Wednesday. May 15th. 2013. Garth shakes a colony of potato bugs off his backpack and shoves it into the tent. We climb our muddy hill, ducking tree limbs and the windows of a house. Do the people inside know that they hosted two vagabonds overnight? Probably not. I think we Americans should adopt that European [...]
Here’s a video update from our busker friends Tom and Sharmini. In late April they sold the trusty old van that they lived in and flew to Europe on one-way tickets. They have no considerable savings, guaranteed income or even a home base. They travel with backpacks and rely on curious strangers for survival. Sound familiar? [...]
We met Abbey Jarvis and her boyfriend James today at the Quincy farmers’ market. Hearing that we were backpackers selling handmade satchels, she gave us a card and said that she too is thinking about hitting the road. Other people have advised Abbey not to become a vagabond……but remember a couple months ago when we [...]
Tuesday. May 14th. 2013. A long line of sprinkler pipe groans as its wheels roll slowly thru plowed dirt. On the other side of the highway, a big farm machine snarls. As far as I can see, there are only fields and blue sky. Garth picks a dandelion and swats it against my thigh. Little [...]
Monday. May 13th. 2013. “I had this dream,” AJ says. “I was running from society and I pulled over to use a pay phone and these two women cops started attacking me, and they said, ‘We have to beat you because we’re the cops,’ and there was teleportation, and I went down this water chamber [...]
Tuesday, May 7 thru Sunday, May 12. 2013. The mural began with a squirrely blue line painted by Garth. It represents the Mississippi River. The picture evolved organically from there, flowering according to the whimsical imaginations of AJ, Garth, myself and many Creativity Club members and neighbor kids. Soon there were flowers and filigree designs, [...]
This is our third and final set of photographs from Quincy, Illinois, as we’re planning to leave on Monday, May 13th. During this last week we have been painting the mural seen in this photograph with AJ. The building belongs to a local photographer named Lisa Wigoda at 8th and Jefferson Streets. She also hired [...]
Sarah started making ACEO’s (Art Trading Cards) out of her mixed media abstract art and selling them on Etsy to help fund the walk up the Mississippi River. If you do scrapbooking, art journaling, collage or any other type of mixed media arts or crafts, check them out. If you don’t, pass the link on [...]
AJ began his first public mural this Monday. Sarah and Garth were there with him to begin the process when a local reporter named Steve Bohnstedt came out to take photographs for the Herald-Whig newspaper. The “Local” section of Tuesday’s paper featured this photograph of Garth painting a blue line across the mural. On Wednesday we [...]
Friday. May 3rd. 2013 Kids in white button-down shirts and black pressed slacks flood McDonald’s. The noise of a million conversations overwhelms my brain. It’s some kind of field trip. “So Tom is deep into negotiations on that house…” Garth says, reading his email. It’s a house on a lake in Northern Indiana. Kurt Vonnegut [...]