Thursday, November 26, 2009

Choose Your Own Adventure

Last Saturday we had a reading that filled our little event space. Gunner,Elwin, and Hannah read followed by our visiting writer, who was that night's feature presentation. Magpie Killjoy read from his SteamPunk "adventure of one's own choosing" book that he had finished during his time as a visiting writer at the Cyberpunk Apocalypse.
It was quite a bit of fun. All decisions were forced rapid consensuses, and there was a lot of yelling and laughter.
When the reading ended and our guests began to leave, Gunner and I hurriedly packed and finished preparations on our bikes. We planned on peddling toward Cleveland in the morning in order to get a 5:30pm bus the next day. We didn't know if we would be able to get there in time for the bus or even where we were going to put our bikes when we got there (since the bus would not let us bring them with us), but we were going.
When our alarm went off, we made some tea and waited for Garret. When Garret arrived, we left. When we got outside of the city limits the sky was lightening, and my brake and back rack fell off suddenly. But I had a do-dad in my pocket that seemed to replace the thing that came loose and fell off, and I added a zip tie for good measure and we were off.
About forty miles into the ride, Garret's hip (which held large hunks of metal from a relatively recent surgery) started to hurt, but instead of saying anything he biked another fifty miles, camped with us, biked another 60 miles into and around Cleveland, and then said something.
We got into Cleveland mid-day.
By the time we got there we had gotten in touch with a friend of a friend who said we could stow our bikes at his place. It was huge, 6 stories and beautiful. Two people lived in the whole building, so they had one whole apartment filled with dried leaves, and another ready for a Halloween party at any time. The manager of the building did programs with neighborhood kids, and the guy we were in contact with (Ian) wrote grants for it. He also was in a noise band that played music on a Tesla coil, which apparently gives off different pitched hums, depending on how much juice you give it.
Ian helped us stow our bikes, fed us, and pointed us in the direction of our bus. He went above and beyond hospitality, and we couldn't have thanked him enough.
We caught the megabus, and went to Chicago. It's thanksgiving day, but we had our feast yesterday. We've been visiting with my sister, and having a great time. We saw Quinby's and BackStory coffee shop, and ate and drank and were merry. We're heading back today, so hopefully we'll catch the tail end of Artnoose's birthday week which is going on back home.

1 comment:

artnoose said...

I like how Gunner's name is kind of sticking. I totally thought it wouldn't.