8a.m. (EST) Sept.1st 2008

Never been much of an "early riser". That's changed on this trip. Seems like I get most of my sleep in the car these days. Joe snores through the night and so instead of waking to an alarm I am roused daily by a sound I can only scantly describe with words. Imagine someone feeding truck tires through a wood chipper next to your bed. In any case, it hasn't diminished my enjoyment of this adventure in the slightest.
After the grand Canyon trip, we visited a meteor crater and I hugged a large meteorite. Craters are big. My butt hurt and we were hungryso we set out for Albuquerque NM to stay with Joe's aunt and uncle and visit with his mom and grandparents. It was a serious blessing for me at the time because I had basically lost the use of my legs and needed a couple days to recover. I'm dead fuckin serious. I had to lift my legs by hand for three days. You shoulda seen me hobbling around. My 87 year old grampa has one stiff leg and could move quicker than me. I'm sure I sustained permanent damage to my left hip socket but hey; ya wanna make an omelet, right?
From there we set out for the Carlsbad caves. I think the motel we stayed at takes the cake so far for creepy-as-hell/fear-for-your-lives establishment of the year. I did enjoy standing in the parking lot barefoot watching the bats hunt. There were probably anywhere from 20 to 30 bats flying around us at any given moment to feed on the many MANY bugs that are drawn to the lamp lights. I got lost for a little bit watching these silent hunters perform aerial acrobatics above and around me. So entranced was I that I failed to notice the massive amount of insects that weren't being caught but merely maimed and left for dead in the form of a sticky, crunchy carpet leading back to my room. Friends, take my advice on this one, wear shoes when you're walkin' around at night.
The caves themselves were just absolutely amazing. After awhile of seeing nothing but staggeringly bizarre beauty, you kinda go numb to it. I think there's only so much blowing the mind can take within a short amount of time before it just kinda shuts down and you revert to basic needs like food, water and indoor plumbing.

So much to say, so little interest...

Much like every other time I've tried to maintain a trip journal, this one is constantly going neglected. I tend to just stay in the moment i guess. Out of everything I've seen and done so far, the most amazing part of the trip goes, hands down, to the Grand Canyon. Despite the torrential rains and flash flood warnings, I made one of the best decisions of my life and did one of the dumbest things I've ever done; I hiked the canyon alone. The trip to the bottom took about four and a half hours. It rained gently and the setting sun moved in and out of the clouds until i was too deep in the rocks to see it anymore. I slept at the bottom underneath a picnic table for two hours, awaiting the fore casted rainstorm but it never came. Since I've never really been fond of bugs crawling on my face and I was pretty sure some serious rains were about to hit, I decided to get a jump on the day and began hiking out of the canyon at 1AM. The first five hours of my ascent were lit only by the full moon. I don't have words for the beauty and similarly cannot begin to tell you how much pain I was in every step of the way. The ten hour hike back to the top was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life.

August 18th, 2008

Well folks, it's already been too long since i checked in here. Here we are, already on day six, and I'm just now sitting down to play catch up. The first leg of the trip hasn't offered many opportunities to access the web. We've been on the move this entire time and now I finally have a day of downtime. We started our journey with a mad dash out to Las Vegas, making sure to stop for T&A along the way.

We shacked up with an old friend of Joe's and immediately set out for a night on the town. The destination: Playboy Club. I didn't even know there was A Playboy Club until someone mentioned there friend is the manager. We waltzed right in like the champions we are and drank for free all night. Special thanks to Rico; the main man: without his generous hostiness, I would have been sober and these two bunnies would have told me to go F&@# myself.

The following day was pretty fun too. I went to the Hilton to pay my respects and say goodbye to the soon to be extinct "Star Trek Experience". It's fun and goofy and I'm glad I got a taste of the campy future to come, but it was just a warm-up for yet another night out.This time we were taken to a brand new club for its opening night. It wasn't actually open to the public, but the bar was open all night...so that worked for us.
That's Joe and Ally doing there best not to be embarrassed around me. I had a lot of fun runnin around with those two and we all managed to have a pretty PG-13 Vegas experience. Nothing that happened in Vegas really needs to stay in Vegas. I wondered if I was doing something wrong (?) I nearly got into a screaming argument and fist fight with a cocktail glass but experience has taught me that it's usually better to diffuse situations like that peacefully and maturely.

In any case, Joe and I set out for the rest of our adventurizing at the crack of 8:30 and that's where the real beginning of our trip took place. We both agreed that going to Sin City didn't really crack the seal on the roadiness of our road trip. It wasn't really until we hit Hoover Dam that it started to set in. On the way we stopped at a few random places to satiate our obscure curiosities.Now, for those of you that haven't seen the transformers movie; the hoover damn is fricken amazing! It's immense and beautiful and all of the engineering and structural support around it just blew our squishy little minds. The canyon it's wedged in is majestic in its own way and there's all sorts of intriguing bits of machinery and metal and high-tension cable all around it.

I mean; look at that thing up there: Do I know what the hell it is? No, I do not. Does it rock? Yes, I'm fairly certain it does. They're also apparently building a new interstate to cross the canyon as well. Ever seen one of these things? It's fricken HUGE!

Once Joe and I felt sufficiently damned, we got back on the road and, in true road trip fashion, took the long way to our next stop; Route 66 to the Grand Canyon. Now, when i say "the long way", i mean the scenic way; wherein you stop whenever you want and do whatever you want and really only sorta aim to arrive at your destination no more more than three times later than you would arrive had you driven straight there. We were just trying to beat the sun really, so we stopped a few times. The first was in some little town in Arizona called Kingman, to stretch our legs and look at a great big steam train.

This seemed as good a place as any to break out the cowboy hats and get this show on the road. Joe and I are hopeless geeks even without the presence of a massive choo-choo train, so you can imagine what happens when we find one we can climb all over.
Good times.

After that we went hiking in a cave 300 feet below ground, visited a cemetery that was out in a forest and, after that, an airplane museum.(dorks)

to be continued....

Welcome To The Show!

I'm setting up this little blog to give those who are curious a little window into what's going on, where I'm at and what I'm up to. For those of you who don't know; on Wednesday, August 13th, My dear friend Joe and I left Los Angeles and embarked on a great adventure. We've decided to drive around the United States. We dont know where all we're going and we don't know when we'll be back. We've both decided to turn off our phones, clear our minds and keep our eyes on the road ahead.

If you're reading this, chances are you're one of my closest friends and I care very much about you. With that said; I don't want to be bothered while I'm gone. I don't want to call or be called. I don't want to email or write or check in or just call to say "Hey". I want to go. I want set out and keep going and run & run & run til' I'm completely out of breath. You guys know me. You know I'll be back; and when I return there will be hugs and stories and lots of catching up to do. But until then, I'm just gone. For most purposes, we don't exist during this time. We're lost, we're alone, we're drifting, floating, meandering, trekking and in our own round about ways looking for something we've never known. If I'm diligent about it, this blog ought to reflect what it is we find and maybe, just maybe, what things we leave behind - out there in the whatever. I'm doing this for a lot of reasons: so many in fact that i'm taken back whenever someone asks me, "why are you gonna do THAT?"? All I can ever think to say is "Why wouldn't I?"