At this point I have to admit I was a bit fullish and forgot to look at the web server's log to see if the files were correctly served. that was an hour and a half of trying to figure out why the javascript functions were not found. So after smartening up I found out that the javascript files were not found. It seemed that django kept looking for them in the wrong location. Using the example here I eventually got it all to working.

It comes down to this. in the settings.py file there is a reference to the media URL and to the file system path to the media directory. Adding the following code to the urls.py

if settings.DEBUG:
urlpatterns += patterns('',
(r'^tripcalc/media/(?P
.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': settings.MEDIA_ROOT}),
)

Will make sure that while django is in debug mode, serving of the static files will be done via django. for production sites it is better to let a dedicated web server (such as Apache) serve these static files.
And that took care of it. I can now continue with the development. And it also enabled me to call the CSS file, so style is also shown. hurray.