San Francisco!

Did you know they make you pay to get in? I guess they think it’s like Disney Land. It’s not.
So after we paid to get in and crossed the bridge, we experienced quite an experience and collected a lot of stories.
San Francisco wasn’t for us.
But the event was good, and the people surrounding the event were great.

We met Erik and Laura-Marie and they were so nice. We liked them. The collaborative cook zine, “Please Pass the Plants” that we made with Laura-Marie was our best selling zine.

We also had a meal with John Morlino. He is a writer and activist. He tackles important issues, and tries to make the world better. Talking with him was enjoyable and meaningful.

Later that night, and throughout the weekend, we hung out with John Bobst (pronounced with a long o) and his friends. They were awesome. John was a lot of fun to be around. He’s like a big Mexican wookie. Can we say Mexican? Is that PC? I guess Jen can. But he really is. He let us borrow his seller’s permit when we forgot ours at the evil motel. But it turned out we could just write in a fake number, so we did that. We’ll definitely be drawing John in the near future. He is kind, friendly, funny, talented, and cool.
We’ll be updating our links page tomorrow so you can find his information there. That is if all goes as planned. If not tomorrow, then very soon.

Unfortunately, we were too busy and stressed to take pictures. Also, our time there was chaos, and we didn’t have the time to find the good of San Francisco.

Next is Los Angeles.
So… from the frying pan to the fire?
We’ll be staying with Jen’s friend Rosie. Hopefully we’ll be avoiding the inherent chaos of another huge city and be able to regroup, organize, do some laundry and stuff like that.

We’re in Sacramento, CA now. This weekend is the San Francisco Zine Fest! It’s hot here! Three nights ago we were freezing in Oregon but since entering California, it has gotten a lot warmer!

We had breakfast in Ashland, OR yesterday (birthplace of Kurt). There, we learned that Ashlanders call homefries, “homers”.

Not long after we crossed over into California, we stopped for some hiking at the Castle Crags State Park. I think it was near Delsmuir, CA. The pictures below are from the park.

We slept in Redding, CA last night. While we waited for the night air to cool we went to the movie theater across the street and saw, Inception. Jen’s friend, Kerri recommended it. She loved the movie, we just thought it was ok.

Two nights ago we stayed at a motel in Medford, OR. We think it was called, “Budget Lodge”. We chose this place because Jen had a coupon from a travel guide. We use these coupons all the time. The motel owners never like it when Jen pulls out her book of coupons but they have always begrudgingly honored them. Until…

The Budget Lodge owner’s teenage son was working behind the counter. We went in the office, was told they had rooms available and then presented the coupon. The kid said it would be ten dollars on top of the coupon price because it was summer time. MC was not having that. No where on the coupon did it say anything about summer time. So finally the kid agreed to honor the coupon.

We paid for the room, went in and it looked pretty nice. Definitely worth the coupon price. We decided to relax for a while and turned on the TV. However, most of the “cable” channels were blocked by something called a V-chip. It wasn’t like we were trying to watch anything “adult”. Even shows rated PG or G were being blocked by the V-chip. MC called the front desk and asked how to deactivate it. They gave him a code that didn’t work at all. So that was pretty lame.

In the morning Jen woke up earlier than MC and went to take a shower. But the shower didn’t work! Warm water would run out of the faucet but when she pulled the little thing to turn on the shower, freezing cold water would drip out of the shower head. So we both had to take baths. And while baths are fine and they have their place, we were pretty grungy and needed a good scrubbing so a bath hardly cut it.

And the jerks had a 10:30 check out time! The standard is 11:00!

I guess the dishonesty was the worst part. Trying to get extra money out of us illegitimately. If you don’t want to honor a coupon, don’t produce the coupon. For that reason alone, don’t stay at the Budget Lodge in Medford, OR.

We crossed a little stream!

We scooped up some stream water and washed our faces. That water was ice cold!

The Castle Crags!

We took kind of the round-about route and it took us about 2 hours to get to the point where we could see the castle crags. There was a route that went way way up the mountain to a point between two crags, but we weren’t so ambitious.

The park was so beautiful! We had a lot of fun walking around these woods! It made us want to do more hiking around Austin when we get back.

Hi everyone! We’re almost out of Oregon. We have enough gas left to drive the remaining 27 miles to the border without having someone else pump our gas again. Awesome. MC hated that about Oregon.

So far MC likes Wyoming the best and Jen probably likes Oregon the best, but Utah and Wyoming were really nice too. Idaho sucked. We paid a lot of money for gas there. When we get back to Austin and can use our scanner, we’ll show you guys how bad we got ripped off. MC says it was more like butt rape.

Unfortunately we were too busy at the zine symposium to take any pictures of the event but we’ll hunt some down on Flickr at a later time and maybe share some good ones.

Here’s a bunch of pictures from yesterday and today.

These are from the Japanese garden we went to in Portland. It was incredibly gorgeous there!

After we left the Japanese garden we drove downtown to the Lan Su Yuan Chinese Garden. I guess we were garden crazy that day. Here are some pictures from there.

Both gardens were really beautiful but I think we liked the Japanese one more. The Chinese one was so in the middle of the city that the sound of traffic and seeing tall buildings poking up everywhere kind of took away from our time there.

Then last night we slept at a roadside rest area that was so pretty, I had to take some pictures. We felt like we were sleeping in a quiet forest instead of next to the highway!

Today on our drive south out of Oregon, we stopped at the Douglas County Museum of Natural & Cultural History in Roseburg, OR. It was fun to walk through. We just wished there hadn’t been so much taxidermy!

A guy sitting in his logging shack.

This was a replica of a tiny one-room cabin settlers made when they first arrived in Oregon in the fall/winter when they needed a shelter fast.

A lady in her general store. It had stuff like: rice, beans, sewing kits, candles, fish hooks and buttons.

This guy was the creepiest of their mannequins!

Well that’s enough of the pictures for tonight. We’ll be stopping to check out Ashland, OR tomorrow (birthplace of Kurt) and then on to California. See you guys later!

We’re still having a great time on our trip! The Portland Zine Symposium was even better the second day. A lot of ButterSword and Plant Life has been dispersed around the Portland area. We sold a bunch and we have an entire bin of zines that we traded for. When we get back to August in a few weeks we’ll have time to go through them and contact some of these zine makers. Maybe we’ll do some guest comics.

Today we’re going to explore the Japanese Gardens of Portland and the Lan Su Yuan Chinese Gardens in Portland. Hopefully we’ll get ourselves a little zen.

Here are a few pictures we’ve taken around Portland.

An art car! We love art cars! MC says, “Apparently this is what happens when you leave your car parked overnight in Portland.” This particular art car had all the stuff MC likes. Namely, toys and science fiction stuff.

There was a huge farmer's market happening on the PSU campus when we arrived for the zine fest on Saturday morning. It was great! They had lots of farm fresh food and a guy playing music on a metal bowl! Unfortunately many people wandered in to the Portland Zine Symposium having already spent their money at the farmer's market.

There were some really fancy houses on a hill overlooking PSU.

On Saturday night we camped at a Wal-Mart in Troutdale, OR. Portland has a no-camping-in-your-vehicle ban apparently. When we approached this Wal-Mart parking lot we saw a bunch of signs saying, “No overnight parking. No camping.” but there was an entire little town of truck campers, vans, RVs and trailers. One trailer was even unhitched! So we made the mistake of approaching two “RV townspeople” who were nearby and asked them if it was ok to stay the night. Those dumbass clowns talked our ears off for what seemed like an hour. They told us it was ok to stay there five seconds in to the conversation but continued on to tell us everything about themselves for a long time. There was no escape. Even excusing ourselves to go inside and use the restroom didn’t work. Finally we walked away with them still talking to us. One of them said he\’d been living in the parking lot for a month. He was kind of creepy. Some of their trailers were very honestly duct taped together. I guess despite the signs Wal-Mart doesn’t really give a shit. Even the Sheriff drove through and didn’t do anything. It was great.

We’re in Portland! We’ve been here for about two or two and half days. It’s pretty awesome! Just as we’re figuring out the city, it’s almost time to move on. However, we still have one more day of the Portalnd Zine Symposium. Yesterday we had a great time at the event! We have met so many nice and friendly people here and we even met a girl from Austin. The weather is amazing! No pictures today because we don’t have a lot of time but we’ll be posting again soon.

Wow!
So we’ve made it to the “suburbs” of Portland. (Portland’s suburbs are pretty much little mountain towns and state parks).
We are recharging in a motel room and planning.
We have an extra day before the event.
Portland Zine Symposium!
Sounds fancy right?

Today the high temperature in Portland was 71 degrees! Can you believe that?! In the days to come, it looks like it’s going to get even cooler. The weather man said the highs are going to be in the mid to low 60s for the next five days or so! This is like December weather in Austin.

Anyway, we still have more internet research to do so we’ll leave you with some pictures.

There are some mountains in Oregon! We forgot to take pictures today but as we get closer to Portland, the hills/mountains get greener and greener. There are lush trees everywhere!!!

The grackles in Oregon are HUGE!

Oregon has some strange looking ducks. Or maybe they're albino grackles?

A bunch more of them showed up when MC started feeding one pieces of bread. We named him Grumpy because he squawked and fought when the others showed up.

There's Mount Hood way way back there.

We’re in Brigham City, UT tonight. We’re staying at a KOA campground and they have wifi. Wifi is much easier to find now a days than it used to be apparently. The crickets are cricketing, the moon is mooning and the bugs are beginning to bug. I guess we’d better turn in. We have two more solid days of driving before we get to Portland. But the drive has been really cool. We’ve never seen any of these places before. Wyoming was gorgeous. Northeast Utah has also been really beautiful.

We took a lot of pictures today. But it would take a long time to get them all online and we need to save our battery. Here’s a few. We’ll do something with the rest later.

Ahh! We're in a tunnel inside a mountain! In Wyoming!

Wyoming got kind of desert like. In fact, it has a desert. Who knew?

Utah has got some big ass mountains, and they're green!

Today we drove all the way from Wichita, KS to Cheyenne, WY! It’s just after dark here and we found a rest area in Cheyenne with free wifi so we thought we’d post some pictures quickly.

Also at this rest stop are hundreds of rabbits/bunnies! They’re just running around all over the place! So far we’re very impressed with Wyoming even though we haven’t seen much of it yet.

We still haven’t crossed the Rockies. We’ve been driving north, parallel to them. However, tomorrow we’ll be crossing them on our way to Salt Lake City.

There was a humongous windmill farm in Kansas!

Some rain in the distant mountains in Colorado.

One of the bunnies we're hanging out with tonight in Cheyenne.

Tonight we’re in Wichita, Kansas. The weather this evening is beautiful compared to how it’s been in Austin. We found some free wifi to mooch and decided to begin our travel blog.

The Dallas Webcomics Expo yesterday was really great! The only thing it needed was more patrons. However, we did sell more ButterSword products than we had expected. And for a one day event, it was really pretty awesome. Everyone was so nice! And we met numerous other artists that we will begin linking to when that daunting task is at hand. Tonight we’re too tired to do so.

Here are some pictures from the road. Tomorrow we should begin our ascent into the Rocky Mountains.

Oh, we almost forgot! For its entertainment value, we recommend reading the comments section of our previous post. We seem to think we may not have heard the last from Tater Poon.

Oklahoma - They have red dirt.

There's that red dirt.

We had a few more pictures, but the wifi we are using is too spotty.

Our goal is to get to Fort Collins tomorrow. If the weather is even more agreeable than it is tonight in Wichita, we’ll most likely sleep in the Scout Ship SEV6.

So… Until we can post again… Don’t get fonk monstered.

Jen and MC

Off we go…

Among other things, we made it to the post office today. So all our chores are done except that tomorrow we finish packing, clean, and turn off/unplug everything.

The open road and sites unseen. After Dallas that is. We’ve seen that. But an event is an event and we’re anxious to find out just what a “webcomics expo” is exactly.

Plus it turns out it’s in Plano, so even though it’s titled Dallas Webcomics Expo…

Anyway… We haven’t exactly seen much of Plano.

It’s all good.

We’ve prepared some old art to go above some blog posts. Not comics exactly, but better than a naked blog I suppose. We hope to post every other day or so.

Upon return I’m certain we’ll go back to a daily.
This picture journal, or whatever it is, has become… necessary for us.

Adventure awaits!