The First Day of the Rest of My Trip!

Woke up and took a while for me to remember where I was.  The car park outside Subway on a rest stop in Castle Rock, some where on Route 5.  Wasn't really sure what to do with myself so I cracked open the last tin of tuna for breakfast and then thought I could walk into Castle Rock town and maybe look for a bit of work.  It wasn't far and when I got into town I realized it was not much bigger than Ritzville.  It wasn't looking good.  I walked into a few places and asked if they needed any help, with anything.  No luck!  It was mainly auto repair places that looked extremely run down and hardware stores.  I had no luck looking around and not surprisingly, it didn't look like the right sort of place I was going to find anything.  Still I had to try.  I had no other choice.  I called on a few houses to ask if they needed anything doing.  People were friendly but no one had anything they needed doing.  Not a good start.  I walked back to the van and thought what to do.  I wasn't feeling to great and I had been sneezing a lot recently.  Last thing I wanted was to start getting ill.  But I can't expect much less really having only eaten cereal and tuna for god knows how long.  I spoke to the Ma on Skype and she said that she should lend me some money just to get me to Newport or just a seaside town where I could earn some money and it would be a fun place to be stuck.  Rather than being stuck on the 5 in the middle of nowhere with nothing to do.  Wise words indeed from the mother as they always are but I wasn't quite ready to give up yet.  I was at this rest stop on the freeway which was clearly where Castle Rock must get most of its business so I thought with all the people coming through here spending money possibly I could try my hand at begging.  Why not.  Should have brought my harmonica.  So I found some cardboard and got to work on some signs!  I had a few good things to write on my signs in mind.  In the end I settled on one comical one and one genuine one.  Start off with that.  Lets not forget as well my "draw on me for a $" sign.

So I propped them all up and thought with nothing else to do I might as well start a bit of drawing on the van myself.  The sun was out and I was content drawing for a bit.  But before long a few women pulled up and were extremely impressed by the idea of drawing on my van for a buck.  And they were very enthusiast about my whole set up and plan.  It was a nice feeling.  So they gave me 2 bucks and wrote a little something.  It turned out they were also on a long road trip and were blogging about it.  so we exchanged photos of each other for the blog and on they went.

 Another guy had come up to me while the were writing and just gave me a dollar because he liked the cause.  As you can imagine I was feeling pretty damn goo by now!  It may only seem like 3 bucks to you but to me this was the beginnings of a means of survival!  I was excited.  Still skeptical though.  It was beginners luck!  This happens all the time.  It happened when me and Alex started hitching around Europe.  It starts off easy and "wow this is great we should do this all the time!" and then Bam.  Your sleeping on a motorway getting bitten to death by super mosquitoes.  So I wasn't jumping for joy just yet.  But what do you know.  Slow and steady came the custom.  And I was doing ok.  One guy even gave me a fucking 20!  He just had a good feeling about me and wanted to help me out!  What a legend!

There where quite a few kids hanging about, kids who worked at the rest stop and they're mates come to chill with them and get free deals.  You know the score.  That kind thing.  Any way my van was a great point of interest for these guys and they brought in a good bit of custom.

 
It looked good to have lots of people standing around.  And not only was it good for custom these guys seemed pretty safe and I got on with them well.  One girl "Karissa" she worked at Subway, was cool and everyone was pretty friendly.  I hung out with these guys Sam, Karissa, Opi, Levi, and a few others for the rest of the eve chilling and chatting.  Then a few more came down and we had a chill in the van listening to tunes and ripping some bowls as they said.  Then joy of joys! Karissa came out of Subway and offered me supper!  Oh wow this was a good day!  A footlong sub just for me!  I had hit the mother load.  The evening was pretty late by then and I had managed to make 36 bucks and a subway and a bottle of moisturizer.  The moisturizer was from this lovely woman that was the mother of a kid who took quite a shine to me.  He saw the van and walked over.  He had plenty of questions all of witch I was happy to answer and he gave me a buck and signed his name.  Then 5 minutes later he turned up in a car with his mum and his brother who also where admiring what I was doing.  They had a go as well and she put her website on my van.  Bit of advertising, sure.  It was for these lotions she had just started to make a little business out of.  So she not only gave me a dollar but a free lotion.  Peppermint!  Lovely!  Now at least I can pretend to be clean!

Here is a few more snaps of the new begging doodles on the van and a few of my own.

 This one was done by a little girl.  She was well sweet bless her!  Got well excited about it.

 I drew this little character over the petrol cap.  Thought it was fitting and comical.

Today had gone so well I was in high spirits and had some cash for petrol now if I needed to move on.  I had visions of it going global!  The blog going massive people all over the country seeing the van and being like  "Oh thats the doodle mobile! Lets pay a buck and draw on it!"  Making it to local news, National news! Earning thousands of dollars!  Possibly getting slightly ahead of myself but you get the idea!  Anyway all in all it was a fantastic day!  I headed to bed about 11 excited about tomorrow! I had only started begging about 4pm.  A full day was bound to be even better!

Kilometers Traveled Today: 2 (by foot)
Kilometers Traveled Total: 1496
Funds: $37 U.S
Petrol: Still Nearly empty.