Yes, some of us jerks are headed out west! Amy, Marty, Loren, and Hunter are all packed up in the ol' Maxima along with clothes, food, silliness, and more modern technology than most people should be allowed to have. That means we can bring more of the trip and our silliness DIRECT TO YOU AS (= a little after) it happens! WOO!!
So follow the links below to see stuff, and read the news below those to know stuff. We have pictures and will eventually have GPS coordinates and then finally, hopefully, maps from the trip and where we've gone. Places we visited and things. Anyhow, on with the show!
And boy did we start late. About two and a half hours late. Not to mention that we have no real plans for how to put stuff on this page, like pictures and GPS coordinates and things. Sheesh. Nor do we really even have a place to put it all, since Schmarty.net is down for awhile. How EXCITING! WHEE! Oh well. With the GPS unit in the trunk, and no pictures to speak of, yet, all I can really say is "woooo!" and write some dumbass HTML. It's about 3:05pm, EDT (2ish CDT, which is where (when?) we are, about half an hour outside Murfreesboro. When we stop for lunch I'll get the GPS unit out, and we'll see how the damn thing works.
It's so cooool.
Fuck Illinois! This sucks! We just crossed the border and the roads here SUCK. They are bouncing us all over the damned place. YIEEE. Oh well. It is interesting, to say the least.
I like the phone and the gps. I must find a way to link all of these things to do time updates and things. I _am_ storing the trip data and can later take pictures from camura and synchronize them! How cool is that? "Oh, that picture was taken here just an itty bit west of Nashville..."
Heh. I like stuff.
Wheeee heeeee!!! We're in Kansas. Kansas is not fun. Not even a little bit fun, but Kansas City was okay in a way. Anyway, Kansas sucks. It's flat and empty and boring, but worst of all, if has NO SPRINT PCS INTERNET!! So I can't even really work on this page except on my laptop. Which I am doing. Whee fucking hee.
WOO! We just escaped Limon, CO, and are grateful for it. Now Loveline is on and all is happy. We haven't had internet since I started bitching about it. That makes me crazy. But I have some good scripts for making updates to schmarty.net. That seems good. A couple more of these and GODDAMNED INTERNET ACCESS and we might be on our fuckin' way. Sadly I don't know too much about what to do with this GPS/camera/internet thing as far as documentation goes, since we are too lazy to write stories as they happen. Gragh! With the exception of Limon, I guess. Maybe it's time to do more of those. Heh.
On a good note, have some good quote files from Kansas, and from Colorado. Oh yeah, and a runin with a Cop!!
Well, kids, we are HERE! HERE!! HERE!!!! We (Loren and Hunter) drove all night, while Amy and I slept. Now we are in das hotel room and ready for damage... after we shower and shave and clean our ugly non-slept selves up. Thankfully there are bars everywhere ready to make me feel better about how I look. I'm gonna upload some pictures and shtuff, now. Enjoy!!!!
Vegas is awesome. As soon as we went out we headed over to New York, New York for some grub. That was truly excellent and greasy-spoon style (not Amy - she had the peanut noodles from the Chinese place). From there we hit some of NY,NY's nickel slots for about 30 minutes, going through a grand total of $5 between the four of us. We did not find the bars to be very accomodating, as the small drinks were about $5.50. Somewhat disheartened, we went off to naptime, because we were tired as all hell.
Then came wakies! We headed over to Mandalay Bay. Hunter and Loren desired buffet, while Amy and I were going to see the Shark exhibit. When one of those things was $22, and the other $15, we decided to bail on the idea and do something else. Hunter and Loren went back to Excal for the $11 buffet, here, while Amy and I spent about an hour on the nickel slots, losing - and this is a lot - $6 between us.
The best news, though, is that Amy was provided with a free (well, she tipped $1) drink during this, and we learned that even the nickel slot kids get free (with tip) drinks. How cool.
Back at Excal it was time to hit the tables (well, stand around and look at them). Roulette is very easy to understand, and the betting and returns make sense. Craps is entirely another story. It's not hard, but it doesn't make any damned sense until it's explained to you. Sadly the table minimums were all $5 - way more than we cared to lose in one go. So Amy and I did some more nickel slots, she got another (this time $2) drink, and she won $2. I went through another $5 bringing my total for the day to something like $13 in the hole. I think I have a gambling problem. ;)
So we all went back to the room where our earlier purchases of Southern Comfort and Pepsi were waiting for us. This was a good thing. We hung out and talked and suddenly Hunter and Amy were asleep. So Loren and I went wandering.
Vegas is the best place, ever, for wandering mindlessly. We have sooo many pictures (which you shall see, soon, when I upload them). Basically we walked around looking at things until Bally's sign said "$3.50 for a shot of tequila and a beer". So inside we went, only to find that the special was only during happy hour (and it was now 2:30am). So instead we each had a $2 beer and hung out. Then it was time to see what the mad cheap breakfast was about at the casino next door. It was excellent. From there, armed with a couple of cigars, we wandered home.
And there is my too-long story for the night.
--Schmarty
Oh Goodness. The last two days of our trip show what Vegas can do to you. After our first, disappointing, night of looking for cheap gambling, cheap entertainment, and cheap drinks, day two revealed them to us in quantities far too vast for... well... just me. :) So Friday was a short and inebriated day.
Saturday was laced with hangover and heat. It was a nice day, but we realized that walking in Vegas = hard. Even when you can say "oh, X casino is right next door to Y casino", meaning there are no major building in between, you can still find yourself walking for a mile to get there. Excellente! Anyhoo, not long after nightfall we retreated to our hotel room and watched Bogart until bedtime (except Loren, who had to see what craps was really all about, really.)
Now we're outta there. It's about 3pm on Sunday and we're deep in California, Sacramento bound. We're going to visit Amy's mother for mother's day, and then go to sleep so Amy and I can go to work, tomorrow.
This trip page has seen some work (on my laptop. I don't know when you, the viewer, will see it). Namely in generating maps of places we've marked on our GPS map program. Sadly, I forgot to charge the GPS battery, so it has died a couple of times, today. I'm charging it, now, and I will probably turn it back on, soon. Anyway, there's a cute page correlating places we've been or marked and when we were there. Amy thinks I should stick pictures in between destinatations, and I think that is an excellent idea.
But more on that is to come, I suppose. :D
--Schmarty