#blutrip

#Blutrip a canooooon #husky #adventurewithdogs #trip

Days 5 and 6 (and a little bit of Day 7): It's a little unnerving to think that I only started this last Tuesday. Right now, I'm sitting in a train station in Orem, Utah, just a few miles south of Salt Lake City. It'll be my first train hop of the trip, though not in the traditional sense. This is a passenger train, I'm just going to sneak on, if that's possible with my huge backpack. But it is, and I know this. Anything is possible, as long as you're able to use the system in place to your advantage. In this sense, I'll be using the system of capitalism, more specifically I am using the system in place of the Amtrak passenger train company. The annoying thing is I have no idea how they check their passengers, so I'm walking into this situation pretty blindly. But that's something that I've wanted to prove to myself on this journey- that any system can be used to one's advantage. In my experience so far, it's equal parts quick thinking, observation, and luck. Even still, I'm a wary of this one. Who knows what it will look like when it comes time for me to hop a freight train. Day 5 was a waste for the most part. It was a resting day, after I'd hiked through the heat and the distance north of Moab. I got to pop a blister on the little toe of my right foot this morning, thanks to that venture. Day 5 consisted of sleeping, before that I ran into a guy named Kyle who traded me some bud for a Naked Juice. I haven't smoked any of it yet, I'll wait until I get to California to do that. I knew Kyle previously, thanks to a site called hitchwiki.com that I frequent for info on routes, laws, and to see how other people operate in this lifestyle. Kyle, or thewindandrain as I know him, has compiled the hitchhiking laws on all 50 states in the United States. The guy's been around. We went behind some trucks at the truck stop we were both near and he smoked some weed out of an aluminum can; I passed because I was feeling funky and wanted to sleep afterwards, and I knew smoking would've made me confused, for lack of a better explanation. I think it bummed him out that I didn't smoke with him. Or maybe he was just high and stopped talking as much as he had been. I found a spot under a bridge to sleep, with cars passing about 5 feet away from my head, but with a barrier in between us so that in order to see me, they would've had to have been leaning out of their passenger window looking down. It was raining and I was in a hurry to sleep. It'd been almost 36 hours since I had. There really wasn't anything exciting about Day 5. Or Day 6, for that matter. The train going the opposite way just pulled up and I watched the passengers get on. Looks like they just get on. Hm. Maybe this will be as easy as the continental breakfasts. I sure hope so. Those are the shit. I really hope this works, I'm supposed to be downtown in Salt Lake City around noon to meet a guy. Moving on. Day 5 was sleeping. If anything else happened, I can't remember, so it's not worth writing about. Day 6, yesterday, I woke around 6, had breakfast (thank you Days Inn in Provo), and started walking. I walked about six or so miles and stopped to eat peanut butter in a cemetery. I yelled 'What did you do with your lives?' to the graves as I sat in the shade. 'What are you doing with yours?' they asked back. A valid question. I'm working on answering it. I passed Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. I passed an apple orchard and ate an apple. I walked. It's what I do. It was hot. According to technology, it was in the low sixties. I'd put it more in the high eighties. Not as bad as Moab, but not fun to walk in either. I made my way into a Starbucks to charge my iPhone and it started to rain. Salt Lake City has an abundance of hipsters and everything is closed on Sundays. I mean everything, even the mall. Only McDonalds and Starbucks were open as far as I saw. The train's coming in ten minutes. That flourish of butterflies in the stomach surfaces for a moment. I always try and figure why I get nervous before things like this. I'm not robbing banks; there's no jail time in the equation here. Worst case scenario, I get kicked off the train at the next stop. So why the nervousness? I can only guess that it's a societal thing. I don't want to be embarrassed by that happening. Which I don't get, because I wouldn't be embarrassed by such a thing. So maybe it's subconscious. Or maybe it's a flush of adrenaline being surged into the bloodstream, waking up the mind in case I have to do some quick thinking or quick talking. I find that funny too, though, because my entire approach to things like this is not getting nervous, ignoring the entire fact that I'm doing something wrong- wrong not in the moral sense but in the cultural sense. 7 minutes until departure. I find that if you can distract the mind from the situation that it considers nerve-racking, it makes the entire body look more natural and act more natural. Method acting in a sense; self-rearrangement as a mode of adaption to the occasion. 4 minutes. We're boarding. My god, it worked. Half an hour to Salt Lake City. I wandered to UVU, or Utah Valley University, last night in search of a place to sleep. I was aiming for the library; I've spent some time sleeping in and around the campus library at the University of Tennessee, though I never attended there. This was to be the end of Day 6. Instead of the library, which had people driving in and around it at 10 p.m., I stopped outside of an unknown building, hit my pack under a tree, and scoped the area for an appropriate sleeping spot. When you're trespassing, it can do wonders to blend in, rather than stick out like the stranger that you are with a giant backpack with an assortment of knickknacks hanging from it. I found a tree, again a short distance from the road, but the angle was such that if a driver was going to see me, they'd have to be looking. I dreamt about something that I've now forgotten, but in the cold night, the dream stuck into me like an icicle. --------------------------------------- My next post will consist of Days 7 and 8, including the train ride I already have away because I was excited about it at the time. I'm currently contemplating hopping a freight train to get the fuck out of SLC and into California! Please share the love and reblog! Thanks for reading, see you soon.