Day 31 - 11/16/2007 - I was totin' my pack along the dusty Winnemucca road...

After our respective delightful evenings in San Francisco, we slogged through morning traffic to reunite our heroes in the depths of Oakland, and embark on a westward 12 hour trek through the desert.

Nevada crawled by. Paris called from Salt Lake City to ask our ETA and where we were. I told her we were next to some rocks, and some brown hills, and a little brown bush. She said she knew the spot. The landscape between the Bay area and Brigham Young’s promised land is indeed barren and brown. Almost Martian. Although they’re totally unlike the dramatic snowcapped peaks from up north, I also love these understated dusty hills, whispering deep truths along their curves to the horizon. Yep, the land speaks as I begin to lose my mind in the desert from holding in my pee for so long, We’re a bunch of rocks and shit. That’s just sorter how things are ‘round here. With Johnny Cash’s voice rumbling in the car as we passed through Winnemucca, life on the road seems isolated, simple.

We made a quick food stop in Lovelock, Nevada, where Brad wandered off as per usual, but returned in time for arcade games and greasy pizza.

At about 9pm we pulled into Paris’ street in Salt Lake City. Paris was my effervescent housemate back in Providence. It was a happy reunion.

Eager to show us that Salt Lake City wasn’t purely a Mormon bastion of squeaky clean puritanical values, Paris poured us generous gin and tonics as we got ready to go out, chatting with her roommates and feasting on leftover pulled pork.

The first bar we visited was crammed full of hardcore skier/snowboarder types, or at least people posing as such. Two hours later, the second bar we visited promised a hott dance floor, something we were all fully prepared for at that point. The bouncer, nametag: “Pepe,” denied our entrance, however, stating with a smirk that they didn’t let anyone in past 1. It was 12:57. Along with a few other disappointed would-be-dancers, we started heckling the guy. His name quickly evolved into “Peepee.” After being asked why he would cause us such frustration and anguish when he could easily just let us in and make a bunch of people really happy, he rocked on his heels like a jerk and responded triumphantly, “Because I can.”

Now, I don’t care how drunk one may be on some pitiful bouncer power, I hope Peepee has explosive diarrhea for the rest of his life.

After depositing my dinner in various potted plants around downtown Salt Lake City, we finally made it home, where we played with Paris’ dog, pigged out in the kitchen, and fell asleep dreaming of mountains and Mormons…

Day 30 - 11/15/07 - California Here We Come

When we got up the next day, we were sad to see that we were still in the sullen Oregon RV park, for which we had to pay $12. Dozens of fake campers surrounded us, and after our billionth round of tuna sandwiches on the trip, we jumped back on route 5 south and headed…south.

This was a pretty spectacular drive. We were surrounded by the most lush, saturated colors of forests as we left Alaska and its temperatures far behind. The sun was blazing in the sky, and the thermometer slowly crept into the 60’s. (Not the decade. That would have made for a bizarre sci-fi twist if our thermometer had time-traveled out of the car.) With myself at the wheel, we drove through warm forests filled with tall, old evergreen trees whose bark was a rich rusty scarlet color. As we passed from the towering woodlands of southern Oregon and into California, the landscape changed to a strange hilly place with steep slopes, short bushes and yellow grass. The sky was raging its blue violently into our eyes and the heat of that big crazy star of ours was absolutely intoxicating us, which would have made me, in a literary sense, DWI. We kept rolling through the gorgeous gentle landscape, making only one rest stop to use the bathroom and to bask in the hot sunlight. Only a few days ago in Fairbanks, the temperature was -3 degrees, and now it was 71. We drove past Mt. Shasta, a big snowcapped mountain that seems wildly out of place, and I believe the namesake for that generic soda.

We stopped at a gas station to get some doughnuts and we encountered the cheeriest gas station attendant on earth. He was this young middle eastern guy with a white turban who squealed and laughed unintelligibly at literally every form of communication. I think he freaked out the middle aged lady in front of us, but we fully appreciated his humor, and the awkward sexual innuendos/jokes he kept unloading on that lady and her shriveled, disapproving soul. We scrounged enough change up to get some Shasta soda and doughnuts. We each had four out of the box of 12, and I ate all of mine immediately and then felt sick for a while. Darren took over as we neared San Francisco, so that I wouldn’t have to drive in a city, repeating my Montreal debacle. We were all splitting up once we got there, so we figured out where we were going, and the trip split into a simultaneous Canterbury Tales format for the night.

I was dropped off unceremoniously in Oakland before the rest of the gang headed into Frisco. I was staying with my childhood friends from home who had moved to Oakland, Kathleen and Harris. I met Kathleen at their place and we reminisced and just sat while she made an unbelievable dinner, which kicked the ass of everything I’d eaten on the trip so far. When Harris got home from work, we all ate and just sort of reunited in the apartment. I hadn’t seen them since before I went to Scotland, which was over a year ago. After touring their place, Kathleen’s boyfriend whose name was Brad came over, which was weird because that was the first person I’d ever met who had the same name as me. The rest of the night was confusing because of that, but not confusing in a bad way. We went out to get really expensive California ice cream, which was awesome. I got peanut butter and chocolate. It was like 60 degrees out and they were all complaining that it was a little bit cold, to which I erupted about Alaska and its weather and “what’s really cold” and so on.

The next morning, I got up and had an amazing breakfast from Kathleen, and got ready to be picked up by the car once again to continue on to Salt Lake City. Harris and Kathleen both made themselves late for work to dress up in aprons and pretend they were my parents seeing me off at the school bus. I met up with the car and they gave me a banana and waved me off with random kitchen appliances, and with that we were on our way east to Utah.

-Posted by Brad

Day 29 - 11/14/07 - See ya Seattle

Today we avoided further passive aggressive pouting by Gordon by *actually* getting our asses in gear before noon, then *actually* went to the music/sci-fi museum as discussed, and they were *actually* open.

Gordon and Darren spent most of their time exploring the music section of the museum – The Seattle Aurally Magnificent Music Hall of Wonders, featuring guitar sculptures, interactive exhibits, and famous musical memorabilia.

Meanwhile, Brad and I wandered the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, replete with all the shit you would expect: Patrick Stewart’s Borg headgear, Death Star models and rubber alienware, oh my. The exhibits did go through a pretty broad history of science fiction writing as the story of genre pioneered in pulp, but now surely recognized as a legitimate literary source of ideas concerning humanity -- the impact of developing technologies and social movements, and our role in the universe. I started furiously scribbling down the names of authors and books that sounded interesting, happily reading blurbs about Philip K Dick and Ray Bradbury… until the next horde of little boys would rumble by, smearing grubby fingers on display glass and screaming at the ray guns on display, screaming at each other, screaming at the exciting world of science fiction in general, before being consumed by ADHD and sprinting to the next room.

After Thai lunch, we waved goodbye to the Space Needle and bolted for California. The rest of Washington and the whole of Oregon flew by, blurry and unnoticed. This far “south,” we were delighted by the warm weather that allowed for car doors to be left leisurely open during a potty stop, and by the sun, who greeted us high in the sky, where that motherfucker’s supposed to be.

Camping tonight was in an RV park in southern Oregon. A bit of a letdown in scenery after so much Alaskan beauty, but goddamn it was nice to sleep without socks on.

Day 28 – 11/13/07 – Seattle Vs. The Blog

We had arrived at a critical point, 13 days behind in the blog, 7 days until the looming specter called “home” was to become a reality, a rare sunny day in Seattle beckoning to us through the windows of Alex’s apartment. Does one pay their debt to past glories or suck the marrow from the now? Give in to the willfully imposed burden or throw it all to the wind? This is how it played out for us:

I got up a bit early to get my blog on and pose for this painting by 17^th Century Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer:

The others began to stir. Actually, Gordon got up and jumped around a lot, Bryan got up and turned on his computer, and Brad kept sleeping. We made an agreement to get out of the house and hit the streets by 12:30. 12:30 rolled around, then 1:00, then 1:30…Brad, Bryan, and I kept typing, while Gordon sat in the kitchen stewing with anger, carving pieces out of the wooden table with a kitchen knife and making little stick dolls of the three of us, which he then burned in effigy with a lighter. Bryan was the first to smell the smoke, so he deftly disarmed Gordon and got him to calm down with no less than 4 karate chops, 2 spoons, a bottle of Jameson, and a shiny metal badge.

We ended up leaving Alex’s place around 2pm. The blog may have taken our morning, but the night belonged to Seattle, or so we thought. We walked from Alex’s house on Capitol Hill all the way into downtown Seattle. We went to Pike Place Market, home of the flying fish, Shoulder Cat, Remy & the Belting Hobos, and plenty of other weird shit.

We then headed to the Space Needle, a mecca for intravenous drug users since 1962. Just kidding, the Space Needle was built for the 1962 World’s Fair, and its top is an example of Googie Architecture. As if the name wasn’t enough to make you not take it seriously, Googie Architecture is a futuristic style from the 40s, 50s, and early-60s during which atoms, spaceships, and boomerangs comprised the creative muse. Not to be outdone by a bunch of sky-scraping futurists from the 60s, Frank Gehry designed his own metallic blob of insolence to complement the Seattle skyline. It takes a lot of chutzpah to poo out a baby blue, shiny purple, and gold train wreck onto Seattle’s most prime real estate, but Frankie G. ain’t afraid of nobody. Perhaps this quote from his wikipedia bio will provide a glimpse into the mind of this mad genius, “As a child, he would observe his grandmother every Thursday putting a live carp in a bathtub full of water to later make gefilte fish. Frank would observe the movement and form of these fish, which later would be an enormous influence and underlying theme in much of his work.” Other childhood events had equally large influences on Frank’s work, like when dad drank a bit too much Manischewitz that one Passover and decided to hide the afikomen in his ass. Oy vey!

This building houses a science fiction museum and a sort of interactive music museum called the Experience Music Project. Though we were warned about the hefty price of tickets from the locals, Let’s Go’s rave reviews spurred us on to this mysterious place. In an ongoing saga of lies and betrayal, Let’s Go told us that it would be open until six; it closed at five. Maybe they should call it Let’s Not Go or Let’s Come Back Tomorrow. The latter is what we decided to do.

We then parted ways. The guys headed back to Alex’s place to freshen up before going out while I staked out Antioch College, awaiting the emergence of my friend and former drum teacher, Justin Tomsovic. In the meantime, I headed to Starbucks and got a lesson in how to speak Starbuck from the girl behind the counter. Did you know that Starbucks is named for the pull-no-punches first mate of the Pequod? Did you know that Moby Dick was written down the road from my house in Pittsfield? and that the inspiration for the white whale was my high school Algebra teacher? Now that Interstate 90 connects Boston and Seattle, the circle is complete and Herman Melville will rise from the dead to terrorize the world with more 800-page books about whales. Sure, you laugh now, but when it happens and you don’t have a tattooed cannibalistic savage (or Maori warrior, as in the Patrick Stewart movie adaptation) to watch your back, you’re gonna bow down and call me Ishmael!

So Justin found me and we shared a bus ride to his home in northern Seattle. There we talked of music and life over a delicious meal prepared by his beautiful wife, Laila. Then I caught a bus back downtown to meet up with the rest of the crew. While waiting for a bus, I observed a street kid asking to bum a cigarette from an old black dude, who responded with a “Haaaaaeeeeellll no boy, you ain’t but nine years old…askin’ me for a cigarette, what I ought to give you is an ass-whoopin.” It was funny, in my head I pictured the man then pulling a 5-foot inflatable cigarette from his pocket and beating the kid over the head with it. (Disclaimer: despite the power of imagination, 9-year olds living on the street begging people for cigarettes is actually not funny at all).

We all met up at Smith’s Pub near Alex’s house for a few beers and some good laughs. Rachel Krefetz, another camp friend currently living in Seattle, was there to join us. We enjoyed the décor of light taxidermy and failed oil portraits, and it turns out that Alex Saunders is a master of African drum-making, who knew?

We then walked back to Alex’s place, on the way he told us about a local coffee shop where a man with a pierced, sweater-wearing iguana was one of the locals. Had I not just been introduced to Shoulder Cat, I would not have believed him. As it turns out, nothing is too weird for Seattle, because Seattle invented weird. As the rest of the guys went to bed and visions of sugar plums (wtf is a sugar plum anyhow?) danced in their heads, I stayed up until 4am writing a post for the blog, just like I’m doing right now. So which side won? Seattle is but a colorful, surreal memory; but the blog my friends, the blog remains…

Day 27 - 11/12/07 - Escape from Vancouver

Attempting to sleep off the seafood/driving induced fever, we stuck around the hotel for a good portion of the morning. Once our stomachs were settled, we ventured into the city to see Stanley Park and the aquarium. Stanley Park is absolutely the most beautiful city park I have ever seen. It is like a rain forest within a city. Tall trees, bushes with lush leaves and vines abound. The drive to the aquarium took us around the perimeter, where we looked across the bay to the city and the mountains on our right while admiring the forest on our left.

By the time we found a parking lot, we felt like we were in the midst of the jungle. With our eyes to the canopy, we wandered into what looked like the set of some twisted claymation slasher. A commanding Mrs. Gingerbreadman stood victoriously on the second floor of her house, rallying the gingerbreadman troops who surrounded her house. In the fields, there was an army of slain Santas. This little park was probably for kids, but it seemed that it would make any normal child break down in tears.

Convincing the aquarium ticket-salespeople of our student status, we immediately began ogling sponges and small fish while hordes of screaming seven-year-old girls made oral communication temporarily impossible. We split up for the afternoon exploring the shark tank, giant Amazonian river fish tank, bat cave (with a camera we could manipulate), rainforest (with sloth!), and the outdoor habitats of sea lions, harbor seals, dolphins, sea otters, and beluga whales. The otter feeding was adorable (they eat ¼ of their weight per day!) and the whiteness and smoothness of the beluga whales looked unreal, like accomplished CGI.

From Stanley Park, we found our way to Kitsilano, the crunchy corner of the city. Brad and Bryan were still plagued by the seafood pasta, so we found a vegan place "Sejuiced" to chow down. We silently filled our bellies hoping that the Salvation Army we saw on the drive in would be open for us to finally purchase our cheesy Canadian tourist t-shirt. Apparently I was the only one harboring such hope, as I wailed in disappointment while Brad simply stated, “I don’t think the lights were on when we drove by.”

We drove out to Wreck Beach by the University of British Columbia before our descent to God’s country. Darren and Brad were tired, so they took naps.

Bryan and I descended a couple hundred steps through tall trees to emerge on a strange beach. Old felled trunks were strewn about as if they had been placed there for benches. Many of these trunks were standing erect in the sand, in the night appearing like sunken masts. Bryan went for a stroll while I meditated, thinking that this setting was straight out of Myst or the Legend of Zelda or Pirates of the Caribbean. We then climbed back up, drove to the U.S. border, and were greeted with an enthusiastic, “Welcome home!” America, fuck yeah.

Day 26 - 11/11/07 - Vancouver

The sun rises on a normal day in Vancouver. People hop on the bus to go to work, parents kiss their children before sending them to school, birds sing, cars honk, and the west coast Canadian symphony is in harmony. Tympanis rumble as a green speck meanders down the long highway leading into Vancouver. Cut to hotel concierge quietly filing papers. In the background, a car rolls into the parking lot. Obscured by shadows, the faces of the two potential guests perplex the concierge. She leans forward, asking, “Can I help you?” Gently swaying, the faces suddenly spring into the light, revealing ashen complexions and jaundiced eyes. They lunge towards the concierge, who screams in agony as they sink their rotting teeth into her pulsing neck…

Finally, after 44 hours of time-transcending, mind-warping madness, we roll into the Ramada hotel at noon. An epic round of rock-paper-scissors determines that Bryan and Darren will check in, leaving Brad and I to stretch and fantasize about an existence at under 60mph. Taking our time to wash the dirt still caked under our fingernails from Anchorage, Fairbanks, and 2000 miles of Canada, we check e-mail and lie down. Around 4pm, our stomachs determine that it is time to re-visit the “real world,” and so we wander in search of food. Smelling pizza, we enter a clearly recently-opened establishment. Bryan is doubtful of the quality and suspicious of tourist-gouging prices, but when the kindly joint matron offers a deal on two pizzas and a two-liter coke that were undeliverable ($9 for the whole shebang!), his complaints are silenced. Enraptured by the ranch dipping sauce, we enjoy our view of the Safeway across the street and begin to plan the night’s adventures.

Vancouver has a number of interesting neighborhoods, and some jaunts are suggested by Bryan’s friend. We decide to park in the poorer part of downtown, near Chinatown, and make our way to the piers and the main drag: Granville St. Deciding on this plan, we immediately take a wrong turn out of the hotel and spend an hour and half finding a place fifteen minutes away. Safely parked across from the police station, we walk through a neighborhood filled with condemned buildings and homeless people. I don’t think I’ve seen that scale of poverty in a city in a long time. One guy on a bike asks if we are interested in sampling the newest line of valium. We respectfully, and for Brad and Bryan’s stomachs, regretfully decline. We find our way to Gastown, an “area is notable for its distinctive late-Victorian architecture, and for some superbly appointed stores and restaurants” (thanks, worldweb.com), I find a coffee to ease my headache. Walking through Gastown, we find Canada Place, which looks like a mall on the water. It is too late/we are too lazy to investigate more closely, so we begin our stroll down Granville St.

Packed with high-end shops and restaurants, Granville appears to be the Newbury or 5^th Ave. of Vancouver, though it also has the characteristically Canadian occasional porn/adult toy store. After strolling up and down, we decide that we really need more rest. Darren and I decide to have a beer at The Landing, which Darren had been to once before and found the waitresses to be among the finest in Vancouver. Upon meeting our hostess, we immediately agreed. We caught the end of a football game and observed the incredible percentage of Asians in the place. Darren and I finish our pints, Bryan and Brad wait in agony to GTFOH, and we make our way back to the Ramada.

Darren and I decide more food is necessary and find a Korean barbecue place next door. The waiter is the friendliest we have ever met (second only to the Vietnamese waitress at Ray’s), as he explains to us the medicinal properties of Korean food and how to properly dry clean. Satiated, we arrive back in the room to find Bryan and Brad feverish and watching The Negotiator, starring Samuel L. Jackson and Kevin Spacey. Though a mediocre movie, the experience is made infinitely more entertaining by the fever-dream induced stories Bryan and Brad would later share. Sitting on the bed, I was laughing at a number of things from the movie, and Brad was convinced the bed had a coin-operated vibration device, as it seemed never to stop shaking. Bryan, meanwhile, understood the pharmaceutical commercials on TV to be mandating him to buy drugs that would boost his negotiation skillz.

Day 24 & 25 - 11/9 & 10 - Southern Flights and Northern Lights

In the morning, we sat around for like two hours before finally leaving the Browns' wonderful cabin.


We drove into Denali National Park in a vain attempt to see the peak of Denali. Instead we were able to check up on the park’s team of sled dogs which lead teams of rangers into the park during the winter off-season to make sure things are okay in the middle of the park.

After that quick detour, we hurried north to the horrific shithole of a city known as Fairbanks. This was the most disgusting, depressing place I think I’ve ever been in my life. The city is a dark, grey maze of strip malls and highways and gas stations. We dropped the car off for an oil change and went for a crunchy, frigid stroll through the fields of asphalt and concrete until the car was ready. As the sun set at 3 pm over this morose cemetery of a town, we took a leaf out of the birds’ book and flew south for the winter.

3:30 in the afternoon in Fairbanks

With me in the driver’s seat, we reunited with the Alaska Highway and meandered southeast at breakneck speed as the early northern night set in. The skies cleared amazingly as we went, and the enormous audience of the stars took their seats high, high up. We flew down through Tok, where we first split off to go to Anchorage, and continued nearing the Yukon border as the hours went by. We finally crossed back into Canada after a meaningless exchange with the customs officer and we were back in the Klondike wilderness.

When we left Alaska, I was sad that we hadn’t seen the Northern Lights during our trip. It was an almost impossible task, when you didn’t know what you were looking for, waiting for both the Sun’s and the Earth’s weather to synchronize with a solar flare-filled cloudless 18-hour night, every second of which you spend staring for amorphous, glowing clouds. It seemed significant to me that this night, the last night we’d be in the right latitudes, was utterly without moon or cloud. From the driver’s seat, I had a view out the left side of the car looking North and East, and I spent almost every minute of the drive looking out at the sky, swerving into the wrong lane of the dark, empty road. Because Darren had already seen them once before, and Gordon didn’t care at all, Bryan and I were the only ones who really wanted to see the Lights. We’d stayed up late on all the cloud-free nights, outside in the freezing air waiting, while Darren and Gordon slept in the tent or cabin.

Unfortunately Bryan was on the wrong side of the car and Gordon was behind me, so I asked him to keep a look out so that I didn’t go off the road, but he didn’t really care, so he rolled his ice-covered window down once or twice every four hours. I opted to keep looking then, and tried to not go insane every time I saw anything, not anxious to repeat another episode of screaming about a cloud caught in the light of a maintenance shed. I had to keep myself under control when I thought I saw a peculiar glow along the Northern horizon. I had everyone look, and they said it was just a city or town on the other side of the mountains there. We kept going, but I kept looking, and kept thinking that glow looked stranger and stranger. I realized suddenly that there are absolutely no towns and cities of that magnitude in the Yukon territory, and decided to swerve to a stop on the side of the road. I got out of the car while everyone else sat waiting, wondering what I was doing. From outside the car, the glow was much, much brighter. It was too high in the sky to be a city. I then saw that the ‘horizon’ which I thought were the dark mountains against the sky, had stars all over them, and that this was just the sky itself UNDER the bottom of the lights. I stepped back and saw the light curving in an absolutely mind-destroyingly massive curve from east, south towards us, then back northwest, curving around what I knew, far in the distance, was the earth’s northern magnetic pole.

This all took place in about 20 seconds, and I ran back to the car and started shouting in a hoarse whisper, “I think this is it! I think these are them! I think this is it!” Everyone got out of the car and joined me on the other side of the road, and before our eyes, this colorless glow against the sky, turned a vivid sea-green from the bottom up, like 100-mile-tall flames that licked the stars. There was some quiet gasping, then about a full minute of complete silence, followed by laughter and deafening screams. We shouted into the frozen wild and listened to the echoes, and reached out for the giant green curtains and danced across the shoulder of the road to keep warm. Gordon immediately went back to the car and slept because it was cold. Darren, Bryan and I were out in the below freezing air for at least an hour, just watching the Aurora shift and glow and fade. I thought it would only last a few minutes, but it kept going once we decided to get back on the road, and as I drove, I could still see it shining and burning against the big dipper.

This is pretty close to how the northern lights looked that night:

This is how my camera thought the northern lights looked:

This is us dancing along with the lights to stave off frostbite:

Our plan was to try to drive as far as we could that night before camping somewhere, or to at least get back to Whitehorse. After I’d been driving for 13 hours, I switched off and the plan became to drive through the night. After our last stop at a Timmy Ho’s at 4 am in Whitehorse, we set off for British Columbia.

We developed some really innovative ways to deal with the blinding light of the morning whilst driving 24 hours a day, which involved some combinations of hoods and pillows and jackets. My best two were putting my head inside my pillowcase while laying on the bare pillow, and my specialty, pulling my hoodie drawstrings tight enough so that it left a hole just big enough for my mouth and nostrils. In this way, we absolutely careened down the west coast of Canada, going over 900 miles in less than a day.

We had to stop at a gas station because one, just ONE of the billions of tiny rocks we drove over, decided to be a dick and puncture our tire, so we ended up using the first of our two full spare tires, deflated the loser one, smashed it into the back and continued.

That night we ended up stopping in a town called Smithers in British Columbia and treating ourselves to a nice restaurant meal as we were about to drive through the night and into our third day in a row. It was a very nice restaurant, and we got some lovely beverages, and I, in the worst decision I’ve made in my life since the time I tried to break up a bar fight in an Edinburgh sports bar, ordered something called ‘Seafood Pasta’. Bryan got the same thing, and it was great at the time. About 4 hours later, whilst en route to Vancouver at about 2 in the morning, Bryan suddenly did the “I don’t feel good” thing. Having my 2^nd vision of the car covered in puke in the last two weeks, I had to keep asking him if he wanted to pull over, and he gave so many non-descript non-committal answers, that I finally just pulled over, and watched him squat in the red glare of the taillights for ten minutes, with his hood over his head, not saying or doing anything. With no gastro-intestinal expulsion occurring, we still blamed the Seafood Pasta even though I felt fine, and he finally climbed back in the car and we kept driving. Bryan was supposed to relieve me of driving, but was in no condition to do so, so Gordon was nice enough to fill in that post, and I settled into the backseat, trying to ignore the horrible feeling in my stomach, and lay there not sleeping for the next 8 hours. I felt terrible when I ‘awoke’ in the late morning of the next day as we were pulling into Vancouver. The combination of seafood pasta and no sleep for days had taken its toll. We pulled into the parking lot of the hotel we’d decided to stay at, checked in, had some pizza, and immediately Bryan and I were both terribly sick for the next couple days.

-Posted By Brad