Captain’s log: May 9th 2011

T-minus 4 days till launch.

This past Friday night we had our Bus Launching Party, awesome would be the word to describe the party before 10pm, epic is what people called the night till about midnight, and after the flame spinners showed up and performed on top of the bus around 1 am, the night was written in the books for all time as legendary. This party truly was a great way to officially launch our bus. Again it was the people that made it. Over 200 people showed up throughout the night, those people were a combination of all our random friends, bus enthusiast, home park neighbors, random homeless guy, and of course the constant parade of drunken post-students who had just finished their last week of school at GT. This ridiculous combination made for a night that was totally unpredictable and constantly entertaining. The night started with the core bus crew cleaning up the bus, removing all tools, and clearing out the parking lot that is the bus home. Farmer brought a fire pit and lots of bag chairs, Davin and Sean showed up with the kegs and around 8pm the party started. There were other house parties being thrown on Lynch street, so we went and met the neighbors and encouraged them to join what had now become the Lynch Street Post Finals Party. Rugers came, ORGT kids came, alumni came, family came, DX came, co-workers came, it truly was an amazing combination of people. At one point we had over 20 people on the roof of the ClubHouse! The fire pit was rolling, burning all of our scrap wood that needed to be disposed of, tours of the bus were continually being given, music was rockin’ some 90’s jams, we christened the bus with nothing else than a bottle of Mexico’s finest- Modelo (left over from Cinco de Mayo) and champagne was sprayed everywhere as we toasted to a safe and life changing adventures to come. I fell even more in love with the crew of the ClubHouse with whom I will soon be living with as we traverse the country.

So thank you to everyone who joined us Friday, it was good to see you all. Thank you to the flame spinners who showed up out of nowhere and started performing to Chris Q’s djembe beat on the roof of our bus (video to come soon). Thank you to those who donated to help us buy gas. A huge thanks goes to Evan for letting us use this bathroom across the street due to our bus toilet not being operational yet.

The excitement of the night can be summed up in a quote from Farmer “just think, this is the kind of night this bus is going to inspire EVERY night for the next 6 weeks”. I cannot wait to see who and what we are going to experience on this journey. Friday cannot come fast enough.*

-Capain

*note: actually we still have lots of work to do to finish the bus before Friday comes, so its OK if Friday comes slower so we have time to get everything done.