I’m heading up to Oregon (a state I love in its entirety) on Friday. I’ll be doing these events:

Saturday, Aug. 5, 10 AM, SMALL HOMES at The Mother Earth News Faire in Albany (70 miles south of Portland on I-5)

Sunday, Aug. 6, 2 PM, 50 YEARS OF NATURAL BUILDING at TMEN Faire

 Schedule: https://www.motherearthnewsfair.com/oregon/schedule/

I heartily recommend the TMEN fairs, They’re genuine country fairs, with chickens, goats, dimensional lumber mills, a ton of workshops, great food, good country vibes. There are 2 more coming up, September in Pennsylvania, October in Kansas

Monday Aug. 7, 7:30 PM SMALL HOMES at Powell’s on Hawthorne in Portland: https://www.powells.com/locations/powells-books-on-hawthorne/

On Tuesday I’m gonna go hang out with Foster Huntington, surfer, skater, filmmaker, Instagram master at his treehouse/skate bowl complex just over the border in Washington. Back home Wednesday. Then back to Oregon in a week (driving this trip) for the solar eclipse.

It’s happening on August 21st. I’m heading up to Oregon, with stop-offs at Stewart Mineral Springs near Lake Shasta (also, looking forward to seeing Shasta full for the 1st time in years), then to see legendary bodybuilder and good friend Bill Pearl and his wife Judy in Medford/Ashland area, then to Umpqua hot springs, then somewhere in totality zone for the big event.

Here’s link to where it will be visible in the US:

https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/total-eclipse-of-sun-august-21-2017

I witnessed a total eclipse in Baja in July, 1991, and it was (sorry for the hackneyed phrase, but…) awesome. Never to be forgotten.

My friend Chilón alerted me to it a year before, and I reserved a hotel room in San José del Cabo ($25 pr night). The morning of the eclipse I got up at 6AM, caught the 1st bus into Cabo San Lucas, rented a Honda motorcycle, and drove up the Pacific side towards Todos Santos, took a dirt road out to Playa Margarita, which turned out to be a spectacular miles-long sandy beach. As it was early, I went bodysurfing; there was abundant fool’s gold on the sand and as I swam (no goggles, but water was clear), flecks of gold swirled around me. What a planet!

It turned out there were 6 other people on the beach:

From left: two hair dressers from Denver, Craig and Frank; and 4 young Mexicans from Monterrey: Enrique (in foreground), Marta, Arturo and Juan. Craig and Frank had weed, the kids had a bottle of tequila, and it coalesced into a party.

The boys had eclipse glasses so we took turns watching the moon gradually blot out the sun. The sky turned blue-dark and everything was bathed in a light I’d never seen before. Incrediblé!

We finished the bottle, and then, after 2-3 hours together, our eclipse family took off in different directions, never to see each other again. I swam some more, then returned the motorcycle, went back to San José and had dinner at Le Baguette, a lovely French restaurant in this desert town. I’d call that a perfect day.

Photo by Godfrey Stephens, in Victoria, BC:

Kent Griswold’s Tiny House Blog was the first full-time blog dedicated to tiny houses. Its subtitle is “Living Simply in Small Spaces.” It’s the standard-bearer and station central for the tiny house movement online: https://tinyhouseblog.com/

Kent also puts out the Tiny House Blog magazine: https://tinyhouseblog.com/magazine/

Bernie Harberts and his mule Polly were featured in the “On the Road” section of our book Tiny Homes.

“I’ve sailed alone around the world, traveled across America by mule (twice), pedaled a ten dollar bike around Tasmania and walked across Newfoundland with a mule. Most recently, I sailed a wood ketch from the Falkland Islands to South Georgia Island, off Antarctica. From there, we sailed 3 weeks across the iceberg laced Southern Ocean to South Africa.…

For the Lost Sea Expedition series, I traveled 14 months across America in a wagon. Just as I did in North Carolina, I explored things that are particular to an area. This time around, it was horse breakers, Lakota elders, sod hut dwellers, ghost towns and a vanished sea that caught my eye.

I filmed the whole voyage myself – a first ever for a cross-country wagon voyage.…”

lostseaexpedition.com/