Exodus

Winter break has drawn to a close.

instead of flying back out to utah for the winter semester, I am driving with my older brother, Josh, who returned in November from his mission to Alaska.

We left thursday morning, which feels like a week ago. prior to our departure, I went and bought an FM transmitter for my ipod so that the 60-hour-long playlist i'd compiled wednesday afternoon could be enjoyed by both my brother and myself. it has proven to be one of the best investments i have made in my life.

The trip was largely uneventful for the majority of the first day. aside from getting mildly confused about what to do around Louisville, KY, we did pretty well direction wise. I was the first to drive, and decided that if i kept the car at a solid 50 degrees Fahrenheit, i wouldn't fall asleep at the wheel. it worked, but my hands wouldn't function after about 20 minutes. We made it all the way to eastern illinois, and spent the night there.

things got interesting.

We pulled off I-64 into what we thought was Mount Vernon, IL, only it wasn't. more on that later. Josh and I were both burned out from driving all day, and had only stopped to fill the car up with gasoline and to use the bathroom. So we pull off in mount vernon for the first meal of the day that wasn't a pop tart or pretzel stick. It ended up being what we thought was the only fast food restaurant for miles: a solitary burger king. About 5 or 6 times already this trip, i've walked into gas stations or fast food restaurants and gotten the feeling that everyone in the store knows each other and they are watching me like i just dropped from outer space. Yes, I am a stranger in these parts, but i don't want to buy cigarettes. Mount Vernon was one of those kinds of towns. it seemed that ponytail boy (the guy who took our order) knew what the people in front of and behind us in line wanted already. I hate fast food. it makes me want to punch babies.

After our fancy dinner, we went to the only motel in the city, The King Inn. It was probably the sketchiest hotel i have ever stayed in thus far in my life. From the lobby reeking of marijuana to the doors' locks not working, i was worried that someone would break in at any moment, take me hostage, and sell me into slavery down in mexico and i would be making shoes the rest of my life. So, for the first time in my life, i slept with a large pocketknife clenched in my right hand. I'm not quite sure what good this would have done me had someone burst in, because i'm rather sure that they would have planned far enough in advance to defeat the average pocketknife-wielding 18 year old, but who knows. it made me feel better. It also did not help that I saw 2 patrol cars parked about a block away from the Inn in a very "drug bust is about to happen" way. The bathroom in our room just happened to have a bottle opener screwed onto the doorframe, which i found odd, but maybe the King Inn's usual clientele is the drink-whiskey-while-on-the-toilet type. who knows. I partially blame my mother for this incident, because she told us that staying in any hotel that ended with "inn" would probably be good. (days inn, hampton inn, fairfield inn). Royal treatment at the king inn. Royal Pain trying to get to sleep when every sound i hears makes me think of how many terrorists are outside trying to get through my not deadbolted door and steal my ipod/muppet keychain. The shower decided that it wouldn't drain, which got me just all too excited to return to my dorm where the shower also does not drain. lesson? the cheapest motel is the one that is most likely to get you killed. at least our car had not been looted in the night by the nefarious residents of mount vernon.

Friday was another long driving day. we went from east of St. Louis to laramie, wyoming. long long day. part of our directions included the phrase "get on I-80 west, then drive 900 miles." 900 miles is a long way. friday included the roadtrip earmark of singing "99 bottles of beer on the wall," which killed a remarkable 8 minutes of travel time. grossness.  it also turned out that after about 2 miles on the highway in the morning, another 17 hotels/fast food restaurants decided to present themselves to us. if only we had driven another 30 seconds, we could have been spared the scariest hotel stay of my life. the irony. after a stop at subway for my traditional lunch, we kept driving. then we stopped for gas. then we kept driving. The car trip made me realize that if you spend to much time with a person, they aggravate you, no matter how well you get along. I like to think that my older brother and i get along famously, but after 40 hours in a car, he was pretty fed up with me. again, i'm pretty sure that you'll end up hating anyone you spend 40 hours in a car with who isn't taylor swift. once you get to nebraska/wyoming, there is literally nothing to see. especially in wyoming. I think that the entire pacific northwest should just be one state, because it's pretty much the same place. If it were not for the "WELCOME TO THE LAND OF WIND" sign, i would have never realized i'd left nebraska.

We were planning to stay in Cheyenne friday night, but I was driving and accidentally blew past the city. It's pretty small for a state capital. Wyoming is the least populous state, and i'm not quite sure how its boundaries were decided. it's like someone in the federal government took a pencil and drew a giant rectangle around this big part of the country where nobody lives. In my defense, none of the exit signs said that it was cheyenne, they just said things like "downtown." still, due to the unnaturally large number of houses (more than 2 in 10 miles) i was able to see from the freeway and the actual presence of a "downtown" in the city, i should have been able to judge that it was in fact cheyenne. So, after missing the turnoff, I had to drive another 50 miles to get to the next exit, which turned out to be a place called Laramie. I knew a bit about laramie from a short excerpt of the play (or whatever you call it) called "the laramie project" that was performed by the theater dept. at my graduation. The play is about a gay man who gets beat to half to death then is tied to a pole in the middle of nowhere in wyoming (which is pretty much anywhere) then is left to die. uplifting stuff. So I was gay to not be gay that night.

Saturday morning, after our stay in a hampton inn (with doors that locked), I awoke to the best breakfast i've had in a while, which meant there was a belgian waffle maker in the breakfast bar. here is the secret hotel recipe for the belgian waffle:

Flour+eggs+Sugar+addictive substance (crack cocaine usually)= hotel belgian waffle.

If you can't tell by now, they're pretty much the best things in the freaking world. almost made me forgetting about being abducted only 36 hours previous.

We aimed to roll into provo at noon, but after 15 minutes of driving, we ran into an obnoxious windstorm (50-70 mph winds) which was blowing around a bunch of snow that had fallen the night before. in short, visibility was about 5 feet at its worst (pun intended), so we got behind a semi and followed him for about 100 miles until the storm abated. after pulling off at a truck stop and josh giving a ride to some random big rigger, we were back on the road for 400 more miles or so of wyoming. we made it back to provo just in time for the USD v. BYU game, which was a blowout, but brandon davies had some killer dunks plus got 22 rebounds and 21 points. the guy is an animal.

After the game, we went out on the town, which means i drove down to buy low to get some groceries. We then ate at Cafe Rio, then came home and crashed. bedtime at 10 PM. first new years eve i have done absolutely nothing and loved it. New Years is pretty much the most pointless holiday in my opinion, and i'd like to see it done away with. not quite sure how the calendar would work, but i don't know what the big deal about staying up until midnight (which isn't that great of a feat for a college student), giving yourself alcohol poisoning, and watching some ball drop in NYC is. who knows.


For christmas, i was blessed enough to get a copy of "Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Slayer," which i forced my brother to read out loud to me in an attempt to stay awake while driving. The first three chapters are dang good, and i have gained a new respect for the uninteresting vocalizations readers' of audiobooks posses who are not jim dale. Your throat gets really really dry after like a page.

all in all, it was a great trip. we didn't die, and we made it across the country.

Today i missed my church meeting (which was moved from 1:30 Pm to 10:00 am; can you blame me?) so i was forced to attend a meeting that was populated with non-freshman. It has been all i can not to launch into a tirade about marriage at BYU on the blog, but it was almost too much to handle today. bluntly, people showed more interest in feeling each other than feeling the spirit. I worry for my older brother who must attend these hardcore cuddle-fests now that he is a sophomore up at BYU-idaho. It is truly a dangerous world. The second speaker also decided to tell the story of shadrack, meshack, and abendigo (spelling is off) by synopsizing the veggitales movie about it, which included reading from the bible and inserting "chocolate bunny" for "graven image/idol", "Rack, Shaq, and Benny" for "shadrack, meshack, and abendigo," and "nezzy" for "king Nebuchadnezzar." People are so diddly-wack out here. It is a real pity that part of being mormon is not becoming a recluse and disassociating yourself from those who scare you, because i would have done it long ago.