Travelogue: Reno to San Francisco

When we last left our technomadic adventurers, they had just completed 12 days at Burning Man 2008 and joined up with the Oliver Road Crew for the International Camel Races in Virginia City, NV.

Due to popular demand, here are pictures of actual camels!

From the Camel Races, we ventured on to Carson City to meet up again with the Oliver Road Crew for a couple of days to help them set up their new blog tracking their adventure of touring with a couple of demo Oliver Travel Trailers. (ahem… ORC folks, you need to continue updating it!)

We headed back to Reno to pick up the last remaining parts from our pre-warranty expiration visit to a Jeep Dealer. Nothing major, just didn’t want to let the warranty lapse without having everything looked over. And then we headed to Nevada City to meet up with a potential new client that we met at the Camel Races. We boondocked overnight in the Tahoe National Forest, after Chris did an incredible job of backing up a dirt road, uphill into an old miner’s wagon trail – where we found the one exact spot that was level. It was an amazing feat that was worth every ounce of effort for the view.

After our stay in Nevada City with our gracious host, we headed on into Sacramento for some de-playafication with our intentional family and homebase with Lindsay and Sean. We did lots of laundry, repacked the Jeep and Orion and got everything back out of Burning Man mode. We attended the Tamale Festival as well as toured art on the streets of downtown Sacramento during the ‘Second Saturdy’ event. We had a generally awesome time hanging out with these awesome people.

One evening, Lindsay called us after her workday in need of a substitute bowler on her league team – so Chris and I rushed over and filled in the gap. I hadn’t bowled much at all since my days as a child league bowler (yes, I will now admit my secret past as a bowler, which I think scared Chris a bit when he found out). I did pretty decently, and had an absolute blast.

(Note the jeans I’m wearing – Haven’t been able to fit into them since my hysterectomy back in February..woohoo!)

After Sacramento, it was off to House Weirdness ( and ) in San Leandro for a few nights, where there was a nomadic convergence of sorts happening and we got to hang out more with and meet the lovely .

Our first outing was the quarterly All Night Dance Celebration (ANDC), which had a pajama dress code this time around. Lindsay had loaned me an adorable leopard print nightgown, that I wore with some other things from my wardrobe. And Chris looked absolutely smashing in his silks.

This was followed by an amazing weekend of socializing before Chris and I headed to the hills overlooking San Leandro to Anthony Chabot Regional Park. It was beautiful and remote there, even if only 3 miles from where we were. We stayed up there three nights, mostly relaxing and catching up. Aside from a visit from , we stayed pretty much out of physical contact with other humans. The campground is very beautiful, but unfortunately the cellular connectivity was a bit sketchy even with our uber cell phone booster system. We scoped out some potential other sites that may be better for future stays in the park.

And then we moved to Woodside on the other side of the Bay, where had invited us to crash. Little did we know that the room she is subletting is part of a huge lot where a 75′ sailboat is being constructed by the owner of the house. He’s been working on the project for nearly 30 years, and it is arguably the most impressive thing I have seen. It’s mind boggling, and we’re parked right underneath it. made an awesome post about the boat during our tour of it over the weekend by the craftsman complete with pictures.

This past weekend has been much fun with more socializing and fun events that included a ‘Flavor Tripping’ beta test for a party that is hosting soon, a pool party at our host’s home, a tour of TechShop, more social partying and Sunday at Folsom Street Fair.

TechShop was really interesting to explore. Imagine you could construct your dream workshop with every tool and building toy imaginable. Now, imagine that you didn’t have to pay to assemble said workshop and could instead just pay for access to it. And you get the incredible coolness that is TechShop. invited us to join him for his scheduled time on the lasercutting machine and told us to bring something to play with. Inspired by his uber cool jeans he created there, I brought a pair of my jeans and he converted my jeans into artwork in mere minutes:

On Sunday, we joined up again with Matt in downtown San Francisco for Folsom Street Fair. I had never been, but considered it something I just had to experience once in my life as part of the awesomeness that is San Francisco. It’s a street fair dedicated to the gay man’s leather community, and, well.. there is lots of leather, lots of gay men and lots of general sexual openness. It was really cool. (I am so totally dragging to this next year!)

After FSF, Chris and I headed to the Rhythm Society Friend’s Meet, who host the All Night Dance Celebration as well as many other cool spiritually infused dance events, and became an offical ‘Friend’, thanks to my sponsor Peter. It feels really cool to be officially part of that community that I’ve been flirting around the edges of for a year or so now. It’s a perfect spiritual expression and community that I have been feeling a desire for in my life for years. And perhaps even more impressive, I managed to do yoga postures in my leather corset dress I was still wearing post-Folsom.

Monday was a very hectic day of moving Chris’ storage unit from San Francisco to Sacramento – there was much public transit goodness and heavy lifting involved. And we did it one day.

For a man who espouses the ‘Stuff is an Anchor’ philosophy, I just gotta say – he has too much stuff for a nomad!!

So, that catches us up until now.

We currently await word from the Obama Campaign, as we have applied to volunteer until election day in anyway we can best contribute. We may be relocating to Nevada (a swing state) for the month of October. Our stay in the Bay Area is on a day-to-day basis until we hear otherwise.