Road Trip, Day 1...

...should have been day 2. But it was foolish of me to have thought I could have moved out of my apartment without spending two full, frantic days tying up loose ends. My original plan was to leave first thing Friday morning, but my plan contained a fatal flaw: it required that I be ready to leave Friday morning.

Not even close. I spent all of Friday, and just about all of today, rushing to finish cleaning out my apartment and packing my stuff. Sometime around the middle of today, I reached the "I don't give a shit" line, and started taking care of both tasks simultaneously by throwing items indiscriminately into the dumpster.

This did help to speed things up.

I finally managed to hit the road by 5 in the afternoon, sore from moving and feeling beaten. I managed to drive as far as Tracy before I saw an In-N-Out sign* and caved in. I was tired, I didn't know exactly where I was going, and I had put *just* enough weight onto the front passenger seat that my car thought there was a person on it and let me know by beeping at me in a helpful and excruciatingly annoying manner.

So I pulled into the first motel I saw that appeared to be hospitable, got a double-double, had a few equalizers**, and hit the hot tub. if I was not going to camp as I should have, I was at least going to enjoy it.

So now, it's off to the hot tub so I can make amends with my back after abusing it so much these past few days. Tomorrow morning I start bright and early, fresh and ready for adventures in Yosemite. Where, presumably, the internet is slightly less accessible. It may be a while until my next post.

-dave-

*Although I had been living in California for close to two years, I had never actually gotten a burger at In-N-Out. It feels strangely fitting that on my last day as an official California resident, I managed to taste such a uniquely California burger. I had a double-double with fries and a coke, and loved every last greasy bite (granted, I had built up something of an appetite during the day and probably would have loved any food with sufficient quantities of fat and salt. But I digress). It's nice to see that in an increasingly modernizing world, the inside of an In-N-Out does not look much different from the original burger joint that opened up in 1948.

**equalizer. Short answer: a delicious drink. Longer answer: a delicious drink made my mixing bourbon (preferably Jim Beam) and cranberry juice over ice. The name derives from the contrasting effects of the ingredients: the bourbon, containing alcohol, is bad for you because it can hurt your liver; the cranberry juice is good for you due to its high vitamin C content. The two reagents thus cancel each other out, resulting in no net effect on your body. Probably.