Day: 122
It’s time to finally leave New York and head into Massachussets to stay for a couple of nights with Joerg, a family friend of Aarons. We managed to get a late check out of our hotel and climbed aboard Skittles after 1 o’clock and pass through the most states in a single afternoon. New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Conneticut, and Massachussets.
We made it to Joerg’s Just after seven and spent the night in, just relaxing, ordering pizza, watching movies, and playing on the internet.
Day: 121
With plans to get out of the city today (not that we wanted to, but it was far to expensive to stay) we stumbled out of bed around 11:30am and tried to attempt to get ready to leave (it had been a rough night). Just minutes after our return to the world of the living Matt’s phone rang. It was his uncle, who lives across the water in New Jersey. He wanted to see us and told Matt that if we stayed he would pick up our hotel bill for all three nights in the city. At $185 a night, and no plans until Tuesday night, it was not an offer we could refuse. He said he’d head into town and meet us for lunch. Now we had all the time we needed to get ready.
An hour later we were on the streets with Matt’s uncle looking for somewhere to eat breakfast (more like lunch, seeing as it was already 2pm). We settled on a little Irish pub, unfortunately the food wasn’t as good as it was in Ireland, still tasty though. He then gave us a driving tour through all the streets of New York showing us all of the buildings of importance and telling us a little about their history. I fell asleep in the back seat. (Hey it was a rough night yesterday!)
Startled from a dead sleep, Chad pushed me out of the back seat of the jeep and onto the bright streets of New York. We said goodbye and thanks to Matts uncle, and started making our way through a street market to downtown to see Wall Street, Ground Zero, and the Statue of Liberty. We walked for a few hours, then ran out of city as we hit the water, we climbed on the subway and made our way back towards our hotel to find some dinner and a bottle of wine at a small Italian food place. During dinner Jandiz called me and happened to be a couple of blocks away, so she made her way to us and shared some of Chad and my food. She had to take off to meet with some of her actors (she’s a director) but said she’d call us later and we might hang out.
We just went back to the hotel for some zoning out watching TV and naptime until we were supposed to meet Matt’s cousin Dan, who had just got back in to town, for beers and burgers. Around midnight we called our day and returned home for one of our first early nights in a long time.
Day: 120
We are not the most excessive of planners (long time readers already know this about me), when I joined this little road trip across the country the only thing the boys had planned on was a concert and a Red Sox game in Boston. This left us to try and fill in the rest of the gaps ourselves, hopefully with some culture and history not only drinking.
This morning when we finally made it upand ready it was just after eleven. We grabbed some breakfast in the park and headed into the overcast city (looks like rain again) to try and find ourselves tickets to a broadway show today. Fortunately, from my last visit here in May, I already knew where the half price ticket window was so we headed there first to see what was playing, and what we could get a last minute deal on. For $54 each we managed to get tickets to Avenue Q a musical complete with puppet sex. It has to be great. We still had a couple hours to our two o’clock matinee, but the rain had just unleashed its complete power on NYC (easily the worst rain of The World Tour so far) and we were all in sandals. We grabbed a cab to the theatre, found a bar next door, had a pint and played some pool while we waited for our show to start.
After a couple hours of classic musical comedy, complete with songs like “Everyone is a Little Bit Racist” and “The Internet (is for Porn)”, we made our way back to Times Square to get ticket to see Kevin Pollock at Carolines Comedy Club tonight, $30 cover and two drink minumum (funny to think I was living it up in Turkey just a few months ago for less than just the cover charge for entire days). Reservations in place we went on a little shopping spree for clean shirts and went back to the hotel for a few drinks in our room and a little down time.
The taxi dropped us off outside the club just after seven for an eight o’clock show. We went inside, got a table and laughed our asses off for a solid two hours. Afterward we piled in a cab and told him to take us somewhere fun; he smiled and shot through the streets of NY at sixty miles an hour barely missing just about everything. $9 later he dropped us off on a street full of bars and we began wandering from one to another. The night flew by, but it somehow ended up with us breaking up a fight and me getting blood (not my own) on my new shirt. Damn.
Day: 119
Waking up just in time for our noon checkout (this seems to be becoming general practice), we were headed into New York City today, supposedly just a short two hour (127 mile) drive up the Garden State Parkway, over the Jersey Turnpike, and through the Lincoln tunnel. Sound easy huh? Well not in a torrential downpour mixed in with friday afternoon rush hour traffic. The last two hours into the city was easily the most stressful two hours of driving in my entire life, I could barely see headlights 100 feet away and the lane line were indistinguishable. There were thousands of cars on the road and everyone was coming deathly close to me.
My mind completely numb from the constant alertness, we managed to make it to our hotel sometime after five and only passing it once. We went into our surprisingly swank hotel and got ready for the evening. I had talked to my friend Jandiz earlier in the day and she had to work serving cocktails in a trendy midtown hotel bar, but invited us over to visit her at work for a couple of drinks to start the night. We put on our best shirts and headed off into the big city. After our first rounds with Jandiz we set off to walk around Times Square and make our way into the lower east side (on her recommendation) via taxi to sample the nightlife of the city.
Day: 118
Starting off in Washington D.C.. the five of us set out on a whirlwind visit to the nations capital before 1pm when Ryan had to get back to the airport to return to his normal life. We saw the Korean War Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, WWII Memorial, Vietnam War memorial, The Bill of Rights, Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and the thriving streets of D.C. All I could say is that it was memorable (pun intended).
After
Ryans departure, we were all exhausted from the morning in the sun, but were ready to move on. Not knowing where we would stay tonight the one thing we could decide on was that a Cheesesteak in Philly sounded amazing. We loaded into Skittles (all four of us at once, for the first time since Ryan showed up a week ago) and started driving north. We went through Maryland, Deleware and into Pennsylvania in search of hot meat covered in cheese.
Somewhere in this ride while I was driving and everyone else was asleep I saw a sign. Not a sign from the heavens, or the omen type, but very close. It had an arrow and said “Atlantic City”. The supposed Vegas of the east. A Mecca for the type of road trip we were currently partaking in. I shook Matt awake and told him to check a map to see how far it was.
About an hour from Phillidelphia. Sweet, we could have our meat, then head across the Atlantic City Expressway to a glowing city on the New Jersey shores.
Hitting the city limits of Philly just after six we set off to a driving tour of downtown looking for somewhere to eat. Everything seemed to be closing, and we couldn’t find a place selling what we needed. We persevered for at least an hour and it finally paid off when we saw a deli with a glowing Cheesesteak sign in it’s window; and it was right next to a parking garage. We left our girl , Skittles, and made our way out of the parking garage just as it turned seven pm.
We made it to the deli to see it’s employees just locking the doors and leaving for the night! Dammit! At this point we were invested, in both time and money ($6 parking), and there was no way we could give up without feeling like we were failures. Life just would never shine as bright if we did. We
wandered block after block of shops closing up for the night. By 7:30pm the teams moral was getting low and we thought it just wasn’t meant to be. We almost turned back but up on the horizon I saw a glowing sign that I couldn’t read. We decided on one last chance for that sweet Philly meat. We started walking and soon, with smiles appearing on our faces, we realized it was an open deli. Glee overcame us as we walked up to the counter and ordered four Cheesesteaks. They were rich, piping hot, cheesy and delicious. It was just the boost we needed to get our night in Atlantic City started.
We paid the parking and piled back in Skittles for our last hour trek into a new state and a new place to sleep. The road was riddled with constant tolls (New Jersey is big on tolls I would soon realize), but before we knew it we had checked into the Best Western, h
ad showered, ironed our best shirts(you might notice we wear them every night), and strolling into the our third city of the day. The party started with overpriced drinks and gambling, but we were soon surrounded with beautiful ladies, sandy boardwalks, and thumping music. The night went on until three in the morning (when some guy tried to start a fight with Aaron on the boardwalk) and it was the perfect end to a extremely busy day.
Day: 117
Waking up as the sun shone in through the open flaps of my tent, my day started uneventfully with the practiced breaking down of my tent and sleeping bag even before the others had woken up. They all started to stir a few minutes after that and we soon had Skittles(our car) and Ryan’s rented HHR packed and we were headed to the next ferry to continue up the Outer Banks here in North Carolina. Soon we (without Aaron, who was a grump from having to camp, and just slept in the car) were messing around on the boat during our 40 minute ride, taking pictures and hanging out in the air-conditioned passanger “lounge” (by lounge I mean two benches in a tiny room; but it was freezing from the air!).
Soon we were back on the mainland making o
ur way through Virginia and into the nations capital to try to find a place to stay. After about an hour lost in traffic we got into the local Holiday Inn, where I was able to blog while everyone showered then it was off to find some dinner and see the cities monuments at night.
Day: 116
Piled into our cars minutes after our eleven o’clock check out, we didn’t know where we were going to sleep tonight but we knew it’d be to the north; we also knew we wanted to take a drive through the Outer Banks in North Carolina.
We drove and drove through the eastern coast backcountry roads where the speed limit was 45mph and we made a snails pace through some of the most beautiful land around. The evening was closing in and we still needed to take a two hour ferry ride (on which Matt tried to steal another life ring) out to the Outer Banks where we decided we would try to find a campsite for the night. We killed some time on the boat watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force, drinking beers, and taking portraits of each other.
The boat landed and we headed to the campground to set up our tents. The second the car doors open the mosquitoes swarmed on Aaron, he became their feast. We covered ourselves in a wall of repellent and set out to catching fireflies, frogs and crabs before we settled at the site for time to tell stories, fight off bugs, try to get a fire going before crashing for the night.
Day: 115
We woke up with the goal to get out of Daytona (since we only rented the house for four days) and get back on the road again and try to make it all the way to Myrtle Beach (another supposed eastern party spot; these guys are going to kill me!) in South Carolina. It was ten hours of humid driving starting with more Go-Kart racing then onward through Savanna, Georgia (beautiful little town) for lunch, a stop at the fireworks warehouse to stock up, and most of South Carolina before we came into what looked like the lights of Vegas without any gambling and dozens (seriously) of miniature golf courses and swimsuit shops.
Coming out of the third overpriced or full Holiday Inn we headed to the Sea Gypsy, probably the dirtiest hotel in the entire area, but the owner was a sweet older man who told us about all the nighttime hot spots in the area. We took showers and got dressed to go out for the night in this new town, knowing we only had one night and should make the most of it. A few drinks in the room to hold the price down and we headed off to a bar, followed by a piano club, then just a regular club before Ryan drove us back to our hotel to go shoot off some fireworks at the beach.
Alcohol + Fireworks = Goodtimes + Danger (I might be able to complete with the great mathematicians with this formula.)
Somehow we managed to side off in two teams and started fireworking each other with and assortment of bottle rockets, black cats, and smokebombs. The fun only lasted a few minutes until someone came around and let us know that fireworks are extremely illegal in Myrtle beach and we should probably stop. The city officials must know about my formula already and are scared of the Goodtimes.
Day: 114
So I received a very formal e-mail from my mother today telling me that to her it looks like all I have been up to is drinking and partying. She wanted me to get back on the ball with my picture taking and explained to me that no one in the world wants to read about the type of excess that I have been partaking in. She’s probably right, but I still had to call her and let her know that I haven’t let up on any of my goals for the future I was just participating in a time honored American Road-Trip complete with rules and guidelines that if broken I would be shunned from my place in the male species. The celebration is a celebration of the vast stretches of highway that connect this country from barren deserts of Arizona to the humid beaches of Daytona that are covered partially in white trash. Every male in their mid-twenties should take a trip like this, It may irreversibly damage your liver, but living for five weeks on the road with three other guys of roughly the same age lets you get a peak at the American male in a state of pure degeneration. It’s spectacular to behold.
After the last four days hitting it hard we couldn’t manage another day of anything but relaxation. We sat around our rented house watching DVD’s, Going Go-Kart riding again, finding a Pizza Hut for lunch, saying goodbye to Aaron’s cousin Becky (who had spent the weekend with us), we tried to motivate ourselves to do something else, but it just ended up falling asleep in various states of disrepair throughout the house. Chad and I woke up around 7:30 or so, took a short walk around the beach then went back to the house to get the other guys to at least go to the movies with us to see Pirates of the Caribbean. After the movie the bar next door was having a Sunday night special of $2 you-call-it’s, but we just couldn’t hang. We head home for an early night.
Day: 113
The problem with a place like Daytona Beach is that if you partake in it’s nightlife it runs you into one of two choices. Either you can get up early and try to make the most of your day being tired the whole time, or you can sleep in (until roughly 2 or 3 in the afternoon) and make the most of your late afternoon and evening. The problem with the second choice is that it becomes a vicious cycle, and each day you stay up later and later and in turn sleep later and later. Last night I managed to watch the sun come up.
Which returns us to the present day and the extremely late morning hours/early afternoon hours at which time I, and my cohorts, woke up. By the time we had eaten and were prepared for the day it was running up on four-thirty in the afternoon. We made it to the beach by five just as all the families/children were leaving. I settled into a Starbucks on the boardwalk while everyone else made their way to play in the surf and sand (see what I give up for you my readers!). After about an hour and three blogs I headed out to join them, spending just a short time at the water before we decided to head back to the house to get ready for dinner.
Driving along Oceanfront Blvd. we found a pier with a small crab shack out on it over the water, looking out over Daytona. We had a couple of drinks each (no one was really in the mood just yet) ate a grip of crab and waddled our way back to the car with plans to latter try to find where the happening weekend clubs are. We found them, had a couple of drinks and some dancing at a few places then had our designated driver (be safe kids!), Ryan take us home for the six of us to do some 3 AM drunk boogie boarding.
