We'd been advised to take a more southernly route, which would put us directly into the LA area, but I was interested in seeing San Fran, and interested in the quickest route to the coast. I'd spent a lot of time talking and thinking about getting to the West Coast in 48 hours, and most people didn't think it was possible. Still, I thought, if we made a beeline, we could make it there by 8AM SVST on the 8th.

Tom and I more or less split the driving before we got to Indiana, Jesse didn't have his license. Plans were to pick up Rich Hosler at a specified rest area in Indiana, and we did that. About the time we got him, the front left brake of the van started making some ugly noises. But, when you're driving on interstate highways, stopping every few hours for gas/bathroom/driver changes, you really don't use the brakes much, so waited till we were in California to get those fixed.

Now seems to be as good a time as any to talk about the interior of the van, because we seriously had it set up. The back seats fold up flat against the sides of the van, and that plus the trunk gives us a rather large cargo area. It was my intention to have a sleeping area back there, but the sheer volume taken up by our "stuff" prevented it. The day before the trip, Tom, Jesse, and I scored about $160 worth of food, most of it from Sam's club. 5lbs of Animal Crackers, 2lbs of pepperoni, 1/2lb each of ham, turkey, roast beef, and bologna, two loaves of bread, bags and bags of chips, a pound of Swedish Fish, entirely too many Good&Plentys, a ton of Coke, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, Sobe...you get the picture. The dry/nonperishable food was fairly strewn about the back and the drinks and meat resided in the cooler. I also spent $80 on a very cool toy called a power inverter. That takes the DC current from your car's cigarette lighter and powers ordinary household items. So we got my 14" TV and jammed it between the front two seats, plugged both my Super Nintendo (about 25 games) and N64 (About 8 games) in as well, and the two people in the back seat had a damn good time gaming for a large percentage of the trip. Goldeneye, NHL 94 and 96, and Super Mario World. (Together, we got 92 of the stages, I think there are 94 or 96.) We actually blew out a fuse in the cigarette lighter the night before the trip finding out that my old 14" computer monitor couldn't be powered by the car. My computer has TV out, and we tried to get it working so we could watch movies in the van, but the TV out just wouldn't go, and with no monitor, that didn't happen. To recap, cooler/van full of food, lots of good videogaming, three drivers, not to mention a ton of good CDs.

Second problem of the trip was in Iowa, about midnight SVST on July 6th. Tom and I were asleep in the backseat, we wake up to the van pulling over with a police siren flashing behind us. Rich got a ticket for 80 in a 65. The damage could have been worse, as we spent a good portion of the trip going faster than that, and while Tom is a licensed driver, he recently lost his wallet and had no license on him, which would have been a huge headache. The cop actually took Rich back to his car, questioned him about where we were going and whether or not we had any alcohol/drugs in the car. Then he asked Tom, Jesse, and I the same questions. He said that if we were honest with him (about having alcohol/drugs), he'd be very reasonable, but would be very mad if he found any after we said we had none. I was about to go all "You picked the wrong constitutional right-knowing motherfucker to mess with today, and I'll need to see your warrant, dipshit" on him, but good sense and the fact that he didn't actually try to search the van kept me from doing so.

I drove for a lot of the early morning part of that night, and by the time I was done, the sun was coming up and we were in Colorado. This amazed us, we were making better progress that we'd thought possible. We went as fast as we could over the Rockies, with that much load on hills that steep with the thin atmosphere, the van had a little trouble. Rich and I had made the decision while we were still in Nebraska to skip San Francisco, that we'd A) have a prettier drive and B) arrive so much sooner if we went directly to LA, so that's what we did. Drove through Utah, and that was rather crappy, but that's where we made our only real stop of the trip out there, which was to eat in a Subway. In Nevada, we also wasted about a half hour driving up and down the Strip, but the brakes were getting so bad we decided to just go to Cali ASAP. And that we did. We were in California just as the sun was setting, quite a fantastic sight. (There were also a lot of cool things to see in Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, and yah, even a few in Utah.)

At 2:25AM SVST on the 8th, we pulled into the driveway of Manuel Garcia, our host, aka Booga. Handily enough, he wasn't home at the time. He arrived a bit later, getting home from nemo at the train station, and he had Kelly in tow. Stupid Kelly had shown up a few days beforehand. The entire trip, over 2750 miles from Williamsport, PA to Huntington Beach, CA had taken 42 hours and 24 minutes.

Booga's had a 56X CD-ROM that created such vibrations that his hard drive crashed, so there was no net access for the entire duration of our stay. But we had California, the stuff left in Booga's house by the previous owner, an old TV of Booga's, my computer with its stash of movies, and each other to keep us more than entertained. The whole group of people, which at times included Rich, Tom, Jesse, Booga, Kelly, nemo, AmXy, Sean, Greg, and Greg's dad was certainly and odd one, but a terribly fun one to be around. Shortly into our stay, it was revealed that there would be no BBQ, Booga doesn't even own a grill. We mostly ate out. Carl's Jr is an excellent fast food franchise, I'd be a little happier if there were some of them around here. The four of us were very tired upon ariving, but we still had time to sit down and watch *something* on TV about Golnar before retiring for the night. In our hotel room. Booga also failed to provide a working shower, so there was a room rented for the duration. That made for niiice long shower lines in the morning.

Other than Golnar, we hung around Booga's or the hotel room, watched MST3K the movie, went to the beach, ate out or got take-out, got the van's brakes fixed, went to a pretty neat arcade and a Krispy Kremes. But once the brakes were fixed, the van was sadly bitten by a fire hydrant, causing some body damage between the door and front quarter panel on the driver side. The day before we left, Rich closed the door as we were leaving the van for a trip into Target, and the window simply exploded. All over the place. He got a little bit cut up on his arms, but was lucky to be wearing sunglasses. There were fragments on my windshield, the windshield of the car parked in front of us, on the roof of the van, all over the ground, and all over the inside.

We had a good time, and left California on the morning of the 12th, spent quite a long time driving to Roswell, NM. We crashed overnight at Rose's place, then went out and demolished a Denny's (I personally had four plates for my food, and I finished it all.), and set out for Indiana. We made it there about 24 hours later, in the afternoon of the 14th. Sometime in this drive, the air conditioner also went dead. Hung out at/slept at Rich's house, had a fine, fine, fine dinner prepared by Rich's mom, picked up Rich's girlfriend Heather, and saw X-Men. It was very cool. There might be gripes, to be sure, but that movie was a lot of fun. Went to bed after visiting a pretty neat playground. Jesse and I set out for Pennsylvania the next day. He was picked up the following day by his mom. Rich and Tom stopped by on Sunday also, but they were just passing through on their way to Mansfield, in preparation for visiting Rochester for their RIT orientation.

I'm slowly getting used to sleeping while not in a seated position in a moving vehicle. I'm happy the trip went as well as it did. Hung out with some really cool people, did something incredible (West coast in 42 hours!), and everyone lived through it.