Author Archives: prawns

Fixes, Additions, Sauna Community Awesomeness

During our amazing stay at the @Gropps Collective House – Michael Undem, George Rahi, Foss, Ari Feder, and Sawmon + (and many others) pitched in to make a bunch of much needed upgrades to the interior of the truck. With the amount of use the truck was getting weekly it began to show its age. But this obvious aging turned out to provide an opportunity to evolve the design of the inner spaces of the truck and give an opportunity for the sauna community to give back to the truck that got them sweaty every week.

New cubby-holes, re-enforced benches, new shoe storage, additional space for manoeuvring around the inner door, fixes to the buckling yellow cedar ceiling and right wall (due to moisture) and new cedar finishing to the right side of the exit door. Wow – that was a lot of fixes. Huge thanks to Michael Undem for taking the lead on these improvements, and big thanks to the sauna community for your weekly donations that bought the Marine Plywood and other things used in the construction efforts. Also thanks to George Rahi for the cedar donation and thanks to Gropps for use of the magnificent tool shed. And now for pictures…

Posted on May 28th, 2013. Posted in Saunasessions | Comments Off

Sauna Truck April 3rd 2013: All Night Beach Mission

Sauna Truck City Beach Mission – Hightide, 4am ocean skinny dips, starry night sky, boombox playing dirty dancing and 90s’s mix tapes, car loads of sweaty naked folks, Hino KL Sauna Truck, fully customized 35foot red ‘spaceship’ bus, hot steamy mulled spiced boozy cider, magnificent tree exhaled air, deep black night, ominous twinkling cargo and oil tankers in the inlet, the city in the distance, the mobile sauna session was in full swing from 8pm sharp till 5am soft.

Infinite thank you’s to the trees, the land, the birds and the people who made it a sublime evening. Below are a few images from the night taken by a new saunagoer, Scott Armstrong.

Info on the event here.

candle lit mulled cider bar outside the back of the truck

impromptu midnight beach picnic

post sweat chill zone in the ‘spaceship’ school bus parked next to the sauna truck

pre sweat hydration session n the spaceship bus

friends stoked for beach mission sweat

caught snacking

the door is open, come sweat!

candles, smiles and $5 donations!

our view from the sauna

view of the north shore from the sauna

where we were swimming all night

Posted on April 8th, 2013. Posted in Saunasessions | Tagged beach, mobile, sauna, saunasessions, saunatruck | Comments Off

This is why the Saunas are MOBILE

First the BAD NEWS.

The weekly sweats are on hiatus until we find a new home for SaunaTruck Mark 2. Due to reasons that are too convoluted and by-law related to bother with here, lets just say that the secret//not-secret weekly sweats will be at a new spot in the future. If you want to know the whole rigamorole, ask me or karlis about it sometime. Needless to say, Heidi and the Hammock Crew are supa sad to see us go, and we are equally bummed about leaving. We love it here!!!!!! BUT, never fear, the mobile sauna is always near.

Now the GOOD NEWS.

We are happy to announce that we are seeking a new glorious home for the saunatruck. Is your back-alley, back yard, or front driveway the next spot for sweat-oriented, healing-core, cedar housed, re-hydrational, community love and weekly wellnessizing? Let us know with an email: adrian@transformationprojects.ca ASAP

What YOU CAN DO.

Become a Member of the BC Mobile Sauna Society! (GO to the “CONTRIBUTE” button on the upper-right part of this page — >

The Society requires extra $ to move it to its next location (towing it will cost a pretty penny!) Also, you may Give us Hugs and put the word out to trusted allies that might be able to secure us a new home.

oh and PS.

Tonight there will be a lovely gathering indoors titled LADY STALLIONS where lost and confused saunaers are encouraged to revel in the lady prowess of local art and music creators.

Posted on August 26th, 2012. Comments Off

Sauna Truck // CBC RADIO North By Northwest // Featured in Hammock Residency Story

It was a sunny afternoon in May when Heidi let me know that the CBC Radio show, North By Northwest was doing feature story on the Hammock Residency and its artists. I was lucky to be available for the interview//hangout//hummus and rice cracker eating party.What follows is a lovely aural tour of some of the voices of artists who are currently in-residence as well as past and future ones. Sauna related chatting starts at about 5:40, but first you must hear from Heidi to get an idea of how special the truck’s current habitat is.

LISTEN HERE: CBC.ca | North by Northwest | The Hammock Residency.

SURF HERE: Hammock Residency

hammock residency living room

Posted on June 12th, 2012. Comments Off

Deep Cleaned the Sauna Sparkly Cedar Eucalyptus Magnificent

What is it with people named Meaghan and how they all have such sauna greatness in their sweat?

Meaghan Orlinski, the newest sauna hero in our midst: provided the muscle and meticulousness to get Sauna III @ The Hammock Residency into sparkly red cedar gleam yesterday eve prior to another well attended sweat.

The BC Mobile Sauna Society Presents:

How To Clean Your 3 Tonne Mobile Sauna in 2hrs

Step One – Get a really badass flood light (blinding level)
Step Two – Hot water, soap, and scrubbies and a bucket
Step Three – Remove all benches and really get-in there
Step Four – Scrape, laugh and grunt the detritus out
Step Five – Hose it down, eh?
Step Five – Fire up the rocks and heat it up!

Posted on February 6th, 2012. Tagged clean, Eucalyptus, Megan, sauna, sweat, volunteer | 2 Comments

Mobile Sauna: Artist in Residence at The Hammock, Vancouver, BC. Sept 2011 – May 2012

We have been enjoying being the Artist in Residence at The Hammock. Karlis built a new mobile shower for outdoor bathers and we have been making some safety and style improvements that have been long overdue. Solar charger for the secondary battery array, new grip tape for the wooden stairs, and new modular lighting rig.

The Coordinator of the Hammock Residency, Heidi Nagtegaal, asked to write a little something about this ongoing pleasure project, and the following is what we submitted for her website.

We built a SaunaTruck. Several, in fact. We roll them around and sweat by the ocean, in parks, in backyards, and up in the mountains by rivers and lakes. Our current mobile sauna is made inside of an Antique 1970’s Hino KL Cargo Truck and you can see it under construction. It has a change room in the entrance and a sauna that seats 6-14 people (14 is very friendly). It gets really hot and the red cedar feels amazing inside. Cedar is quite the healing material. The SaunaTruck is sometimes available for rentals. Keep in mind that it’s a very old and temperamental truck; but we do love parties and festivals and weddings and full moon gatherings and all sorts of stuff like that. We’ve been having weekly sunday saunasessions since 2001. You may have been already. Some sessions are huge and awesome, some are small and awesome. They are in various locations with various intentions. Some are dance parties, some are potlucks, or live jams, or tea parties, or booze-ups. We’ve also seen maybe more mobile saunas than you can imagine, and we’ve got the biggest photo gallery of mobile saunas anywhere. Got some ideas or want more information? — Adrian (Prof. Prawns) Sinclair & Karlis (Count Snacky) Kalnins

Adrian (Prof. Prawns) Sinclair — Besides co-curating Mobile Sauna Truck Happenings, Adrian has been staging Guerilla Freestyle-Rap interventions via Sound Bike with the Freestyle Focus Group FFG, growing and fermenting various foods, Serving Tea with the RYTWM Project, and doing activist and communications work for arts and non-profit groups like [PIVOT Legal, GREENPEACE, 45WEST STUDIOS and Wilderness Committee]. He is an amateur entho-botanist-forager, an academically trained philosopher and a childrens zine writer. He lives in eastvan with his jade plant Maurice M P.

Karlis (Count Snacky) Kalnins — Karlis Kalnins is based in Vancouver where he bio-intensively gardens, builds mobile bike-based sound systems, freestyle raps, develops his skills in mycology, and is co-director of the newly founded BC Tea Growers Association. His past works in the arts contributed to the early formations of locative media art in Canada. In 2001 Karlis founded the Locative Media Lab with Marc Tuters to explore the field of user generated cartography. These efforts resulting in GPSter (2001), Geograffiti (2002) and now Where-FI (2003). His work has been presented internationally at conferences and new media festivals including: IMPAKT (Utrecht), Media Architecture (Riga), Collaborative Cartography (London), VSMM (Berkeley + Montreal), Next 5 Minutes, E-Culture Fair (Amsterdam) and others.

http://saunasessions.ca/v2/saunas

Posted on December 23rd, 2011. Comments Off