still alive! home stretch.

final banner refresh.



we are still alive. just really behind. currently in Chicago.

possible mega-ultra-recap-post in near future. otherwise, we'll see you in NYC.


-jerone

And what a birthday it was!

So we make it into Scottsdale, AZ on Friday night and pull into the cul de sac (that's right, I said cul de sac) of Mr. John Mineiri and his lovely wife Nancy. We are greeted with a sign in their front garden reading "Reality Time-out Bus Parking" in true Mineiri fashion. Everyone should know that we often call Mr. John Mineiri "John MacGyver" because he is just that...a superhuman who can run up mountains and fix our leaky bus with duct tape and a match. Anyway, Rob was looking forward to going on a hike with Mr. MacGyver and then hitting the Scottsdale bars more than he was looking forward to his new Brianna Banks video. So at the crack of dawn (or ass crack of dawn as Jerone usually says) we woke up to embark up Tom's Thumb...it's not what it sounds like...Tom's Thumb is a mountain in the outskirts of Scottsdale. As Mr. MacGyver ran up the mountain, we attempted to keep up and successfully made it to the summit. Taking in a gorgeous view for 10 minutes at the summit and with no water breaks on the way up or down, the 4 of us destroyed the Thumb. We tried to go to a cool water-park afterwards, but it was closed...so Mr. Mineiri took us to the next best thing: Dos Gringos Bar. We did a midday barcrawl, and due to our dehydration from climbing a mountain, we were a bit drunk to say the least by 3pm. We returned to the Mineiri's to power nap, and woke up to sizzling steaks and mashed potatoes. After rejuvenating ourselves with food, we attempted to rally for the night out.
Starting with a redbull vodka, we began the birthday fest at a cool club known as six (or nine upside down). We began a new pubcrawl and hit about 4 places before returning to six. Yah, I don't remember much else, but I do have a spectacular image of Abhi doing his headshake breaking-neck-dance and, once again, getting the hottest girl in the club to dance with him. Waking up was, for lack of a better word, excruciating, but we were able to get up in time to go inner-tubing (or inter-tubing as Jerone usually says) once again. We headed out to the Salt River for our second tubing adventure of the trip. We packed our cooler full of beers (and cantaloupe?...Abhi's idea, go figure) and headed down the 2 hour long journey. We ran into a bunch of different characters, but my favorite one was the lady who asked Abhi if he had ever seen the movie Harold and Kumar. We all kind of looked at each other open jawed to see if she was taking it where we thought she was...and she did. She followed up this statement with a number of inappropriate black jokes which made us more puzzled at where she came from. Regardless, we had a blast tubing and headed up to Sedona to visit another one of Rob's family friends with a daughter...ahem.
Sedona was gorgeous and we really just walked around town, getting cool gifts for people and followed it up with a beautiful hike down to a river for swimming. The water was cool and the mountains were breathtakingly striking with the sunset's reflection on the already flame-red rock...that was the most ridiculous sounding sentence I could've written, but you get it...it was beautiful. We ate like kings with the DePasquales (Rob's family friends) and headed out that night to the grandest canyon of them all: The Grand Canyon. That's it for now, but a preview of things to come: We're in VEGAS!!!
-The Cap

Roofus develops some bad habits

So leaving Dallas at rush hour made our trip from there to Silver City New Mexico a solid 11 hour drive. This was made all the more ridiculous by our 6 PM to 5 AM time frame(seriously Herzog, Odessa?). We rolled into the campground and proceeded to sleep off the road-weary for a couple hours till the blazing New Mexican sun sweated us out of our sleep. Now every parent tells their child to "do as i say, not as I do". Unfortunately our baby bus Roofus chose the latter and picked up some of our bad habits. In addition to the aforementioned leaking of rainwater, during our fairly rough and curvy drive to the Gila Indian Caves, Roofus chose that moment to start smoking, heavily, from the engine. Not good. We put our engineering degrees to work, opened up the hood, hemmed and hawed until a passing motorist pointed out that we were bone dry on coolant. A trip to town, 30 bucks of coolant, 4 surplus army jackets, and a delicious meal with a delicious waitress later we were back on the road to the cliffs. Roofus then proceeded to start smoking again, this time from the wheels. Again, engineers to the rescue. We stopped the car, poured some water on it, and haven't been bothered since. After a short hike to the awesomely sweet Gila caves we showered up and tried to go out in Silver city. Two things impeded this. 1: trying to find anywhere that was open after 9 PM. This includes restaurants, bars, and foodstores. 2: every fucking idiot in a pick-up that drove by seemed to want to fight us, seriously, everyone. Now wanting to dirty our knuckles in a round of fisticuffs, we choose to head back to our campground and get shitfaced watching the stars.
The following day we set out to hike the nearby catwalk on our way to Scottsdale. What's the catwalk you say? We never found out. 4 Miles away from our destination Roofus proceeded dump gallons of neon-green coolant and again, start smoking from the engine. So inventory of Bus problems: leaks water in the rain, dashlights don't work so we can't read our speed at night, leaks coolant, can't fill up gas very fast or it spills from....somewhere. We weighed our options, decided against spending another night in Silver City, made a heroic drive to Arizona stopping every hour or so to refill coolant, and arrived just in time for Herzog's bday.

Sooooo...they have finally forced me to post on the blog. Not that I dont love all of you (truth be told, i'm not even sure I know everyone who is reading this), but I have tried my best to stay away from emails, phones, etc. That being said, let me do my best to fill you in on the rest of our Texas experience.
After floating the river with the Mexican we got word that my buddy Bernie was visiting another friend of mine (Joe Johnson) in San Antonio. If you want to learn where the Texan stereotype is fulfilled, meet Joe Johnson. Joe met up with us and led us back to his place which was beautiful. After showing us around Andrew and Jerone immediately made themselves comfortable in his movie theater. Abhi and I paddled around in the pool with Bernie, Joe, and his little brother. After hanging out for a while the Johnsons took us out to a great Mexican meal. We strolled around the Alamo and Andrew took another 4,000 pictures of himself in front of another famous building. Fast forward through another night of partying and we find ourselves being sent off from the Johnsons after having a great breakfast, having our bus looked at, and a cooler full of fresh venison sausage, jerky, and salami. All from animals murdered by Mr. Joe Johnson himself. All were delicious and VERY helpful later in the trip...story to come...
As we left San Antonio we headed to Dallas so I could meet up with my buddy from High School. I used to be best friends with this guy Nick but he left H.S. after freshman year and I really havent spoken with him until now. We didnt get to his place until 9ish at night. We ran through the shower drill as usual and spoke with his rents/cousin. His mom cooked us a BOMB meal and we ate as much as we can, only leaving leftovers because we knew we would be back from it later in the night. Nick took us out with a couple of his buddies who were really chill to a local bar. Interestingly enough, Texas cards (and has bouncers) EVERY night of the week. Needless to say, Mona would NEVER have made it in TX. Being that I have not seen this guy in a while, we all shot for the stars. We got absolutely hammered. Once the bars closed down we went back to the bus to drink/smoke for a few more hours. We were sitting on the roof, beers in hand for a while then realized we should probably get down when Nick fell through the emercency exit and crushed all of our food products. To cap off the night Abhi takes off his shirt, gets the biggest firecracker we had (3 ft long) and runs into the median of this highway road. Immediately Jerone and I realized our friend was about to blow off his hand but we also realized he was not goign to give up so we told him he could keep his shirt off and light the firecracker so long as it was planted in the ground. If you are asking yourself 'where was andrew during all of this?" ...he was cheering Abhi on. The firecracker goes off, we go to sleep, wake up, eat a savage burger and cheese fries and head out. Side note: Everyday Italian is a GREAT show. We could not leave until we watched a few episodes.
Texas was really good to us but once we hit the road we wanted nothing more than to get out of TX. This was not an easy task because TX is fucking HUGE. Not to mention, Andrew wanted to stop in Odessa to see the "stadium" from Friday Night Lights. We got there in the middle of the night, pulled into the parking lot only to realize that this "stadium" was a low-end H.S. football field. This was the most ridiculous stop we have made yet. TO celebrate we had an Andrew Herzog photoshoot then gunned it as far as we could, leaving us in New Mexico. The drive was rough. We all drove and in total we made it over 500 miles straight through the night.
There you have it, my first blog post. Post something witty to show that someone is reading. More stories to come...
Best
RC

a/j banner refresh

I'm thinking we'll change the banner each week... yeah? hence the retirement of "banner A," posted here for our records.

-jerone

Floatin, Floatin, Floatin down a River

As if Roel had already not helped us out enough in guiding us through Texas, he proceeded to lead us to New Braunfels, TX which is home to the greatest invention known to mankind since our bus...floating the river. We drive for awhile south towards San Antonio, and come upon the town of New Braunfels where they offer inner tube-ing down a number of rivers. A couple rights and lefts brought us to the parking lot where one can rent an inner tube (for both oneself and one's beer...that's right, they have inner tubes for beer). We proceed to get our tubes and hop into the cool, crisp, light green river for our day of floating. It was very difficult work, sitting in the inner tube and letting the current carry us, but we got through it. Along the river are a couple of "tube chutes" that are amazing whitewater rapid-like chutes. We, of course, linked arms and went down the chutes together...and all flipped over together. The entire float took about two hours at which point we had to reluctantly get off of the river and into a shuttle bus to take us back. I would VERY highly recommend doing this activity to anyone who is hanging out around San Antonio or Austin; it is just shy of heaven. That's it for now, but here's a short preview of what's to come on our blog: our bus, named Rufus or Bruticus, has finally hit a roadblock and overheats because it goes through antifreeze faster than Jerone goes through hard liquor!
-Cap'n

After going to prison, we broke into Darrell K. Royal Stadium

All I have to say is TEXAS...FIGHT! After going to prison "just the four of us" all made it to Houston, TX to meet up with our friend Roel Garcia. After eating our first of many meals at "Whataburger" we met up with Roel at his home, ditched the bus, went into our 30 min planned routine of showers and changing, and headed out for the night. We set out to have a nighttime tour of the city and also wanted to meet up with one of Rob's good friends, Shannon at a snazzy bar in midtown Houston. We all got to the bar and immediately ordered beers (because I guess they drink beer in Texas?). We successfully linked up with Shannon, realized we were too tired to keep drinking, so we told her we'd meet up the next day. Roel gave us a wonderful driving display of the very spread out neighborhoods of Houston, and per my request, showed us all of the stadiums in the city. Although Rob, Jerone, and Abhi were completely passed out for the tour, I know they enjoyed it.
Bright and early the next morning (1pm) we set out for Austin, TX in order to find the burnt orange in all of us and see the lovely campus of UT. On the way, Roel made sure that we stopped in the Southside Market which is home to the Elgin Hot Sausage. If that sounds ridiculous to you, let me assure you, it isn't. This sausage was just about the most flavorful sausage any of us have ever eaten (except maybe Abhi, what?)...in all seriousness, this is the best BBQ, and if you're ever going to Austin, swing by the Southside Market in Elgin, TX...mmmmm. Upon arrival in Austin, we realized that our lovely host Cathleen would not be able to meet up with us until late, so we began touring the campus. Immediately I asked Roel where the stadium was, and he assured me we'd get there. After a lovely walk, we moseyed our way over to the gigantic Darrell K. Royal - Texas Memorial Stadium. What a sight. Our crew had our hearts set on getting onto the field despite large construction going on in the stadium (and the stadium being closed during the summer). But would that stop us? Oh no...we successfully located an open door to the stadium (that was clearly a maintenance door) and immediately went into James Bond-stealth mode (Jerone went into ninja mode, but it was comparable). After noticing the sign that said "roof access" we began our ascent up 10 flights of stairs. We got to the 11th floor, and sure enough, we were on the roof level of the stadium. We walked around for awhile up there, took some pictures, but still no access to the field or seats. At least one hour later, we were still opening every door we could find, walking into every locker room, and sneaking around every corner just to get onto the field. Eventually we wandered into the construction zone and after Abhi wheeled around the ramps of the stadium with an office chair he found, we realized that we would not be able to get on the field. That pretty much concluded our campus tour, so shifted our focus to our night out in Austin. From what I can remember, the two highlights of the night were 1)Taking flaming doctor pepper shots that consisted of the bartender blowing fire over all of the glasses from his mouth and singeing our eyebrow hair and 2) A wet t-shirt contest with all Austin locals? Anyway, all in all Houston and Austin were a blast and were a great start to our Texas chapter of this trip.