International Road Trip: Entry 1

Day 1 - Underway

I woke at about 8 to finish packing my livelihood into one piece of luggage and a backpack. Not too hard to do I guess: 15 pairs of underwear, 12 T-shirts, 5 dress shirts, 10 pair of socks, 4 pairs of jeans, 1 pair of black work pants.

After getting that squared away I had to pack the remainder of my belongings into a few boxes that could be stored in someone’s garage without taking too much space. I finished that around 12 noon. Then met up with Burton, a guy I know through Los Hermanos who got the same gig . It was to be me, Burt and Glade driving to Alaska in a two-door Saturn. We ran around taking care of last-minute things. Then went to pack Glade's stuff. Glade had consolidated his things down into a few pieces of luggage and a backpack, but we didn’t have room for some of his camping gear, so he packed in what he could into his suitcase. We got it all in and started to head out of town. At which point I realized I had left my birth certificate, driver's license and social security card in the Xerox machine at the library (dumb dumb dumb.) I went in and it wasn’t there… checked with the front desk… not there. She sent me to the back desk and... they had it there! The librarian gave me a look like "you lucky dumb ass!"

So we headed out of town, stopping to fuel up at Costco. I ran in to try and buy an SD card for my digital camera but it was like $40 for a 2 gig (and I already had one in the mail from Hong Kong) so I figured I’d make do with the camera's internal memory until I could find a cheaper one (Wal-Mart has 1 gigers for like 14 bucks).

Headed to Idaho. Stopped in some Idaho town to fill up again. It had one gas station/grocery store. Not that weird to me since I grew up in Podunk, Oklahoma. But it was funny that the music playing in the store sounded like the score for Nappy D. We got to Boise around 10 and stayed with Burt's uncle Warren (not Jeffs). He had made us some nice minestrone soup. Unfortunately, I'm allergic to beans, and it had beans in it. But I had some cereal and corn bread with honey. We slept like... dogs (at least I did, I got the floor).