A Lot of America - Part 3

Part 3 of my series A Lot of America, the film about my road trip with my buddy Dan.



In this part: Grand Canyon, Arizona, New Mexico, El Paso.

A Lot of America - Parts 1 and 2

Here is Part 1 of "A Lot of America" - Utah and a bit of Arizona












Part 2 - Las Vegas and Hoover Dam

This is a 6-part series, so be on the look out for the rest.






Filmed and edited by A.J. Cabrera and Daniel Thomson

An A Games Productions Film

Road Trip: What Actually Happened

I hope you enjoyed the preview in the preview blog (to those in the Islands...I understand if your internet is not good enough to allow you to view these clips. They're not going anyway). If you haven't seen it yet, scroll down and watch it. If you've seen it already, watch it again.

More movies are definitely on the way. My buddy Dan and I are taking this film editing project pretty seriously. In fact, I think we're taking the film of our road trip more seriously than we took the actual road trip. Ponder that.

Anyway, a little bit about the trip:

Over 4,000 miles driven in 12 days.

Amount spent on lodging: $0.

Number of couches I slept on that were too small for me: 3

Tempurature in Utah, April 27th: 50s.


Tempurature the next day in Nevada: high 60s


Tempurarute in Phoenix, the day after that: high 90s!! And like -10% humidity!



Best meal: Atlanta, fried chicken, fried green tomatoes, sweet corn, corn bread, fried steak, and Coke, but not imported Coke because Coke is made in Atlanta, so it tastes better there (or so I convinced myself).



Longest drive: El Paso to Houston....12 freakin hours. I'd say 10 of those hours are through NOTHING.





NOTE: To Texans: stop boasting how big your state is if there is nothing even as interesting as a tumbleweed in 65% of it.





ANOTHER NOTE: We did see and in fact run into several tumbleweeds along the way. But that happened in Arizona and New Mexico, where there were cacti and dust storms, two things way more interesting than western Texas.





A FINAL NOTE: Don't make fun of Connecticut.








Longest road: we were on I-10 East for the longest time EVER. From Tuscon, Arizona alllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll the way to Mobile, Alabama. Thank you, Interstate 10 East. Dan and I miss you dearly, but at the same time, we dislike you a lot. We've had too much of you.

Interesting things we saw:





Salt Lake Mormon Temple


Rocky Mountains


The desert! (first time for me...well, not true. Spain has deserts, but these are a little different)


Las Vegas Strip


Hoover Dam


Grand Canyon (best part...every human on Earth should see this thing)


Mexico border at El Paso


Astors game


NASA


9th Ward in New Orleans


French Quarter in New Orleans


beautiful beach and Atlantic Ocean in North Carolina











First for me: eating crawfish in New Orleans. It was not that bad, but I prefer the fried shrimp poboys.




Places stayed at, in this order: Provo, UT; Las Vegas, NV; Phoenix, AZ; El Paso, TX; Houston, TX; New Orleans, LA; Mobile, AL; Atlanta, GA; Willmington, NC; Williamsburg, VA; Greenwich, CT




Some rules followed:



1. No junk food in the car (it's so easy to mindlessly snack while driving, but you feel so rotten afterwards).





2. No fast food. If there were no local eateries we could check out, we usually resorted to a low calorie, low budget snack: baby carrots, Wheat Thins, peanut butter (for the record, the peanut butter we bought in Phoenix is still in Dan's car...and still edible), and Gatorade...lots and lots of Gatorade. The elixer of life, as I like to call it.





3. No AC. Saves gas. There were a lot of sweaty backs in the southern states (gross).


4. I'm sure there were some other rules, especially ones we made up along the way, but I cannot remember them now.












A Fun Game to Play on Road Trips:
The Vanity Licsence Plate Game


We taped a blank page onto the dashboard to mark Dan's and my scores. Every time we saw a car with a vanity liscence plate (like "HEY BUD" or "FLYGRL" or "LIZZZZZ") you would have to a) shout it out first and b) shout it out correctly to get the point. This game got VICIOUS. So competitive. Dan kicked my butt.

Motto of the trip: "Victory or Death"

We adopted that somewhere in South Carolina. Dan and I listened to 1776 on CD. Awesome story. We both really got into the whole battle of Trenton, Washington crossing the Delaware (we now both refer to him as His Excellency, as he was referred to back then), and one of the passwords of the night was "victory or death." So that's obviously what we're going to use now.

Other things we did to pass the time:

1) Memorize all of the state capitals. We did it, but we memorized two incorrectly. On our map, it looked like Philadelphia and Lexington were the capitals of Pennsilvannia and Kentucky, respectively. But they are obviously Harrisburg and Frankfort!! Duh!!

2) Try to rank all 50 states in order of square miles!! It's really hard to do. Hint: start with the smaller states. The biggest 4 are simple, and so are the smallest 10. But everything in between gets a little tricky. Dan and I actually did very well. Yay spacial reasoning.

3) The Power Cabinet. This was the most popular thing we did. This easily took up several hours to think about. Essentially, we want to create a Presidential Administration that is comprised entirelly of fictional characters from film and TV. We have to fill out the top positions in our government with people like Han Solo or the Terminator. The character cannot have already held that position, or else Jed Bartlett from the West Wing would obviously be our president.

Here is a taste of what we came up with:

President - Don Vito Corleone, from The Godfather

Vice President - Professor Xavier from X-Men

Sec. Defense - Optimus Prime from Transformers

Sec. Tansportation - Dr. Emmit Brown from Back to the Future

Chief Justice - Jack McCoy from Law and Order

Head of EPA - Captain Planet

Sec. State - Gandalf from The Lord of the Rings

and so on.

NOTE: We have asked almost every person we stayed with, including many liberal-minded females, and there has not been ONE good idea for a female character, especially for the position of First Lady. Society's fault, not ours.

Ultimately, this trip felt great for me. It's a fitting way to end my "transition year", my year of coming back home to the states. Just two weeks with my buddy, no worries, and a chance to finally see most of this country that I need to now start calling my home. For any of you who have lived abroad for so long, you will feel me when I say it's easy to call another country your new home.

After living back on this "main island" for almost a whole year at this point, and after feasting my eyes on the beauitful Rocky's, sprawling deserts, the Grand Canyon, and the great people in this country, I think I'm ready to feel more settled into America.

Don't miss out on my videos about my road trip, coming soon!

Road Trip

I'm back! 3 weeks ago I flew out to Provo, Utah to see my friend Dan graduate from BYU. I spent a week in the land of Mormons and it was a blast.



Two weeks ago he and I left for our road trip across the country, back home to Greenwich, CT. Dan and I have planned this trip for over a year now.



I have tons of pictures that will be posted soon. I am also making a movie of our trip. But for now, enjoy a small teaser trailer:

East Coast Party

Hi everyone.

Let's consider these past 8 months of mine to be one big road trip. One big party on the east coast.

I want to take this time to reflect on these past 8 months because, well, right now I'm not traveling, and that's a huge shock to me, in a way. My life was dictated by my next destination, the hours it would take to get there, and the mental preparation needed to consider a 5 hour drive normal.

So let us consider the past 8 months.

Travelling, for me, started in the middle of September.

According to the second to last blog I wrote in 2007, I traveled roughly 12,500 miles! That took place in about 90 days.

That's an average of 139 miles a day!

Now the second half of my job.

I started travelling again in mid-January. I finished my job at the end of April (although two weekends ago I did make (driving) it up to and down from Boston in 3 days.). So in the past 3 months, I traveled to New Orleans, Jacksonville, Gainesville, Miami, Baltimore, Boston, Worcester, Fairfield, New York, Philadelphia, Raleigh, Charlottesville, Williamsburg and Washington DC.

According to my GPS, since I began to use the rental car on the last day of January, I have driven over 4,610 miles. That does not include driving from New Orleans to Mobile, Jacksonville, FL, to Miami, and my recent Boston trip. Oh yeah, and the flying.

So with all of the flying and driving taken into account, I have traveled about.....

7,600 miles.

Now, if we take that number and add it to my first couple of months as a recruiter, we get...

20,100 miles! That is how much I traveled this year. That of course does not count my winter trip to Spain, or the train I took to and from Greenwich and Baltimore.

And all of that was accomplished in 7 months.

It's been a crazy year, and calculating those numbers proves it.

What is left to do after an accomplishment like that?

Obviously travel from Utah, down through the south, back up to Connecticut in about 2 weeks.

Road trip! Starting tomorrow! Until then, enjoy a video to celebrate my past year of traveling.

April

Hello everyone.

Blog posting has been down.

Why?

Because I'm not traveling any more. I'm in the office in Baltimore, doing office work. It is a nice break from the craziness of driving miles and miles and miles and miles.

But two new updates for you:

1) I'm driving up to Boston this Friday (hopefully stopping at Greenwich to pick up some Garden Catering High School Special with extra honey mustard) for an idealist.org international volunteer fair. Coolest part: I'm driving stick shift all the way up there. Should be interesting. Hopefully I will be part of some high-speed chase scene, because it looks cooler if you are driving stick during a high-speed chase scene. Let's be honest.

2) April 22nd is an important date. NO! Not because of the PA Primary (Obama is going to win the nomination). Because a different type of traveling will start on that date!

What do I speak of? I will leave you in suspense for now.

Meanwhile, watch that Micronesian video I made so you, like me, can wish you were there right now.

The Things They Carried

Being on the road is exhilarating; meeting many new people, visiting beautiful and often historic college campuses, driving through the American countryside (I know he eastern seaboard can hardly be called the quintessential American “countryside” in relation to the Midwest or the west coast, but give me a break).

The life of a road warrior is also exhausting. For the past 7 months, as my traveling comes to a close, I reflect on how crazy I must have been to be able to withstand the vigor of being away from home, sleeping on couches, playing guest, being “on” all the time, etc.

One thing I think about is how organized I had to be in order to survive on the road, to stay fresh and clean and prepared. Here are ALL of the things that I usually had with me while traveling from city to city, college to college.

1 Rental car.

One laptop bag. One laptop computer, headphones, extension cord. Promotional DVD. Checkbook for emergencies, flash-drive, name tag, a few pens, extra copies of application and promotional brochures.

One display stand. One stand-up poster. Three pamphlet stands. 6 different types of small booklets, about 50 each. Stacks of single sheet, half-page brochures, over 100. Stack of bigger, 10-page booklets, about 50. Application booklets, also about 50 at a time. A bag of promotional pins. A couple of handfuls of promotional pens.

A travel bag with travel sized toothpaste, two shampoos (in case I lose one, which I have), travel sized body wash, small (not travel sized) shaving cream, disposable razor, toothbrush, nail clipper, ear plugs, eye mask (I have been made fun of many times for that, but when I’m sleeping in a living room, where the light shines in early in the morning and people are walking about, it has been very useful). Cold medicine for the day, cold medicine for the night. Advil. A bag of cough drops.

One big travel bag to keep clothing in the car. One smaller travel bag, which usually contains my toiletry bag and the clothes I am wearing for the next day.

Two pairs of shoes, three pairs of pants, anywhere between 3-4 dress shirts, depending on how long I will be away from home. 4-5 white under-shirts, 7 pairs of boxers, 7 pairs of socks, sweatshirt, jacket. Flannel pants, long-sleeved pajama shirt. Winter hat, gloves, scarf.

These are the things I bring with me on my travels. Sometimes I realize it’s too much, but it’s nice to know that I am prepared and have enough clothing where I do not have to re-wear dirty clothing.

Also, thankfully I have a car to store all of these things in. When I travel by plane, it’s a pain to carry all of these things with me.

So that’s what I take with me. And as I leave Greenwich for Baltimore (I’m currently on the Amtrak train right now, leaving New York City), I am glad to realize that my travels are finished for the year. This 4 hour train ride is considered the last trip to conclude 7 months of this insanity.

Which is why it was a complete pleasure to only pack my computer, a pair of socks and my basketball shorts for this Easter Break. That’s it. Traveling with nothing is a liberating experience. You should try it, if you can get away with it.