Trip must go on

Looking at the pictures of the previous month, I said to my self; “they were not so bad”, since I didn’t remember we had such good material. 

text & photography: Akis Temperidis

The truth is that some things we did not do as we are used to, while others we completely skipped. We may have been in San Francisco for a week, but we spent more energy trying to find a brake repair shop (to no avail!) than in our beloved city itself.

By the time our brakes were fixed after six days in the small town of Groveland, we were so mentally exhausted that for the moment we said not to even enter Yosemite, even though the entrance to the national park was only 20 miles from the repair shop.

In the end, we entered the park without an online reservation and only spent two days there, perhaps because it was unbearably crowded. But we got a taste of it. We bathed in the river and in the afternoon we met three black bears in their natural habitat. And of course, we saw the famous El Capitan rock, which is 914 meters high and is the Mecca of free climbing. If you remember, that’s what Apple called the 12th generation MacOs operating system.

In fact, on those exact days, the second three-month residence permit of the mission girls, who traveled to the USA under the Visa Waiver Program ESTA, expired after Guatemala. So on our way down to San Diego we skipped Sequoia and Death Valley National Parks and didn’t go to Las Vegas as we had planned.

Next time we left the Mojave Desert – which was closed due to flooding – and Joshua National Park. The last fond memory from our six month long trip to the United States, was from the weekend we spent in Los Angeles. Three days of Attic sun, swimming in the waves and walking or skating between Santa Monica and Venice Beach and free parking-camping on the beach, among locals, vanlifers.

These slightly crazy, alternative types who chose to live in their vans, either because they can’t stand the cost of living in the big city, or because they discovered a more carefree, ecological and human life. They are rolling stones, just like us, and they don’t grow grass..._AT