The Mississippi Trip

Well, we’ve made it. It has been a long and amazing adventure, now 53 days later we are in New Orleans. We arrived in the city late last night after running a gauntlet of ocean cruisers, barges, and even a battleship. The last few days have been a surreal mix of industry and the river. Factories with almost familiar smells tinted with the scent of chemicals and large amounts of river traffic have been the norm. Jared and Kyle picked us up and we’ve been enjoying New Orleans. We’ll be back home tomorrow night and can’t wait to see everyone! We’ll be having a big show on November 30th at the Triple Crown with Mira! Look! and Muchos Backflips to celebrate a safe return and see everybody we’ve been missing for the last couple of months. Hopefully we’ll be debuting some new music fresh off of the river. Here are a couple of videos and some more pictures from the last week or so. We want to thank everyone for checking the website and being involved. We’ve really enjoyed the interaction the site has offered and we’ll be continuing the blog format, look for the Ghana blog shortly. Everyone take care and check back soon for more pictures, stories, and whatever else we can think of and hopefully we’ll see everyone at the show!

Barge Wars

Wake

We’ve made it to Louisiana, although currently posting from the Mississippi side of the river. Natchez seems like a great town so far and we’re in the public library here. The weather has been beautiful the last few days and we’ve been making great time, about 50 miles a day. We hope to be in New Orleans around Tuesday of next week. Still missing everyone and can’t wait to be back in Texas. Thanks to everyone who checks the site and comments, it’s always great to hear from everyone back home and even the people we have met on the trip. Hope everyone is doing well and we’ll see you all soon.

We apologize for the long interval between this and the last update, but hopefully all the pictures will make up for it. We’re writing this from the Memphis Metal Museum, a small, one of a kind metal arts community and museum right on the banks of the river. It’s a beautiful place with kind people. And we have to give many thanks to our new friend Lauren for driving us over here and introducing us to everyone. We made it to the city last night, stashed the canoe in a super secret hidden location and hiked along the woods, fields, factories and highways for a few hours until we reached Beale St. It was very reminisent of 6th street with all the bars, people, and music that go along with it. We had a great time, got some food and met many interesting people, including a lively troop of actors from Knoxville. It got to be too late to trek back to the boat so we stayed in a motel and finally got clean and slept in real beds. What a night! It’s fascinating to come off the river into such massive structures and human activity.

We miss all of you, and we especially want to say “I love you” to our beautiful lady friends. We’ve paddled well over halfway and soon we’ll all be together for the holidays eating Zac’s “pasta of love”… right Zac? Deep Peace to all

We made it to St. Louis! Not quite half way yet, but close. We came in at about six yesterday evening and met up with our good friend John. Kent worked out a deal with a shady barge dock to tie the boat up overnight, we paid by the foot. St. Louis is a huge city with quite an impressive arch inside of it. We spent the night walking all over the town and seeing as much as we could. And now to back track. The past week has gone well. We met some new friends from Illinois who kindly offered us beer and pizza, and even towed the canoe a couple of miles down river to a sand bar. It was interesting to actually be causing wake instead of trying to navigate through it. We made our first fifty mile day- sixty is next. Unfortunately, no pictures this post, as Kent’s camera has gotten a bit wet and currently isn’t working. In place of visuals, here is a rough draft of our ideal canoe mix tape. And it must be a tape, as a cassette player and mini disc recorder is all we have available.

1. Keep On Rocking In The Free World -  Neil Young
2. The Night They Drove Ol’ Dixie Down - The Band
3. Born On A Bayou - Creedence Clearwater Revival
4. War Pigs - Black Sabbath
5. Born To Run - Bruce Springsteen
6. Life In The Fast Lane - Don Henley?
7. Whip It - Devo
8. Immigrant Song - Led Zepplin
9. Once In a Lifetime - Talking Heads

If you have a way to get these songs on tape, or you’d like to make your own mix tape for us, we’ll try to find the address of a small town post office down river and put it in the next post. So, now that we’ve been refreshed and cleaned in St. Louis, it’s time to move on. We miss all of you and hope all is well.

Hello Friends, Family, and Internet Surfers,
We’re writing you from Muscatine, Iowa with high spirits and all of you on our minds.  Today marks the beginning of our third week on the river and we’ve been blessed with some stronger bodies and faster currents.  We’re averaging about 35 miles a day now.  The library is about to close so I won’t write too much- but mainly we want to say that we’re feeling strong and thinking of all of you warmly.  Speaking of temperatures, we heard it will get cold next week and then this trip will officially be a winter adventure.  We’ll write again soon.

With Love and Respect,

Kent and Chris

Hello from La Crosse, Wisconsin. We’ve stopped for the night and the good people of the Diamond Way Buddhist center here have been kind enough to let us stay with them. We’ve done a little meditation, some indoor rock climbing, and even a little basketball. Tomorrow, we’re going up to the bluffs bright and early to check out the view before we take off. The trip thus far has been great. The weather for the most part has been wonderful, except for a large thunder storm on Lake Pepin which gave us a good scare. We’ve seen two bald eagles, been through eight locks, and travelled one hundred and fifty miles. We have been camping mostly on sandy banks and are learning to deal with grains of sand in everything. Going through the locks has been a new experience, but so far has been relatively quick and easy. You just paddle up, pull a large chord (which proceeds to let out a custom sci-fi ring for each different lock), wait for the gate to open, paddle in, chat with the locksman (always friendly and usually with facial hair), wait for the water to go down, and then paddle on out after the second gate opens. The paddle/rowing combo has been working well and our daily mileage has been increasing, up to 35 miles yesterday. The shower and beds here in La Crosse are welcome ammenities that we probably won’t be seeing for the rest of the trip. So here’s a few more pictures of the trip so far, more to come later I promise. And don’t forget, all comments and questions are welcome. We hope everyone is well and we’ll update the page again as soon as we can.

Hello friends and family. As some of you know, we’ve been up in Minneapolis for the last few days. The trip up here was exhausting and fun. We made four dollars at an Indian casino and found Oklahoma very kind. The last few days have been spent working on the boat and testing it on a nearby lake. The newest additions to the craft include: workable oars with bonus rowing ability, beefstick keel for extra straightness, and a bedsheet/oar sail combo for windy days. Everything has been tested but not retested and we’re doing last minute packing for an eight a.m. launch tomorrow. We chose Pig’s Eye Lake to start from, it’s below a couple of locks and we liked the name. So thank you all for your patronage of our blog and as a reward here is a video from the plains of kansas and some pictures. More updates soon, keep checking back.

Plains of Kansas

The canoe is mostly complete now and has been baptized in the waters of San Marcos. Here’s a few more pictures.

Here’s some more photos of the canoe being built. I’ll add more as I find them.




is an 18′ Micmac style cedar canoe built using the “strip planking” method. I think a huge aspect of the trip is that we built our boat and paddles from scratch, hoping to involve ourselves in the process of the journey from the start.