wes middleton & brandi chalker
We are Wes and Brandi, the newlywed couple taking off across the United States (and hopefully a bit of Canada) in our vegetable-oil-converted school bus named Gimli (son-of-Gloin). We hope to see all 48 states on the mainland, and share our experiences on this site. The website for our route map is: http://www.travelblog.org/gmaps/map_3dE.html so you can see how far we've gone!gimli guts
Here are some websites we love and think you should visit:
* www.couchsurfing.com a great website for travelers- our name is Weeze if you want to search for us
* www.vegrev.com This is the site for the mechanics who did the vegetable oil conversion on our bus
* www.nosweatapparel.com A good site for non-sweatshop clothing
* www.justiceclothingcompany.com Another non-sweatshop clothing company
* www.littlestarpizza.com Best pizza in San Francisco
* www.akpress.org Revolutionary online infoshop, books, shirts, CD's, etc.
* You can find us both on myspace.com
Restaurants that have given us free oil so far (please give them your business if they're in your area):
*Woody's Grill and Barbecue, Sacramento CA (10 gal.)
*Oka's Japanes restaurant, Oakhurst CA (17 gal)
*Punjab Indian Palace, Riverside CA (15 gal)
*Bahama Breeze, Phoenix AZ (40 gal)
*Wanfu Too, Austin TX (best oil so far!) (45 gal)
*The Galley Seafood Restaurant, Metairie, New Orleans, LA (45 gal)
*Winn Dixie Grocery Store, Orange Park, FL (20 gal)
*Christo's Cafe, Winter Park, FL
*Saikyo Sushi Bar & Grill, Winter Park, FL (20 gal)
*Ole Ole Tapas Bar and Grill, Winter Park, Fl (20 gal)
*Huddle House, somewhere in GA (10 gal)
*Ura San's Sushi Restaurant, Athens, Ga (45 gal)
*The Pho Vietnamese Restaurant, Memphis, TN (20 gal)
*Betty's Bar & Grill, Nashville, TN (20 gal)
*Eddie Spaghetti's, Asheville, NC (20 gal)
*nameless restaurant in NC whose oil we plundered... (45 gal)
*Panda Cafe, D.C. (25 gal)
*Zen Cafe, Morgantown, WV (2 gal)
Travel Blog Posts
July 12th 2008
So Brandi & I have spent over a month in Alaska. We got here on time for the longest day of the year, it was a dusky kind of light out until a little after midnight, and we were told it was light again around 3:30 or 4 the next morning, but neither of us could verify that. The weather has been sometimes sunny and beautiful, but mostly gray, and often rainy. It never gets really cold or really hot, which makes sense considering the island of Ketchikan is actually a temperate rain forest. The scenery is amazing. We live right on the ocean, there are bald eagles everywhere, we've seen whales, and seals, and of course massive fish. A guest pulled up a halibut today that was over six feet in length. As for the ... read more
June 7th 2008
So we just drove up to Prince Rupert in British Columbia, from Muir Beach in California. It took about five days. We hung out at our friend Tori's cabin, went on a beer hunt (like an easter egg hunt, but with beer) played with a see-saw on the beach, and got in a sea weed fight. The next night we stayed in Eugene, Oregon which was uneventful, just a place to stop. The next day we had lunch with our buddy and fellow couchsurfer, Jason, who we met in Florida, but now lives in Portland. Portland seems like a way cool city, and we'll make sure to spend a few days there on the way back down from Alaska. By that evening we were in Seattle, visiting our buddies Andrea & Jeff (also a Florida couchsurfer). ... read more
June 2nd 2008
The road trip came to an end, Brandi and I were running out of cash and looking for a place to stop. It just so happened that our awesome friend Tori, who was originally from Morgantown, West Virginia, but who we knew from SF, was visiting DC. We met her there, and went to Morgantown. It was super cheap, and everybody was friendly. It was summer time, so half the population (the students) were out of town, and it was peaceful. We figured it was as good a place as any, and lucky for us, Ed was looking for a room-mate. Soon enough we had a place in south park, we got jobs, and a dog, and spent the next year making great friends. Brandi made a whole bunch of jewelry and worked waitressing jobs. I ... read more
June 7th 2007
Hello everyone out there in blog land... So sorry we haven't been keeping this site up to date, but it's often hard to find internet on the road, and to spend time on the computer when there's so much else to see and do. For everyone who hasn't heard yet, we've actually stopped traveling. We made it to Morgantown, West Virginia, and decided we didn't want to leave. So we rented a house with our friend Ed and have been working on the whole getting-a-job thing. Wes got hired last week as a cook at the West Virginia Brewing Company, and I am starting my new job today as a bartender at Hibachi, a great Japanese restaurant. We got a dog yesterday, named Mouse (a pound mutt, she's super small and sweet), and we've been meeting ... read more
April 30th 2007
So we left Athens, having done little in the way of sight seeing, and much in the way of stressing out over car troubles and sickness. The next stop was Atlanta, Georgia. We knew the bus needed work, but there wasn't a mechanic in Athens who could do it, so we lined up a shop in Atlanta, and that was our first stop. The Mechanics were so nice it was a little creepy. They took us to get food, and were super chatty and hospitable. They replaced our glow plugs and we were ready to go. Now Gimli starts up like a champ most of the time, and even when he doesn't, we know how to coerce him into starting. We stayed with a really great girl named Danielle and her boyfriend, who we found ... read more
April 26th 2007
On our way to Athens we ran out of the little amount of veg oil we had left, and we were lucky enough to find a place along the way where we could get oil (after much searching, of course). So it took us quite a while longer than it should have to get to Athens, but we made it by evening. We had everything lined up to stay with Anthony from couchsurfing, and he was a pretty cool host. He even had an entire guest bedroom for us to stay in, which is rare. We were tired from getting up early and doing a lot of driving that day, so we just hung out at the house that night with Anthony and his girlfriend. The next day, Wes and I went to this really ... read more
April 20th 2007
After leaving Orlando, we headed to Savannah GA because we had heard it was a neat, historic place to check out. We only had a couple days there because we had a hard time finding people on couchsurfing.com to stay with. Wes caught a cold of some sort in Orlando and was really starting to feel sick on our first full day in Savannah, so we rode our bikes into town and walked around a bit. Savannah looks a lot like New Orleans, with the huge trees lining the streets, covered in moss. We went down by the river into this sort of cheesy tourist area, wandered around downtown a little, went to the cemetery, and stopped in the park for a while. But at that point Wes was feeling pretty sick and had a ... read more
April 14th 2007
Orlando was surprisingly great. We had next to no interest in amusment parks, thus we were far from the regular Orlando tourists. Our main reason for going there in the first place was because it is an ideal location for day trips around Florida, but we didn't really want anything to do with Orlando itself. Then we met our couchsurfing hosts, Jeff, and Jason. These guys lived in an amazing little neighborhood tucked away in Winter Park where you would never expect it. There was spanish moss hanging from the Oaks covering the brick road. They were right next to a lake, and they were the coolest, rad-est, most wickedist hosts. Jeff was a super mellow fellow who is currently prepping to go on a bicycle trip across the states, building houses with Habitat for ... read more
April 7th 2007
Wes and I left Gainesville to make it to my Aunt Emily’s house in Sarasota for Easter dinner. She lives there with her husband Michael and daughter Michelle, in a house not far from the gulf coast and Siesta Key. Michael’s family was in town for a family reunion, so we got to meet some of his siblings and had a great Easter dinner with everyone. I hadn’t seen my aunt since our family reunion in 2005, and her daughter has grown so much since then. While we were there, Wes and I rode our bicycles out to Siesta Key twice. The first time, it had rained for most of the day and we missed most of the daylight hours at the beach, but the next day we rode back again and spent a few ... read more
April 7th 2007
While we were living in San Francisco we hosted people on couchsurfing. One of the people we hosted was a great guy named Louis who was travelling from Florida to see the Pogues (a fantastic irish band) in California. Every day he was at our house he said he'd leave the next day to go explore more of California, and every time he decided to stay, and we were happy to have him. Jump ahead five months, now Brandi and I are the one's on the road, and being hosted by couchsurfers. We were in Florida already, so we decided to contact Louis and see his world. It was the first time we were able to both host and surf with the same person. Louis actually lives in Hawthorne, a suburb of Gainesville, out in ... read more
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