The American Festivals Project is back in action!  After a little winter nap and a few minor tweaks (ok, major is more like it), AFP is in better shape than ever.  We’re proudly sporting a new website.  Thanks to the boys at BA21 for getting this up.  The Airstream is gone.  Sigh…yes, but you try weaving in and out of flooded Chicago traffic pulling that behind your half-ton pickup.  Just feast your eyes, however, on our elegant luxury 1964 camper/home “The Dodge Lodge.”  Her ass is pretty big but she’s a true beauty.  Plus, the propane still works!  You might also notice a new face on the AFP website.  Charlottesville resident and photographer Andrew Owen is joining the project and gettin’ dirty with picture-takin’, bloggin’, and veggie greasin’.  So far so good with all the new changes!

We’re super excited for the next eight months and the upcoming adventures.  You can practically ride shotgun with us by tuning into our blog which we’re hoping to update daily.  We’re a touch behind already but we have some awesome posts coming really soon.  Keep an eye out too for some new features including daily twitter feeds, hi-def video clips, and a sweet map to track our progress.  Of course, make sure to see all the slideshow galleries from each festival.

It wasn’t easy getting out of Cville but with a little help from our friends we were able to pull it altogether.  Many thanks to Wheeler, Emily, and Jenna for the extra boost so we could set sail.  With Jonny Mills and Gabe Allan in the backseat, the Dodge Lodge loaded up on a tank of fresh veggie in Ivy and then departed on Friday January 30th for New York City.   We hit some nasty weather in PA but Ross kept his head as best he could and steered the big rig into the Big Apple.

We arrived just in time for a nights sleep before Brooklyn’s most vicious, fearsome, competitive, and ruthless shopping cart race the Idiotarod.  Inspired by the grueling dog-sled race through the bitter Alaskan wilderness, the Idiotarod also features sub-freezing temperatures, a nearly un-navigable course, and a host of predators.  Sabotage is just a way of life in the Idiotarod.  Feelings of helplessness, confusion, and despair can set in.  But with any great risk comes great reward.  And nothing can replace the exhiliration of crossing that finish line at GreenPoint Park.  A special shout-out goes to Razvan, Dudu, Natalia, Stelliana, Roma, and Gwendolyna of the Romanian Gymnastics team who finished the 5-mile competition in 13th place.

Make sure to check out all the best of the Idiotarod in our photo album

That’s it for now.  More to follow soon…

If I knew Chinese my life would be a lot easier.  Why, you might ask?

Well, in the very messy, taxing, and time-consuming world of driving a waste vegetable oil (WVO) powered vehicle, one soon learns that the best place for finding clean oil is at Chinese restaurants.  Knowing Chinese would greatly increase my chances of convincing restaurant managers that it is O.K. and a very good idea to give me free oil.  Persuasiveness goes a long way when acquiring WVO, and a language barrier does not help.

Our Dodge Ram 2500 is converted with two 40-gallon tanks and we’ve upgraded our potential oil storage by purchasing four 5-gallon buckets.  So we have the ability to store 100 gallons of sweet, beautiful, free WVO in our truck.

The difficulty with acquiring WVO is not finding it.  Finding it is the easy part.  If you care to notice in the next few days while driving around your town, almost every restaurant or diner has a black container behind their building or in the parking lot.  It looks like a small dumpster.  We’ve found that they are almost unanymously designed.  I’ve learned to spot them from a mile away, even when we don’t even need veggie oil.  It’s a sad habit that I’ve naturally fallen into.  However, if you view each of those containers like $500, you’ll understand my reasoning.

The hard part of acquiring WVO is finding restuarants who are willing to give it to you.  The “magic” WVO system has not proven to be as magical as commonly talked about.  Five years ago, maybe–but now there are companies who pay the restaurants for their WVO.  I was talking to the owner of a diner in Pennsylvania, and he told me how the WVO market fluctuates over the years.  In the 80’s restaurants were getting paid for their oil.  In the 90’s the market turned, and they found themselves having to pay to get rid of it.  The owner I was talking to said it was just recently that a company supplied him with a container and they started paying him a few dollars a month.  But because he was barely making any money, he had agreed to give us some.  He was a really nice man.

In the areas of the country with greater wealth or more environmental awareness, those contracts are a given.  This has been true of almost all big cities, and all of the New England that we visited.

Typically, we ask around at ten to twenty restuarants, some who might have beautiful, huge vats of oil, but we receive the same answers: “We’d love to give it to you, but we have a contract.”  Arrggh, damn the collection companies!!  Sometimes it’s so hard not to want to return at night and just steal it.  The restaurant wouldn’t care, the collection company would never know…we could all be friends.

But slowly, we’ve been learning how to find WVO despite these contracts.  Most of the time we score big it’s just luck, or divine intervention!  We’ve learned that the restuarants in small towns are less likely to have contracts, especially the mom-and-pop restuarants/diners, where even if they did have a contract, they are willing to give it to us due to our situation and friendly smiles (and polite begging).  So, when on the search for oil, instead of taking the interstate, we stick to state highways.

And the Chinese restaurants?  I would estimate that 90% of our collected WVO has come from Chinese restaurants.  Actually, sometimes it helps that the workers don’t speak English.  I make lots of hand gestures that look like me driving, and outlining the shape of a box, and then something to the effect of pumping oil like one of those old-fashioned water pumps.  By that point they probably think I’m crazy, and just smile and say, “Yes, ok!”  But truthfully, when we do score big with the Chinese restaurants, it’s usually because they don’t know anything about a contract, or the owner is not present, so they just give the o.k.  It’s always a little scary when that happens, because as we are pumping the WVO, I always imagine the owner coming rearing around the back of the restuarant, flaming mad and accusing us of stealing.  That’s why we have the shotgun though!

So, the question that I sometimes ask myself, and you might be asking us right now is, “Is it worth it?”  Well, in terms of saving money, there is no question.  Yes.  Incredibly so.  I estimate that in another month, the conversion kit will have paid for itself.  The process has been messy, frustrating, and incredibly time consuming–but I’m willing to put up with all that if it’s saving dollar$.  And the more experience we get, the easier everything becomes.  Besides, we’re helping to save the planet, right?

While we wait for the WVO market to change, which will probably be another twenty years, I’ll work on my Chinese.

I’d like to recap and call out some people who were an incredible help in getting on the road.

Two weeks ago Matt and I traveled down to his hometown in Albemarle, North Carolina. There, Matt’s father, Rick Burris, donated a set of tires to the Airstream and hours of work by his shop crew. Their help and knowledge was invaluable.

how many people does it take to fix an Airtream?

Rick Burris in the Burris Tire office. His father, pictured on the wall, started the business. Thanks for all your help Rick!

Here is Kevin, auto-electrician-extraordinaire. He wired up the Airstream and trailer hitch in a matter of hours. Thanks for your help and for buying a print Kevin. You know we will be calling when we break down!

The official shop crew that helped so much. From left: Steven, Kevin, Boo, Alan, and Eric. Thanks guys!

I’d also like to thank Matt’s sister and brother-in-law for taking their only day off and helping us to clean and fix the Airstream. You all are so generous! Here, Julie braves the ammonia fumes and give the trailer a scrub-down.

Dan the man working on the Airstream seals. Danny took his only day off to help us on the trailer, then spent an hour after work the next day to do some welding on the bumper.

Here’s the whole Burris crew in the shop. Matt is being sent off with a good support team behind him! Thanks Rick, Sue, Julie, and Steven.

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On Thursday afternoon we received the WVO conversion kit from Golden Fuel Systems. What should have been a 2-day installation turned into a maddening 4-day challenge to get the system installed because we were not sent adequate directions. Nonetheless, we had a genius behind us all the way, Mr. Wheeler Gum himself:

If it were not for Wheeler, and a few others, we never would have figured out the installation. Wheeler worked endlessly for almost three days to help us leave in time.

Our other savior was Mr. Dan Raudenbush (left). He swept in at the point of despair and laid out a diagram for the wiring. Thanks Dan!

Mr. Tom Hughes devoting his whole weekend to help us. Thanks Tom!

I can’t remember who took this picture of me covered in veggie oil.

The crew doing some problem solving.

Another big thank you goes out to Emily Gum and Hope Sowell. Emily shared her husband with us for three days and did some beautiful upholstery work for our couch. If you may remember from before, Hope re-plumbed the Airstream and put in more hours than what we traded for. Thanks for your knowledge and work and sharing your tools!

Lastly, I have to thank the two people who really assisted in helping during the last few months of preparation. Jeff Erkelens and Joey Conover gave me a free house to live in for a few months and let me park the Airstream on the street for its two-month slumber in Charlottesville. They let me store my personal items, use a bathroom, and borrow tools. Thanks Jeff and Joey for your generosity, flexibility, and support!