california bound: ann arbor to los angeles
April 2000
» trip summary
basically, my friend jeff and i drove his car and stuff out to los angeles from ann arbor in under 2 days...this is my recollection of the event and some horrible pictures i took along the way...
i swear, if you're ever told that you have 1 day left to live, hop into a car with my friend jeff and drive to california with him...your last day will feel like an eternity...no just joking, driving out to california wasnt that bad...it was just jeffs company...i mean how many times did he think i wanted to listen to him sing backstreet boys songs?...10-15 times would have been ok but he didnt sing them at ALL...i was like "DUDE, i didnt bring my collectors edition machine autographed backstreet boys cd cos i thought we could just hold hands and sing the songs together..."...he wanted to hold hands but he wasnt down with the singing...no just joking, um...so we planned to leave at 6am on thursday but jeff called me at 6:30am and was like "i feel like shit" and i was like "so do i" so we used surprisingly good judgement and decided that we should get some more rest before we started off on our journey...besides, we figured we could make up the time by averaging 136mph through iowa, nebraska, and wyoming...so, we ended up leaving ann arbor at about 11am...by 12 we were about 5 miles from home...f ing construction...but our drive through michigan, indiana, illinois and iowa went quite smoothly and i had brought a bunch of bubble wrap along so we had plenty of entertainment...
now, for some reason jeff decided that he wanted to try and drive the entire way himself and i didnt argue with him much because driving sucks...and jeff tends to scratch and bite when he doesnt get his way...i got enough of that from my sister when i was younger...and the cat...but i deserved what i got from the cat, although i still think he should have enjoyed that ride in the dryer i gave him more than he did...my sister was just mean, can you believe she would scratch a little angel like me?...but i digress, when you are driving you have to be aware so in effect you are concious of each mile marker that you pass and each minute that goes by...when youre a passenger you can drift off and be unconcious of time...unless youre driving with jeff because you will be subjected to conversation that is even more mindnumbingly boring than watching the painted dashes pass you by...i think the trick to not going insane while you drive is to not focus on your driving...that way you will end up swerving off the road into the median wall and you will be unable to continue on...you may get hurt, but you wont go insane...jeff just bought his car so like the baby that he is he decided that he should keep his eyes on the road...but we played this one game where one person thinks of a movie title and then the other person has to think of another movie title that starts with the last letter of the movie title the other person said...jeff kept coming up with titles like "debbie does dallas" and "forrest hump"...and i was just like are you sure all of those boxes in your trunk are clothes?...and why are they labeled "porn a-i", etc.?...so we played that movie title game for a large part of the trip and while it may sound stupid, it is...but still, it passed the time...
things started to get tough when we got into nebraska, a very long, flat, and boring state...oh and it was night time by now and for some reason people kept flashing their lights at us, both oncoming traffic and the people we passed...we could never figure out why, the best guess we could come up with was that jeffs car has those new brighter headlights and the people in those parts of the country had never seen them before so they thought he was driving with his high beams on...i dont know, maybe it was because i was hanging out the window flipping everybody off...so by the time we got like half way into wyoming, jeff was having difficulty driving without swerving like a drunk and i was just as tired because i couldnt sleep in the car since jeff packed his "clothes" all behind my seat so that my seat back couldnt recline past a 90 degree angle (straight up)...so we decided that we should stop and get some rest...by this time it was about 4am...the car was too cramped for comfort, it was freezing outside, and the only rest area for miles was closed...so we decided to get a hotel room so we could sleep some...but we were only going to sleep until daylight which was like 3hrs away so when we got to the hotel i suggested that we just crash in the hotel lobby or something...so we walked around the hotel looking for a place to sleep and there happened to be these 2 chairs on the second floor of the lobby...so we sat down there and fell asleep to paranoid thoughts of the hotel staff, whom we could hear talking on the floor below, finding us...every so often someone who was checking out of their room would walk by us and if i was half concious i would kinda sit up a bit and try to look like i was supposed to be there...however you do that...so once we had our 3hrs of sleep we walked out of the hotel and went on our way again...
once we got into utah the scenery started to get interesting...and the movie title game was getting real challenging since we had already named off about 4324234 movie titles that could no longer be used...so blah blah blah we got to las vegas and drove down the main strip...the casinos were amazing...but we decided not to stop and walk around since it took us over 30min just to drive the over populated mile long strip...and jeff accidentally ran someone over because i was distracting him by arguing that making generalizations about groups of people is wrong...we think the guy we ran over was french though, so you know, no loss...we had originally wanted to check out the grand canyon but we decided that it was too far out of our way...as we were driving out of vegas though we realized that we were passing close by the hoover dam...we figured we should visit at least one place where we could potentially fall to our death and we took a detour to the hoover dam...it was tall...i asked it if it played basketball...it gave no reply...so after that nothing really interesting happened until we got to california where we ran into a dust storm...everything looked really hazy and there was this dust floating in the air that looked like smoke and jeff was like "maybe los angeles has been bombed and this is the fallout"...so i was like "that is the most outrageous idea i have ever heard of...this dust is most likely just some sort of force field created by aliens to block the sun, thereby killing us...."...but yeah, it was just a dust storm...caused by aliens...but we made it to los angeles at about 11pm on Friday night...the trip was a lot less painless than i had anticipated...my thoughts on los angeles are as follows: too many people (sure its interesting to people watch, but when youre trying to get from point A to point B and there are 3453456634 people in your way it can be annoying), nice vegatation (palm trees and other tropical plants), nice sights (ocean, women, etc.), very diverse...and they seemed nice...although they could have been snobs because there did seem to be a lot of wealthy people there...i dont know, some people would say that the people in ann arbor are snobs but i havent noticed....that may just be because i am too good to associate with them so im not around it...
the worst part about the trip was not the drive out, but the flight back...i flew from los angeles to phoenix, az and then from there to detroit...my flight to phoenix wasnt bad other than it was delayed and overbooked...on my flight from phoenix to detroit, though, things started off with a flight attendant closing an overhead compartment on my head...she tried to play it off like "oh this is just a new service we are offering to our passengers...you can be knocked unconscious so that you will be oblivious to the incredibly cramped seats we put you in and the incredibly bad food we will serve you..."...oh just joking, it didnt hurt and i didnt care, it was an accident...but let me tell you, being tall is no picnic...more like a barbecue...a barbecue where everyone continually asks you if you play basketball...so my second flight from arizona back to michigan wasnt as great...being cramped together with a bunch of people for a long period of time is just not fun...ok, i just thought of a few specific situations which could be fun...but not involving a plane...ok, i just thought of one involving a plane...hey, i think jeff has a movie of that....hmm, anyways...after 4hrs of being in the plane we got to detroit and started to descend...youd think this would have made me happy, and it would have if the dumbasses in charge of the plane didnt forget to equalize that cabin pressure...as we descended i started feeling this pain in my ears which just kept growing and growing...i looked around wondering if it was just me and noticed a few people around me visibly holding back their pain and messing with their ears...somehow the cabin pressure got screwed up and that of course is not good for your ears...it wasnt just the little ear popping pressure change, it was painful...the best way i can describe it is imagine someone ramming a pencil down your ear canal...then multiply that by 2345234...then divide it by 2345234...at the peak of it i totally lost my hearing and was ready to rip my ears off my head...not because they hurt, just cos i heard vincent van gogh did it and i thought itd be cool to do...but eventually the air came on and the pressure was restored to normal...i still couldnt hear very well and i had this constant wind noise over everything...i was really worried that i had caused some permanent damage to my ears cos even by the time i got out of the airport my ears were still messed up...i had decided i was just gonna take a cab home from the airport because i didnt want to bother anyone with giving me a ride home at 1am sunday night...so i was in real bad shape, i could hardly hear and as the stereotype dictates, my cab driver was not too good with english....i kept having to have him repeat his questions and sometimes i never got them, i dont really like asking someone to repeat themselves more than twice...so usually at that point ill just give a random generic answer and if they seem satisfied with it then i leave it be...so, he ended up driving me to chicago...whoops...not really...i got home...and i think my ears are ok...
basically, my friend jeff and i drove his car and stuff out to los angeles from ann arbor in under 2 days...this is my recollection of the event and some horrible pictures i took along the way...
i swear, if you're ever told that you have 1 day left to live, hop into a car with my friend jeff and drive to california with him...your last day will feel like an eternity...no just joking, driving out to california wasnt that bad...it was just jeffs company...i mean how many times did he think i wanted to listen to him sing backstreet boys songs?...10-15 times would have been ok but he didnt sing them at ALL...i was like "DUDE, i didnt bring my collectors edition machine autographed backstreet boys cd cos i thought we could just hold hands and sing the songs together..."...he wanted to hold hands but he wasnt down with the singing...no just joking, um...so we planned to leave at 6am on thursday but jeff called me at 6:30am and was like "i feel like shit" and i was like "so do i" so we used surprisingly good judgement and decided that we should get some more rest before we started off on our journey...besides, we figured we could make up the time by averaging 136mph through iowa, nebraska, and wyoming...so, we ended up leaving ann arbor at about 11am...by 12 we were about 5 miles from home...f ing construction...but our drive through michigan, indiana, illinois and iowa went quite smoothly and i had brought a bunch of bubble wrap along so we had plenty of entertainment...
now, for some reason jeff decided that he wanted to try and drive the entire way himself and i didnt argue with him much because driving sucks...and jeff tends to scratch and bite when he doesnt get his way...i got enough of that from my sister when i was younger...and the cat...but i deserved what i got from the cat, although i still think he should have enjoyed that ride in the dryer i gave him more than he did...my sister was just mean, can you believe she would scratch a little angel like me?...but i digress, when you are driving you have to be aware so in effect you are concious of each mile marker that you pass and each minute that goes by...when youre a passenger you can drift off and be unconcious of time...unless youre driving with jeff because you will be subjected to conversation that is even more mindnumbingly boring than watching the painted dashes pass you by...i think the trick to not going insane while you drive is to not focus on your driving...that way you will end up swerving off the road into the median wall and you will be unable to continue on...you may get hurt, but you wont go insane...jeff just bought his car so like the baby that he is he decided that he should keep his eyes on the road...but we played this one game where one person thinks of a movie title and then the other person has to think of another movie title that starts with the last letter of the movie title the other person said...jeff kept coming up with titles like "debbie does dallas" and "forrest hump"...and i was just like are you sure all of those boxes in your trunk are clothes?...and why are they labeled "porn a-i", etc.?...so we played that movie title game for a large part of the trip and while it may sound stupid, it is...but still, it passed the time...
things started to get tough when we got into nebraska, a very long, flat, and boring state...oh and it was night time by now and for some reason people kept flashing their lights at us, both oncoming traffic and the people we passed...we could never figure out why, the best guess we could come up with was that jeffs car has those new brighter headlights and the people in those parts of the country had never seen them before so they thought he was driving with his high beams on...i dont know, maybe it was because i was hanging out the window flipping everybody off...so by the time we got like half way into wyoming, jeff was having difficulty driving without swerving like a drunk and i was just as tired because i couldnt sleep in the car since jeff packed his "clothes" all behind my seat so that my seat back couldnt recline past a 90 degree angle (straight up)...so we decided that we should stop and get some rest...by this time it was about 4am...the car was too cramped for comfort, it was freezing outside, and the only rest area for miles was closed...so we decided to get a hotel room so we could sleep some...but we were only going to sleep until daylight which was like 3hrs away so when we got to the hotel i suggested that we just crash in the hotel lobby or something...so we walked around the hotel looking for a place to sleep and there happened to be these 2 chairs on the second floor of the lobby...so we sat down there and fell asleep to paranoid thoughts of the hotel staff, whom we could hear talking on the floor below, finding us...every so often someone who was checking out of their room would walk by us and if i was half concious i would kinda sit up a bit and try to look like i was supposed to be there...however you do that...so once we had our 3hrs of sleep we walked out of the hotel and went on our way again...
once we got into utah the scenery started to get interesting...and the movie title game was getting real challenging since we had already named off about 4324234 movie titles that could no longer be used...so blah blah blah we got to las vegas and drove down the main strip...the casinos were amazing...but we decided not to stop and walk around since it took us over 30min just to drive the over populated mile long strip...and jeff accidentally ran someone over because i was distracting him by arguing that making generalizations about groups of people is wrong...we think the guy we ran over was french though, so you know, no loss...we had originally wanted to check out the grand canyon but we decided that it was too far out of our way...as we were driving out of vegas though we realized that we were passing close by the hoover dam...we figured we should visit at least one place where we could potentially fall to our death and we took a detour to the hoover dam...it was tall...i asked it if it played basketball...it gave no reply...so after that nothing really interesting happened until we got to california where we ran into a dust storm...everything looked really hazy and there was this dust floating in the air that looked like smoke and jeff was like "maybe los angeles has been bombed and this is the fallout"...so i was like "that is the most outrageous idea i have ever heard of...this dust is most likely just some sort of force field created by aliens to block the sun, thereby killing us...."...but yeah, it was just a dust storm...caused by aliens...but we made it to los angeles at about 11pm on Friday night...the trip was a lot less painless than i had anticipated...my thoughts on los angeles are as follows: too many people (sure its interesting to people watch, but when youre trying to get from point A to point B and there are 3453456634 people in your way it can be annoying), nice vegatation (palm trees and other tropical plants), nice sights (ocean, women, etc.), very diverse...and they seemed nice...although they could have been snobs because there did seem to be a lot of wealthy people there...i dont know, some people would say that the people in ann arbor are snobs but i havent noticed....that may just be because i am too good to associate with them so im not around it...
the worst part about the trip was not the drive out, but the flight back...i flew from los angeles to phoenix, az and then from there to detroit...my flight to phoenix wasnt bad other than it was delayed and overbooked...on my flight from phoenix to detroit, though, things started off with a flight attendant closing an overhead compartment on my head...she tried to play it off like "oh this is just a new service we are offering to our passengers...you can be knocked unconscious so that you will be oblivious to the incredibly cramped seats we put you in and the incredibly bad food we will serve you..."...oh just joking, it didnt hurt and i didnt care, it was an accident...but let me tell you, being tall is no picnic...more like a barbecue...a barbecue where everyone continually asks you if you play basketball...so my second flight from arizona back to michigan wasnt as great...being cramped together with a bunch of people for a long period of time is just not fun...ok, i just thought of a few specific situations which could be fun...but not involving a plane...ok, i just thought of one involving a plane...hey, i think jeff has a movie of that....hmm, anyways...after 4hrs of being in the plane we got to detroit and started to descend...youd think this would have made me happy, and it would have if the dumbasses in charge of the plane didnt forget to equalize that cabin pressure...as we descended i started feeling this pain in my ears which just kept growing and growing...i looked around wondering if it was just me and noticed a few people around me visibly holding back their pain and messing with their ears...somehow the cabin pressure got screwed up and that of course is not good for your ears...it wasnt just the little ear popping pressure change, it was painful...the best way i can describe it is imagine someone ramming a pencil down your ear canal...then multiply that by 2345234...then divide it by 2345234...at the peak of it i totally lost my hearing and was ready to rip my ears off my head...not because they hurt, just cos i heard vincent van gogh did it and i thought itd be cool to do...but eventually the air came on and the pressure was restored to normal...i still couldnt hear very well and i had this constant wind noise over everything...i was really worried that i had caused some permanent damage to my ears cos even by the time i got out of the airport my ears were still messed up...i had decided i was just gonna take a cab home from the airport because i didnt want to bother anyone with giving me a ride home at 1am sunday night...so i was in real bad shape, i could hardly hear and as the stereotype dictates, my cab driver was not too good with english....i kept having to have him repeat his questions and sometimes i never got them, i dont really like asking someone to repeat themselves more than twice...so usually at that point ill just give a random generic answer and if they seem satisfied with it then i leave it be...so, he ended up driving me to chicago...whoops...not really...i got home...and i think my ears are ok...
(copied from 5/03/00 whatever)
this was in wyoming...i realized we were over half way to california and i hadnt taken a single picture...i still dont quite understand what "little america" is, it seems to just be a hotel/restaraunt/party store/gas station in the middle of nowhere...jeff shows off his immaturity with his vanilla ice "word to yo momma" pose...
i try to bring back some decency with the classic "leaning on the car" pose...despite what it looks like in this picture, jeff is not one of those jackasses who normally parks his car across 2 spaces...he just had to swerve while he was parking so that he could run over a small child...
since we were driving across the country we figured we should see all of the famous landmarks in our path...shown here is mt. rushmore...well i mean you cant actually see mt. rushmore in this picture cos its behind that canyon....but who needs mt rushmore, i can kinda see some presidents faces in the canyon wall...use your imagination damn it...
i think that tall thing there is the CN tower, the worlds tallest freestanding structure...but we didnt have time to stop and check it out...besides, jeff and i dont really care about stupid records...we were focused on getting to california as fast as we could...and i bet we made it there faster than anyone ever has...WE RULE!!!...seriously tho, thats salt lake sity, utah...
ok, this is the grand canyon....or as close as we got to it...
looking back at vegas...we had intended to stop and eat there but it was just too damn crowded so after we drove down the main strip we just kept on trucking...the casinos looked really cool tho...
vegas looks funny because there are no trees around...im used to seeing trees...where are the trees?...
when youre driving along at 100 mph the bugs splatter when they hit...
ok, so we never made it to the grand canyon because it was too far out of the way but we figured we should visit at least one place where we could potentially fall to our deaths...at 700 and something feet, the hoover dam would have to do...
jeff standing inches away from a 700 ft drop off...yeah, we like to live dangerously...as long as theres a railing...
not sure how jeff got that shadow to align directly over my face...
see, thats a long way down...
this is the beach near santa monica...now, it looks like all those film classes jeff took in college didnt pay off because the lighting is terrible in every shot he took...
ok, the lighting is actually pretty good in this one, he got lucky...
every time i take a picture of jeff i have to just pretend that the camera is a gun and that i am shooting him...he never understood why i kept yelling "bang!"...
me, the streets of santa monica, and some guy taking a big bite out of his food...
holy sh*t, look how long my arms are...ive put an actual sized picture of the sears tower buildng next to my right arm for reference...the sears tower building beats me only cos of those antennas on top....talk about cheap...
every where we went in LA there was 345345636 people in our way...
me practicing my smiling...
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