Travels With Naked Girls - CHAPTER 30 - 31

Chapter 30.

Lily.

Like gold, pretty girls are where you find them.

I met Lily at the World Naked Bike Ride in Brisbane in March of 2007. The World Naked Bike Ride is a kind of a crazy festival in which a bunch of bike riders go naked as a way of protesting how vulnerable they feel riding bikes in cities.

In Europe there are many special trails and lanes for bike riders, but in America, Australia, and elsewhere, bike riders are often at the mercy of cars. Cars make pollution and give off a lot of greenhouse gases too. Time to make a stand.

The Brisbane ride was organized by Dario Western, a nudist activist, and was a big success. More than 30 riders got naked and body painted and then rode along a riverside park. Hundreds of people showed up to cheer us on and to watch and take photos.

Well, actually we weren't very naked. Queensland is the most conservative state in Australia, so there were also more than 30 police. They allowed very little nudity, because the human body is so offensive no one could possibly want to look at it.

If there's a seeming inconsistancy there with the fact that hundreds of people showed up to watch, the Queensland police carefully kept themselves blithly oblivious of it.

After all, it's much more pleasant to spend an afternoon in the park harassing naturists, than to go out and have to deal with criminals, or to try to solve a bunch of boring old crimes.

Lily and Laura were two of the bicycle riders. They both started off topless, but the police soon made them cover up even that token nudity.

The police seemed to be determined to be stupid and get things wrong. The obvious was all around them: nobody is bothered by people going naked nowadays. But as Mark Twain said, "It's hard to convince a man of something if his salary depends on his not being convinced."

I asked the two girls if they would like to model naked for me, and they thought it was a great idea.

Lily was quite striking to look at in those days. She had long blond hair which she had back-combed into hippie dredlocks, with about a dozen small braids which she had covered with bits of brightly-coloured cloth. There were bells on the braids too, and on her ankles, which made a pleasant music as she walked.

She also liked to dress in bright colours with flamboyant patterns and designs, which I loved, though of course she was mostly naked when I first saw her.

Lily and Laura came down to my house in Byron Bay, the big house with the big living room which I had purchased when Henriette came to live with me. They ran around and played in the living room, and ended by dancing on the dining room table. They both agreed that dancing naked was much pleasanter than clothed. Clothes hinder your freedom of movement, and get sweaty too. Nakedness was unrestrained and breezy.

I asked the girls if they could go naked at a party if everyone else was dressed, and they said they could. After the good times of Shannon and the other girls going naked at nightclubs amidst clothed people, I thought it would be fun to try the same thing at my house.

We decided to have a party. Lily would arrive naked and spend the evening naked amidst my clothed friends. She thought it was a great idea.

(Laura got left out somehow. I don't remember what happened, but she never modeled for me again. I feel kind of bad about that.)

The party was a big success. Everyone chatted and danced and had a great time. Nobody minded Lily being naked; nobody even reacted much, including a few friends who were not informed before arriving.   Lily was a smash with everyone.

You can see the Brisbane World Naked Bike Ride, the shoot with Laura and Lily, and the party, in Lily's Fantastic Summer 1.

We did another shoot a few days later at the beach. It was chilly, but the waves were lovely in the setting sun, and I asked Lily to go in and splash around despite the cold. She dived and played, and rolled around in the shallows, tossed by the waves. The light was great, and Lily was great.

After that shoot, I thought of Lily as someone rather special, and suggested we might go traveling together. It fitted in perfectly with her plans.

Lily was 19. She was looking forward to a long trip to Europe when she turned 21, which would be in July of the next year, 2008. She had an inheritance which was being held in trust for her til then. Not a lot, but enough for a trip.

She also was studying photojournalism, and needed to find somewhere to do an internship during July and August. This usually meant working for some small-town newspaper in country Queensland.

With her bells and bright colours, it seemed unlikely that she would fit in.

I suggested she work for Synetech. She could do photos which could be inserted into videos about her naked travels. We would travel together in the U. S., and we could visit nudist places like The Grand Barn and other Canada resorts.

We could also go to Starwood in July. I think that was the clincher. Lily and Starwood were made for each other.

So Lily was definitely in. She asked her university advisors, and they were equally keen. I think they were a little bit worried about sending Lily out into the Queensland wilderness too.

Lily even qualified for her Ausstudy allowance while she was traveling. It seemed like all our Christmases were coming at once.

I flew on ahead to Connecticut to chase out all the spiders and mice from my cottage and my cousin's cottage down the road, which was where Lily would be staying. We got her a really good deal on a ticket to the U. S., which she said turned out to be not such a great deal when the bargain airline kept her waiting in Sydney Airport for 12 hours for the plane to get ready.

"Any dramas on the trip?" I asked innocently.

"I didn't like the 7-hour diversion to Shanghai when the engine caught fire," she said, "but otherwise it was OK."

Back at my cousin's cottage, she settled in. She loved the cottage, and the Connecticut woods suited her to a T, as I knew they would. I did a shot of her as she dragged her backpack out of my car and entered the cottage.

Next day she made a lasagna lunch for me. I did a shot of her entering the kitchen naked, and in the video I edited these together as if her clothes suddenly disappeared as she walked. That was pretty good, I thought. So was the lasagna.

We did a shoot of her walking through the woods naked, and exploring the stone walls and cellarholes of bygone farmers. It's an interesting area. The land was thickly settled in the 1700's and up to about 1870, but then the Great Plains began to open up. The land out west was much better, more fertile and not so rocky. Trains could bring the food back to the East, so Connecticut farms could not compete.

Farmers from Union sold up and went west, or often just abandoned their land as useless. As a result Union had 700 residents in 1776 but only about 200 by 1900. Gradually the population has worked its way back up, but it's one of the rare areas in the U. S. that has not seen population explosion.

As a result it's very beautiful, with plenty of forest and wildlife like deer and turkeys. There are two completely natural lakes within walking distance of my cottage, and lots of trails through the forest. We had a couple of very pleasant weeks there.

Lily and I headed off on our first trip to explore the nation. We were very lucky. We went north only about 50 miles and discovered a butterfly zoo, where we happily videoed and photographed the beautiful creatures.

We also discovered a hippie farm where the residents had put a series of statues and mazes of thoughtfulness, with many signs discussing life and how to live it. Lily loved it. She spent the whole afternoon meditating on one display after the next.

I found a hammock in a shady grove, and lay there enjoying the refuge from the heat, for it was a hot sunny day in July. I had another of my epiphanies, as I call them. It was a wonderful happy moment, thinking how great it was to lie here with a beautiful girl sharing my travels.

We made out way gradually to Montreal, where Shannon was still living. We met her and I spent a day with her. She was delighted to see me, which was gratifying. Lilly was delighted to find there was a music festival on, and her favourite band Manischevitz was playing. I may have the name wrong.

Shannon had just left Sabane, sad to say. She found her own apartment and was busily trying to furnish it, on a low budget. We were able to help her. As we were driving along, we spotted a mattress in good condition which someone had left on the curb with a FREE sign on it. It was just starting to rain, but we managed to get it into the boot of my Lexus before it got ruined.

The rain came pelting down, but Lily and Shannon and I sheltered in the atrium of a lunchtime restaurant. I got to tell them my favourite story, because Shannon was talking about how she was learning French. Lily knows French very well because she was raised in Vanuatu.

Snail comes into a deluxe auto dealer, points at the snazziest sports car, and says he wants to buy it.

"Don't be silly," says the dealer. "You're just a snail."

"No, it's OK, I got lots of money," and the snail fans out a whole wad of hundreds.

"Well, in that case . . . "

"Just one thing. I want that black one there, and I want you to paint the letter S in red all over it. Can you do that?"

"Well, OK," said the dealer, wondering.

Snail comes back two days later and there's the car, painted all over just like he said.

"Well, we did it," says the dealer. "But we've been wondering . . . we thought the car looked pretty good before. Why all the S's?"

"Hey," says the snail. "I'm gonna drive this baby right through town, and I wanna hear those people say, 'Look at that S car go!'"

Anyway, the girls loved it, as we sat there happily in that rainy afternoon.

Chapter 31.

Bonanza

In 2002 I made a DVD called The Grand Barn about a resort in Ontario. It's always been one of my most popular titles. Lily and I headed there on our journey, and did lots of footage of Lily wandering the huge grounds.

We took in New York City too. We didn't find anyplace for Lily to go naked Are you surprised? but we toured art museums and Central Park and so on. We were lucky enough to see the huge fireworks display over the harbour, since it was the 4th of July.

In our second trip we drove out to Niagara Falls, which Lily said was Awesome and Huge. From there it was only a short hop to our real goal, Starwood.

As I expected, Lily loved Starwood. She found lots of friends her own age, and lots of subjects to photograph. Bella was there too, and the two of froliked for the video all over the gathering.

You can see the visits to Connecticut, the butterflies, Montreal, New York, the Grand Barn, Niagara, and Starwood in Lily's Fantastic Summer 2.

The final bonfire was even more huge than in the years Kai and Henriette went to Starwood with me. One thing was different however. There was no more nudity at the bonfire. Before, about half the celebrants would get nude, but no more.

The explanation was the ubiquity of phone cameras. In past years, cameras were banned from the bonfire, a regulation that was easy to enforce. I warned Lily not to take her camera to the bonfire, but I soon realized that warning was obsolete.

I would have loved to video the nudes in past years, but now that cameras were so easy and plentiful, there were no more nudes to photograph. Inventions change reality.

It's similar to travel today. Travel is so easy that hoards of people agglutinize all the main travel destinations. I remember when I visited Stonehenge in 1966, it was just sitting in a field next to the road, with a small sign to point it out. Now you have to pay a fee to enter the grounds, and you can't go near the monument.

The value of going to a place varies inversely with how easy it is to get there.

All too soon it was time for Lily and I to go our separate ways. Her good luck continued however. A friend invited her to tour the West Coast for a few weeks. They went to Burning Man, a huge gathering somewhat like Starwood in Nevada. They explored the parks and towns of the coast all the way to Seattle.

Lily even got her student stipend while she was traveling. Truly it was Lily's Fantastic Summer.

The next year Lily turned 21 and got her inheritance. She set off in August for her world travel trip. She came to stay with me first. I was in Barcelona, making video with some Spanish models and Jose Baca.

Jose had a friend who owned the marina at Sitges, a deluxe beach resort town about 30 km south of Barcelona. At the marina there was a boat display one evening. A company which made deluxe 10 and 15 metre cabin cruisers was introducing their new creation of 20 metres.

It was a super deluxe boat, with six bedrooms and the most luxurious of fittings. I suppose it must have cost around a million euros. The party was for people who could afford it.

I showed up with three girls. Lily brought along a friend, also named Lily, and the third was Morthen, a friend of mine and former model whom you can see in Free & Wild 2: Spirit In Motion. Morthen was traveling in Europe and had dropped in to stay with me, just as Lily had.

I came to the marina party to shoot video, at the request of Jose's friend. He was making a promotional video about his marina. Everyone else was there because they were millionaires.

As you can imagine, it was a fantastic spread. There was a table of wonderful sushi and even better wines. There was a professional singer who was young and beautiful, just like the half dozen servers. The company was doing everything to make the party go.

But it didn't. The singer went from table to table, trying to get a response from the suavely dressed banqueters with their posh jewelry and tans. I never saw a party so slow to get going. Finally it did around midnight, as the perfect wines clicked in.

Meanwhile Lily, Lily, and Morthern got right into it. They feasted on the sushi and wines, and danced to the singer's tunes in a corner of the pier. They were having a great time, and I was too, videoing the beautiful servers.

I reveled in the irony too, that I was the only one here not rich enough to buy the boat, but I arrived with three beautiful girls. To be sure, I wasn't having sex, but to judge by the wives there, neither were any of the millionaires.

Jose knew many of the people there. I asked him, as far as he knew, were they really happy?

"Well, half of them are worried to death about money, whether they have enough, and whether they are going to lose what they have. The other half have found a younger woman and are getting heaps from their wives."

Some people spend their lives making it easy for people to go places, and the result is, it's no longer worthwhile to go. Others spend their lives chasing money, and find out they aren't really rich at all.

Others travel with naked girls. I suppose there must be a downside somewhere, but I haven't ever found it.