Background; A month before the rally, two friends ask me if we could all carpool. I said sure, since that would cut the travel cost from $70 all on me, to about $25/person and, we were going to crash at a mutual friend’s apartment. Two weeks later, my dad is up for homecoming and when I mention it to him, he dislikes the idea of it because my car was the planned vehicle. To give him credit, it’s a leased car in his name which is why I asked him rather than told him about my planned trip. Anyways, the next day he got his wish as my two friends told me that they were going to be end of the quarter art students and stay home doing final projects. This is two weeks before the rally.
Fast forward to day before the rally. 6:30 am my alarm clock goes off for work, 7:30 out the door. Put in a full eight and a half hour day. It’s now 5:00 pm. Had everything been going to plan, I’d be on the road starting now. This made me want to go even more than hearing myself tell my dad and friend who has the apartment that I wasn’t going to be going after all. Instead, I was going last minute costume shopping with a friend, complaining to him the entire time about how I should be on the way to DC (thank you Dan for not killing me). Anyways, after that failed, since I was still in town, I got to go to our men’s hockey team’s first game at Ritter, our home arena and witness our first win of the season with 1:19 left in overtime (GO TIGERS!!!). Anyways, I wanted to go to the point where I asked one friend if we could trade cars for the weekend and let me take hers to DC (By telling my dad I wasn’t going all I needed to do was find a way down with not my car). All of this failed and I eventually ended up at my friend’s birthday party.
This is where everything starts going right. The party was pretty fun, close group of friends and drinking, always a good mix. Anyways, by about 3:00 am, the party is winding down, and several key things have already occurred. My original plan was to go with my friends to their apartment across the complex to sleep on their couch since I was not fit to drive home. I noticed that they had left without telling me due to another friend partying a bit too hard. The other key thing is that the last game of Mafia for the night was stretching longer than anticipated. So there I am, 3:00 am, about to pass out drunk on the couch, where I hear what I had been hoping to hear all day long. Amidst the jumbled conversation about the game, I hear our ring leader of sorts chime in, “Tim, shouldn’t you be on the road soon, aren’t you headed to DC?”. This makes me jolt up so quickly that I almost fell over while still sitting. Sure enough, he was heading to DC as soon as the party was over. I asked to join him and another friend, and boom, I was going to DC.
Now, at this point, we’ve all been awake for about 20 hours. Oh well, its college. I immediately started drinking glasses of water and shoving bread down. I took my keys, give them to my friend (read as: shoved into his chest) that I had drove there, tell him to drive himself back to campus (only 1 mile away), and included a precautionary death threat should anything happen. This is the same friend that I was bitching to the whole time we were costume shopping by the way. We spend the next hour shooting over to each other’s apartments to grab cameras, MP3 players, etc. Finally, we are all ready, and need nothing more than a trip to the gas station to be on our way.
Time: 4:15 am; Hours without sleep: ~21; First driver: Tim. In one of those “DUDE!” moments, we enter I-390 with a 375 mile trip that according to Google will take 6 hours and 45 minutes to complete. Miguel is passed out in the back seat, me and Tim are upfront enjoying the Rochester radio stations before they die out (by the way, Pennsylvania has like two, maybe three good stations). About an hour later after “OH SHIT *swerve*” number one, me and Tim switch seats just north of the New York – Pennsylvania border. My part was rather uneventful with the exception of the GPS having a nervous breakdown and freaking out. Apparently part of Route 15 didn’t exist when the software was written for it, though the new part eventually connected to the old part and all was well. At around 6:30 am, a solid 24 hours after my alarm clock woke me up for work the previous day, the mix between the country music and only having the lane lines to stare at had won. Miguel, who had been napping the past 2 hours and 15 minutes, took the wheel and I proceeded to pass out in the back seat for an hour.
Judging by the fact that my head/neck hurt, there was at least one “OH SHIT *swerve*” moment, but all was well as I was woken up by an awesome Catskill sunrise over the Delaware River. This is around 7:30 am and we had just seen more than one car at a time for the first time since we left. For the next few hours nothing exciting happened with the exception of Miguel missing the exit, taking us through Harrisburg, and somehow shortening the ETA in the process…I don’t know. Around 9:00 am we stop for a bathroom break, and Tim takes over driving, Miguel resumes passing out in the back seat. The rest of the drive went rather smoothly. And by smoothly I mean THE BELTWAY WAS CLEAR OF TRAFFIC 0_0. For the next 30 minutes, the GPS routed us on a variety of different highways, seemingly trying to keep us off of I-695. I start making contact with my two alumni friends that I’ll be meeting up with and they inform me that at the furthest metro stop, where they got on, it was 100% full, passing by over crowded stops the whole way in.
Time: 10:17 am, 6 hours and 2 minutes after leaving Rochester, we get off I-295 onto Pennsylvania Ave. SE. With Miguel still out cold in the backseat and the GPS no longer of any use, me and Tim undertake the awesome task of finding in town parking (we’ve had 5 hours of sleep between the two of us since 7:00 am the day before keep in mind). As you can see from this map http://bit.ly/boRd8a, it was a bit of an adventure. Eventually, after about 30 minutes of aimlessly wandering around DC, we found a parking garage, that was open, and it was almost empty, and it was, of all places, ON 4TH STREET. The whole day was like that by the way. So that’s the story of how we got there, there’s still another 17 hours left to our day, including the reason we came.
At around 11:00 am, I finally link up with my friends just before the cell service dies for the next 3+ hours. We spend the next45 minutes in the food line while observing some rather entertaining ralliers as well as gawking over the shear amount of people there. Then we spend the next 20 minutes or so slowly working our way into the crowd, slowly getting closer till we were about 15 feet east of and about as far to the south of the scissor lift security tower that was on the section of the mall just west of 4th street http://imgur.com/4l86A.png. If you really curious about where exactly, there was a giant green California redditor with a bottle of not water right behind us (if you see this, don’t worry, I would have let you known if you were bugging us). The rest, well, watch the rally for that part. I will add that the breeze carried with it multiple times, the strongest smell of pot that I have ever smelled. Seriously, sticking your nose in a bag and taking a whiff doesn’t smell that strong.
Fast forward to the end of the rally; We start making our way out as all the performers minus Ozzy do their parting song. Now begins the awesome task of finding a place where our phones will work again so that we can link up with Tim’s friend and find food (see map). We eventually link up with Tim’s friend (dear god, two WoW players socializing in real life), and try to find somewhere to eat. Now, to say it took a while to find a place with a less than two hour wait would not do justice, so here’s some numbers. The population of DC is roughly 600,000. There were an estimated 215,000 JUST AT THE MALL. In total there was probably in an influx of around 300,000 since a lot of people retreated to nearby bars and such due to overcrowding. So back on topic, we had to find a restaurant with a less than 2 hour wait while the city was experiencing a population increase of 50%. Oh, and we were three blocks from the White House just to make it more challenging.
A little before 5:00 pm, we finally find a place, Shelly’s Backroom Tavern http://bit.ly/dcGF93. Keeping inline with how the rest of our day had been going, we got a table for six people in 15 minutes. About 30 minutes later, they finally get around to taking our food orders, prefacing it with saying that because of how insanely busy they (and the whole city) are, it will take about 45 minutes for our food to be prepared. In reality it took 25-30 minutes, although they had been completely emptied of french fries. Oh well, the food was really good, would love to try it on a normal day (Cheryl, if you say anything about the place or their service, I will hit you).
So, after a much needed real meal, the first of which for the three of us in well over 24 hours, we said goodbye to our friends, and headed back to our car. Walked past the stage while it was being dismantled, foolishly hoping to get something (the mall looked really clean reddit, good job :) ). Anyways, the 30 minute walk back to the car gave us enough of an appetite to stop by mcdonalds while heaed down 4th street, and fries have never tasted so good before. So, after Tim figured out how to pay for the garage without cash, filling up on gas, and another “OH SHIT *swerve*”, we were on the road headed back to Rochester.
Time: 8:03pm; Driver: Miguel. We get on I-295, and about 1.5 exits later after just missing becoming part of the failbus (it ended up turned sideays blocking two lanes and an on ramp), I fell alseep. Waking somewhere just south of Harrisburg, I stayed awake long enough to see Miguel miss THE SAME EXIT AS ON THE WAY DOWN, and another “OH SHIT *swerve*”. A few hours later at around 12:30 am, Miguel was done, and I took over driving for the rest of the trip back. The GPA put our ETA at 3:02 am. With cruise control set to 85 mph (86 accoridng to the GPS), empty roads, and the most godly playlist ever (a 30 minute long fusion of Queen and Pink Floyd), I shaved the ETA down to 2:54 am. The drive itself was uneventful with a few a exceptions. I added some bright red paint to the wheel wells courtesy of a freshly demolished, and I mean, DEMOLISHED, deer. The GPS freaked out and got itself lost at the same part of Route 15, and some poor sap managed to get pulled over for speeding in a construction zone at 2:15 am on a Sunday morning.
At a little after 3:00 am, exactly 24 hours after finding out that I was going to the rally, we pull into the parking lot of the apartment where our journey began the night before. Dropped off miguel, and had Tim drive back to campus as I could barely keep my eyes open. Rescued my keys from Dan, drove the 4 final miles back to my apartment, and left my room a grand total of 4 times in the next 27 hours.
Totally have to do that again sometime…
Totals:
- 5 “OH SHIT *swerve*” moments
- 13 hours and 750 miles of driving
- ~15 Waldos
- 4 signs referencing Hitler
- 1 look of disapproval
- 0 trollfaces (I don’t know…)
- 2 Flying Spaghetti Monsters
- ~7 Redditors
- 4 RIT students/alumns (minus Brad and Cheryl)
- 1 Helluva good time
Also, this is typed in word and copypasta’d to facebook and reddit so the references to different people won’t make sens to you all.
Side note: MS Word doesn’t mark “copypasta’d” as incorrect spelling or grammar 0_0
TL:DR; There’s 2,213 words that I spent 4 hours typing, READ IT
