For those of you who do not know, I'm going to Mesquite, Nevada to compete in the World Series of Beer Pong. Along with 9 friends (4 of which who drove out here with me) we will represent not only our league (chbpl.com) but our city and state as well. The following is a daily blog entry describing what went on each particular day...
1/01/06 - 2:57 am - 7 minutes into the trip, we're trying to leave Milwaukee and we've already lost Balkman and Aaron's girlfriend has already called to check in on him.
1/01/06 - 3:00 am - We just got pulled over by a Shorewood Cop because Aaron was driving without his headlights on. We calmly spoke with the cop and reassured her that we were not drinking (it was New Years after all) and that we were on our way to Nevada to compete in a beer pong tournament for a grand prize of $10,000. She gave us a friendly reminder to keep the headlights on at night and wished us well.
1/01/01 - 4:45 am - leaving for Mesquite for real now. Brodey finally decided to finish up working. We had been waiting for him for over 3 hours now (Salmon and I were at Aaron's at 1:30 am). I suggested that the people in the car (Brodey, Balkman, Aaron and Salmon) call me the enemy because I will be able to see all and I will write what I see (referring of course to Almost Famous.) Brodey responded with "My only enemies are Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MaDD). I'll try and use my writings to get them on the cover of Obscure Sports Quarterly (OSQ) or coverage on ESPN 8 - the Ocho. Aaron was coming up with possible comeback taunts to the opposing team when they try to taunts his team, including this clever one, "I live in the town that invented beer...don't give me that bullshit." Balkman said that it could possibly be a future t-shirt for members of the chbpl.
1/01/01 - 9:05 am - we're 70 miles from Des Moines and in the middle of Iowa.
1/01/01 - 9:45 am - Salmon is driving and raced a dude driving a VW Bora with a license plate reading VWPower. This is the greatest race that Iowa's freeway has seen since the Corvette/Pontiac GTO race of 1964, and we all know how that turned out. Salmon's Honda won the race, finishing ahead of the Bora in laps 1 and 3, before totally losing sight of it when he pulled ahead of it for good.
1/01/01 - 12:25 pm - crossed over the Mississippi river and into Nebraska - the home of Arbor Day. Seriously, that's what it says on the sign. The display sign for the city of Omaha did feature full signs trains though - woo woo!
1/01/01 - 7:47 pm (Mountain time) - Stopping in the Denver outskirts at a Burger King for some grindage. Along the way here, we saw...
- a semi truck flipped onto its side
- a burned out semi trailer that caught in fire
- a semi that almost hit a fox 50 feet in front of the car when I was driving and swerved
around it just in time.
That pretty much sums up the last 6 hours. I drove and Salmon and Balkman played Mario Party on Game Cube. Brodey was asleep on the backseat still, where he would be until Balkman drove, which was arguably the most exciting part of the entire drive out.
01/01/01 - 8:00ish pm - Balkman got behind the wheel for the first time and had to endure the worst driving conditions of the trip. He drove through the Rocky Mountains, in the dark and with snow on the ground. The turns were sharp, the visibility was low, the downhill grade was steep and I was hiding underneath my hood listening to my headphones and shielding my eyes from the road. I seriously thought we were going to die, but I was confident in Balkman's ability to keep me alive. He came through on his promise, and we made it. It's so beautiful up in the mountains, especially around Vail and Colorado Springs; places that I could never afford to live, but I couldn't bring myself to look out the window.
01/02/01 - 12:00ish am - 6:30ish am - Balkman and Brodey took turns driving through Colorado, Utah, and Nevada. We arrived it Las Vegas at about 6:30 am. We decided to skip stopping in Mesquite for now because it was far too early to check in to the hotel. Since Brodey, Balkman and Aaron had never been to Vegas, we thought it would be nice to check it out once in the daytime and once again at night (when we go back on January 6th before driving home.) I was super psyched to be in Las Vegas again, but everyone was so tired and didn't feel like staying long. I'll talk more on this when I bring it up on the entry about January 2nd's events. We got to the hotel in Mesquite at about 9:30-10:00 am, but out hotel room wasn't ready yet. Arriving at our final destination meant that this road trip was complete for now, and the fun can now begin. Stay tuned for Day 2 of my trip out here and the beginning of the WSoBP.
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