9 JULY 2005 GOOD TO GO! I wrote in the Las Vegas/Vagina entry about Mahdi Somo, a friend from the Tilsner Artists' Cooperative in Lowertown, Saint Paul. From Ethiopia, Mahdi has some great stories to tell, including my personal favourite, about Afro the beer-drinking goat. Afro is a goat that spends his life moving from bar to bar in Addis Ababa, looking for people to buy him beer. If there's no one he knows in the bar, he moves to the next bar. If there's someone he knows there, and they buy him a beer, he'll stay. Sounds like the kind of job I could pull off with a goatee beard. Time to grow some prison pussy and move to Africa. Anyway, Mahdi's favourite phrase, "Good to Go!" was pulled out at regular intervals during the packing up of my studio in the Tilsner. "This chair has to leave your apartment? I have put it on the cart. Good to go!" We adopted this as one of the Monkey Van's mottos, and it has strangely followed us around. A gas station in Michigan City. "Good to Go" has definitely become one of the themes of the Flying Monkey Airlines Courtesy Bus maiden voyage. Although in general, my body is bruised and dinged up all over from moving and banging into shit for the last three weeks, the marks under my mouth are actually not signs of oral herpes but in fact a digeridoo-related injury from the Wisconsin leg of the trip. In Kentucky, we stayed at the Ramada Inn, a relatively tolerable hotel chain with a nice pool, but only dial-up Internet, which put a dent in the blogging. Add to this bath towels the size of handkerchiefs, a free continental breakfast that disappears an hour before the posted end time, the lack of any useful hotel information in the rooms, maid service that bursts into the room even as you're yelling "Later, we're still sleeping!" and then never returns to clean the room, and you're left wondering what the $70 a night was for. Things were greatly redeemed by the fact that Roo the Dog got his third swimming lesson in the hotel pool at 2AM and the clincher, at checkout, was when the the hotel receptionist looked at our bill and said, "Yep, you're good to go." No kidding. We were Mahdi Somo-level Good to Go, fucker. All told, Kentucky was a trip to finally see. After being told for years by Ken and Chad about "KY, the Home of the Jelly", we finally slid into town to check it out for ourselves. Ken's wife Dara is about to give birth in the next couple of weeks, so it was great to see her and Ken before the event and especially good not to have it happen while we were there, all that screaming and blood and stuff. Despite it coming at a point in the trip when the Courtesy Bus flight crew was exhausted, Louisville, KY is a very nice town with beautiful architecture, great weather, a definite artsy vibe underlined by the "Keep Louisville Weird" campaign, and cheap rents. Unlike Minnesota, the people that live here don't have the standard Midwestern bovine appearance, and the entire flight crew all agreed that Louisville was babe city. For $590 a month, you can rent a 1,000 sq ft apartment with hardwood floors, a huge patio, and off-street parking. Compared to the gothic Germanic monstrosities of the houses that line the streets of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Louisville's beautiful homes manage to avoid evoking the thought that each home should have a couple of miserable Lutherans standing outside with a pitchfork. A porch to die for in Louisville, KY. If you're still put off by the Deliverance portrayal of Kentucky, which reputedly cost the state of Kentucky something in the region of a third of its tourism the year following its theatrical release, we weren't asked to squeal like pigs at any point during our visit. Shame, a bit of cousin-poking, gun-toting fun would have livened things up. It was from my homeland of Scotland that many of the people who settled Kentucky originated, particularly those who settled the Appalachian mountains where Deliverance was based. The most strained interaction with a Louisville local was a waitress who couldn't understand my British accent. "Hey, it's okay," I said when she apologised for not understanding my order, "I'm the fucking foreigner." And then she couldn't stop giving me that winning Kentucky smile... I don't know how I lasted in Minnesota so long. The winters there give the entire population seasonal affective disorder for half the year which seems to primarily manifest in eating and smoking way too much pot. The rest of the time people come off like the living dead, and then there's all the people who go around hating you because you disagreed with them politely once at a party. Yet, even while they're hating on you, they don't stop smiling and saying hello in the corridor because we're all Minnesota Nice, part of the cultural debris brought by an uptight bunch of settlers from Germany, Norway and Sweden. Elsewhere in the world, it's called passive agressiveness, and in Minnesota, it means that hardly anyone ever says what they really think, a recipe for crappy interpersonnel communications and selfish driving. Every culture has its warts. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my time in Minneapolis and Saint Paul and I'll deeply miss some people there, but it's definitely time to move out of the boonies, leave what my friend Monica calls "Flyover Country", and head for that ole Big Apple. STATS! Since Minnesota, we've driven 1,115 miles to get to the "Appalachian Highway", Highway 32 in Ohio by 8PM on Saturday 9 July 2005. So far, we have spent $160 on gas and $60 on oil (most of this second figure for a full oil change) which totals around 20¢ a mile. Just for gas, it's been 14¢ a mile, and the Flying Monkey Airlines Courtesy Bus has been getting about 15 miles a gallon at its fully loaded cargo capacity at an average speed of 55-65 miles per hour. For the total car geek, we are driving a 1993 Ford Econoline 150 Conversion Van with a V8, 5.0L engine. View the full Kentucky photo gallery Captain Nigel Parry, writing from the cockpit of the Flying Monkey Airlines Courtesy Bus, Michigan City, Indiana, 6 July 2005.
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