We’re throwing a 9-day music festival on wheels, taking the bus on a lap around our own backyard.

We carried the generator into the boulder pile. As the sunlight faded, the lights flickered on, and the boulders turned green, blue, and violet. All twenty or so of us climbed into the rocks and made ourselves comfortable. Then came the music.

I was off the road and in my polling place by election day. But in the weeks leading up to it, I was living on a 35 foot blue school bus, singing songs about my love life.

“Six months of this, Rosie,” Wiley said. “What’s that going to look like? Am I going to die?”

Mikayla said that every Splendor female had at some point borne the proud, difficult, necessary duty of being the only female on the bus. And, she said, she’d see me in Los Angeles, and godspeed. Seven days later, here we were.

Mornings are usually pretty nice on tour. It's later in the day that usually sucks. On tour, our experiences stack up against each other like the sour and sweet layers of a warhead.

One week in August, Wiley, Whitney and a crew of volunteers convened in Drum Canyon to cut a giant hole in the side of the bus. In souping up our converted school bus, we often have to go a little backwards before we can go a lot forwards.

The morning of Day 2, on a hot tip from the UCSC trailer park residents, we swung by Natural Bridges in Santa Cruz, a "winter safe haven" for monarch butterflies.

Any amount of rainfall in California is a blessing these days. But it sure doesn’t feel like it when the only storm of the year hits on the very first day of the tour. 

a·lign·ment (noun) --  the arrangement into appropriate relative positions, the route or course of a road, a position of agreement or alliance..