Mph for "The Road Trip"

So the headline news is that our average Mph for the whole whole trip is an amazing 29.75 Mph!! How cool is that!?!?!? This includes time eating, sleeping, cavorting. The whole thing. Woot!

We travelled a whopping 13,775 miles in 463 hours, 3693 of which were driven across America. Distances and times were measured from Edinburgh to Edinburgh. Working is below and hasn't been checked. Corrections will be filed in an industrial furnace.

Less cooly this also involved us chucking out something like 4837.31 Kg of Co2 per person. Serious environmental Karma damage. Oh well.

Miles in whole trip = (3665 + 590 + 55) + 3693 + (5442 + 330) = 13775
Hours in whole trip = 13 + (18 * 24) + 18 = 463
Mph over whole trip = 13775 / 463 = 29.75

Car Co2 per person on road trip =
3693 miles / 22 mpg = 167.86 Gallons
167.86 gallons * 8.87 kg of Co2 per gallon = 1488.92 Kg of Co2
1488.92 Kg / 3 people = 496.31 Kg of Co2 per person

Flight Co2 per person on road trip =
19.56 pounds of Co2 per gallon
1810 kg Co2 on way out
2531 kg Co2 on way back

Total = 496.31 + 1810 + 2531 = 4837.31 kg of Co2

June 25th LA -> Edinburgh

Well I can't really be bothered writing too much about our day in LA so I'm going to do a bit about the jolly fine Bradbury building (its in BladeRunner!) and then describe most of the rest of the day in chronological order using short phrases. This should be enough to remind me what I did in LA in times to come if not much fun for you guys :)

The Bradbury building was commissioned by a chap called Lewis Bradbury. He went through a variety of architects whos design's didn't match his grandiose plans. Instead, and somewhat curiously, he then hired a draftsman with no architectual training. The draftsman had apparantly been instructed to take the job whilst conversing with his dead brother, which is certainly an interesting opening line for an interview and seemed to do the trick. The building itself is inauspicious from the outside but really neat inside. It makes heavy use of glazed bricks, ornamental tiles and detailed wrought iron work that appears to be in Parisian style. It has a nice airy feel from the central courtyard and the large glass domed roof which lets in copious amounts of light. Its great! and looks nothing like it did in BladeRunner, where it was the dilapidated apartment block inhabited by Sebastian.

Heres some photos from as high up as the public can get in the building :-





Ah, and the draftsman subsequently switched to being an architect and produced nothing of note for the rest of his life. Hmmm.

And for the rest of the Day :-
Wake, Drive, Bel Air, Look, Suburbs, Breakfast pie, Chap from 'Swingers', Stupid valet parking nonsense, Ooo lovely lovely Bradbury building from Bladerunner, Downtown LA, walkity-walk, What a dump, Everyone is spanish, Crippled chap doing a job that could be replaced with an IR sensor, Cheap labour, Silly, Hollywood sign, walkity-walk, Hollywood street with the stars on it, Ah godzilla has a star - wierd, Blokes dressed as storm troopers, Chinese man theatre, Beach, Mmm beach nice, Sun, Flight soon - sadness, Flight. Right.

June 24th Santa Barbara -> Los Angeles

June 24th Santa Barbara -> Los Angeles

There were few things that could have voluntarily dragged me away from Devon's parents place. Brenna's promise of a Kappa Kappa Gamma soriety girl fuelled evening featuring a mechanical bull turned out to be one of them. After some general pottering around in Santa Barbara we cruised onto our final stretch of road :( and, with a seemingly endless array of songs about California, cast off for LA.

We arrived in LA and met up with Brenna's friends one of whom would be graciously supplying couch, bed and floor. They all looked exactly like the Californians on TV. It was a bit freaky, had all the ugly girls been culled under some secret Gattaca-esque eugenics program? Perhaps it's just that most people at UCLA come from pretty darn rich backgrounds.

We began the evening with a visit to 'In n Out', an apparantly famous fast food burger joint. I was initially sceptical but won over by the brilliant menu. The menu has 5 things on it! Burger, Cheese Burger, Double Cheese Burger, Fries, Coke. Somehow in an age of ever increasing consumer choice, fancy meals and anal nitpicking about exactly how ones sandwich should be constructed an 'optimised' menu had managed to remain! It's so easy, you basically decide whether you want cheese! Long live 'In n Out' I say.

Post burger (with cheese) we loaded up on a raft of our old friend 'Deux Eques' and Corona. We proceeded back to to the flat and begin drinking with Brenna and Co and await the arrival of the remainder of the Kappa Kappa Gamma gaggle. A few degenerative beers later we were ready to hit the town. However, it turns out getting a cab on a saturday night in LA is really, really, really hard. Multiple attempts and summon a Cab and some more beers later we decided to blow morality and pinch a Cab that had turned up looking for someone else. Hey-ho, lets hope the mechanical bull doesn't attempt to recalim some karma by throwing me through a wall.

Disgorging from our ill gotten Cab we entered 'Saddle Ranch', a bar with a mechanical bull and OC stylee crowd. A quick round of drinks later the Bull looked fun, and reckoning that any more beers would impair my ability to get on the Bull never mind stay on it I began reading the lengthy legal documentation I would have to sign to approach the Bull. The Bull itself is a human controlled mechanical beast that bucks and rolls around. Whilst on the Bull your only allowed to hold on with one hand, the other must apparantly be thrown around in a cowboy like fashion. Mounting the Bull I managed to stay on for a respectable period and longer than I expected, Keith slid off like his trousers were made of a some sort of super frictionless teflon and Josh with a vice like grip with his soon to be bruised thighs managed to stay on for the full run of the Bull. There were also numerous female attempts on the Bull which I mention only to note they're a bit rude to detail. One I will however mention was from a lassie who was quite clearly, well there's no other word for it (gulp), fucking the Bull. Bizarre. I mention it as I have never, ever, seen so many camera phones produced so quickly, a new danger of our times indeed :) Other than that the evening passed acceptably in an odd world of californian style chat with mexican liquor induced haze.

Tomorrow we bum around LA before catching flight back home.

June 22nd, 23rd Santa Barbara

June 22nd, 23rd Santa Barbara.

Driving towards Santa Barbara I felt a pang of sadness. Despite it's enormous size we'd somehow managed to run out of America to drive across. I still felt the road trip momentum, I still wanted to keep moving, try more places and, unusually for me, I was nowhere near ready to return to bonny Scotland. However we weren't over yet! and mentally reviewing our journey so far I drifted into Santa Barbara with a satisfied smile.

In Santa Barbara we had the immense good fortune to be staying in what can be best described as tasteful opulence. We were staying with Devon's parents. Devon's physicist father had started a Infared detector company at some point, had done rather well out of it and bought an old, run down, spanish style villa with grounds to do up. Well they done it up alright, it's now a *gorgeous* tastefully decorated villa complex based around a central courtyard. It comes complete with stables, six horses, riding area, wine cellar, guest house, easy access to a pool etc etc and some cool pets. It's also in the same sealed community as Oprah's place, and it looks much cooler than her's. Within hours I had a whole new desire to be incredibly wealthy.





In our infinite wearyness and lazyness the only real event we managed to attend whilst here was a parade celebrating the summer solstice. The parade was pretty big and watchable enough for a while, but Edinburgh's Beltane celebrations completely blow it out of the water. Also, despite promises of nudity and cavorting none was evident and no-one was even carelessly chucking around cans of fuel and matches! Interestingly though the parade did seem to confirm the odd sort of alternative lifestyle vibe that I'd been kind of getting in Santa Barbara, and despite and this being a very posh and expensive place to live there's still a few hippies managing to cling on.



The rest of our time was pleasantly spent eating, recuperating by the pool, cruising downtown for food and beers and chatting with Devon's family and friends. Steven (Devon's father), Brenna (Devon's sister) and Kathryn (Brenna's friend) were all really gracious hosts and looked after us well. Their sharp, combatorial and sarcastic conversations were a welcome return to a more British (In my mind anyway) mode of speech that I found I had been missing this a little during our travels.





Ah, I also went swimming in the Pacific. I think this is my first time swimming in an ocean. It turns our they're big, cold, and are fun to use for swimming, sort of the opposite of small, heated lead weights.

So Santa Barabara, or more specifically Devon's parents house/family, was a really, really pleasant place to spend a couple of days, and with our batteries suitably recharched we got ready to depart for Los Angeles.

June 21st, Vegas.

June 21st, Vegas.

I should probably say somethings about Vegas first but the night out is at the end so you may want to skip to that.

The whole thing that everyone thinks as Vegas is a series of Hotels and Casinos either side of 'The Strip', which is just a long road running North/South. Despite the fact that there is only a single road that everyone wants to go up and down there is no decent public transport. There actually are a few buses that run the length of the it but they are so few in number that you have to wait for a few to come and go before you can actually get on one. Also all the roads are jammed full of cars and so it takes ages to get anywhere. I cant believe they havent build a decent tram service that loops up and down the strip.

Suprisingly Vegas doesnt actually look very much like Vegas, even at night time. It seems that perhaps everything is on too large a scale and so you cant see enough of it from ground level to be impressed, only enough of it to be loomed on. We later found out you have to go up high for Vegas to look like you want it to, i.e. glitzy, shiny and flashy.

The casinos themselves seem universally pretty horrible. They are packed *full* of slot machines, easily 90-95% of the floor space is given over to them, which is so boring. I mean wheres the fun in watching people play slots? or in fact playing slots? Hurrumph, not enough card tables or poker games. They are also universally murder to get out of once your in them. The layout usually forces you to take a few left/right turns as you enter to slightly disorient you, then you find all the outside light cues are hidden and your stuck in some bland slot machine filled uniformity, murder.

Well enough and that onto the evening....

I had read a review for a bar called the "Ghost Bar" and it was described as a place for "stylish young trendsetters" where "the beautiful patrons are the focal point". Thinking there could not be a more apt description for the travel worn Josh, Keith and I this sounded like the place to go. It was also in the Palms resort which Josh had heard was cool, so if we didnt get in there we would have other alternatives.

With a good many formative beers inside us and our funky-est Tshirts and party pants outside us we ventured forth. Our pockets bulged with over hundred dollars each, locked and loaded we were ready. (Incidentally we all came home with exactly zero dollars, stiffing the taxi driver for his tip). The intention was to start of with some light gambling on roulette, given we weren't going to gamble for long we thought we'd be best off going for something with obscene odds so we *could* at least finish with a load of money rather than piss around for 20 minutes and be $5 better off. A collective $60 and ~3 minutes later we decided roulette was a mugs game, to summarize, "Odd", "Arse", "Odd", "Arse", "Odd", "Arse", "Hmmm".

Approaching the Ghost bar we tried to look like we were sylishly setting trends, like getting poor very quickly at roulette, this appeared to work some $10 each later we were being bounced into lift and off to the 55th floor.

Exiting the lift a grin quickly appeared on my face. From the overly minimal decor to the excessive use of UV to the stunning views from the 55 story balconies with bars this was a pretty funky place. I could feel the urge to stylishly set trends rising in my gut. Three $7 + tip bottled beers later we were out gawping at the view, after last night this was great! It was Vegas! Woot! Woot! Most of the rest of the evening was spent with Keith and I merrirly chatting away to assorted groups we had accosted whilst Josh went off and did his thing. It was a pleasantly spent moderatly drunken evening in some good surroundings, cool. The end of the evening was spent in a very different manner however.

This started when I noticed Josh chatting away to a middle aged chap and his wife, rather than a group of young ladies, confused I approached to see what the score was. Getting some odd looks from Josh that I completely failed to interepret it quickly became apprant these guys were *total* nutters. The first I had met in our travels so far. Intrigued I engaged in a series of highly reasonably put (from my side) discussions to try and work out what right wing nutters are actually like and what their views are. It turns out they were too insane for me to reasonably convey. The more crazy / unexpected statements were, it is good for people with disabilities to die in the streets, that Britain should have nuked the USA for their involvment with the IRA, that the Statue of Liberty should be sent back to France and that the World Health Organization is a "crazy commy waste of time". When the Wife stated she hated France and that they had obstained from French Fries for two years I enquired as too why, after about 5-6 seconds she said "because they are against everything we believe in", asking for specifics led to the responses "stuff" and "everything", genius. Crazy ignorant sociopaths indeed, but still two out of all the USA is pretty darn good going. Josh later revealed they had both said that the were 'packing heat'. Packing heat! In a club! Nutters!

None the less a good night and with our wallets, brains and bladder suitably crippled we taxi'd off home for a bit of a kip.

Tommorrow Santa Barbara for some OC sweetness!

June 20th, Flagstaff to Vegas.

June 20th, Flagstaff to Vegas.

Now that the flat move is over (more on that some other time) its time to resume the blog! I will however be more than a little hampered by the apparant sacrifice of my little travel notebook during the move :(

Well the 21st seen us back on the road and off to Vegas. The drive was through some pretty-darn-similar-looking-to-yesterday desert. By now Ive given up on seeing desert thats has bugger all in it - the deserts here are far too lush for my liking with lots and lots of small shrubbery, hurrumph.

On route we stopped at the impressively scaled Hoover Dam. The dam is not, as I assumed, named after J Edger Hoover but is named after the Herbert Hoover the 31st president of the United States. I wont rattle on about it too much other than to say it interesting in an engineery sort of way with some nice 30's style flourishes in the architecture. Its Also the single hottest place Ive ever been. The wind appears to come in straight of miles and miles of desert and get funneled into a single people cooking gust, yuck.



Arriving in Vegas we found our Hotel the 'Lady Luck'. Wandering in it appeared we had, in the words of the dead knight dude from Indiana Jones, "Choosen poorly". Not only was it a pretty decent distance from the fun parts of Vegas it was also populated with 'huver-around' clad oldies bumming away dime after dime in the slot machine filled ground floor. However, no mere collection of soon-to-be-poor oldies could dampen the mood! This was Vegas! And with our minds buzzing from flashbacks to 'Swingers' we stepped out to sieze our first night in Vegas.

About 40 minutes of walking in 40C heat saw the mood well and truly sweated out of our rapidly dehydrating bodies. Walking in Vegas was a bad idea. In dire need of a beer we fell into the next casino and grabbed some seats in the bar at the back.

The bar had some 'entertainment' in the form of three dubiously dressed filipino singers and their associated band. It was weird, really weird, and the 60 year old lithe filipino audience who were salsa-ing with frightening proficiency didn't help. At this point I considered I had somehow and without remembering dropped some acid. Was I experiencing a 'fear and loathing in vegas' style trip? Looking around I decided this probably wasn't the case - my imagination wasn't *this* warped. A couple of beers later we dragged our still heat exhausted and confused hides back into the night and off to our Hotel, resolving never to walk again and to do Vegas properly tomorrow night!