On the road

Her purple hair was turning heads and their tapestry-strung bus couldn’t be missed on Rosser Avenue.

In search of coffee, cigarettes and a replacement tire for their big blue bus, three Grateful Dead groupies found just what they needed in Waynesboro on Thursday afternoon.

“Your town seems to have hundreds of tire places,” said Miranda Holman, 19, a New York City native living in Connecticut.

She and sister Kayli, 17, wandered into Waynesboro last week when their mini bus blew its tire on Interstate 64. It was their second blown tire since Asheville, N.C., the city the sisters had chosen spontaneously for a Spring Break adventure.

But Asheville was just a start for the big-city girls. It was there they met their “hippie friend,” known only as Rising Sun, who had his bus hot on the trail of Grateful Dead concerts, where he would hawk merchandise and bus-made burritos to other fans. With an ultimate destination of Albany, N.Y., his ride was a perfect one to get the girls back home.

Only they had to work too.

“We had to be cooking all these burritos. That was crazy,” said Miranda, who used a Pullman stove and a tiny cutting board amid the rumbling bus. “There were, like, pots and pans flying.”

“That smell would fill the whole bus,” Kayli said.

By the time the Holmans reached Waynesboro, their trip had become a bit fatiguing. But they had their dad’s blessing and support all along.

“He’s all about us learning about life,” Miranda said.

Kayli had suggested Asheville, she explained.

“The next day he had our tickets,” she said of the Greyhound bus on which they rode south.

That ride was mostly a sitting affair. But on Rising Sun’s bus, the girls found themselves lounging on a mattress and sending peace signs out the back window.

“Sometimes they were kind of weirded out,” Kayli said of fellow drivers. “A lot of times I got really warm reactions.”

Mixed, too, was their time in Waynesboro.

“When we were in Waynesboro, [Rising Sun] was kind of in a bad mood,” Kayli said.

But they found the surroundings to be as pretty as any they’d seen, Miranda said. “We discovered this whole different life ... just watching the countryside go by. In New York you don’t do that a lot. It’s high energy. You always have to be doing something.”

One convenience store clerk, though, looked at the girls funny and refused to sell cigarettes to Miranda. And a woman asked “what on Earth” had happened to make her hair purple.

“We thought that was kind of rude and funny at the same time,” Kayli said.

The girls, with Rising Sun, found what they needed and were back on the road before long. And after arriving home safely at her Brooklyn apartment Friday night, Kayli was chalking up the trip as an outright success.

“It was just really, really different and refreshing and relaxing,” she said.

And likely just the start for the sisters. Kayli will spend a month riding her bike in Ireland this summer.

“We’re going to sleep in fields and abandoned castles,” she said. “I guess the adventures just get bigger.”