gypsy cab, plane, plane, taxi, bus, taxi

We got to JFK in record time. At one point, I think the driver was doing 80 on Atlantic Avenue, barreling down the empty black street, hitting all the lights perfectly. We had to arrive two hours prior to our departure, but I was starting to imagine the news reports about the car accident in my head. I asked him to slow down. He did so gladly and I tipped him $5. It had only taken 15 minutes from our door to the airport's curbside drop-off point—shattering all previous records.

The rest of the city was still asleep, but the airport bustled. We waited in some lines, took off our shoes, and showed some people in uniform our documents. The next thing we knew we were in Costa Rica. Deb and I tried to catch some zzzzs on our two flights and we'd maybe gotten a couple hours between us. Once we got there, we waited in some extra lines: immigration and customs. We were approved as tourists by rubber stamps and hopped into a taxi to the bus station.

In the hazy, sleepiness of the new day, the culture shock of being in another country takes on a dreamlike quality. The billboards are all in Spanish, people seem to drive differently, more aggressively, the air is thicker, and the plants are foreign and tropical. I was fading in and out as our driver manuevered through the narrow streets in the city center. There were lots of colorful, gated storefronts on both sides of our speeding taxi. We arrived at the bus station, and Deb used her mastery of the Spanish language to secure us a couple bus tickets and the next leg of today's journey.

I remember lush, green hills and getting a Coca-Cola at a small market in the mountains. After minutes turned into hours, our bus ride eventually ended. Deb got us a ride with a local cabbie who knew our destination. "You know Jack?" he asked. No, but we were keen to meet the innkeeper.

More green blurs and intermittent naps ensued. And as the last light of day was fading to grey, we climbed, at long last, out of the cab and into our little oasis of jungle paradise.

west to the vermillion cliffs

I woke up at 5am bathed in sweat. The heat had clicked on with a vengeance and we were fully clothed under several beds worth of blankets. I opened the front door wide and let the cold, fresh air rush in along with several more moths. I guess this was why we weren't supposed to mess with the thermostat. Tomorrow was going to include a lot of driving and I desperately needed sleep. I cursed the Anasazi, an entire Native American tribe's good name was now sullied in my mind due to this destitute, roadside flophouse. I futilely tried to fluff my filthy pillow but it just made it lumpier.

The night was long and far too short. The next day came too quickly. We drug ourselves out of our uncomfortable bed and got the hell out of there. We'd gotten pretty savvy at packing in a hurry during our first week of travel. Then we double-checked under everything, aware that if we accidentally left something behind we may have to return to this awful place.

The day was bright and beautiful and we fueled up with coffee and gas at a tribal post. Two dogs sat panting in the shade of the front porch flanking the market's front door like the New York Public Library's stoic lions: Patience and Fortitude. We hit the road. Our final destination was the North Rim of the Grand Canyon. But we'd be taking an out of the way route that would send us past the Vermilion Cliffs. Traveling the Four Corners region is like navigating Middle Earth. Lots of colorfully descriptive and ominous sounding place names.

We ate at a Subway in a town called Page. Deb sat with her back to the parking lot. Halfway through the meal a bus pulled up and teenagers started pouring out, heading our way en masse. "Europeans," I whispered to Deb and nodded in the direction of the door as the tiny restaurant filled with the tour group. "Das est not eine Burger King," said one in a thick accent that I'll say was Swiss. We made a quick exit as blonde teens continued to file in and got back on the road.

We first saw the Vermilion Cliffs after the road was narrowed by high rocks on both sides. The road curved round a small bend with 30-foot canyon walls of rock on both sides. As we came out the other side we realized we were on the top of a huge mesa and could see for miles looking down across the valley floor. Across the valley, far in the distance lay the Vermilion Cliffs, and in between was the fissured floor of the valley. Within the fissure lay the Colorado River and the easternmost beginning of the Grand Canyon.

big monuments & tiny snakes

We woke up tired and achy from sleeping in the car and headed to The View hotel to buy breakfast. It was a breakfast buffet that had been sitting out for hours (it was also $13). So we had some terrible coffee instead and I kept my eyes pointed at the ground as much as I could. I didn't want my memories of a place as spectacular as Monument Valley to be seen through the panoramic window of a massive gift shop. We exited slowly, got into the Hyundai, and drove down into Monument Valley. Being in the Valley is even more impressive than overlooking it and your perspective changes from the grandeur of the overall scope of the area to the reality of being surrounded by such towering, impossible rock formations.

The road into the Valley is dusty, steep, uneven, and unforgiving. But we were in a rental, and I'd gotten the insurance, so you drive deliberately and be thankful it's not raining. Part of me really wanted to get a convertible for our southwest roadtrip. The more practical part of me concluded that we'd get char-broiled by the desert sun and covered in dust the color of Burnt Sienna. Plus, all those people driving through the desert in a convertible (in movies that romanticize driving through the desert in a convertible) usually have the mob, the cops, or both in hot pursuit.

Monument Valley is a place where it is difficult to keep your camera in it's case for more than 30 seconds. Every 50 feet I was stopping the car and hopping out to take another photo of the massive mesas—the orange and red rocks against the cobalt blue sky. Every time you move the shadows change and the camera comes out again. There's almost a desperation on your part to try and get what you're seeing into the camera, to capture it for posterity.

The previous night we could only make out the faintest black shadow of the mesas against the dark, starry night. You could sense their presence, but couldn't make them out in detail. Now they were everywhere, surrounding you and dotting the horizon in every direction. Every John Ford western you ever saw, every memory of a Roadrunner cartoon suddenly flooded with personal context. Much like standing on the edge of Grand Canyon overwhelms the senses, the experience of being in Monument Valley short circuits something and your brain must rush to catch up with the sensory overload taking place.

We pull over so I can take some more pictures and we see a couple staring at something in the brush by the side of the road. There is a baby snake coiled near some brush and a thin German man with a camera is bent over at the waist, staring intently at it; his feet a safe distance away, his face inching closer. "Do you zhink it is a rattlesnake?" he asks, "I don't hear anyzhing." The snake is very small, tightly coiled, and in the shadows, but it could be a rattler so I keep my distance and advise caution. Even a small rattler has venom, right? I decide I need a photo, but the digital buzzing startles the snake and it slithers under the bush, it's tiny rattle shaking as it goes. I decide it's wiser to stay on the road, then proceed to take several dozen more photos. I drive 100 feet, then hop out to take a few more.

Deb and I decide to take the remainder of our cash (which was about $66) and see how long of a horseback ride we could get. What we didn't yet realize that it's not the length of the ride that's important; it's the angle.

happenings in vegas

After a quick dip in the Sahara pool (which closes at 5pm for some reason) we returned to our 22nd floor room to enjoy the view and prepare for our night on the town. We'd failed to pack any nightlife duds into our tiny backpacks, so we decided to go Vegas casual. It was hard to tear ourselves away from the comfort of the room and the promise of "Hitch" on TBS, but the next thing we knew we were cruising down Las Vegas Boulevard in our snazzy, rented Hyundai Sonata. It was Saturday night and The Strip was packed to the gills, as we cruised at barely a half mile an hour, heading toward the New York-New York Casino at the opposite end.

While stopped a red light, I happened to glance over at the car to the right and saw a woman performing oral sex on her male companion. I know, I know, a clandestine BJ in Sin City, it hardly bears mention. But here's the twist: the woman was driving while the man relaxed in the passenger seat, one hand on her head and the other casually holding a drink, his elbow leaned on his open window. I told Deb to glance over to 3 o'clock and we both spied with amusement, waiting to see if they'd beat the light. They did not and she got the tap when the light turned green. We lost them in the intersection and never found out what became of those crazy kids. Speaking of kids, they were everywhere. And while I'm not saying that parents who drag their young children down Las Vegas Boulevard late on a Saturday night are bad parents; I really don't know what else to call them.

After almost an hour we had made it nearly halfway and I turned off the strip in disgust. First mistakenly venturing into a valet parking section, then making it to Frank Sinatra Boulevard, which ran parallel to the Strip, but was utterly void of traffic. We hit New York-New York (note the hyphen: New York-New York is a registered trademark, I guess they couldn't copyright the comma). Deb was keen on seeing it—and who wouldn't want to see a miniature version of the city they live in complete with slot machines? Vegas has Paris, Rome, Venice, and Monte Carlo, but no Seattle, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., or Dallas/Ft. Worth-themed casinos.

We walked the Strip for a while and on every corner there were crowds of immigrants wearing multi-colored "Girls! Girls! Girls!" t-shirt and handing out flyers that were tossed to the ground two steps later and littered the sidewalks like autumn leaves. I suppose those aforementioned children wandering the strip with their folks are going to have to learn about call girls sometime. Walking the strip is not like walking any other street as there are escalators and pedestrian bridges instead of crosswalks, and as someone who had recently tried to take a right turn driving, I can understand why. Vegas can be both overwhelming and dull at the same time, but I wanted Deb to see what the city had to offer so we wandered in and out of casinos, had a few drinks, and I even won $15 on a single slot pull at Ceasar's. Then we wandered back to the car and returned to the Sahara where I was eager to play some $1 blackjack.

The last time I was in Vegas I played two hands of blackjack at the Luxor at $10 each. In both hands I was showing 20, but the dealer got 21. I took that as a clear sign and gambled no more. Poor folks like me love $1 blackjack because we can spend $20 and play for at least a half hour, even with the worst of luck. I turned Andrew Jackson into 20 chips and started winning immediately. When I didn't win, I pushed, and when I lost it was usually only a buck. I even doubled-down and got the face card I needed. This was fun; the free drinks helped. Deb got bored and went to the room to nap and I kept winning. After doubling my money they shut down the table for the night and I headed up the room to retrieve Deb and do some more gambling.

Deb was in no mood to have the table games explained to her and played the slots instead. She went up ten bucks quickly, but kept playing and was reduced to her starting $5. This upset her to no end and I tried repeatedly to remind her "that's how they get you"and that she hadn't actually lost any money. We decided to call it a night before the night became the morning and Deb put one last buck into the "Sex and the City" machine and hit it big. Well, technically she hit it Charlotte and won $7 (Mr. Big would've payed out $338). We stumbled back to the room, which is the preferred way to enter a Vegas hotel room, and realized we would not be getting that early start.

no fear nor loathing

Despite the fact that we had no set destination and no real idea where we were going, we drove south from Los Angeles and managed to find a Motel 6 in Long Beach only 10 minutes from the airport. We bought some two for a dollar tacos from the adjacent Jack in the Box and watched the second half of "Rocky" on TBS before hitting the hay. The next morning, we finally succeeded in finding that elusive In & Out Burger for a hearty breakfast and caught our plane to Las Vegas with time to spare. A quick note about In & Out Burger: they are fucking amazing; clean, fast, friendly, and inexpensive. I counted fifteen people working with Swiss watch precision. It makes you wonder how the other fast food giants can do so much wrong and be so successful and why there aren't more In & Out Burgers around the country.

The hour-long plane ride to Vegas resembled a high school party bus on it's way to the State Championship and there was much hooting and hollering upon our arrival. We caught a tram to a shuttle bus and ended up far from the airport at a rental car place that informed us that the state of Nevada has all kinds of extra rules, regulations, and insurances required to rent a car. After panicking over the extra fees which more than doubled our quoted price and destroyed our carefully orchestrated budget, we calmly called my credit card company and found out that they did indeed cover some (if not all) of the extras.

Nevada has a "loss of use" rule that if you get into an accident of any kind and the car becomes unrentable, you must pay to rent the car for the duration of its repairs. We breathed a heavy sigh of relief and thanked the lady at the counter who must deal with customers experiencing this rollercoaster of emotions a dozen times a day. She couldn't have been nicer or more patient with our stages of disbelief, anger, bargaining, and acceptance. When it was all over I wanted to give her a big hug. It really goes to show how important the lost art of customer service truly is.

On the advice of another very friendly lady in the car rental check-out booth, we checked out The Orleans. It proved beyond our means, though it was fun to see the Vegas version of a city we'd visited only days before; it was bigger and brighter, but lacked a certain je ne c'est qua. We ended up at our originally intended destination at the far end of the strip: The Sahara. Former home of Elvis and Ann Margaret, Sinatra and Dino, and a bargain to boot. Originally, we'd planned to hit the road running and try to make the Grand Canyon by nightfall but it was getting late and we'd been pushing ourselves for days. We needed a good night's sleep and what better place to get one than a casino in Sin City.

sweet lady gumbo

It is impossible to experience all that New Orleans has to offer in one day—but we gave it our best shot.

Yesterday began at 4:45am. I (very slowly) leapt out of bed having gotten nearly three hours of sleep to find that Deb, having stayed up all night printing itineraries, had gotten none. We decided to take a cab to the airport and although it was the costly choice, even the thought of tackling the subway at that hour was daunting. Our flight took off at 7am and we arrived in New Orleans at 8:30am (thank you time difference). Deb was even able to catch a few zzzs on plane, so now were both running on nearly three hours sleep. We hopped in our rental car and hoped the combination of caffeine and adrenaline would carry us through the day.

The best thing about New Orleans is that there is simply no other place like it in America. A truly organic American city, rich in history—both modern and ancient—where reminders of the past abound on every corner. The people are laid back, friendly, and patient with tourists who are there to treat their city like a frat party. It was hot and muggy, an almost oppressive heat for anyone not used to such a climate. But since it closely resembled Brooklyn in July, we were up to the task.

the final countdown

Well, we decided against the last stoop sale today and instead focused on making lists, fine-tuning our inventory, and doing laundry. We are now all packed and ready to go. I laid out everything on a card table and checked every item of the list. My bag's not crazy heavy, but I am surprised by how much socks and underwear weigh.

We won't be carrying these packs around too, too much (except in Chicago). As New Yorkers, we figure we can suss out the Chicago transit system on foot and survive there autoless for 23-hours. We even decided to rent a car in New Orleans after we discovered that the car cost only $1 more than a one-way cab ride from the airport. It's going to be nice to drive again. But our first two cars in New Orleans and Los Angeles are just warm-ups for our big Las Vegas to Grand Canyon road trip.

Now we eat, then we sleep, tomorrow we ride...

second city of angels

Two of Deb's sisters have arrived from down south; the bride-to-be & the maid-of-honor-to-be. My stacks of uploaded/to be uploaded/and don't want to upload cds have been squirreled away until tomorrow's stoop sale and in its place—a three-woman, clockwork, assembly-line producing tiny gift boxes for this weekend's bridal shower. Pink flowers, pink-pattered wrapping paper, and pink ribbons all working together toward a common goal.

I've been asking my facebook friends for recommendations of stuff to do in a couple of the cities we'll be visiting next week: Chicago and Los Angeles. I received a lots of great responses about the Second City: Navy Pier, architecture tours, Nick's Bar and Italian Restaurant, a jazz club called the Green Mill, a pizza place called Dijiordanos, and the Art Institute of Chicago. The responses for the City of Angels were less than enthusiastic, only a couple suggestions including: botox, the Getty Museum, and driving around. I like the driving around tip the best. Maybe we could head to Van Nuys and visit the place of my birth. Or maybe not.

we must, we must increase our blog

I have been trying to write at least one blog entry per day. And although I didn't write a post yesterday, that is quite alright because nothing really interesting happened. Today we have more exciting plans: laundry, dishes, mail sorting, cleaning, and organizing more items for tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow's stoop sales.

I expect that once we leave our apartment for JFK and actually start traveling, that this travel blog is going to start really getting good. So get ready for that. Until then, please enjoy more tidbits of homestead goings-on and my meandering philosophical musings.

abbreviated sale

Our brief stoop sale only lasted three hours but it netted us exactly $100. At this point every drip helps fill the bucket and even if we'd made $50, it would've been well worth our time. I'd been worried that our weekend stoop sale would be ill-attended since the city really clears our on Memorial and Labor Day weekends. What I failed to take into account, however, is that the city's biggest Labor Day parade, the West Indian-American Day Parade, ends only a few blocks away. So hopefully we'll get some happy, slightly tipsy post-parade foot traffic and plenty of nice folks just itching to buy my old cds.

Scott quartet

Deb stitched together this series of photos from our Saturday stoop sale. She is a master of the photoshop arts, a dream weaver spinning her Inceptionesque web to create this mosaic parallel universe Brooklyn populated by four Scotts.

Deb and I have been discussing our travel plans and fine tuning our plans for travel. We had never planned to check bags on this trip. We always travel light, so not bringing bags to check will be easy for us. But Deb is aiming higher and I am intrigued. Can we do it with just a backpack each? And I'm not talking about big hiking backpacks, I'm talking small enough to fit in the overhead compartment.

When I was in Europe long ago, I'd arrive in a new city and plop my big backpack into a train station locker so I could roam the city unburdened. Do airports even have storage lockers anymore? For that matter, do American train stations? I know train stations in movies have them; whenever there's a mysterious key it inevitably opens a locker in a train station. And inside of that locker is a duffel bag full of money, a severed limb, or a dirty bomb, the discovery of which drives the plot into the third act.

We'd just like a square box to store our clothes and toiletries for a few hours while we walk around the city. I think we're on our own.

can I offer you five dollars?

Two full days of selling our stuff on the street and we are wealthier and wiser. Perhaps wealthy and wise are overstatements; but we do have many more monies to fund our impending trip and we know a lot more about what people are willing to pay for old dvds and cds. Apparently they're both available for pennies on the internet.

It's a strange thing to have a themed stoop sale and to try to give people a reason to buy your stuff, a reason beyond offering them something they want at a price they're willing to pay. To sell the sizzle and not steak, as Hank Hill might say. The end result had us enthusiastically listing our itinerary to everyone who asked and then solemnly watching as they slowly walked away empty-handed. One nice lady talked to us for quite a while, asked a ton of questions, then smiled broadly and offered us a third of our asking price on a dvd boxed-set.

I don't mean to sound bitter; I'm not. The stoop sales were a rousing success and no one who asked to hear our traveling tale was under any obligation to buy anything. Though after chatting with friendly folks about what a wonderful thing it was that we were doing and being offered the best of luck on our travels, it was sometimes surprising when those ebulliently supportive folks didn't spend a buck or two.

It was fun talking to random people all day, it was fun making deals, and it was fun trying to make those deals financially beneficial. My favorite customer was a middle-aged man who came by yesterday and bought two dvds and three cds at face value. Then he asked about my Ray Charles box-set and promptly paid the asking price. That box-set was the first gift Deb ever gave me on our first Valentine's Day together (my gift to her was the first thing we sold online and the subject of an earlier post).

Bringing in lots of three to five dollars sales really adds up over the course of a day. When a single customer spends $75, however, you think about what that particular sum of money will buy on the trip: a nice dinner in New Orleans, a motel room in Las Vegas, or an upgrade to a convertible in Seattle. The convertible was a travel tip from a friend of ours about how spending a little more money in the right places can improve a trip tremendously. So the more stuff we can sell in the next week, the more travel tips we can take, and the more upgrades we can afford to make.

freddy's dead

Yesterday was our day of rest.

We tidied up the apartment and went to Target. On the way, we saw construction workers tearing down a building with a huge back-hoey thing wielding a pincher-claw that cut through a steel support beam like butter, bringing down an entire floor. In front of us was the empty space where Freddy's once stood.

Freddy's was the best bar in the neighborhood; an old school establishment where curiosities, trophy heads, framed photos, and statuary decorated the cluttered bar. The windows were lined with books and board games, and the bartenders possessed a potent mix of friendly and surly. When I used go down to watch the Mets playoff games I could also watch the avant-garde video art that played endlessly at the other end of the bar. Freddy's was almost the only bar in the neighborhood when I moved in 11 years ago. Now there are bars-a-plenty and many of the buildings between my apartment and Freddy's are being razed (via Eminent Domain http://www.expertlaw.com/library/real_estate/eminent_domain.html) to put up the new arena home for the Brookyn Nets.

And Freddy's dead.

I'm not much of a drinker, and neither is Deb. So that last time we were there was March 17th, 2008. I mention Freddy's here not because it's a bar, but because it's the type of place that we hope to discover on this trip. Places that are of where they are—that is: unique to, and a product of, their surroundings. Places that the locals not only frequent, but revere. They are hard to create and impossible to replace.

We're lucky then, I suppose, to be able to spy on the cities we intend to visit and mine for their local treasure online so that we can make the most of our short time in each place. It's hard to get a sense of a city in a day. Sometimes it's best not to try so hard. Just find a good place to start and then wander.

a case of the mondays

Today was most definitely a recovery day. After four days of movement and planning, we successfully booked our tickets in the wee hours of Monday morning. In addition to a formidable lack of sleep, both Deb and I have only eaten about one meal's worth of food all weekend. We were both so nervous about getting the trip details locked down our bellies' could only handle a few bites. But enough about our gastroenterological dilemmas; it's nothing a little oatmeal can't fix. On the plus side: we both lost five pounds.

I'm not usually a person who likes to over plan the details of a trip. My trips are usually on the road, so it's impossible to know when I'm going to be too tired to go on or for how long an irresistible roadside attraction will distract me from my destination. This technique worked well on solo trips, but had produced diminishing results during drives with exes. Deb and I, however, travel exceedingly well together, and even the strain of looking for a motel in the middle of New England at 2am could not break us up.

When I was 20-years-old, I was having a conversation with some friends about what you would do if you found out you only had 30 days to live (that old chestnut). My answer was to go traveling through Europe. It seemed crazy to me to wait until such dire news to embark on such an endeavor. So I cashed in some of my aforementioned wise investments, and two weeks later I stepped off the plane in London, Eurail Pass in hand, and eagerly heading toward the first ferry to Amsterdam. The thing I remember most of all from that summer was standing in a Berlin train station and gazing up at the schedule board in utter disbelief. Practically, every city in Europe was listed, like rides at a theme park: Paris, Rome, Prague, Tilt-A-Whirl. I remember the overwhelming sense of freedom as I realized I could pick any train I liked and wake up in the city of my choosing.

Sometimes, when I mention a detail from that trip to Deb, she'll lament that she'd never taken such a leap. Now we're going on such a trip together. True, it's much more structured; it won't have that day-by-day freewheeling aspect. And while that trait certainly has it's advantages, it also leaves you sleeping in parks, on train platforms, and on the edge of the occasional seaside cliff.

I'll be damned if my fiance will be forced to sleep on a cliff. And thanks to diligent internet research, we won't have to. I'm not selling off my possessions to sleep on concrete.

I read a recommendation today from someone who had done the AYCJ ticket last year that suggested you shouldn't book seats next to your traveling companion so you don't always have to wake up next to the same person. For someone traveling with a friend, that sounds like good advice and would create opportunities to meet other travelers. But if I'm going to survive the taxing parts of this trip I'm gong to need Deb by my side. I look forward to waking up next to her as we arrive in each new city exhausted and hungry.

Which reminds me, we need to buy two of those inflatable neck pillows.

the gauntlet, and then some

At the stroke of midnight, jetBlue's All-You-Can-Jet booking site opened up and only one of us was able to buy tickets: Deb. I was locked out of my page which had been "deactivated." We called the 1-800-number as instructed and blanched as all the tickets to Aruba on our planned dates sold out in minutes. Speaking of minutes, 50 minutes of static and muzak later, a woman came on the line but informed me that I had to speak with an AYCJ operator and that she could not help me. I protested, explaining that I had pressed 2 as directed, to no avail. She transferred me to the correct line, only to be greeted with "an expected wait of more than 60 minutes!" (The exclamation point is from me, the recording was surprisingly blase. Actually, it might make you feel a little better if even the recording was like, "Holy shit! You've gotta wait another hour. That's crazy!")

After two 1/2 hours (which felt like five), a woman came on the line (a very polite and helpful woman I might add); and as I was explaining my plight, Deb refreshed the page one last time and I was in. For the next two hours we frantically booked flights, and transfers, and seats. When the dust settled we came out pretty good: we secured all of the domestic flights we sought, then we swapped Costa Rica for Aruba, and filled Costa Rica's slot with Jamaica. We both had our heart set on Aruba, but perspective is important. If anyone ever walks up and complains to you that they have to go to Jamaica for five days, it is your right, nay, your obligation, to punch them square in the mouth.

I will say that the process was a nightmare of unnecessary inconvenience and frustration. jetBlue has done a very cool thing offering these unlimited passes, but the bloom is off the rose. I still like jetBlue, but I'm no longer in like with them. The people I really feel bad for are the ones who made the mistake of going to sleep last night because they were told to wait for an email, but may awaken to very limited options.

waiting is the hardest part

After draft after draft of our thirty-day flight schedule, we think we've cracked the code. We drew up calendars on the big blackboard we have in the kitchen. Repeatedly trying to leapfrog our Friday/Sunday blackout days and really trying to avoid getting stuck in Orlando. After I was done finalizing our blueprint on nineteenth century technology, Deb brought us into the twenty-first with a lovely computer spreadsheet. We'd thought we could start booking our flights when our E.S.T. clock struck midnight. Now it seems we must wait for an email from jetBlue to free us from our anticipatory cocoon and let us complete this butterfly metaphor.

stoop sale #1

Yesterday's stoop sale was a rousing success: cloudy skies, cool weather, and ample foot traffic. We made lots of sales, cut lots of deals, and brought in a respectable amount of cash for our trip. It was such a whirlwind of a day that we both passed out the moment we got upstairs. This morning we awoke to the reality that we have to start booking our actual trip at midnight. Shit just got real.

A stoop sale in Brooklyn gives you the rare opportunity to talk to all the passers-by that would normally just pass on by. Some folks were amazed by our plans while one lady seemed to actually scoff at the idea (New Yorkers are notoriously difficult to impress). I wrote our blog address on 3x5 cards and gave them to anyone who made a purchase, so they could see the trip they just helped fund. Since I don't read a lot of blogs myself, my feelings didn't get bruised when people refused our URL.

We met a tough as nails mother-in-law with an impressive bruise on her arm from her first skeet shooting contest (which she won). We met a young punk rocker who refused to pay more than $7 for his "favorite" movie. There was a nearby neighbor who went back to his apartment and returned to give us a Costa Rican coin to spend when we're there and a woman who gave us the names of the best restaurants near Wrigley Field. Even our upstairs and downstairs neighbors supported the cause with purchases or their own. I spent the day talking to everyone foolish enough to break stride; telling them about our trip and trying to entice them with details of the wonderful special features on the DVDs they were eyeing.

Today's rainy weather is a blessing in disguise as we need to spend the day cracking the intricacies of jetBlue's flight routes. Good thing we have a big blackboard in the kitchen...

the claw

Our living room is in disarray. Stacks of CDs litter the floor. The coffee table is hidden by towers of books. I've sorted and priced all of DVDs and split them into categories and separate boxes for easy shopping. I've even sorted seven sets of dominoes into seven sets of dominoes (see photo) priced to sell. And now my hand has curved into a horrible claw from making a half-dozen exquisitely designed and meticulously hand-drawn signs to advertise our inaugural stoop sale tomorrow.

the first sale is the deepest

We made our first sale on our new "Thirty Days of Flight" Amazon account:

http://www.amazon.com/shops/A1348K32RPVJKI

Deb posted it last night at it sold within hours. It was the very first gift I ever gave her on our first Valentine's Day together. (I'll pause here so the studio audience can go, "Ohhhhhhhhhhhh.") It was the most romantic gift I could think of: the complete DVD collection of the Nickolodeon series "Invader Zim." It was a lucrative sale and she got more than double what I'd paid for it. I guess it's out of print. Am I going to try and sell what she got me? Yes, but not out of spite. We are going to sell it for the same reason we're selling everything else: to pay for our spiritual jour---to pay for our trip.

Maybe it's symbolic, maybe it's coincidence, maybe it's dumb luck, but it's certainly something that gave me pause. And it gave me a topic for this blog. The point of this project is to trade old for new, to exchange a cluttered apartment full of stuff I've been collecting for 30 years for brand new experiences with the woman I'm going to marry—experiences that we otherwise couldn't afford (because we don't have jobs) on a trip we wouldn't have the time to take if we did.

does anyone have change for a button?

The planning for our journey got complicated quick—luckily, we are problem solvers. Deb just tackled my passport renewal and $200 later (good thing we can sell those six stocks to cover the cost) we are hoping that it will arrive by Sept. 7th. But we're going to book a domestic destination for the first couple days, just to be safe. We were hoping to trade NYC's grey concrete for white sand and blue water, but we can ill-afford to incur the monetary wrath of jetBlue's change/cancellations fees. So we're thinking New Orleans.

I don't know jack about HTML, so I tackled the task of adding buttons to this blog. And after nearly two hours, and a string of increasingly frustrated emails to my tech savvy friend Wes, we have both a [Follow Us on Twitter] button and a [Donate] button. Another friend wanted to help us with our journey financially but didn't really want to buy anything. She suggested that others might wish to the same. Now, thanks to PayPal, that dream has become a reality. And, as an added bonus, anyone who contributes $10 or more will receive a personalized postcard from the road!

Deb just said the trip is gonna be "epic." I concur.

She also wants me to quit calling it a journey.