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Ok I only let you lon or on ni h. o, I you oun he ui k no e llin you I oul e one oupl o ni hts. My secret mission was to drive some holiday stuff up to our place in Utah and bring some of our stuff down from Utah.
It is 729 miles from our house in California to our place in Utah. If you don't drive like an idiot and don't hit too much traffic leaving or coming back to Southern California, and you don't hit any traffic in Las vegas, and you don't hit any traffic in Provo (Don't laugh they have been working of the freeway there since Bringham Young said, "I don't care there's no ocean, this will do."), you can make the trip in about nine and half hours including very quick potty breaks.
My buddy Dennis and I nailed it each way at almost exactly nine and half hours each way. He did most of the driving. It did bother me to watch him get out of the truck and walk with a lean to the left. When I asked, he said he was little dizzy. He still drove about 70% of the trip.
I was playing guitar. I brought my Washburn Traveler with me as I have not played in about a year or so and needed to build up my calluses again. After about 8 hours of playing guitar over two days, the tips of my left hand have nasty blister and it makes it very hard to type without crying. That is why the first two lines look the way it does. Here is how it should have looked.
OK, I only let you alone for one night. Two, if you count the quick note telling you I would be gone a couple of nights.
There, the Percodan and Demerol have kicked in and I can now type.
Dennis is so easy going when we travel together. We can go 200 miles and not say a word. Then we each wake up and are amused to discover we have not driven off the road.
He likes to listen to the 60s channel and I get to learn a lot about 60s singers and groups. I especially like how Dennis relates almost every some to whether he was in Vietnam or not. I usually get that determination within 16 bars of each song.
On this trip, I made it interesting by bring the guitar. If you have ever tried to play guitar to the radio, you know that all songs are tuned a little differently when they get played back over the radio. I have never understood why, because in theory every song should have been originally recorded at 440 cycles (for a standard C base note). But when you have some live cuts or some studio recording that was not right on the 440 cycles or the masters and glass master were not spun at the perfect speed, each song comes out just a little different when played back.
Poor Dennis had to listen to me try and find each song's melody in order to attempt to determine the key and then attempt to find the chords. All of which I suck at. Then I would get lucky to have a song in tune with the guitar and I would get even luckier when it was chords I could play like E, A D, G, C, and F as well as some of their deriviatives. (NO Bs ALLOWED).
Of course once all that luck was in place, either the song was now over or there was a key change. Any way Dennis's patience is to be commended.
He should also be commended because when I was not making his ears bleed, I was taking calls from my lovely wife who had a few fires happening on the home front. Now usually that would not be a band thing, but Dennis and I had found the Old Time Radio Channel.
We were listening to The Whistler, Fibber McGee and Molly, Johnny Dollar, Gunsmoke, to name a few. It seemed like Devin would call at the 25th minute of each half hour, which coincided with the end of each show. I honestly don't thin Dennis got to hear the end of any of those shows? Sorry Buddy.
We made it up to Utah by 5:30 and by the time we unpacked, we were both tired. We had a single malt and he headed to his humble abode and I unpacked a few of the boxes we brought up. Then it was 6:00 AM this morning and we were on the road by 7:00 AM.
So 19 hours, 4 calluses, a egg croissant sandwich, trail mix and 318 songs later, here I am saying good night to you.
We did interrupt our trip to listen to Bloomberg every few hundred miles, so let see what we missed.
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Since 11/25/2012
