Life Update (Road Trip Recap Pt. II)

The second long drive was much weirder and harder than the first. For one, nobody in a car slept more than like 4 hours, with Miles sleeping 4, Robin and David sleeping 2 and myself sleeping 30 min. Still, we were all surprisingly sober, apparently the concept of a 12 hour drive will sober you up when you've stayed out late drinking and partying (getting late night Carl's also helped). So, we were supposed to leave Claremont at 6 in the morning, and as such I left Never Land at about 5:40 and got to the car at about 5:50. Being the impatient type, and wanting to save some time I went to fill up on gas and buy some personal driving fuel. Seeing as this wasn't an all night drive we were about to embark on I decided on a 1L bottle of Coke instead of ramping all the way up to the Dew. I got back to the parking lot at about 6:05 to find Robin, Miles, and to my surprise David, waiting for me. Initially Thomas a.k.a. 'Jenga' was considering joining us, but that would have been 6 strain driving weekends for him (fall break, road trip, UCLA tournament, Sean Ryan, SoCal Warmup, something else) so he decided against it. Well, David is a free spirit and an awesome guy who realized that the San Diego wild fires afforded him a great opportunity for a sweet life experience (reading On the Road and writing a paper about the mystique of the road couldn't have hurt either). Robin, Miles, and David all got in the car, we then made a quick stop by David's car so he could get some things, then we hit the road at about 6:15.

I took the first driving shift because it was my car and I couldn't have slept with someone with less than 4 hours of sleep that was not me driving it (unless that person was Shaggy with a 2L of Mountain Due or an appropriate amount of physics homework and coffee). Robin took shotgun with the responsibility of staying awake and choosing the music seeing as none of us undertook the task of making a 12 hr playlist. Luckily for me, Robin had his laptop and thus a sweet assortment of music that I don't have. His musical choices combined with the post apocalyptic feel of the early morning I-15 were enough to easily keep me awake.

There were already a ton of cars on the road when we started our drive. False dawn came around 6:45, bringing with it a red haze through all the smoke that had drifted north with the wind along I-15. The early morning traffic (well, the flow was between 60 and 80 mph at all times) combined with the red haze and the still visible moon gave the drive a Mad Max sort of feel that really tripped David, Robin and I out in our sleep-deprived states. Unfortunately for Miles, he slept like a rock and never got to see the smoke, even though that was a big goal of his for the trip (he had even suggested that we take a detour to see the flames if it wouldn't take to long, in fact, on the way down he was almost insisting that we do so seeing as the flames were visible from the 5 and we were on it, but we got off at the 210 instead of driving through LA just to see the fucking fires).

We got off the 15 on the north side of Barstow and got on I-40, which apparently connects Wilmington, NC to, um, Barstow. When we got on the 40 we were greeted with a sign saying Needles 144 miles, Washington D.C. 2,556 miles. Somehow we decided that this meant needles was a very important destination, and that yelling NEEDLES! anytime we saw a sign for the place was a very funny and entertaining action. Well, it seemed logical that we should fill up in Needles because we'd be be at about a half tank then and we didn't want to spend a ton of money each time it was your turn to fill up (I couldn't convince everyone that we should go till just about empty then play credit card roulette for who pays). Little did we know that Needles is such an important destination that gas costs $3.70 a gallon there (luckily for me I payed for gas in Claremont and wasn't hit with the bill in NEEDLES!)

I traded off driving to Robin in Needles and decided to play captain iPod for a while. After about an hour of this we went to instrumentals and started freestyling, basically, we all sucked compared to Robin, but we all improved greatly during our first forte into freestyling on the roadtrip (except maybe Miles, he's kind of special when freestyling). I think my favorite part of freestyling was trying to get Miles to rhyme. Inevitably, when he did, he'd try and rap about Man Ferns, but he couldn't mess up without being to self conscious. I really liked "Man Fern, yeah, Man Fern, man fern, uh, man fern, fuck." as a rap. Anyway, the hours flew by and Robin drove until we got to Flagstaff, at which point I (unwisely) took over again.

After about a half hour of driving I realized I was far to tiered to drive, and that I should pass the torch again. Well, I started driving again for two reasons, first, Robin is a really good driver, he's just not that fast of a driver, and I wanted to get to Santa Fe pretty quickly, second, Miles is a crazy sob when it comes to driving, I am often legitimately scared when I'm in a car and he's behind the wheel. Somehow, in my drowsy state I forgot that I was so hesitant to let Miles drive. When I pulled over to hand over the driving responsibilities I foolishly let Miles drive thinking I'd just nap in the back and not get scared/stressed. Well, I should of known that this was a bad plan when Miles got up to 120 mph just getting back onto the highway. I was about to fall asleep when I heard my car fucking roaring so I looked up at the speedometer from the back seat and saw a new speed record for my car. I was like "what the fuck Miles, you're going 120!" He was like "oh my god, sorry, I was looking at the other meter and was wondering why I was going only 40." "Well, just slow the fuck down" I said. Miles responded "Okay, don't worry." Needless to say, I didn't sleep to well.

Eventually Miles's horrible driving lead me to become very aware and awake. I had him pull over at the first gas station and we switched back for driving duties. At this gas stop we lost all of the time that Miles's craziness might have gained us because he paid to put $20 in the tank then never actually did because he assumed one of us would pump the gas even though he didn't tell us he'd paid the $20. Anyway, we got back on the road and I noticed that we were still at half a tank so we turned around and had to go back to the gas station. This time we filled up with no hitch and were on our way. Thankfully that was our last stop before we finally got to Santa Fe. Wow, that took a while, still, I'll try and write about the weekend and the trip back for later tonight.