Summer of Insanity, Volume 2

[oceantheorem]

Wednesday, 5 July
Today was great. I'm slightly tipsy still, so this will be a short entry.
Emily got here yesterday. Today we packed the car and we're pretty much ready to roll tomorrow morning.
We went to the bank today and ran into Jen. So we ended up meeting Jen at Starbucks and then going to the Silver Legacy and drinking and Rum Bullions. It was awesome to see Jen, and we had a great conversation. Emily and I got home just before midnight and I think now we're sober and tired enough to go to sleep.
Tomorrow we commence our journey across the country.

Friday, 7 July
Whoa.
Well. Wednesday night we went to the Silver Legacy with Jen. We drank at Rum Bullion's and then staggered over to Circus Circus and saw a really bad trapeze act starring "The Amazing Alex," which we decided was a really stupid epithet. I mean, come on. The Amazing Alex? The Amazing Alessandro would have sounded a lot better.
Thursday morning we got up, finished packing the car, and finally got out of Reno around 10:30 am. We drove and drove and took pictures out the window and laughed.
We got to Dominic and Joseph's house in Salt Lake City around 9 pm their time. They had some girls over, so the seven of us played this card game Apples to Apples, which Dominic's girlfriend kept winning.
Dominic and I went for a walk at about 3:30 am and finally got a chance to talk and get caught up. I finally went to bed around 5:30, when the sky was starting to lighten.
Today David Brown and his sister Kristen came up to SLC and we had lunch with them. It was really good to see David again after sooo long (he just got home a week ago from his two-year mission in Paris, France). The mission sort of tempered and calmed him. He's not as energetic as he used to be. He's still David, just mellower. He did drive through a red light, which was pretty funny. I guess he's used to driving in Paris.
We set out around 12:30 or 1 pm driving ever east. We drove up over mountains and into Wyoming on I-80. Wyoming is pretty insane. There were all these billboards for a place called Little America, so we got all excited and stopped there, but it turned out to just be a hotel. So we bought postcards and ate the reeeally melted chocolate that had been in the back window of the car. We got back on the road and drove to Green River, which is a teeny tiny little excuse for a human settlement. We found a bank and then wandered around and stumbled on a bar called The Brewery. So we went in. It was about 5:30. We bought a pint of beer each (some Colorado beer called Easy Street or something) and drank with the locals. It was the bartender's birthday. He was a pretty nice guy. Some other guys were there, plus his wife or girlfriend and some other woman. They had a birthday cake for him. His name was Todd. They gave us directions to the grocery store. It was hilarious. I love bars.
We got in the car (after waiting for the nice tipsy feeling to wear off) and drove to Flaming Gorge National Recreation Area, where we are camping tonight. We sort of grilled some sausages, then drank a bottle of red wine from Bonny Doon Vineyards in Santa Cruz, then laughed at how drunk we were. We fell asleep around 10 and woke up because of a full bladder. It's about 1 am now, I think.
The sky here is amazing right now. It's huge and domed and the Big Dipper is RIGHT THERE. The clouds are all marbled and it's just such a strange feeling.... Land-locked places make me feel so weird. Like there's nowhere to go and you're all hemmed in by all the land, and the sky curves over you in every direction to meet the land, sealing you into the middle of a giant dome. It's kind of disconcerting.
Anyway. We're in Wyoming.