So far, the trip across the Great American West has been fun, but it is taking much longer than I expected. It took us nine hours to get out of California, which was completely unwelcome. Granted, we didn't leave my place (or rather, my office, where we printed off directions) until 11am, and we spent almost an hour and a half in Tracy eating Long John Silvers and fixing my sideview mirror.
That's right, my sideview mirror, which was broken on an infamous Fourth of July trip two and a half years ago, is now fixed, thanks to my brother's technical skill and a stop for tools at Sears. However, I got angry all over again at that stupid Pontiac dealership in Menlo Park--when my brother was putting the new mirror on, he discovered that they had given me a manual mirror, rather than a power mirror. Luckily, the new mirror fits, but it will never be adjustable from the inside. Damn them! This made me even happier that they have since gone out of business.
Anyway, we were making fantastic time getting out of the Bay Area, and my brother had quite happily fallen asleep, when we hit a sign around Placer County that said 'heavy traffic over summit - expect three hour delays'. In a typical display of California stupidity, Caltrans was requiring chains on all vehicles on the summit before Truckee, and while it was snowing, there was just slush on the road. As my brother pointed out, chains do keep idiots from going too fast, but the consequence is that they destroy the roads and back up traffic for hours. Luckily, I had the chains that I was forced to buy the last time that I was trying to get out of Tahoe, and we paid some guy twenty dollars to do it for us, which saved a lot of cursing and sibling bickering (and dirtiness and dampness and general annoyance). Past the chain control checkpoint, the road really cleared up, so we made fabulous time out of Reno.
The problem was that by the time we got out of Reno, it was eight p.m. I was able to keep going until midnight (partially thanks to a 'cappuccino' at a convenience store in lovely Winnemucca, NV--it was definitely not a real cappuccino, but it was full of sugar and caffeine, so it kept me up for another hour). By the time we hit Elko, NV, we were still three hours out of Salt Lake City, I couldn't go any further, and I was in a truly foul mood from being in the car for thirteen hours without making it through California and Nevada. So, we stopped at a Comfort Inn in Elko. The place was fine, what with the complimentary high-speed internet access (key! although I was too tired to blog), but the fact that it wasn't in Salt Lake City made me hate it.
So we woke up this morning, and our mother called--to say that the road reports for Wyoming indicate that I-80 is closed west of Laramie. Sweet! We definitely don't need any more road closures, since I looked up the distance from Elko to Cheyenne, and it's exactly 666 miles--armageddon! I had hoped to make it into Nebraska, but I doubt that that will happen, since we probably won't hit Cheyenne before ten p.m., even without any road closures.
We're currently going across the salt flats in Utah, and we just passed the Nevada/Utah border. I can write this because my brother is driving, and I have to keep typing or else I'll grab the scissors in the glovebox and stab him in the face--I love the kid, and we're getting along really well, but he just popped in the 'Garth Brooks Double Live' CD, and so the volume is pumped up and he's singing along to tales of jealous wives, jealous husbands, Baton Rouge, etc., etc. I shall exact my revenge with DJ Tiesto's Summerbreeze mix this afternoon--it will cost me something since I can't sing along to techno, but the raw pain evident in his features will be worth it.
My last night in California was really great. We had dinner with fourteen of my closest friends at Buca di Beppo in Palo Alto, which lasted for about four hours, and much fun was had by all. It had the unfortunate side effect of keeping me up way too late, but I'm glad that we went out. It was a strange mix of people; my oldest friends were there (Claudia, Zach, Adit, Oniel), some of the newer additions to that group were there (Vidya, Sri, Jackie), my brother and Claudia's brother were in attendance (and unfortunately the death match between them didn't happen), and some of my former-residents-turned-friends (Tom, Shari, Julie, Rachel, and Kyle) showed up as well. All of those groups are really winning, although I can't repeat most of the conversations that we had because this is a family blog. I don't want to risk the future, when the FCC will suddenly get control of all blogs and retroactively fine everyone for indecency, so I will have to avoid all mention of what was discussed at dinner. But, it was an appropriately raucous send-off, and I can't wait to see everyone in six months.
I think I'm going to see if playing Civilization will make it easier for me to ignore the music; I'll let you know how that goes.
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