Claremont, CA: Too much, Time on my hands

Miles since last blog: 19.7
Miles Total: 3759.7

Route

I am now within a distance of the pier that I have covered in one day before. With four days to go, it looks like I'll have it mostly wrapped up by tomorrow leaving a little bit for later in the week and Saturday with whoever wants to join me. I'll have a lot of time to think and try to wrap my head around this being over and the idea of staying with people I know every night. Weird.

48.7

Rialto, CA: Coasting

Miles since last blog: 17.0
Miles Total: 3740.0

Route

Well, I had fun in redlands but it was time to make a break for the coast and away from the Eastern side of the Inland Empire where all the smog from LA and the west collects, poor Redlands and San Bernardino. I was shocked, shocked, to see a blue sky when I hit Rialto in the afternoon and was thoroughly unprepared for it to clear up resulting in a mild sunburn. The next two days I'll be turning in most of the mileage for the remainder of the trip and then taking a bit of time off to try and wrap my brain around this whole shebang being over and done with. And maybe I'll get a haircut too.

68.4

Redlands, CA: Coming Home

Miles since last blog: 13.3
Miles Total: 3723.0

Route

I've been staying with some cool college-ish age kids here in Redlands. I always feel comfortable in this environment, I feel comfortable most anywhere, but especially in a place like this. A place like this is a house with a few roommates in a residential neighborhood near a park. It's older and has a porch, the furniture is older but not shabby, comfortable, and the floors are wood. There's always beer in the fridge and a guy at the kitchen table studying. I've always loved this place and have seen hundreds of versions of it, but never lived there.

A place like this makes me think of my past and wonder if I had ever done this how my life would have been different. I doubt I would have come here. I worked hard and bought my own track house and was busy being overly grown up when I was in school, I wonder if I can come back and fit into this life later on when I am older, calmer and can sit still long enough to go back to the university system that always seems to be calling to me.

In any case, it's been nice and regenerative. I've met some cool people with great lives and goals and dreams and it feels good and right to be moving on from here. So little time left.

86

Beaumont, CA: Psyched

Miles since last blog: 10.1
Miles Total: 3709.7

Route

I'm finally getting excited not just for the walk ending, but after the walk, of course this corresponds directly to getting deeper in debt but I can ignore that a little bit longer before the hounds begin to bay.

I know you've all been twiddling your thumbs and doing your underwater basket weaving and thinking, "WHAT IS SKIP GOING TO DO WHEN HE FINISHES!?!" (It seems a sizable portion of my readership statistically is insane)

Well, I don't have a long term answer, but the short term is: Traveling. I am booked up for about two weeks visiting the 'rents in Hawaii starting a few days after the walk and then a week after that I plan to go back to Prague for two weeks, sometime in or after there I am also trying to find time and cash for Buenos Aires and Roatan (Honduras). Color me excited. My skin is actually hot because I am so incredibly psyched to GO, GO, GO!!! Now that the walk is in it's last 8 days (a few days ago when I said ten my brain was fried from the sun, I had 12 left even then) I am starting to have solid dates and places and people to meet in them that I have known and loved for more than a week. I had no idea how exciting it would be, but many of these plans are sort of coalescing today and it is leaving me super charged.

It's hard even to think of the past at the moment. So here I go, Blythe. The desert was hot, maybe a little too hot, and I hadn't walked far, maybe a little too not far, before long, I had to rest out of the heat. I had been sketching out some of the lyrics for my long planned zombie comedy musical romance and the heat of the day and dryness from singing had worn me out so I slank back off the road behind a broken down old shack and laid down in the dirt. The flies were buzzing and I couldn't get a decent rest, "cool its youz guys," I snapped.

Down the road a bit of dust was being kicked up and a car was bouncing up the dirt that passed for a road. A tall dark man got out and started questioning me, "what are you doing?" "do you want this cold glass of ice water?" "do you want to stay at my house and get food and a shower?"

I said yes to all of it, which probably left him a little confused with respect to the first question. His name was Marvin, a nice guy who was into cage fighting and being a pastor, I wondered if ever at the same time. I could see him rubbing a guys face against the cage bars, "repent sinner!" he would rasp in the victims ear. I stayed the night in his living room and all the next day he let me rest, waking me periodically to feed me and take me to see his other family, which he helped out but wasn't 'involved' with. He twirled a loaded gun on his finger and was nice as hell, funny too with a past that was as wild as my hair in the morning. I was a bit sad to leave such a great guy and character in the dust when I trekked off into the sunset, but my cousin was coming from the state capitol and I had to get moving.

The days with Cousin Kathy passed beautifully in a colorful haze of sunsets and fast food deliriums. We had our adventures, helped another man walking across the desert, found a stranded motorist and helped him with his overheated car, we were a duo of preemptive Sam Becketts (Quantum Leap) traveling through the desert to put right what could have gone wrong. I got a cactus to the foot and Kathy snarled at the Dead fish in the barnacle shores of the Salton Sea. We rode the Painted Canyon and hunkered into mineral baths, those were the days.

Since then I've rolled rough and said goodbye to Kathy, Ando (my carrier), and a host of other things like my tent, sleeping bag and blanket. I've been couchsurfing and experimenting with authentic homelessness in the cold and windy passes exiting the Coachella valley and the giant dinosaurs that lie beyond it. But I've said to much. Until next time my monitor mates, my blog buddies, my life lovers, my my my.

97

Banning, CA: Numbers

Miles since last blog: 15.6
Miles Total: 3699.6

Route

200 Blogs, 3700 miles and 9 months later, I'm only about 100 miles from the coast. I'm couchsurfing, and last night I slept for a paltry hour. I have not slept since. Tomorrow I am only walking 10 miles and talking to one class, I am reasonably caught up on video and photos as well, which means i can start dredging my memory and get back to writing that I have been terribly negligent in. I know I say that all the time lately, but every once in a while I bust out some move for you guys, right? Give a weary traveler a break, damn.

In any case, the sun has set on the desert. It is a small, but meaningful, bit cooler where I am now which makes the days easier. This and the fact that there is regularly places to eat and get water makes a enormous difference in my day. The coast is calling.

106

Whitewater Rest Area, CA: And rest I shall

Miles since last blog: 28.5
Miles Total: 3684.0

Route

I'm sleeping in a rest area tonight, it's right in the pass between some mountains where it's so windy that on the other side is one of the biggest wind farms around. I'm putting on my clothes, all to most of them, and hunkering down. Looks like I'll have a bit of down time in the future and I'll be catching up on writing and photos, but as promised, here's a few videos I had to chop up to fit on Youtube.

1) http://bit.ly/19O14O
2) http://bit.ly/9LP5u
3) http://bit.ly/pSE9K

122

Palm Desert, CA: Thank you Comfort Suites!!!

First off, thanks so much to the Comfort Suites in Palm Desert for giving me a place to lay my head tonight.

Second, I am working very hard on getting some video up tomorrow. If you are on Facebook it is already up along with a host of new photos.

Third, I am going to bed, I've been working on this all day. Goodnight.