G E T T I N G    T H E R E . . .

...is half the fun, right? In our case, luckily, it wasn’t close to half the fun we were about to have, but we had a good time nonetheless.

At approximately 6:00pm on August 11/1999, we finished packing our hundreds of pounds of robots, batteries, clothes, tools, food and drink into our 1999 Ford Escort rental. We were lucky enough to have enough room left over for the three of us to fit in the car too. We were off. LA is pretty easy to get to from Vancouver. We just got on the I5 and stayed there. Steve drove the first stretch from Vancouver BC to about Portland. Ed was in the sleeping spot in the back, but much to his chagrin later, he didn’t take advantage of it. Ed drove through almost all of Oregon until he realized he shouldn’t drive anymore. Even with the help of Turbo Truffles, it was far too late (4:45 am). I took over at this point. Drove through the Shasta mountains right before dawn, but I missed all the good scenery as when the sun had come up, we were in a very flat and dry part of California. It stayed this way for the next 8 hours. We switched drivers a couple more times before driving up the big long hill through a so-called "forest" and seeing the big city...

Some trip highlights: The angry lady at the gas bar store in Oregon yelling "shut up!" repeatedly at the guy she worked with. Rental car one-wheel-peel smoke show at a rest stop at the Oregon/Cali border... YEEEHAAW! The drunken couple in the bashed in pick-up with less teeth than eyes at the first gas/tooth brushing stop after day break, Northern California at its best. Playing with the Zoobe Toob Doode building toys at a Denny’s in Northern California, pretty cool modeling toy with spherical joints, but not quite flexible enough to be put to any good use. BTW the food was awful. Hitting the Jack in the Box two hours outside of LA (super hot), and seeing a couple cool Lambretta and Vespa Scoots in the back of a pick up and a crazy jacked-up duallie conversion van (see pics) Driving 130 km/h the whole way there – with 2 radar detector, one forwards, one backwards.

Some lowlights: Sacramento... was that all of it? Reminded me of Winnipeg. Seeing the same overpasses over and over again. Morning radio in the States. Morning radio is bad anytime and our "economy" rental had only a radio, no tape deck.

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