In November 1989, I volunteered for an educational non-profit organization to travel across the US.  These two brothers, Seth and James Levy, were bicycling across the States and they needed someone to go along with them to drive the support vehicle and take pictures.  I was the second person in the role.  The first guy was with them from Maine to Birmingham, Alabama, which is where I took over.  They would cycle 3 or 4 days a week and then we would stop in a city and they would do a workshop with junior high school students. 

​

We had almost no money.  I received no salary, but they paid for my film and processing and whatever room and board expenses we incurred.  Part of my job was to scout ahead each night on the road and find a place to sleep, preferably for free.

I must be a pretty smooth talker because from Birmingham to Albuquerque, via Del Rio, Texas, we never once had to pay for a hotel.  We slept on a lot of floors, but we always had a roof over our heads.

 

At the end of March, in Albuquerque, we ran out of money.  Someone suggested we get jobs waiting tables and pool the money to finish the trip, but it seemed to me that paying to sleep on floors was a losing proposition, so I packed my bags and headed home by train. 

A little more than a month after leaving Albuquerque, I would be getting on a plane bound for Moscow (see the project Moscow).