Petra and I start the day with another lounge in the hot spring tubs before going back to see Mike mixing the tracks we recorded last night. Mike has micro festivals here with audiences of a hundred or so. He says that some of bands he has here play to thousands in the big cities, though I can’t say I had heard of any that he mentions. I wouldn’t expect to either.
Mike applies himself to many crafts. He has a glass blowing studio, little building projects are scattered around his grounds, he dabbles in graphic design and he also has a ping pong table. He shows us the inside of the bus he has parked outside his office. Unlike most of his bus collection, this one still runs, and the inside is kitted out with lounge chairs, a queen size bed and an elaborate wood cabinet from Vietnam. It’s no surprise to learn that he only gets 6mpg out of it.
Our journey continues and for lunch we stop at Big Rock Candy Mountain, an old mining town made famous by a 1920s song by ‘Haywire Mac’, who was a mine brake man here. The song is a Hobo anthem, celebrating amongst other things the fact that at Big Rock Candy Mountain ‘the jails are made of tin, and you can walk right out again’.
Back on the bus a train of massage gets going. I’m sat at the tables so miss out the chain but I get Chai from Malaysia to massage my back as I was told she had learned about pressure points on a course. If that was true, then I have to say my pressure points hurt too much for massage. Maybe I should have got Tanille, our hyperactive ladette Aussie to do it, though she seems to prefer sat on your back technique, so perhaps not.
In the afternoon we take a few hours to walk a trail through the red rock formations of Kodachrome State Park. We are told this is like a mini version of what we can expect at Bryce Canyon which we will visit in a couple of days, with a multitude of phallic stone spires sticking up from the ground and the rock faces exposing layer like patterns cause by wind and water erosion. Boulders make good spots for fiddler Neil’s now mandatory performances, while a smooth wave of a rock has everyone jumping up and down for the cameras. My knees are suffering flashbacks to my Nepalese hiking experience, so I crouch while everyone leaps.
Going through Idaho and Montana, there was a spring crispness in the air, with chilly bookmarks to each day. The snow was still in melt when we were at the Grand Teton NP. However, now we are in central Utah and the dry country, we are in thirst inspiring weather.
Tonight is the last night we spend together as a complete group, as this is a tour split in two with some people only having booked the first week. This means I will be losing my Czech wives Petra and Adele, but we will be collecting another group who have booked onto the second week. There is a last campfire party at night with festivities going on until 2am, when Jimmy ordered the children to bed. I relay this as I was long gone to the world by this time.
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