Every Day Adventurers

These are Mike Cobb’s words and wisdom from his Xtracycle tour around Europe as part of the Pleasant Revolution. Enjoy!

Wifi is precious and rare for this mechanic… just performed field surgery on my iPhone to replace the battery. Disabled the camera in the process! So- I can only send old pictures + hopefully a few that tourmates e-mail to me. But let’s start this off right!

Had a one week vacation from our working vacation. Ljubljana, Slovania, the city of love, is where it started.

Ljubljana: Soooo full of grafitti. Seems as though civic concerns lie elsewhere. I like it – street level culture staining the walls. Saturation of personality. Sweet, mellow.

The squat in Ljubljana – the 5th squat or so. Always a somewhat creepy adventure. Squats attract creative people, anti-establishment people, rebel-rousers, sick people, poor people, drug adicts. This one had no electricity, lit by candles stolen from the local cemetary. One morning I watched a young man conspicuously trying to act casual outside the main building in the courtyard. It was a tough role to play as he kept puking in the storm drain. You can’t puke quietly. Or casually. After finishing, he quickly stood erect and wiped his whiskers. I just can’t stop assuming he was a junky who’s junk stream dried up – at the squat looking for a solution. William Burroughs has filled my head with diagnosis details…

Spent the night last night on a rugby field inside an Aix de Provence, France sports complex. I slept in my bivi sack on the field’s grass. Woke up to cloud bursts that delivered regular intervals of rain – 15 seconds of hard rain, 50 second break, 15 seconds of hard rain…kinda like a sprinkler…After about 4 or 5 rounds of this onslaught, it dawned on me that it WAS a sprinkler. Moved 30 meters away to the dry zone while Kipchoge first attempted to thwart the rain-makers with heavy rocks, then successfully with cooking pots AND heavy rocks. The tent-testing ended.

I’m finding a lot of “raw sienna, reduced red” (color of my room) all over provincial France. Often the main road through villages is canyon-walled with solid shop/residential walls, buffered by minimalist one meter sidewalks. These walls are often awash in subtle variations of “raw sienna, reduced red”. It’s a faded earthy yellow, familiar like memory from dreams. Truly soothing and pleasant. The feeling of ancestral habitat.