2 July 2008: Laramie, Wyoming

Believe it or not, my trip didn't end in Provo.

After I left Rachel's place, in less than the best of moods on account of the Mormon cock block, I walked back to the twins' house to get my stuff. Like I've said, they always left a key in the mailbox for me, so I could get back into the house whenever I decided to call it a night, but Lenora had left town and Nerina was spending the night elsewhere and didn't know where her key was. So I had to climb in through Nerina's window.

That, in and of intself, isn't such a big deal because I'm pretty acrobatic. But I had to climb/crawl my way through the tightest of spaces, and I knocked Nerina's ceramic coin bank which she had gotten in Italy off the window ledge and it broke. I couldn't believe it. I mean, I literally could not believe it. What a fucking way to go out, Zach.

Anyway, I got my pack and walked to a bus stop a few blocks away. From there I took a bus little ways down and then another bus to the very end of the train line, at which point I took the train to downtown Salt Lake City. Not quite downtown, I guess, but just south of downtown near an on-ramp for the east-bound Route 80.

And just like that, I was back on the road.

I had gotten a pretty early start to the day, and despite the 90 minute trip from Provo to Salt Lake, I was still making good time. But when I got to the on-ramp I saw that there was another dude already trying to thumb a ride.

Now, when it comes to hitch-hiking, there is a certain degree of etiquette you have to employ when you've got competition. Anyone who's actually trying ot hitch hike has most likely been on their feet for quite some time, so it's not unreasonable for a second hitcher (me) to set up on the same on-ramp as the original hitcher (this dude) rather than walking to a new spot. The only thing is, you've got to give the first guy enough space so that, if he does thumb a ride, it's clear who the car is stopping for.

Well, this other dude was standing almost right at the very start of the on-ramp. I mean, he literally might have been five feet from where it began to curve. So, one, he had chosen a pretty terrible to stand. His loss. But, two, he gave me just about the entire rest of the on-ramp to choose from. My gain.

So I picked a spot a bit of a ways past him and set down my pack. And wouldn't you know, no more than five minutes later the dude turned around and walked past me without saying a word and stopped about fifty feet away.

No, no, no.

This dude had just totally infringed on my turf, and I was not pleased. But you gotta grin and bare it, since we were both trying to get SOMEWHERE. It's the etiquette of the road, after all, and if someone breaks it-- well, you just hope even more that you still get where you're going first. It's the bulletin board material of a life on the road.

Anyway, I didn't have to worry, because 17 minutes after I set down my pack A.J. picked me up in a silver PT Cruiser and took me from Salt Lake City to Park City. A.J. was, in a sense, my counterpart, but if my counterpart was a part-time plumber. Which A.J. was. But he's also a part-time snowboard instructor, which is sweet as hell. As he put it, "Plumbing is a job but snowboarding is a treat. I mean, teaching what I love to someone who's gonna love it, seeing a kid make his first turn-- there's nothing better."

He was leaving Salt Lake to go back home, because he had just fucked his friend's sister "who just turned legal" and he had to leave before his friend got back and kicked his ass. As if that weren't good enough, he said that he also a little while back fucked his other friend's mom at a party, a la "American Pie," and now "dinners over there aren't the same." What a champ. The other cool thing about this dude is that his third job, I guess, is he takes pictures from mountain peaks all over the world and sells them to be used in postcards. Pretty sweet.

So A.J. dropped me off in Park City, and no one was biting. It had been about an hour and, though that wasn't really so terrible, it had been one of the longest waits of the trip so far and I was feeling a little discouraged. Then this complete idiot pulled over and asked if I wanted a ride to Provo. I was on the east-bound side. Check a map.

To be perfectly honest, if he had come by ten minutes later instead I might have gone with him. I guess I just couldn't really escape the draw of the Provo charm. Although this time it might have been for Rachel.

Finally, after exactly an hour and a half, this dude Miguel Galegos picked me up in a silver Beetle, although he only took me to Coalville which was about ten minutes down the road. I wouldn't have minded talking to this dude longer because we had the following conversation a few minutes after I got in, when I saw the "Hillary Clinton '08" hat on his dashboard.

me: Guess you must be pretty upset about Obama being the nominee.
dude: Yeah, we were all pretty disappointed.
me: Who was?
dude: Well, Hillary obviously, but I mean all the rest of us too.

So yeah, it turned out I had thumbed a ride with one of the senior field directors of the Clinton campain. Which, all politics aside, was pretty cool.

Not to mention that this made him the most accomplished person to ever pick me up. By far.

Anyway, this dude Miguel obviously had a bit more to say than I did, not to mention that, having spent the past year almost exclusively traveling with and campaigning for Clinton, I probably didn't have a single thing to say that would have interested him in the least. Which I was fine with.

Anyway, I'm not going to lie and say that I understood even half of what he was saying, but one of the things I did pick up is that "People don't realize this, but Hillary's campaign is only suspended, not aborted." What that means, according to this dude, is that Clinton is going to request a role-call vote at the DNC in Denver, at which point-- as is the plan-- all her half votes will become full votes. And then, so says her senior field director, "Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee for President."

You heard it here first.

After Miguel dropped me off in Coalville, I had another long wait-- an hour and 27 minutes until Kansas and Cody picked me up in a silver Subaru Forester and took me to Evanston. These two dudes were on their way up to Bear Lake for the 4th of July, which was also where Provo-Katie was spending the holiday. So, for already the second time, I found myself very nearly saying fuck it to Wyoming and going back to Provo-- although this one would have been to Bear Lake, instead of back to Provo, to see Katie.

(I should say that, on the ride that finally took me into the state of Wyoming, are there any two more appropriate names for the kids who drove me than Kansas and Cody? That's partly ironic, but mostly pretty obvious. Which I guess makes it a paradox.)

I must also point out though that before we got to Evanston, and in fact less than a minute after they picked me up, Kansas and Cody decided to stop for another hitch-hiker. My nemesis from Salt Lake City.

Yes, that guy. We were on a race going east, and we ended up in the same fucking car. Unbelievable. And let me take a break from my story, now, because this dude's story needs a bit of explaining too.

Basically, he's hitch-hiking from Malibu to New York City, which he said was "a good distance." To put this in more obvious terms, he could have just as easily said he was going from Los Angeles to New York City, and that would have been the same "good distance."

1) Thanks for pointing that out. I had no idea California was far from New York.

2) Could there be any "gooder distance" than what he was trying to do? I mean, short of going from Seattle to Miami, maybe this dude has never looked at a map in his entire life because "a good distance" isn't quite how I would describe his journey.

Anyway, to make matters even worse, not only was he trying to hitch-hike 3000 miles, but his bag was stolen back in Malibu, he only had $5 left, and he was traveling completely empty-handed. Talk about a sob story, he might've been my nemesis but I gave the dude $5. Of course.

The worst thing about this dude, though, wasn't that he had no sense of hitch-hiking etiquette. It's that he told us, in complete seriousness, that New York "is the biggest city on the east coast" and "you need to stay hydrated, you know, it's important." I had no idea. I hated this guy.

By the time I got dropped off in Evanston, I was beginning to get a little nervous. I had spent over three hours thumbing on the on-ramps and had already gotten three different rides, and I had traveled a whopping 90 miles. I was maybe three miles inside the Utah-Wyoming border, and still had 300 miles to go to get to Laramie. If I had another hour and a half wait on the side of the road I'd probably end up spending the night in The Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Wyoming. If it took me three more rides to get there, I'd probably end up spending the night in The Middle of Fucking Nowhere, Wyoming.

But as the way of the road would have it, Casey, Jamie and Kendra picked me up in their gray Toyota Corolla as I was literally walking down the on-ramp. This is a rare occurance on the road, but easily one of the all-time moves. First of all, you look totally sweet as you're walking backwards, towards your destination, and your thumb is pointing the way, too. That's how you know you're a bad-ass hitch-hiker. But secondly, it's what I call the negative-minute wait, since you're still at least a minute from reaching the spot where you would set down your pack. Thus, you waited for at least one negative minute.

So that took care of the hour and a half wait dilemma. But even better? These three kids were on a roadtrip to Chicago. And so it took me less time to go the final 300 miles than it took me to go the first 90. What an incredible thing that was.

This was seriously one of the most beautiful rides I'd gotten. Four hours of straight driving. During the first half of the ride the windows were down, so it was too loud to talk. During the second half of the ride they were playing their friend's CD, so no one else was talking. I was just sleeping in the back seat and hanging out and loving it. Great times.

By the time I got dropped off in Laramie it was well past 9:00. My first move was to try campus and see if there was any activity, but the union was closed and the library was completely empty. So I went back outside and tried to find students walking around campus, but it was just as dead outside as it was inside. I saw three people in nearly half an hour, and what I got from them was that there was no "student housing," no "student food," and no "student bar." To top it all off, there were pretty much "no students."

What was recommended was to go to the cowboy bar-- as is to be expected in the great state of Wyoming-- which was apparently the hot bar on campus. So I went. Not exactly a thrill ride, but it was OK. There was a hokie rock band and a sweet harmonica player and a hot 26 year-old celebrating her birthday. I figured I'd give the cowboy bar enough time for the 26 year-old to either work out or crash and burn, and when it was clear it would be the second I decided to head out.

But as I was leaving I finally found out what I had been looking for-- where to go for a student bar. So I went to Third Street Bar, which is such an obvious "student bar" that I literally must have met the only three people who go to the University of Wyoming and didn't know that.

It should be pointed out before anything else, though, that I brought my pack to the bar for the first time on this trip. In all five of my previous college-town jaunts I only brought my school backpack. When I would go to the bar, if I hadn't already found a place to crash, I would just stash my backpack under a bush somewhere on campus and pick it up later that night or the next morning. It was small enough that it would be completely hidden, plus I figured that even if it was stolen I would lose some clothes and an old, ripped backpack. Not a huge loss.

Well, with my new pack there's no way I was going to leave it somewhere overnight. For one, it's too big and would probably be visible almost anywhere I could hide it, and for another, I sure as hell can't replace it if it gets stolen. Luckily-- or, depending on who you ask, luck has nothing to do with it-- I had found a place to crash every night before I went out, so the pack was never an issue.

This time, though, I had no choice but to bring it with me. Not that I was particularly upset by it. There's nothing you can do or have at a bar that's more money than a big pack. If you walk into a bar with a pack, you're obviously a traveler and, bam, there's your conversation with anyone else who's in there. If you've got a pack everyone knows that you have some stories, so you're not going to spend more than five minutes the entire night by yourself.

Not to mention that, once in a while, the bartender will give you a beer on the house because you're "living the dream." And by once in a while, I mean the bartender at Third Street Bar.

Anyway, I sat at the bar for a little while but realized I wouldn't find my couch in my current location. So I picked up and moved to a table with three friendly-looking people and, no differently than if I were still at Denny's in Provo, I sat down.

It was a dude Andrew, his girlfriend Gabby, and Gabby's sister Catherine. Andrew was obviously and right off the bat an incredibly friendly dude and Gabby seemed pretty nice too. They went to the bathroom after a little bit and it was just me and Catherine, and I found out that she has a three-year old son and had gotten married the week before. And then, for some reason, I called her husband a douche. I'm not really sure why. Anyway, I guess that was Strike One.

So, as you might imagine, Catherine wasn't exactly crazy about me, but Andrew was digging the pack-- see, I told you-- and Gabby just kept smiling. I knew about 30 seconds from the moment I sat down that I had found my couch for the night, and I wasn't disappointed when the bar closed and we left.

In fact, I guess you could say that they didn't hook me up with a couch, because Andrew asked if I wanted to stay at his mom's house that night or go back to Gabby's with them. Not wanting to intrude on him and Gabby, this was a pretty easy choice. Thinking I might get to channel a little "A. J. time," the choice was even easier.

As it turned out, Andrew's mom wasn't around, so that part of the dream was over. But not only did I get the guest room to myself, I got the entire freaking house to myself. Not a bad deal.