War era Russian submarine.
One of our hosts friends from the Burning Man community came for a weekend and brought his homemade travel trailer!
Salvation Mountain, it was just like in being on the set of Into the Wild!!
The structure on the left is an old water tower that someone actually lives in now! They have 2 dogs that were guarding the door inside, and they raise chickens in the open circular space in the middle of this picture.
Thanks to Mike & Genevieve, we were able to come out for a weekend at 'East Jesus' in Slab City to participate in a "sculpture slam". We made sculptures out of recycled materials, had a big pot luck, shot off fireworks and rifles, chocolate martinis, propane fire blowers... It was a pretty fun weekend that was in honor of the founder of East Jesus, a man named Charlie Russell who recently passed away. There is a great community of his friends who have stepped up and now keep the place running. We talked to them about the colossal solar system they have and some of their future plans. You can see a lot of the place in this video:
http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0 ... 53,00.html
When the owners of this bus got to East Jesus their transmission went out. After replacing my shortbus trans I can only imagine what it would have cost to fix theirs.. whatever it was they decided it was too much and decided to turn it into an art installation. They buried the back half and then re-leveled all of the tables and cabinets on the inside. There were people staying in it when we visited so I didn't get any good shots of the inside but it was very wild.
Several of our new friends are really good at fire spinning, another nightly activity while we stayed in Slab City.
Unfortunately, outside of the 'East Jesus' area most of slab city looked like this.. just lots of trash and abandoned torn up vehicles. There were certainly exceptions here and there but I had envisioned it being much different.
We have seen several urban gardens and one huge community garden here in San Diego. This one is Mike & Genevieve's and they taught us a lot about worm composting.
We explored the mud caves in the Anza Borrego National Park and got very dusty. The caves are made entirely of dirt, you can pick apart the walls as you go along if you want, very foreign to us since the only caves we have in VA are made of rock like the Luray Cavern. Some parts of the cave are so small we had to crawl and wriggle through on our belly for several minutes, not something to do if your claustrophobic!
After the mud caves we hiked into the hills and found some massive desert oasis's that were just amazing! Probably my favorite site of the trip so far.
The tread on this tire blew out just as we were getting off the highway to go see The Hunger Games. The inside tire kept going flat too so I replaced both with Geo-Track tires totaling $320 which was less than I expected.
To pay for the above tires I painted this mural for a guy building a man cave in his garage.. jealous!
OK OK ENOUGH!!
Looking back on the last 2 months its amazing how much we've fit into this visit. This coming week on our way to Portland we're trying to stop by the Cal Earth foundation and interview someone about their sustainable housing project, and then hopefully stop and see some Red Wood trees too! I'll try to do a better job posting more frequent updates so I don't have one huge one at the end. Thanks for reading! If you know of anything really cool to see in Portland or the surrounding area let us know!!!
The only place I've ever seen a no overnight in Walmart was in Flagstaff, and that was a marked sign when you entered. So we went back across the river to Troutdale, but not before blowing a trailer tire 
Its raining and late so I'm going to change that in the morning.. lousy way to end such a fun day. oh well. Tomorrow we'll be staying with a friend of a friend and hopefully get a much needed hot shower.
So I'll need to find another one of those soon and then this morning I noticed the right front blinker bulb is out... always something eh? At least we found a nice empty coffee shop to recharge in, I didn't even drink coffee before this trip but I've become quite fond of caramel lattes 
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