Posted by Jarihn on August 21, 2001 at 18:57:26:

The trip was great. 17 days with these freaks and you can’t help but enjoy yourself, really. It seems like it started an eternity ago...

Wakeup isn’t terribly early, only about 11. Takeoff isn’t until 3. I checked my list a couple hundred times, crammed some more useless junk into my bag, pulled some out, crammed some more in... you know, the same old nervous pre-trip stuff everyone does. I hope. Well, even if it’s just me, I did manage to eventually declare everything ready and be finished. Then I crammed in the rest of the stuff I remembered at the last minute and threw it in the back of our van. My parents saw me off from Portland International Airport right on schedule, with a copy of the Portland Tribune to... read on the way.

After a boring flight that WOULD have been entertaining if only I hadn’t brought six DEAD batteries accidentally for my CD player (I’m still annoyed at this, I packed three sets! That’s supposed to be enough for a stupid 90 minute flight!) I did my best to sneak away from Mori, Jana, and Dk (I’ll try and stick to handles for this posty-thingy, but I’ve been using whatever comes to mouth first so far, so I may not succeed fully... succeed.)

I emerged from the gate with my head behind the newspaper. I made it out of the way successfully! I was quite pleased with myself. Sat down in a chair about 50 feet to the side to watch. Put my bag down on my left, peeked at the group of freaks that was staring into the extendy-tunnel-thing waiting for me to appear, and smiled. Waited about ten more seconds and got tapped on the shoulder. I _think_ it was Jana who spotted me first, or at least moved first to go catch me. I don’t remember though. I later realized that what I _really_ should have done was to pretend that Jana wasn’t Jana.

"Hey guys, who’s this? What? What do you mean? I met Jana before, that’s not Jana..."

It would’ve been great. Oh well. Off we went to Great America. Where we met a bunch of people that Jennie knew (I’m sorry I don’t remember any names, but my official excuse is that you brought them to us too quickly. Overloaded, yup.) and then found noire and someone who I never saw again named Laura. Noire dragged me on a roller coaster. I hate roller coasters. I like Stealth. It doesn’t count. I had her draw up a contract that required her to feel guilty upon my request for making me ride Stealth for the rest of the trip. I never actually did request, I don’t think, but I could have. On Stealth you’re basically riding on your stomach going headfirst the whole time. Superman style. But you can’t move your legs much, and you can’t reach your arms far, so you can’t do much crazy stuff that might result in limbs being smacked into stationary support struts while moving at very high speeds. That’s a reasonable restriction, I suppose, but it takes some of the fun out of it. After this we went down to the amphitheater, were we were *ahem* just in time to get good seats for the show. The show was good, consisting of a series of performers doing various traditional Chinese things, like spinning plates on big straight sticks. And Jennie’s brother was definitely the best one there, yup. Never did find out what he was actually doing though. The announcers were as completely flat and annoying as I think, I hope, they come. If they get worse than that, I fear for the audiences lives. The jokes were all scripted but not rehearsed, and bad puns to the last one.

THEN we split up and Dk took Mori and Jana and me to her house, where we were forced to watch Ever After, a thoroughly entertaining movie, and make Dk smack herself in the face in her sleep during the movie, also thoroughly entertaining. We did wake her up eventually though because we thought her parents might not take her and Mori sleeping together too well. Eventually everyone found their way to a decent place to sleep and proceeded to make use of it.

I forget what we did Sunday morning. But I remember it didn’t involve breakfast. Well, maybe a little, but nothing solid. We went to Chuck E. Cheese soon enough that I supposed I’d be okay... and then my stomach did it’s freaky "I’m hungry/I’m not hungry" thing and so I felt sick after just a little over one piece of pizza. Argh!

Crashing a toddler’s birthday party is a strange feeling indeed. But we did it. And darned if we didn’t enjoy ourselves too. All four of us got some tokens that came with their party package (Jennie’s family is so nice...) and used them to play some Cruis’n game or another (Exotica, I thnk). Mori and I played the Lost World light gun game for a while. That was fun. Jana even shot dinosaurs with me a bit. And we played in the play structure for a while. Well, Jennie and... Dk... okay, I give up on that one... anyway Jennie and Jana went in first and they were clearly having so much fun that we eventually decided to join them. After Mori hit Jana in the head with a penny (and a great rivalry was thus begun), that is.

After a bit of that... hmm... I forget what else we did. We watched people playing DDR, but they weren’t that good, so it wasn’t too interesting. Ah well, eventually we decided to go see a movie, but that we didn’t want to actually pay money to do this. So Jennie’s connections brought us to a theater a good five minute walk from her house, and got us tickets to Planet of the Apes. Which we used to walk in and watch Rush Hour 2. Weeeee. It was a nifty movie, but I don’t remember too much of it anymore. Oh yeah, at the theater we joined up with noire again, this time she had Vel and Shellie, who has been MIA from the Land of Freakdom for some time now. After this event though, it seems Mikel may be back more often. I hope everyone will, in fact...

The movie ended just about the time we were supposed to go to dinner with Jennie’s family. Real chinese food. At some place called... nobody seems able to remember the full name at the moment. ABC? Well, here I was looking through the menu until Jennie corrected me. Apparently all we have to do is take as much as we wanted out of the dishes that were brought to the table in rapid succession. It was very good. Jellyfish, and little chicken-like things with less meat than Mori, and ribs, and crab, and bunches of other things too, but I think I mostly focused on the crab. It wouldn’t come open! I made quite a mess trying to get into the stupid thing so I could get some meat out of it. Bah. At least my exploits were overshadowed by Mori’s, so I didn’t have to be too embarrassed. And I got the hang of chopsticks quickly enough that I felt pleased with myself. I’ve never actually bothered to try them before, because I’d never been anywhere quite like this place before. It was great. I got very full, and this time my stomach obliged and did it’s job RIGHT, so I was able to eat the way I wanted to. Mmm...

Mori, on the other hand, gave us a couple of great photo opportunities. If these turn out... well, take a look for yourself whenever they get put up. They’ll brighten your day. This was one of the most entertaining meals I’ve ever eaten. Thanks again to Jennie and her whole family for treating us to that.

After the meal we gathered our stuff back together and took off in the car to Shellie, Mikel’s house. Well, one of them anyway. The closest one. We again met noire and Vel there. There followed a planning session and a game of Pictionary. The two Jenn-people and I were trounced by the others. The low point that I remember was when somebody drew, I’m serious A CIRCLE, and Mikel yells out "HAT!" Which is the right answer. Of course. The rest of us are left gaping for a while. That’s when we knew it was hopeless.

Oh, I almost forgot, on the way to Shellie’s house we almost hit a moron who was stumbling around in the street. It was quite dark already, and he was wearing dark clothes, just paying no attention to his surroundings and walking down the street. If there had been other traffic we would have been in a major accident. As it was, I pointed and yelled out something like "WHOAWHOAWHOA!" and Jennie was able to successfully swerve around him.

If we did anything after that I don’t remember it. I fell asleep to the sounds of Elizabeth, which japan-time Vel was wide awake watching in the other room. I woke up to it as well, watched five minutes, and fell asleep to it yet again.

Note: I took a break from writing here. Slept in my own bed. It finally hit me that it was over. It was FAR too quiet. *sigh* now it’s Tuesday... well, not morning, because I overslept, but close enough.

I think it was only Jennie that got up early this day. She wanted to get food for camping before Tannen arrived, if I recall... but I could be wrong. Because I’m sure she was in the shower when she answered her cellphone, and very shortly thereafter burst forth still dripping and yelling "HE’S HERE!". Five minutes later we all piled into two cars and drove to the San Jose airport... where we waited for 3-4 hours before Tannen’s plane ACTUALLY came in. Figures, don’t it? He’d called from customs, in LA, and his second leg didn’t actually start until... what, a full hour after we got there and were waiting for him? Tch...

So in the meantime, we discovered that nobody had cards handy. Jennifer kindly remedied this by buying not one but TWO expensive souvenir decks of cards that we proceeded to trash by playing Spoons with 7 people. In the mad dash for a spoon the cards themselves were just in the way, and were rapidly crushed, bent, mangled, and otherwise ruined. The game was LONG, and by the time Tannen arrived we were actually down to just four people, myself, noire, Mikel, and dk. All of whom were on the verge of being tossed next. And despite the fact that three of we four were all for letting Tannen find US by the loud noise and the fact that we were sitting in a circle on the airport floor making a general scene, Jennie got up and went to watch for him. We all followed.

Tannen was met, perhaps, not as joyously as a freak hopes for. Heh. After waiting this entire time for him most of the annoyance had been lost, but still. We returned to Mikel’s house (#1 still) and met up with her brother Todd and watched the end of Elizabeth. Then it was time to go to dinner. For Aussie boy’s first meal in the US we dragged him to the Outback Steakhouse. Why not? He took lots of pictures. This was a theme for him. I think he’ll be selecting the more interesting ones of his... what, 1300 photos? To show to everyone. Eventually, of course, because it’ll take him forever to go through all the originals and give us some web-friendly versions (read: around 1/5 the file size of the originals, if you can please *g*).

Personally, the food tasted fine, but I made a mistake. I ordered one of two shrimp options, only to discover that it wasn’t quite what I expected. It was cold, and it still had legs on it. Umm... I’m supposed to... just tear them off, crack the shell, eat the insides slimy and cold? Gaak... it was messy. I almost finished it though, except for the last two of about... 20. Had to get cheesecake, after all. That, now, was excellent. I didn’t think I’d be able to finish it, but when nobody else wanted the last few bits I shrugged and ate them anyway. Ah...

I think we then split up, because the guys were watching a home-made mystery science theater episode (but very well done) while the ladies were off somewhere else. That’s right, a contingent went to Jennifer’s house to get certain camping equipment and returned around 12:30. We stopped the tape because Todd then took off. We never got to finishing it. Ah well.

This was the morning we left *ahem* early for camping. We actually did manage to make it out the door about 10, which was later proved to be an amazing feat for this group, but we made so many stops, at the bank, and getting a replacement walkie-talkie from a nearby shop (since one was broken and we figured we WOULD need to communicate between cars on this "4 hour" trip) and to get a charger for a cell phone... that we really didn’t get moving until almost 11. Three hours to finish a four hour trip or lose the reservations. I know, let’s stop for an hour at McDonalds and eat a nice relaxed lunch! So we did. Well, only AFTER informing the campground office that we would be late, but could they please please not cancel our reservations? So it was all going to be okay. We also managed to do the actual driving in three hours, and so ended up late only because of that stop for lunch. It was fun though. Tannen took more pictures. I won’t even bother mentioning this fact in the future - it’s a given.

We drove the last leg up this winding coastal highway that wasn’t very pleasant at all. The road was cracked and narrow. Then we passed signs like "Road Narrows" and "Uneven Road, next 8 miles". Then we hit road construction, where they weren’t making the road wider, just raising it up so that those narrow shoulders were now foot-deep cliffs. And replacing the actual yellow line dividers with yellow reflectors every few feet. And so due to this there were a lot of dumptrucks and construction vehicles, and even one logging truck, heading straight at us on this road. I don’t envy Jennie and Vel that drive...

We picked our campsite quickly enough. Found a nice one that was big and open and had trees growing sideways and large boulders and nifty things like that. And no poison oak, though it took some time to convince Tannen of this fact. So we set up two tents a good 15 feet from the vehicles, dragged out the food, and proceeded to... hmm... what did we do the first day? Probably play Phase 10. Yes, during dinner I think it was. Dinner was spaghetti lite, meaning we mixed a can of sauce and three types of abnormal noodles.

Mixing noodles apparently has very powerful side effects, in case you hadn’t heard. Depending on the shapes you can get some pretty deadly poisons, I hear. Don’t worry, we treated these noodles with extreme caution, only throwing the ones that spilled into the stove back in the pot - we let the ones that hit the table and the ground go. Nobody died from eating it (though I suppose it COULD be really slow acting) so I think it must have been okay.

Then we stayed up and talked around the lantern on the table. Noire went into the tent and fell asleep. Apparently we were all supposed to follow her in and play cards, but we didn’t hear about that part. We just looked in and saw her sleeping and decided not to bother her. Awww... poor girl, must’ve been really tired. Eventually, I think it was just barely midnight, we broke up and went to sleep. Guys in the smaller tent, girls in the larger. Tannen, and I continued talking about various games and stuff until he fell asleep midsentence, then I gave up and went to sleep too.

So that’s 4/17 days down... do you suppose I really ought to write three more of these things? Wow. I’m so impressed with myself. I think I’m going to have to anyway, so be wary all you freaks, you’re going to have Jarihn posts to spare for a while... BWAAA hahahaha!

Watch out. I’m as persistent as Warrenton and .8 mile hikes.