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and couldnt work out why bertha the van was hangin from the yurt fastened by braided dental floss.The flood had passed and the yurt was perched dangeriously atop the eiffel tower no more sandstorm either thought ripple if we can braid more floss we can tie it to thease monkeys and they can fly us to safety ripple thought.Now being drunk and flying a yurt was a criminal offence in france,out of nowhere appeared a one eyed sailor with a cheshire grin....

think this the 2nd time we posted at the same time its fine though continuity was out the window a long time ago brother!

lessen ya stuck alla the Rangers inside...wif the beer and fermented mare's milk..

we kin askum....

help the SF Giants win the next few games???

and he awoke with a start....huddled in a fetal position on the floor of the yurt, surrounded by passed out drunken flying monkeys, empty beer bottles and a half full skin of fermented mare's milk. " Oh my......what did I do THIS time" Hippy mumbled while holding his head in his hands. "Ripple TOLD me not to let these guys in..." Nauseated by the breath of drunken flying monkeys , he stumbled to the door of the yurt....

Hippy was scratching his head and thinking he forgot something....."the van!!...the VAN!!...We forgot Bertha!!" Hippy exclaimed...Ripple thought for a moment, and coming up with an idea, he reached in his pocket for the dental floss he always carried and started to weave a rope, one strong enough to pull a van up the eiffel tower. Enlisting the help of one of the more sober flying monkeys, he instructed it to find Yurtilicious, for he knew that's where Bertha would be. "Tie the rope to the bumper" he said...........

I think we posted at about the same time. Continuity once more out the window!

Hippy, practically feverish with worry, was pacing and pacing, hoping to come up with a strategy to end this conflict with a minimum of mayhem. Bertha (his van) was parked just outside the door. Over the years, after countless paint jobs in countless painting styles, Bertha had always retained two elements in her design. The first was always found, upon close examination, in the strangest of places: a pair of luminous blue eyes which, if you looked at them long enough and looked at them just right, would seemingly pierce right through your soul. The second, which could be found hidden in plain sight all over the van: the name, "Bertha." If questioned about who/what "Bertha" was, Hippy would typically and variously claim that Bertha was his family dog when he was a kid; a bullfrog that he had for a couple of weeks when he was 6; a cat that had lived to the incredible age of 25; even an iguana that he kept in his college dorm room his freshman year. But if you got enough beer in him, and steered him into a sentimental mood, you just might prise this story from him: About 2.8 million miles back in Bertha the hippie van's history, Hippy shared an apartment on Haight St in SF with his good buddy and best pal, Rob Trapper (note: name changed to protect the living). Rob was an aspiring poet, and he and Hippy had clicked from the start. As was common in those days, the apartment also hosted a revolving cast of various and sundry other like-minded folk and its share of very short-term transients. It was here, in fact, that Hippy had first encountered Too-Late Tony and his none-too-bright sidekick, Longhaired Bob. Tony was in the midst of his first and only rebellion against his family and his brother, and Bob was as always along for the ride. Though he tried to fit in with the peace-and-love crowd, his "15 minute" rages turned everyone off (except Bob, who seemed to find comfort in them), and he was soon sent packing. (Tony wasn't stupid, though, and learned something about the drug trade during his West Coast tenure, and tried to use that to ingratiate himself with this Family upon his return. It worked to the extent that it could, but Guido was still Guido and would always be Guido; Tony was Tony and would always be 15 mintues too late). Hippy and Rob spent relatively little time at the apartment, preferring instead to roam around in (as yet unnamed) Bertha. You'd find them at the docks, in the park, in the mountains. They'd take long roadtrips to the desert, where Hippy would paint away on the van and Rob would scribble endlessly in his notebook. Their very frequent companion was a striking, golden-haired young woman named Bertha. Bertha had luminous blue eyes that seemed to pierce right through to your soul, and a smile that would melt a bit of your heart each time she turned it your way. She was a fiercely intelligent young woman, wise beyond her years, and was kind enough to suffer fools with humor and grace. She was also unrepentently independent: she belonged to no one but herself, and never would. It's no surprise then, that nearly anyone who spent time with her would fall in love with Bertha. One evening Hippy and Rob were off to a big party at a nearby dancehall. Bertha had other plans, so she dropped them at the hall and they arranged for a time when she'd pick them up. The party was a great success, everyone danced all night. During breaks, Rob spent a lot of time chatting up the lead guitarist of the house band, another of his buddies, while Hippy shook the hand of each and every person in the hall. At the end of the evening, they stumbled out into the dark and into the awaiting van, and Bertha began to pilot them home. The night was uncharacteristically clear, with a big old full moon dipping toward the horizon. Hippy got a notion and stuck his head out the window and began howling at the moon, and Rob soon followed suit. Their timing was poor, as a bored police officer parked in a alley heard the ruckus and pulled them over. Bertha managed to shush her friends and banned them to the back of the van. When the officer approached, she turned the full force of her smile on him, and he felt his knees buckle just a little as part of this heart melted. Cops are inquisitive by nature, so despite his smile-induced decision not to hassle these folks, and to soak in more of that smile, he decided a few questions were in order. "What's wrong with your friends?" he asked. Bertha laughed, and said, "Oh they're fine. They just got done with a test and are blowing off a little steam. I'm taking them straight home, you bet!" "Test, what kind of test?" "Well, kind of a chemical test." "A chemistry test?" "Not exactly, a chemical test." "I don't understand. What kind of chemical?" "Acid mostly, I think." In the back of the van, Hippy had gotten quite mesmerized by the strobing red light of the cops cherry-topped car. Rob, though, overhearing the conversation, started muttering something over and over, not quite loud enough to be heard. The cop shone his flashlight into the back of the van right at Rob, and said, "What are you saying, boy?" Rob bellowed out, "I'm saying TEST ME, TEST ME, YOU MORON, WHY DON'T YOU ARREST ME???!!" Thus Hippy and Rob found themselves in a holding cell with a bunch of drunks for the rest of the night. As they were semi-lucid by morning, the cops cut them loose without charges, dropping the idea of holding them for psychiatric evaluation. Hippy was some peeved at Rob for his night in the hoosegow, and shuddered that they came just this close to ending up in the loony bin. The incident caused the tiniest crack in the bond between Hippy and Rob, but nothing that a little time and maybe a roadtrip wouldn't have fixed. But real trouble was brewing: Hippy was in love with Bertha, and so was Rob. This is never a good situation and seldom ends well. As Bertha would never be tied to one man, Hippy eventually was filled with despair and longing, and jumped into his van solo, the start of his life of wandering, looking for Bertha around every corner. Rob hooked up with a band, but that's another story entirely. Bertha managed to have three daughters but no husbands, and the daughters all resembled their Mom in a striking way. The daughters too each had three daughters, following Bertha's lead, sans husbands or any longterm romantic entanglements. (To Hippy's everlasting regret, he could call none of those lovely daughters, nor any three of of the grandkids, his own. And with some bitterness, he suspected that Rob could. He was wrong about that, but he held that against Rob for much, much too long). Bertha supported here brood by writing fantasy novels and children's books (under a pseudonym, of course) and did a bit of wandering herself. When she finally settled, it was on a thousand acres of farmland in the heart of the country, where her heart seemed to beat as one with the rhythm of the land. The farm was in Kansas. Now while the rainbow that connects Kansas to Oz tends to move here and there and can be particularly tough at times to track down, its Kansas home base happened to be smack in the middle of Bertha's wheat field. Some say that Bertha was drawn to the rainbow, but most believe that the rainbow was drawn to Bertha. Back at the yurt, Hippy's reverie ended, and he knew what he had to do. He locked the yurt door against the sandstorm, jumped into Bertha the van, and drove west.

ripples hippy became hipper,beer was brewed,mimers mined,yaks yaked and flying monkeys flew,long haired bobs hair grew short and llamas did what ever llamas did.Yurtilicious started to become visible and guido got 5 to 10 for possesion of chinese opium.And then came the great flood ripple thought what now but tony had an idea he turned the yurt upside down in the hope it would float,and guess what it did.The mimers were thrown overboard for balast reasons and found there way safely to france where they perched there selves safely on top of the eiffel tower.Ripple and his hippy were tired and longed to return to there quiet and humble life when out of nowhere......