At some point on my ride west in the spring one of my tail lights has stopped working. I assumed it was just a loose connection and I'd just have to jiggle a wire. It didn't work. It wasn't the bulb either. I did all I was able to track the problem but I never got it fixed and resolved that I'd travel mostly during the day to avoid the faulty light from being spotted by the cops.

So when it came time to leave Burning Man I traveled mostly during the day and avoided driving til the wee hours of the night/morning as I usually do. It was nice to actually get decent sleep for once on this cross country trip. I was astonished when once in a while a cop would pass me by at night and NOT pull me over. I figured that an old VW bus would be high profile for carrying some weed and any thin excuse would be used as a pretext for getting a look inside the bus. They would be disappointed if they wanted to find any drugs inside the hippie bus, but I certainly didn't want a defective equipment ticket for the trouble.

It wasn't until I was at the PA/NY line that I realized that as of Sept 1, my bus was no longer registered. I didn't leave Nevada til Sept 10. Back in April I had sought to register my bus in advance but I was told that it was too far in advance. My plan was to have my father register it for me in August, but motorized transportation was not a big theme in the past 5 months of my life and so registration seemed like a distant abstract by the time I was driving home in Sept.

After I realized that I was unregistered I became so paranoid I might as well have been smoking big bags of weed. Unfortunately it was already past dark when I came to the realization that my bus could be impounded several hundred miles from home. For the next 50 miles, until I could find a place to park for the night, every pair of headlights that came up behind me was a potential cop that was going to pull me over.

It was a miracle that I somehow managed to drive from coast to coast in an unregistered '71 VW bus with a tail light out and not get pulled over. But in the end I arrived safe and sound mid day in Sanbornville, NH.