Our Visit to Slab City & East Jesus

We had such as awesome time visiting and exploring Slab City – the remains of the abandoned Marine barracks of Camp Dunlap just outside Niland, California along the Salton Sea in the desert of southeast California. And I had big intentions of writing prolifically about it to share with you.

However, I didn’t anticipate just how little ‘free time’ we’d be getting working at amazon.com’s distribution center in Kansas this month.  We’ve now completed our first full week (working 11 hour days – 5 days a week), and it’s exhausting. It’s not mentally challenging by any means, but it sure is physically challenging.  And it’s quite an experience and peak into this side of consumer culture and America. We’re all about experiences and learning about things we’re not normally exposed to – so it’s definitely worthwhile from that perspective.  Hopefully when we’re done with our time here in a few weeks we’ll have the energy to post more indepth about what we’ve learned (without violating the terms of our NDA we signed about the specific processes.)

So back to wonderful antithesis of consumerism – Slab City and East Jesus. When we met up with Route 66 Roadtripping Sandi Wheaton in what seems like so long ago now, she was thrilled to be able to play tour guide for us around the Salton Sea – an area of the country we had not yet explored, and were quite curious about.

We posted previously about our afternoon at Salvation Mountain.

However, we also explored The Slabs, and were introduced to her awesomely cool friend Container Charlie who has created an experimental artistic habitat constructed out of found materials and made into art – he calls it ‘East Jesus’. It came as no surprise to us that he’s a fellow burner (Burning Man participant) and vagabond. We instantly clicked, and new friend found.

Sandi just saved us a ton of writing by posting her write up of our visit to East Jesus. So instead of trying to muster the creative energy to post about it ourselves, I’m going to refer you to her awesome post – East Jesus, Pop 1, Elev 75.

Before starting at amazon, I also managed to complete a video piece about The Slabs in general (not focused on East Jesus) to give you an overview of our time there.

In case you don’t see the video above if you’re on RSS – here’s a direct link to the video.

So, I wouldn’t be expecting much in the way of posting for a few weeks from us as we complete our time at amazon – we hope you enjoy your vacation from our stories, and we look forward to continuing sharing our adventures after the first of the year with you.

 

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