Tag: travel

Blog, life, Plants and Herbs

The Winding Skyline Drive

J.

I didn’t think much when I posted a picture of a cool rock. (It was columnar basalt, which always reminds me of some surreal, alien landscape out of Kenshi.)

“Hey,” a friend replied in not-those-exact words, “There’s a neat example of that not too far from us.”

“Oh sweet,” I approximately replied, “Where?”

And so that was how my partner and I ended up loaded with snacks and music, navigating our way down a gorgeous scenic drive through Shenandoah National Park. When I say scenic, I’m not messing around, either — it was gorgeous, the kind of beauty that pictures can’t really do justice.

Of course, we tried anyhow.

You know how when the landscape is uninterrupted for far enough, you can see the way the hills fade to blue in the distance, and the shadows of the clouds moving over them? I live for that.

We even stopped for a bit of a hike at Compton Gap, where the columnar basalt was. The entrance to the trail showed a picture of it, but we weren’t able to find the specimen itself — the trail branched, and I think we ended up taking the wrong fork. Not that I minded at all. The air was fresh and sweet, the trail was quiet save for the song of birds and bugs, and everything was a fresh, deep green so intense, it almost didn’t seem real.

There was a small mushroom friend (a Russula, I think), bright orange trumpet creeper, and some very busy insect buddies — including a spicebush swallowtail and an American bumble bee!

The drive was long enough that we were in the midst of golden hour on our way back. The sun painted the clouds shades of pink and lavender, and the light took on that warm, comforting, well… golden tone. We paused at all of the overlooks to soak it up, relishing the warmth radiating from the granite rocks, and the cool, fresh breezes all around.

We’re planning on going back in the autumn, when the leaves start to change. It should be amazing!

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Witchcraft

And so I made a safe travel charm (since the gremlins were already handled).

J.

Note: This post contains some affiliate links to supplies. They allow me to earn a small commission, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting artisans, artists, and this site!

“Hey, mind doing a tarot reading real quick?”

I’m kind of used to this — my S.O. and I swap readings on the regular. If he has a decision he’s unsure about, he asks me to pull a few cards. I do the same if something’s bugging me. It’s a helpful way to get some insight that we can’t really get by reading for ourselves.

See, he’s wanted a motorcycle for basically ever. He’s taken riding classes, shopped around, and kept his eyes open for deals. This time, he was messaging me from a dealership. He’d found a used bike at a decent price, but wanted to know more before making the commitment and dropping the dosh.

I pulled a few cards — strangely enough, one of them reversed itself before I could flip it to see what it was. (I often arrange my deck so it’s all upright, and watching the card slowly spin in place until it was perfectly upside-down was super bonkers.)

Temperance reversed, and The Magician.

Buying the bike wouldn’t be sound judgment or a good monetary decision, but it would be the manifestation of something he’s wanted for a long time. The cards he’d pulled before asking me indicated that buying the bike would take a load off of his mind, but waiting would offer a new, better opportunity.

He decided not to buy. (I was pretty relieved, gotta say. I trust his skills, it’s just everyone else on the road I’m concerned about.)

Sure enough, not long afterward, he was hit with the perfect opportunity to get a great bike. Its last owner bought it new last winter, but now he has to move overseas. So, my S.O. managed to snag a nearly-new bike in fantastic condition, with the exact specs he was looking for.

… Which meant that I had to make a charm for safe travel. He’s got a bell, but there are worse things on the road than gremlins.

Historically, travel was always fraught with peril. If there weren’t highwaymen, there were rough roads, storms, injured animals, broken axles, and worse. Even today, it’s not exactly a breeze — most accidents happen within a few miles of home, and longer journeys have their own set of problems. (Trust me, I know. I managed to get run over less than a block from my house as a kid, and someday I might type out the story of how I got stuck on a stranded train in the Utah salt flats seated behind a guy who was on the lam after shooting a dude.)

Long story short, there are a ton of magical measures to help keep you in one piece on the road. Since this is a bike he’s planning on using to commute in the city — weather permitting, of course — I thought this charm was the best way to help keep him safe. Hopefully, it’ll also keep his bike safe, so we don’t have a repeat of the time our car got hecked apart by bad gas in Mississippi!

travelcharm.jpg

 

 

An Amulet for Safe Travel

For this, you’ll need:

I performed this spell on the full moon, during the equinox. Travel doesn’t always leave us room for picking the most auspicious day for spellcasting, so feel free to put this amulet together whenever you need to. Good timing is nice, but not required.

Set up your ritual space as you usually do. Hallow the space, cast a circle, open the gate, call the quarters, you do you.

Combine the herbs, using your projective (dominant) hand. As you do, visualize them filling with energy — enough to extend beyond the amulet itself, to surround whichever vehicle it’s placed within. Place the herbs in the center of the fabric.

Empower the stones as you usually do. If you don’t have a preferred method, hold them in your projective hand. As with the herbs, visualize them filling with warm, protective energy. Place them on the herbs.

Hold your hands over the herbs and stones. Say whatever words are appropriate for your situation — it doesn’t matter if they’re fancy or feel magical, what matters is that they come from the heart. State your intent for this charm. What kind of vehicle do you want to protect? What kind of hazards do you want to protect it from?

Draw the corners of the fabric up, so it forms a bundle. Tie the string or ribbon around the opening (I usually use a miller’s knot) to keep everything in place. If you have any other travel charms, tie them on as well. For this charm, I used a holed stone and a safe travel bindrune (made of raidho and algiz) burned onto a small slice of pine.

Keep the safe travel amulet in the vehicle or, if you’re traveling by public transportation, in a pocket or bag. Before an especially long or risky journey, take a few minutes to hold it in your hands and channel the protective energy.

life

Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part III: And then someone poisoned the car.

J.

Some things are unavoidable. As it turns out, occasionally accidentally poisoning your car is one of them.

Unfortunately, sometimes pipes burst, tanks leak, deliveries get mixed up, or janky gas stations in the middle of nowhere try to cut costs by selling gas with a prize inside.
(The prize is extra chemicals.)
All told, it’s not really that unlikely that you’ll end up with a bad batch of fuel that has the potential to turn your car into a very expensive, highly impractical paperweight.

We filled up in Mississippi, and again in Tennessee. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where the trouble started — it’s not like we could call a gas station and say, “hey, you just broke my car,” and expect whoever answers the phone to just sort of agree with us, you know? Either way, we ended up en route to Nashville when the check engine light came on, and we started feeling a pretty serious knock.

We were on the highway, and not far from Nashville, so we looked up a mechanic in the area and got there as fast as we could. Several hundred dollars later, we had replaced all the spark plugs, tested the fuel for diesel several times, and were not really any closer to an answer. The mechanics were pretty awesome about everything, though, and did their best to get us back on the road as soon as possible. We managed to get home, driving the last seven-odd hours with our fingers crossed and me fervently hoping that the travel protection amulet I’d made also extended to car engines.

(It did. We limped it back to our apartment’s parking space just in time for the car to decide it was not going to start again.)

Another mechanic and yet more hundreds of dollars later, we managed to get the car running — after dropping the fuel tank, flushing it out, and accepting a very flexible definition of the word “running.”

If you’ve been in this situation, it is scary (in a very how-am-I-going-to-get-home-oh-god-isn’t-this-basically-the-beginning-of-House-of-1000-Corpses way), frustrating, and infuriating. It’s expensive to fix, and it isn’t even a problem you can try to avoid to begin with, unless you visually inspect and thoroughly test every drop of fuel that goes in your car. So what do you do if you end up with a tank full of tainted gas?

As it turns out, this:

  1. Call your insurance company. Your coverage may handle tainted gas, but it’s important that you contact them before having any repairs done. Damage from tainted gas is not your fault, or a consequence of regular wear and tear on your vehicle, so it’s not really any different than any other damage someone else inflicts on your vehicle. You’ll have to be able to provide some proof that the damage was from contaminated fuel, though, so…
  2. Narrow down where you got the gas from. This is important — save your receipts when you get gas. Always have the last receipt from the last place at which you filled up. We didn’t think to keep our receipts, so we had to go by a bank statement. It made the process a bit longer and more tedious.
  3. Call the Department of Weights and Measures for that station’s county. As it turns out, they’re the ones with jurisdiction over this, and they’ll see what’s up.

It should be noted that, if you have a feeling you somehow ended up with diesel-tainted fuel, it is not a super great idea to keep driving your car. The longer you drive with contaminated gas, the more extensive (and expensive) the damage is going to be. We didn’t have much of a choice — the first mechanic said we’d be alright if we added some octane booster and let everything cycle through, and we didn’t have another way home.

All told, it was definitely one of the more nerve-wracking trips I’ve ever been on, and I once went on a cross-country train ride where someone died, four people got arrested, and we spent an extra twelve hours stranded in the Utah salt flats. True story.

life, Witchcraft

Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part II: Mobile Magic.

J.

Note: This post contains some affiliate links to things I think might be helpful or interesting to you. They allow me to earn a small “finder’s fee” if you buy something, at no additional cost to you. Thank you for supporting cool people who make neat stuff, and this site!

Man, where do I start?

This trip came right when I was in the middle of a thirteen-day uncrossing. (It’s something I like to do periodically to ditch other people’s accumulated nonsense, in addition to regular clearing and protection stuff.) Fortunately, I was able to take it with me. This got me thinking — how do you perform spells or rituals on the road?

We were going to be gone for a week, so I knew I wanted to be able to handle whatever came up. Since we’d be in hotels every night, whatever I used had to be:

  • Discreet.
  • Transportable.
  • Smokeless. Not all hotels have smoking rooms anymore, and almost none have windows that can open. It’d be really rude of me to light a bunch of incense or diffuse oils in a confined, temporary space in a non-smoking room — what if the person after me has severe asthma or allergies? It’s one thing if I accidentally give myself a headache or trigger my allergies, but another thing entirely if I accidentally smoke out my cats or the poor unwitting soul who’s going to occupy the room after me. (Also, some places will heck of charge you if your room smells like smoke when you leave.)
  • Difficult for me to forget. This is saying a lot — I have a neurological disorder that makes me forget things very easily. I’m not even supposed to do things like cook, because there is a significant chance I will lose track of what I’m doing and burn my entire block down.

In the end, I settled on a couple of key items that I could use for pretty much whatever I needed to do.

Like a portable altar.

The altar structure I use only really needs three things: a tree, a well, and a hearth. These are somewhat malleable. The tree can be any representation of a tree, or even an upright stone. The well can be a cup. The hearth can be three candles. With a quartz point and three tea lights stored in a glass food saver, I had a tree, a well, and a hearth that could travel. (And I brought along a wand I made recently, so I could both have it with me, and see how well it traveled/held up to being in my purse for days at a time.) Score.

I also wanted to be able to do some more specific work in contexts where busting out an altar (even a portable one) and lighting candles wasn’t exactly… doable.

Continue reading “Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part II: Mobile Magic.” →

Cat relaxing in a car harness.
life

Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part I: “THEY ALL SAID I WAS MAD!”

J.

Note: I link to some products here, but I’m not getting compensated for anything. Trust me, I don’t think any of these companies actually wanted to be associated with this idea.

This was not the post I planned to write.

This was not the week any of us planned to have.

Let me start from the beginning.

Neither my S.O. nor I have family in the area. I left the house I grew up in pretty much the second I was legally old enough to do so, and have moved wherever the wind blew me more times than I can count. He left home for college and job opportunities, to pursue his dreams. The end result is that we’re here pretty much alone, though his family has always been just a phone call away when we needed them. Unfortunately, this awesome family sustained a terrible loss.

Tl;dr: With pretty short notice, we had to find a way to get to a funeral in Mississippi.

We looked up plane tickets — $857 worth of no luck.

We looked up Amtrak — 44-odd hours of no luck.

He didn’t want to be away from home for too long if he could help it. I didn’t want to leave our cats alone if I could help it. We’ve had them for a little over a year and, in that time, we’ve discovered that Pyewacket needs more daily mental stimulation than a human toddler, and Kiko has separation anxiety that will make her try to destroy doors and hit the road in a bid for a Homeward Bound-esque reunion. Since they are both rescues, we also didn’t want to put them through the experience of being taken and dropped off in a kennel-like boarding facility. We also haven’t had to use a sitter in the past, so we didn’t really have anyone we knew well enough to trust them with.

(By the way — If anyone tells you cats are independent creatures, laugh at them. Laugh the high, gibbering laughter of the mad.)

We love them, but they are weird, weird animals. Ultimately, we decided that the simultaneously-most-sensible-yet-most-ludicrous solution would be to take the cats on a road trip.
Yeah, I know.

Two cats. Five states. One car.

It should be noted that these nerds hate being in carriers. They had a vet appointment for some boosters and a general yearly checkup two days before we left, where they sat in the waiting room growling at each other, Pye hissed at everything, and the vet came right out and said, “Yeah, this trip? It’s a pretty bad idea.”

Nevertheless, I kept on keeping on with my dumbass plans.

I’m not gonna lie, this was a long, strange journey. My S.O. was a surprise pallbearer. We visited a rad occult shop in Memphis. Mississippi poisoned our car. I’m going to have to break this up to keep it from turning into some kind of novella.

Continue reading “Have Familiar, Will Travel. Part I: “THEY ALL SAID I WAS MAD!”” →