THE ROAD TRIP FROM HELL

july 2002. i have been in yosemite national park for two months now. we are all a little homesick, and more sick of being stuck in the valley. ben needs to go to phoenix to break up with his girlfriend, and me and bj, shannon, and mike all decide to go with him. a ten hour drive, no big deal.

so we thought.

our pastor wouldn't let us leave right after worship on sunday like we had planned, so we decide to leave at 4 in the morning instead. much safer. i am the only one who went to bed between 11 and 4. everyone else thought that it's better to not sleep at all when you can only get 5 hours. mike drives the first shift since it's his car. we listen to switchfoot, and me and mike are the only one's that are awake. he's in the front, obviously, and i am in the back, waiting for my dramamine to kick in. and kick in it does, right about the time that we decide to stop for breakfast. i sleep in the booth while we are waiting. i sleep at the table while i am supposed to be eating. the waitress knows my name and brings me coffee. i sleep until bakersfield where we stop to get gas. although bakersfield's only 4 hours from the valley, there difference in the landscape is huge. the valley is beautiful. bakersfield is quasi-desert. since we have been in the desert land, we have found that the car has been running really hot for a while, so be buy some water to put in it, thinking maybe it's just dry.

but something has gone terribly wrong.

as luck would have it, we were right next to a mechanic, so we decide to have him check it out. we watch some oprah while they discuss. our battery AND our alternator need to be replaced. let me just explain that yosemite wasn't bringing in the bucks enough for food most of the time, let enough bucks to fix someone else's car. we all throw in some cash, and shannon throws in her credit card. we decide to just replace the alternator, in hopes that that was the reason the battery was dying. it's all we could afford to do anyways. we drive to autozone, and they don't have the part we need. so, they tell us that we need to have our's rebuilt, and they direct us where to go. 30 minutes later, we arrive.

it was called the ranch of the living dead, and it had a huge black flag with a skull and cross bones. surely this wasn't the right place. but it was. we talk to him about prices and he follows us back to the mechanics and takes our alternator, while we sit and wait. good thing for us there was a bar next door. we ate some good cooking, played some music on the jukebox, and played some seriously old arcade games. we were there about five hours. we owned that bar, even though i was the only one of drinking age.

finally, we see the blue truck that took our baby away driving with a cloud of dust behind him. he is our new best friend. they put the alternator back in, and we are off. july. the desert. no air. no radio. and a packed out car.

we wrote a song. "i think we're in hell now." indeed we were. we still had 6 more hours to go with a faulty battery that made it's presence known with the strong smell of battery acid. egg.

no stopping unless we had to. that was the trick. our next stop was hours down the line. it was in kingman, az at a place called crazy fred's. crazy fred's whorehouse actually. we bought t-shirts because the idea of it was so amusing.

on the road again. this time, we only make it flagstaff, and our car is struggling. the smell is the worst it's been, and we still have 2 hours to go.

but make it we do. we pull up into ben's front yard about 9 that night, 15 hours later. we go to sleep in a real bed with air conditioning and real walls for the first time all summer, and wake to find that the car is dead. completely dead. to save money, the boys put it in themselves while me and shannon watch the labyrinth. later on, ben breaks up with his girlfriend, while we go to the mall in the middle of a dust storm. it felt just like home.

less than 12 hours later, we were on the road again. the road back was much less eventful, except for the gas station on route 66 that wouldn't give me my change back, the fact that mike still insisted that we ride with the windows down in july in the middle of desert, and the time that ben almost drove us over a cliff. but that will all have to be another story, for another time.