Road Trip A

Quick disclaimer: Somewhere between fact and fiction in a fun way.  You decide what's true and what's not!

How does one begin writing about one's travels?  Possibly, one could converse with two or three and together they could dissect the many facets of moving from place to place.  But, perhaps, even better, would be to just, as it were, start, immediately and without hesitation, getting right to the point and heart of things, writing...

So this adventure began in May.  Not the early part of may, right after my birthday, when I'm still convinced people owe me presents and expensive dinners, no no.  The later May.  The time, most closely related to my brother's birthday.  That is to say, his birthday.

We had a party for him.  I left directly after the party.  Well.  I left at 4:00am.  The party probably ended at 10:00pm, afterwards we played Risk, and generally talked about how silly it was that I would be leaving in a matter of hours for an indeterminate length of time.  ((That length of time is the duration of summer employment at Stanford, plus however long it takes me to find a job and become wildly successful, or run out of money and kindly ask for transport home.  Currently, still indeterminate.))

This adventure began with four people into a standard Mazda 3.  For those of you who are unaware, "standard" means "possesses a stick shift."  It is probably not the standard way that car comes.  A Mazda 3, the model I got, is a happy constantly smiling sort of car.  She's always pleased to see you, even if you haven't gotten her oil changed, taken her out to a car wash as often as you'd have liked to, and so on.  She'd still be smiling if you had a hooker and cocaine game of hide and seek involving crowbars and police in the backseat.

Everyone backed about half a days worth of clothes, or whatever they could fit into a space about the size of their pockets, whichever was smaller.  To say, the smallest version of a Mazda 3 possible, gets a little cramped with four gents, and bags and boxes galore, is a lot like saying incontinence is shitty and unpleasant.  That is to say, a gross understatement.

So anyways, it's four am.  Maybe 2:30am, but definitely early.  And there's four of us in a car, wondering if caffeine can really help in pretending you're not tired.  By the way, Irish Cream Java Monsters are ideal for road trips, the Loco Moca or Mean Bean will do in a pinch.  If you're desperate grab one of the Starbucks Doubleshot Energy drinks.  Get a regular Monster, or Red Bull if drinking Anti-Freeze is appealing to you.

The lot of us are driving from Upstate New York to Stanford, California.  Our first locational goal is Washington DC.  Takoma park area.  Not to be confused with the post-trip temporary destination of Puyallup, which is not far from Tacoma, Washington.  You may, or may not be well versed with America's geography, but I'll have you know, Washington is absolutely not on the way to Stanford.  We chose that location, because we had a friend we thought we should see.

We got to Washington sometime in the morning.  If you start driving at 3:30am you're bound to get somewhere by morning.  We found a nice parking spot in the middle of the sidewalk outside our friends place, and went in for some nice peanut buttery somethings.  Maybe it was a sandwich.  Perhaps, it was a sandwich with zero peanut butter employed.  It's honestly tough to say what kind of sandwich I had at roughly 11:00 in the morning after having tiredly driven for some eight to ten hours.  But, there was in fact some sort of refreshing something, that was, if I know my friend's hospitality inclinations, potentially edible.  He has a wife you see, and I always trust wives to know what is and isn't edible, and instruct me if I seem to be making some terrible mistake.

Oh, the other people in this story?  You want to know names?  Well, instead, how about I tell you about their fathers?  That's always a popular kind of story thing.  You talk about one man's father's father's father and how he was probably a blacksmith of great regard.  Well, I can't go that far back, but let's see.

There's me.  My father's a lawyer.  He works for the law.  There's another person, his father is an auto mechanic.  For cars, not like an automatic mechanic.  But whatever an automatic mechanic is, that sounds great.  Another, his father.  Well his father has been on the roof of a school where I lost my hackey sack.  I'm not positive that he's paid to do that sort of thing, but I can say for certainty he has done that sort of thing.  The final of the in-car story members' father is the owner of a gym.  He also acts, quite convincingly, as a personal trainer.

So, again, us four with a friend and a wife, the wife is the friend's only and we did not all pick one up during our travels, have all come together through hours of driving and edible goodness, and we're about to set out on more adventuring.  Tune in next week to find out what!  Donate money and I'll embellish the story to be much more exciting.  If we get up to twenty dollars I'm beginning to remember a fight with a dragon at the mall.  For zero dollars, we probably watched a parade, because it was Labor Day.


Money for me, gets you dragons.  No money for me gets you parades.  Maybe just people standing around before parades, depending on how much no money has been donated.



*A note to friends who are referenced in this story:

Namely John, Adam, Bill, Scott, Jim, and Jill((Names have been changed to obscure identities)) if you would like me to further obscure yourself, or your father as I have described him, please send me a personal note, and I'll add vagueness.

((The second post in this road trip series can be found, here))
((The third post in this series can be found, here))
((The fourth post in this series can be found, here))