On the Train - Brendan

Seattle is 3 hours behind us. We spent our past week giving away our stuff as best we could, and then we moved all the rest to Stina’s parents’ house in Everett, WA. Giving things away was fabulous! We managed to convince our friends to take bags and bags and bags of stuff from us that they will hopefully enjoy as much as we did. There’s more stuff in the world than there needs to be. We should share more, then we wouldn’t all need to own our own. I read an article the other day about Lucy, the “missing link”, and it made me think about what funny beasts people are. We hoard things and love them and hide them and collect them and lock them away. It’s just funny - there’s no inherent value to many of them, we don’t even enjoy a lot of them, and yet we save them. It’s funny is all.

My best advice for moving cheaply: do the math (and the research). After all was said and done, we paid $70-ish for the moving van plus $14 for gas, and $114 each for our train tickets. We used online promotional codes to get discounts on our rates (just use a search engine to find them) and we compared the various deals and then we did lots and lots of math to come up with each option’s final cost.

On from the tedium of our move, we were interviewed by the Everett Herald. We talked at length with the reporter about the philosophy of this whole trip - the idea of trusting strangers and of living this way that we’re living - I’m looking for words to describe it: “cheaply” comes to mind, also “sharing” and “through the kindness of strangers”, but I think it’s less about our not spending much money and more about our consuming fewer resources, which probably go hand-in-hand, but have expressly different goals... though cheaply also describes a goal of ours. “Living Sustainably” is a nice, quotable phrase. I don’t know how accurate it is, but as long as we’re living on other people’s excesses (hitchhiking, couchsurfing, dumpster-diving), I don’t think we can really count our carbon footprints. Hopefully we’re giving people something back, too, with our busking. We’re the rats of society - scavengers have a bad rap, but they serve a function and don’t hurt anything with their consumption of other creatures’ excesses.

The reporter also seemed interested in talking about our politics and the politics of our trip, from our interaction with the current state of US economics and our views on the failure of the bailout to the sexism inherent in hitchhiking safety (how to make it safer for women to hitchhike alone).

Later, we met the photographer, who turned out to be a hitchhiking hopeful himself. He told us about always having wanted to take a grand hitchhiking adventure, but never being able to. I’m sure he’ll find his way to it eventually. Look for the article in the Friday Everett Herald.

By the way, we have a show. A funtabulous show. We’re such convincing actors - when we showed the reporter a little bit of our show, I’m not entirely sure she got that we were pretending to fail. Either that or SHE’S a fabulous actor. Our performance last Saturday went off without a hitch, twice! We’re looking good. I don’t know what we’re going to do with an unsuspecting crowd, though. We’ll have our first real test in Wisconsin at the West Bend Farmers’ Market. Look for us there if you’re in the area!