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Dear Friends and Family, I am back in the states, and my "big journey" is over... but what's life if it isn't all a "big journey?!?" My e-mails will be a little less frequent, and probably a little shorter and less exotic now that I am back into the relative routine of "normal" daily life, but I still hope to send them once in a while. As I have been known to say, "if there's nothing to write in my journal, I must have wasted my day!" It was nice to get back home. What huge spaces there were for putting my belongings in! What a large and soft bed! What a warm living-room and what abundant food! Almost immediately after I got back I spoke to a friend of the family who was interested in selling me his 1973 Volkswagen Campmobile on good terms. Although I have my yellow hatchback, and it's running well, I didn't have a place to live in San Diego (since I had sold my boat before the trip.) I had told a few people I intended to live in a bus when I got back... and suddenly my words were springing to life! We had agreed to do an engine swap with another bus and its recently rebuilt engine. Had we known the trouble we were to have we may never have undertaken the job... VW engines are notoriously easy to remove, and within the first day we had removed both of them. That IS the easy part. The next day the first engine slipped into my bus no problem. We hooked it up and cranked it over. It wouldn't budge. It was frozen solid. Perhaps the starter was stuck. Finally we had to remove it, only to find that the clutch was slightly too large for the transmission! The gear had cut grooves into the housing and aluminum filings were everywhere! We switched clutches and the engine fit. It even ran... very badly!!! We went from one end of the other on that engine, spending three solid days going from misconception to misconception until finally discovering that the linkage between the dual carburetors was crooked and four little screws were out of adjustment. It was a simple problem, and I felt foolish for taking so long to figure it out... we had been nearly to the point of swapping the engines back again just so I could get going! We had a wonderful Christmas with my fathers family at my Grandfathers house. All of the cousins, aunts, and uncles were in attendance. I love our Christmases together. Two big news items were my next-youngest cousing getting engaged to be married and the fact that I will soon be an UNCLE! My sister and her husband called us to announce their Christmas present... a baby! I finally had the bus running decently New Year's Eve. I planned to leave the next day. I spent the evening with my friend Gurion and his girlfriend Noel. We were on the road home from a movie when the New Year arrived... not much of a celebration. I think they played Auld Lang Sie on the radio. My family was just going to bed, about 30 minutes into the new year, when our phone rang with shocking news. My step-grandmother, who had been our vibrant hostess just days before at Christmas, had passed away in her sleep! It was a sad blow to our family, and difficult for my grandfather, who had only been married to her a little over three years. I realized now that in God's Providence I hadn't been able to fix my bus so that I could be here for this time. Also in His hand was her quiet passing on this only night when none of the family were in their beds yet. Although sad and incomprehensible to us, we know that "our times are in His hands." In the intervening days before the funeral I was able to do many improvements on the bus, making it a fairly comfortable home. (It's much larger than living out of a backpack!) My sister flew in from New Jersey, and with her plonking on the piano and myself strewing oily mechanical parts across the tables, I was reminded of the not so distant past. It was good to be with my family again. I headed for San Diego the morning of January seventh. It was a nice day, and the van ran smoothly over the mountain passes and along the coast of northern California. I had taken historic I-1 with a certain sense of "deja vu," rolling through the breathtaking redwoods and down the "Avenue of the Giants" in my VW bus. I slept my first night in the bus on a backroad in the redwoods. I took a picture when I got to San Francisco, and kept on driving. Just past the Oregon border the bus had begun running roughly, and I had found that I hadn't tightened a set-screw on the carburetors, letting them go out of adjustment. I tinkered with them all the way to San Diego, sticking my arm into the engine-compartment at every gas station along the way. I didn't get it right until about midnight, somewhere in the sprawl of L.A. The bus pulled nicely up the grapevine, and I met some Mexicans who needed water for their steaming pickup. It was fun to talk to people with an accent, and I gave them the water I was carrying in my holding-tank. They made it at least to the next gas station. They waved as they went racing by. I arrived at 1 am on a Monday morning, and was back to work at 8 am. I love my job. I have been quite comfortable sleeping in the bus, usually right there at the airport. It's kind of the "home at work" program (grin). I have a plant. I velcroed it down so it wouldn't fly around when I drive. I have a cel phone now... call me (619) 818-5741. I'm back at school. I just started last week... studying powerplants to get my Aircraft Mechanic's licenses. I have three semesters left. One afternoon my boss told me at lunchtime "get ready, you're going to L.A. with Brett." Brett had been working on a plane with a collapsed nosegear at LAX. A few hours later we had loaded up everything we could imagine, along with the new nosegear, and were headed for LA. Traffic was LA. As we neared the airport the blue sky became grey and large drops of rain began falling. By the time we arrived it was quite a storm. We had to sit and watch a safety video for 45 minutes. When we finally got outside to work on the airplane it was pouring. We were soaked almost immediately. A large sheet of plastic helped somewhat, but I realized as I waded through an inch of water that we were too near a storm-drain. Brett worked from the creeper. I lay on a plastic container lid to keep out of the rising lake around us. The biggest danger from a dropped wrench was the splash. As we puzzled together the springs and levers of the gear downlock the water rose higher and it got darker. As I tightened the last few bolts I leaned on my elbow in nearly three inches of rain! When I returned from putting away a tool I couldn't find the container-top... it had floated away in the flood! I thought of freezing in Turkey, and decided this wasn't so bad. I was still glad for the $20 bonus the customer gave each of us for our trouble. I hope to drive to the southern tip of Argentina, Patagonia, someday. In the near future I plan to make a lot of weekend forays into Mexico and learn Spanish fluently. Who knows what might happen?!? I'll keep you posted. -Dustin
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