After almost two years living in San Diego, I decided to make the break. I packed all my stuff up, said goodbye to my friends and my ex and my dog, and headed East. I slept for a while in the desert outside Tucson, AZ, but the sun woke me up before long so I carried on. After getting through New Mexico, I stopped by the Comanche Inn, an old motel in Ft. Stockton, Texas where I had stayed years before when I first drove to San Diego. I asked if John was around, the owner who sang
Kareokee with us the last time through, but was told that he'd died three months ago. Saddened and feeling a bit lost thinking about the last three years spent
criss-crossing the country, I put my little backpacker guitar across me like a
seatbelt and drove with my knees across the Texas highway, trying to lift my
spririts with music. I wrote a song but when I played it back later I didn't like it. Texas is way too big... my destination was only half way across the state but it seemed like it took days to get there.
When I arrived in
Kerrville, Texas I found the comfort I needed. I was greeted at the front gate with hugs and "welcome home"s from some really good friends and some total strangers who seemed like they could be good friends. It is an amazing thing to drive 1,200 miles to a town you have never been and to be told "welcome home," and to really feel home. I was walking into the tail end of the
Kerrville Folk Festival, an annual event that lasts 18 days, featuring some
phenomanal musicians from Austin and throughout Texas and the country,
jamming around campfires and on stage in a completely organic, drum-free, celebration of songwriting, life and music.
My friends got me on the staff which meant that my food, beer, camping and admission to the concerts was free. I met some great songwriters, played on one of the stages, tried to trade licks with a gypsy jazz player named
Django, and came one step closer to being a true member of the Austin music family.
From
Kerrville I went to Corpus Christi, on the Gulf coast, and saw Green Mountain Grass play with some friends from Illinois that I had run into at the festival. We stayed in a hotel with the band and then went
seperate ways; they to New Orleans and I back to Austin for more music and post-
Kerrville festivities.
Back in Austin I stayed at the "Hippie Half Way House," so named because unlike the "Hippie Mansion," which was home to 15- 20 Austin hippies at any given time, the half way house usually had only 7 or 8. All three members of the Austin based band "The Blue Hit" were living there and it was really fun playing music with them and sitting in on their practices. There was also a pirate from Vermont who had abandoned ship on his
jugband's west coast tour and headed back to Austin, and a girl named Lotus from Montana. Everyone was still high off the energy from
Kerrville and trying to let it last as long as possible.
Eventually I decided it was time to move on and I headed North, through Dallas, through Oklahoma, and into Arkansas. I stayed with my friends Kara and Landon in
Springdale, Arkansas, and met their new baby girl,
Seaghan, who is four months old. It was pretty crazy to go from a hippie house in liberal Austin to a conservative Christian household in Arkansas, but both are beautiful in their own way.
I got really excited as I went through St. Louis the next day, passing the arch, crossing the Mississippi river and returning to familiar territory. I made it to
Darien, IL by about 10pm Saturday June 16
th, 11 days and 3,000 miles after leaving San Diego.
