Clearly, this flog is a bit late — we finished the cross country road trip on July 5th, so the events below took place on that and the two days before it (in Moab [Utah], Vale [Colorado], and Las Vegas). Belated or not, I felt that we should wrap up the coast-to-coast in full flog form…
We woke up at the ass crack of dawn. We had just spent the past two crazy-bloody-bonita nights in Denver, and we had 6 hours hours ahead of us before we reached our destination. Our next stop: Moab, Utah. Home of Arches National Park.
As to the question I’m sure is on your mind (“Why?”), this was the perfect middle point between Denver and Las Vegas. Also, I can’t imagine myself ever taking a trip to Utah for any reason ever again ever. Annnnd Arches is supposed to be phenomenal. (It’s the home of that really famous stone arch, which you’ll see below)
We were on the road by 10:30am, weaving through these epic mountains on Route 70. Elevations ranging from 8,000 to 12,000 — and that’s on the highway. These roads were starting to make Denver look like chicken shit. “Mile High”, more like “pussy high” (also the name of “High School Music 4″). It’s a beautiful drive if you ever get a chance to take it; snow, forests, peaks…
Route 70 also weaves through the valley with all those famous ski towns. You pass them all one by one: Aspen, Breckenridge, Vale, Telluride…all the big boys of Colorado. You could see these massive trails, which I would describe as “a bazillion times better than the shitty Massachusetts ski mountains I grew up riding on”. But it was summer, and they’re all green, so no knuckle dragging for right now.
I had never been to any of these towns, and I was getting a half-chub driving by them all. So we decided to stop at Vale and grab some lunch.
Vale is gorgeous. Rich, white, and gorgeous. I thought it would be relatively empty, due to this being the off season, but this place was packed. It was like an Aryan Eagles Nest, quietly tucked away in the evergreens. Hitler would feel at home. The main town area was bustling; a ski-town main-street bigger than any I’d seen before.
We ate at this authentic German restaurant right on the main drag. Our seats faced the sheer, green mountain slope right in front of us. We made sure to order a tall, local-brew beer so that this could count officially as a stop on the trip. (In case you haven’t noticed, “drinking” was a prerequisite for our trip checklist).
We gobbled it up, I farted (double bonus?), and we hit the road again. We still had 4 more hours to go and we were trying to get to Moab with enough light left in the day to actually see the National Park.
A few rainstorms, several piss breaks, and a lot of low-gear mountain driving landed us in Moab around 5pm. We didn’t check in or anything — we headed straight to the national park.
Describing this place in words in kinda useless, since the beauty is all natural. It’s like another world; a crazy, Mars-like rock world filled with the ghost of Mormons and enough red rock to make a crackhead have a stroke. But the pictures say so much more than I ever could:
Sheer rock faces standing 15 stories tall. Half-mile long pillars, just somehow balancing straight up and down. And then there’s the arches.
I’m told these form due mostly to wind erosion. That at first, the sheer rock faces form, and then the wind hollows out the middle over large periods of time. However the hell it happens, it’s nuts. The weight of these rocks makes it seem like there’s no way these things should be standing. But they are, all over the place.
We first hit up the “Landscape Arch”, and then a few other spots. But the sun was going down, and the goal was to get to “The Delicate Arch” (this is the most famous, pristine one) before the sun went down. And smoke a doobie at sunset.
The trail was a mile and a half. Not all that long, but it was pretty rocky and steep. The trail isn’t all that well marked, so it was a bit of a challenge. And racing against a setting sun isn’t exactly fun. Desert. Heat. Sweat.
But we made it to the top with a little time to spare. We found a comfy place with a view of the arch, and just relaxed on the top of the world. The rock arch is magnificent, I’m not sure if this picture does it justice, but take my word.
Below it, and all around it, are these huge canyons — red, steep, filled with rock formations — for as far as the eye can see. We watched the sun set over this amazing place, so mission 1 accomplished. Mission 2, doobie, still was up in the air. The sun had set about 20 minutes ago and there was still a number of people lingering around. But we waited it out, darkness approaching, and finally sparked that accomplishment.
On the top of the world. Pretty awesome.
I also took this picture I thought was classy.
Then came the walk back. You know how sometimes you really think things through? Yeah, this was not one of those times. We were one of the last people to leave the arch. And at this point, it’s dark. No exaggeration needed: it was really, really dark.
About 5 minutes into the hike down, we both realize — fuck. We’ve got a mile and a half hike back to our cars, we’ve got no flashlights, no one in front or back of us, we’re in the desert in a desolate Utah national park, the trail is not well marked, and we’re having trouble seeing 5 feet in front of us. I’m not sure if you can guess the emotion we were feeling, but I’m pretty sure one word would summarize it…”fear”.
Huge lumps of doody in your pants.
I watch Bear Grylls, and I’ve seen the episode where he goes into the desert. And there are some pretty scary animals he takes on — snakes, coyotes, more snakes — and a lot of them are nocturnal. I believe he also drank his own urine in that episode. Which I was willing to do (it’s sterile and I like the taste), although I didn’t know if that was going to help anyone.
About 30 minutes into the hike, we start questioning whether we’re going in the right direction. We haven’t seen a marker in a while, we’ve been climbing down this rock face for what seems like forever, and we don’t recognize any of what we’re seeing. We have absolutely no way of knowing. No flashlights. We start jumping, clutching onto one another because we keep thinking these black rocks are curled up snakes (they really did look like it).
We started just taking pictures of the ground, using that brief flash of light to gain momentary vision.
So yeah, it was pretty terrifying. I’m not sure if you can really imagine that very real sense of natural fear we felt. Being in the middle of a desert an not knowing where you’re going, or if you’re going in the right direction, no cellphones (we left them in the car bc there was no service anywhere), no light, paranoid, thundabaked. You pretty much feel like a walking target. And maybe we were.
All I can say is this: Lois and Clark had some real balls. Fuck man, those guys deserve to be on the dollar bill or have their own religion or something. I don’t know how they did it.
But long story short, we slowly made our way back. We picked up a marker a couple minutes later, and clutched onto that trail for dear life. We must have done the scream-and-grab-each-other snake-scare ten times during that walk. It was pretty terrifying.
I’d never been so happy to see that Silver Jetta.
We got back in the car — and I think this will be permanently etched into my head — I picked up his iPod, turned up the volume, rolled down the windows, and put on the Kanye West jam “Can’t Tell Me Nothing“. I then inserted the the word “Utah” in after each line in the chorus.
Excuse me? Was You saying something?
Uh-Uhh. You can’t tell me nothing UTAH!!
We were pretty tired by the time we got back to the hotel and checked in. It was about 11 PM, and we lamped on a couple micro-brews we picked up at the border of Colorado. (Utah has weird liquor laws, you can only get beer with 2.3% alcohol. It’s normally around 4% or above. Mormons.)
The hotel didn’t have one clean towel in the entire place (they all had weird brown stains, which I assume was doody residue). But we showered and packed up the car. Las Vegas was our next and final stop on this trip and we had about a 6 hour drive ahead of us. We ate a delicious Chorizo Scramble at this local joint (The Jailhouse Cafe). It was delicious and I insisted on calling it “Chur-ruzzo” in an Indian accent, much to Brian’s discontent. I realize now this is not as funny as I thought it was.
Back on the road. Vegas baby.
Vegas. It was the 4th of July. Saturday night. We were expecting some fireworks.
We were staying at the Excaliber that night. it was the cheapest thing i could find on the strip and I have a soft spot for jousting-themed places. (Hence my boner for Medievil Times) By the time we checked in and everything, it was about 8pm. We immediately went downstairs to start the night off right.
Wanting a quick meal, we hopped into the first place we saw. Dick’s Last Resort. Which we realized shortly afterwards, this place had the most brilliant theme I’ve ever seen in a restaurant — the waiters and bartenders make fun of you and treat you like shit. They don’t hold back. There’s not smile or a kind word spoken in that place. In fact, they make you these hats that pretty much shit on you (below). It’s awesome.
We sat at the bar, next two these two ladies. Sisters. One was pretty decent looking, the other one was kinda like a catcher’s mit, or a “ManFace Goobma” (as we called her). But the Catcher’s mit was married, and her husband was somewhere in the hotel so she was off limits anyway. They were like 25 and 27 (AttractiveOne, ManFace, respectively). So we drank. Drank more. Ate a shitty burger. Drank some more.
We missed the fireworks, which were apparently at 9:30 at one hotel all the way down the strip (we forgot that Vegas likes to keep you indoors), so forget it — we were drinking and these ladies seemed like decent fun. Wrong. We would soon learn that this was “Erroneous”.
So we got a few more beers. by this time it was like 10, we had our stupid hats on:
“I’d screw either one of these sluts” (Mine, referring to the above two ladies)
“I’m sorry bitches! It’s not razor burn, it’s herpes!” (Brian)
And we wanted to keep this party rolling. We had a few beers up in our room, so we invited them back up to have some free booze and play card games. Which we did. We’re a bunch of beers deep and we run out of booze, but before we do, we also run out of “fun” with these girls. They really are a bunch of wet blankets. The Man-Face one was insistent on calling me “Jim”, which I told her didn’t bother me (and it doesn’t), but after her repeated saying it with her manface, it started to. And they didn’t want to call Brian “Brian” either. This bothered them. I think they called him “Andy” or something stupid like that — all she [the more attractive one] would say was she “had a bad experience with a Brian”.
While the attractive one was in the bathroom, we learned from ManFace that she didn’t like “Brian” because — drumroll please — her husband’s name is Brian. They’re both married. But hey, “it’s cool” because she really doesn’t like this Brian fellow.
Awesome. No, it’s not that cool. Yeah, this is Vegas, but I don’t want to have a sister, sister crying session with you two wet blankets. We went back downstairs with them, and when they stopped at the ATM to get some money, me and Brian kept walking. “Wait! She needs to get money!” ManFace yells. “OK” I said. And we kept walking.
Next song. The one funny thing I should mention is something Brian said while we were in the room. ManFace was telling us about her husband, who she recently married and was apparently a compulsive poker player. She was telling us how the guy was like 38 or something (she’s 27) and that her now-husband cheating on his old wife (with whom he had a couple children) to date her. She broke up that marriage and then they got married. She said this all very proud-like, and Brian just says, “Wow. He’ll probably do that again.”
She got really upset; “Take it back”. Like he would never ever cheat on her ManFace. I laughed. Then pretended like it was a cough. But anyway, out into the Vegas night…
I took this picture…
…And then I heard New York, New York beckoning my call. This is my favorite place on the strip, really for only one reason: it has the most amazing “Dueling Piano” bar I’ve ever been to — the best bar in Vegas (in my humble, drunken opinion). We had already rocked out to one in Nashville, and this is as good as it gets. Packed bar, rapid song changes, skanks, skanks, yager bombs, skanks.
But before we went into the bar, we had “the itus” — we had the gambling itch. So Bmac hit the roulette table and I hit the blackjack table. I should mention briefly that we had also played a bit of Roulette with ManFace and Goobma, and that I had lost about $60 and Brian had won about $100.
So me, not a great start. Bmac, fuck that noise. And things didn’t really change. Brian kept winning. And I lost about another $60 to a chinese man named “Steve” (definately a fake name) who had the coldest deck in the world. 6 hands in a row, I think he beat everyone at the table cold.
There goes that paycheck. I’m not a big gambler — so I put on the kabosh. My “itus” was now for booze, as gambling, I realized now as I always do, sucks. But Brian was on a streak. He kept winning/breaking even on this Roulette nonsense. And he (rightfully so) didn’t want to stop the fire.
So I drank a few bevvys, then hit up the Piano Bar solo. There must have been something about the way I was snap-finger, sway dancing, because some big-tittied girl was talking to me in no time. I don’t recall her name, but we chatted about some stuff while I pretended to listen, and instead oggled her massive milk stations.
We sang and danced and I stared and we danced some more. Somehow, this bar closed at 3AM — a “shot in the heart”, as Bon Jovi put it so well. I was just gettin’ stahted on this place. But alas, my big-breasted lover was soon surrounded by her “friends” (a posse of mostly males that was eying me not so happily) and I said my goodbreasts — I mean, goodbyes.
I found Bmac back at the table; I believe he was up about $250 at this point, so I gave him the old “shit or get off the pot” routine. Watching someone else gamble is like watching someone else have sex — you either want to beat off as well, or you don’t want to see it at all. Well, there was no place for me to legally beat off there, so I wanted to move on and keep drinking. He kindly obliged, and we headed to a couple other casinos.
We hit up the Luxor and MGM Grand, but surprisingly, the crazy Vegas all-night blowout we had expected had definately died down. Granted, it was 4AM at this point, but hey, let’s get real here Vegas. I mean, look at this picture of Carrot Top. It does not make sense.
NOTE: The picture above was me trying to impersonate Carrot Top’s gay pose, and the joke leading into it was me trying to make a vague reference to “the Chewbacca Defense” from South Park. I apologize for both.
We drank a few more beverages at the Luxor, Brian made one last push to win money and so did I. He won more, I lost more. Seemed like that was the trend. But the casinos had all but died down (minus, of course, the Asian gamblers who never, ever go to sleep or ever, ever stop gambling. This might be the one place on earth where they don’t take pictures. They just gamble. All night long). So we walked back towards our medieval castle lurking in the distance.
And let me tell you one thing about Vegas: even at 5:30 AM, it’s still fucking hot as balls.
The next morning, we woke up, hungover. Pretty painfully so. It’s one thing to be hungover, and then there’s being hungover in the heat of Vegas. As is the normal feeling the morning after, we wanted to get the f*** out of there as soon as possible. We took a ride down the strip, and because the traffic got us stuck on the north side, we ate at the Stratosphere.
Mistake. Brian described the buffet as being “a lot like him”: Sure, you can have as much as you want and it’s not that expensive, but you probably won’t like any of it. Or ever want to come back.
Shakespeare. This entire trip was filled with some of the most delicious, most authentic food from around our great nation, and we ended it with probably the shittiest meal of the trip. With a cherry on top.
The drive back to LA was nothing too special. It’s supposed to take 4 hours and it never does — traffic, combined with the insane heat of Death Valley (which you drive through) — always slows things down. But we made it, back into the City of Angels. The city of fake titties and movie madness. Our final destination.
We started from the farthest eastern tip of America (Cape Cod) and ended on the beach at the Pacific Ocean.
The trip spanned 12 days, over 4620 miles, 18 states, and 2 bouts with the hershey squirts. We rocked the cities of Cape Cod, Nazareth PA, Washington DC, Nashville, New Orleans, Austin TX, Denver, Vale, Moab, and Las Vegas. We saw friends, family, food, and a whole lot of nothing in between. But in that nothing is some truly amazing stuff. Natural landscapes I never imagined, cultural influences ranging from French to Mexican to American, food and drink better than any I’ve ever had, and corn fields where people must have first had sex with their own sisters.
America is a massive, enormous country. And I am thrilled to have gone truly coast-to-coast through it all. But perhaps the most rewarding part is the knowledge that, over these past 4600 miles, I spread a little bit of pizza everywhere I went. And by pizza, I mean mostly urine and beer.
THANK YOU AMERICA!!
