A new seven minute slideshow is up on The You Are Here Project's website!
This week click on David and Sylvia at www.theyouarehereproject.com (see below to locate them on our map). They live with their three children near Fort Hood in Harker Heights, Texas. David was home on a two week leave from his second tour of duty in Iraq when we did this interview.
Watch and listen at: www.theyouarehereproject.com
Also, check out our Bonus Materials on the site, where we have some new audio outtakes. Ralph (from back in Topeka) talks about taking in an exhange student, and David (from this week), talks about his experiences in Iraq.
Thanks for following all the folks we met, and stay tuned for more!
Blue and Flynn
A new seven minute slideshow is up on The You Are Here Project's website!
This week click on Ralph and Linnea's photo on our site - www.theyouarehereproject.com (see below to find out where they are on the map) - to meet them and their two teenaged kids that are still living at home. You won't want to miss their uniquely decorated home in Topeka, Kansas.
Watch and listen at: www.theyouarehereproject.com
Thanks for following all the folks we met! Stay tuned for more, soon!
Blue and Flynn
A new six minute slideshow is up on The You Are Here Project's website!
This week click on Todd and Gina's photo on our site - www.theyouarehereproject.com - (see below to see where they are on the map) to meet them and their four kids, hilarious, talkative kids, who live in a new subdivision in Kansas City, Missouri.
Also, click on Bonus Materials for a conversation with Todd and Gina about the challenges (and rewards!) of trying to find someone to send us to next in order to keep the project going.
www.theyouarehereproject.com
Thanks everybody, and stay tuned for our next stop on the trip soon!
A new five minute slideshow is up on The You Are Here Project's website!
This week click on Patrick's photo on our site (see below for cheat sheet) to meet him and his two daughters who live in a suburb southwest of St. Louis. Brett and Sue hadn't been able to find us anyone west of St. Louis, so we decided to make a short hop to the other side of town to meet their friend Patrick, hoping that he could send us farther westward from there.
Patrick is a teacher at the same high school he attended as a kid, and has always lived within five miles from where he grew up.
www.theyouarehereproject.com
The You Are Here Project has a new look and new content from our Summer 2006 trip!
Starting this week and every two weeks throughout the fall and winter, Flynn and Blue will be putting up a new five minute slideshow on The You Are Here Project’s website (www.theyouarehereproject.com).
This week log on to meet Brett and Sue in St. Louis, Missouri by clicking on their image on the map at our home page.
Also, this week a story about our project is featured in the online magazine Priceless.com (http://priceless.com/articles/a197.html) in an issue about “Meeting of the Minds.”
Thanks to all who helped make this possible!
We are back in New York again, and have been for a couple of months, working on finishing the project. Blue is editing the audio from the interviews we did in each place, and Flynn then takes the audio (once its down to a reasonable length) and adds a selection of the photos in a flash slideshow of sorts. Then it gets passed back and forth a few times, and tweaked each time.
Our plan is to launch the new material for the site starting next week, with a new slideshow for St. Louis, followed two weeks later with the next stop, and two weeks after that with the third, etc, etc, until we arrive California with the slideshows.
We've been getting a bit of traffic to the site, and are looking at ways of getting more. Also, we have been reviewed or mentioned on a few other blogs like Rachet Up and Lissen Up and Jaunted. And an article about The You Are Here Project is supposed to go up on priceless.com, a web magazine affiliated with Mastercard. So, we are looking forward to that, which should come out October 2nd.
Overall, we are really busy with this project, and it feels like the TRAVEL part, where we went to the places and met the people is really only a fraction of what there is to do. What we're doing now, the post-production I guess you could call it, is really the invisible part, but just as much work, or more.
We are still in touch with most of the people we met on the trip, via email, and its been really great getting to go through the tape and images and relive the experiences we had with each person. They were all so interesting and special to us, now its just a question of translating that into a form where other people can relate to it and care about it, who weren't there with us.
More soon!
We made it to the coast, and had our final meeting with the Shafter family, Chassie, Micah, Annabelle and Evan. They're former Navy, and have moved around a lot: Guantanamo Bay, Virginia Beach, Michigan, Utah, now California - and still haven't found their ideal home. Halfway between Modesto and Stockton, they live on the edge of the town of Escalon, which has a little, old Main Street next to the train tracks where we lounged on the grass in the shade for a few minutes before the interview. There wasn't a lot of shade in Utah or Nevada.
We finished the trip with this family, and now we will return to New York, and get to work soon on turning these interviews and photos into finished stops on the map. Until then, thanks for following our circuitous path, which allowed us to meet such a surprising mix of people and see the country from inside their lives. Maybe the most amazing thing about the project was that everyone was willing to trust the friend who sent us to them enough to let us in the door, and then to trust us enough to tell us what they think about their home and the world they live in.
We’ve decided to make our next person be the state of Utah. A little unorthodox, we know, but after interviewing Scott in Moab, we spent the next couple days driving through the state and feeling overwhelmed by everything we saw, and we decided it had to be done.
It was originally Ruthie and Susie who inspired us to broaden our network of people to include one of the 50 states. We were trying to figure out who they could send us to next, and they kept saying that no matter WHO we got sent to, we simply HAD to get to Utah. Listen here to a clip of us talking about it on their front porch:
Everything on the drive from Moab to Zion National Park was incredible to look at, but our favorite Utah moment, and one that best describes what Ruthie and Susie are talking about in the audio clip above, had as much to do with sight as with sound. When we drove over Cataract Canyon on highway 95 we hadn’t seen another car in about half an hour, and when we got out to look over the edge, the silence was like nothing we had ever experienced. The hugeness of the space combined with the quietness of it was surreal. There was one small happy bird swooping around, and a few bird sounds, and the wind, and then the wind died down, and everything was unbelievably still.
After Ruthie and Susie struggled to come up with someone who lived west of them, and who wasn’t on vacation for the 4th, we settled on interviewing their friend Tom, who lives in Glenwood Springs as well. He’s a regular customer at their spa, he loves them, and we spoke with him for a little while when he came over to get a massage.
We finished the interview, then rode bikes with him and his friend Johnny to his friend Diane’s house, a better spot to view the town’s fireworks off the rim of red canyons surrounding Moab.
The next morning we went to Arches National Park, outside Moab, and began a unbelievable two day exploration of Utah.
After doing laundry and hanging out in Albuquerque eating sopapillas with our friend Hershel, we drove from there to Glenwood Falls, Colorado, our next meeting spot. We spent a night in Santa Fe first, in the home of old friends, Elizabeth and Leo. The drive from New Mexico to Glenwood Springs was incredibly beautiful and dramatic - involving an hour long delay on a mountain road waiting for a mudslide to be cleared off the road, then driving through the Rockies on narrow Route 82 across the Continental Divide at Independence Pass, elevation 12,000 feet. There was snow all around us and the temperature dropped to the 30's on the way up, then back to the 70's when we went back down the other side.
In Glenwood Springs we met with Ruthie and Susie - Tom Wilmots' sisters. They run Splendor Mountain Spa out of the house where they live together downstairs. They do massage and other body work, including the kind where they walk on your back.
They have been running the spa together for two years, ever since Ruthie returned from Ecuador where she lived for many years, until a volcano erupted next to her home and she returned to Colorado.
Here's a clip of tape of she and Susie talking about her return and their lives together.
After the interview they took us to the nearby hot springs pool, which was full of hundreds of people lounging at 9pm in the 104 degree surphury water. Ruthie said that it was "the beach of Colorado" to go to the public hot springs. It was so beautiful and relaxing in the water. Picture of the pool to come!
