Dr. Giganto

So, this past weekend, I made my first trip out to the West Coast. Here's the story (pictures to come soon)

The story begins the night before. It's 4:45, I'm getting ready to leave work and go home and pack so I can be ready for my flight at 7:20 a.m. One of my co-workers says, "Hey Tom, we're going to happy hour, wanna come?" I say "Sure, but I have to leave early, so I can be rested up for my flight". Next thing I know, it's 1 a.m., I'm drunk as a skunk By the time I settle my tab, find a cab, and head home, it's almost 2:30 a.m.

I say to myself, "Hmmm...I need to be up in like 3 hours anyway, so I'll just pull an all-nighter. I pass out on my couch 10 minutes later. So, after 2 hours of sleep I head out to the airport with a raging hangover. I have some leftover painkillers (Vicodin) from a recent medical problem, so I pop two pills thinking that it will cure my headache and make me numb and put me to sleep. Unfortunately, all it did was make me nauseous. But, I managed to make it off the flight without puking.

So, I pick up my rental car from the Long Beach airport, and drive down the Pacific Coast Highway (a beautiful road, by the way) to Huntington Beach, where my girlfriend is waiting for me at her friend's house. Her friend is at work, so we have a few hours to get some food and some sleep. Despite my utter exhaustion, my girlfriend forces me to take a bike ride along the beach with her to this burger shack about a mile up the PCH. I was absolutely miserable, but the burger was delicious, and it cheered me up a little bit. So, we head home and sleep for a few hours.

Her friend comes home from work, and we head to downtown Huntington Beach. We go to this bar/restaurant with a Mexican theme, and I get a giant chicken burrito, and down a few beers. Unfortunately, we're all tired, and we head home kinda early. Me and my girlfriend are sleeping on an air mattress in the living room, and we wake way earlier than her friends that we are staying with. So, we decide on a little late night romp in the sack. it was good.

Saturday, we wake up, and find that my girlfriend's friend's husband has bought breakfast for us (chocolate-filled croissants and almond criossants) from this really good bakery around them. We then head out to beach, while i wait for my friend from high school to get done hanging out with his family in Pasadena. On the way to meet my friend, we stop at In-and-Out burger and I get a double-double, which was fucking great. The fries kinda sucked though. but I digress...

So we then drive away from the beach, to the desert and my friend's place in Palm Springs. We pass the Morongo Casino (where they film that "Poker Superstars" show on Fox Sports Net), and a bunch of giant energy generating windmills. We go to my friend's place, get some more Mexican food, smoke some sticky-icky, drink some beers, and then meet up with my girlfriend and another of my friend's from high school, who came by a little bit later. We then went bar-hopping in downtown Palm Springs, and we saw a statue of Sonny Bono. We then head to the Spa Resort Casino in downtown Palm Springs, and I unfortunately lost $100 playing poker. Still, I had a good time.

The next day we wake up to discover that it's like 90 degrees out, and we head out to get breakfast. After breakfast, we go to the Coldstone Creamery for some ice cream. We then head up to the Joshua Tree national park, which is a big desert with cool rocks and Joshua trees. We climbed up one of the rock formations, took some cool pictures, and had a good time all-around. We learned that the temperature in the summer gets to be 120 degrees 4 feet above ground, 150 degrees one foot off the ground, 160 degrees six inches off the ground, and 180 degrees on the surface. Yowzers...

We then leave my high school friends and drive back to Huntington Beach. My girlfriend's really hot college roommate drives up from San Diego with her nerdy and introverted boyfriend. We have a barbecue, drink some beer, and chat for a while. The hot girl unfortunately leaves to head back hom to SD, and the rest of us go to sleep.

the next morning, me, my girlfriend, and her friend drive up towards Long Beach, and we stop at this nice beach town a few miles south of it. We go to this restaurant that serves authentic Lebanese food and have a big delicious meal. Me and my girlfriend then head up to Long Beach airport, hop on our Jet Blue flight, wait anxiously for 24 to come on, watch 24 on the flight, then land in NY only 15 minutes behind schedule.

When we get out of the airport, we go to where taxis pick people up. There's a really long line, and there's a bunch of "gypsy cab" drivers trying to pick people up. Going from JFK Airport to Manhattan is a 45 dollar flat fee, and anywhere else, it's whatever the meter says. But, we're making two stops, me in Queens and my girlfriend in Manhattan, so we dont know how the fare is going to work. One of the gypsy cab drivers says that he'll take me to Queens for 35 dollars, and then my girlfriend to her place for the regular cost to go that far, which by my experience is usually 20 dollars at most. So, we figure it will cost 55 at most, and we walk witht he cabbie to his car in the parking lot. when we get to the car, he says, "ok, so it's 35 to your place in queens, then 45 plus tip the rest of the way", and we're like "WHOA!!! That's NOT what we agreed on" and he's insisting thats what it is, so I tell him to just take me to my place in Queens, and she'll take a yellow cab for 20 bucks from there. And he says "No, if you're not going to Manhattan, I'm not taking you anywhere". So I tell him to go fuck himself, and we take our bags out of the trunk, I tell him that he's lucky that I don't kick the shit out of him right then and there, and me and my gf walk back to the cab stand, get a yellow cab, it cost between 50 and 55 bucks, and I got home at 2 a.m., and unfotunately had to work the next day.

So, despite a few bumps in the road here and there, I had a great time. California is awesome. I loved it there.