Today we drove some 700 miles to Salt Lake City, on our way to Billy's place for Thanksgiving. With me are two of the Daves, Pickering and Sweet, those foolhardy enough to join me in this madman's adventure. Actually, it'll be nice to see Billy and his family again.

I suppose our trip officially started last night, when we went to pick up the rental car. We rented a Buick Park Avenue from Alamo, since we get a corporate discount and milage is free. The nearest Alamo is at the San Francisco Airport, and we had to go after the Raiders game since Pick is big fan of theirs.

So Dave (Sweet) and I went out to dinner at Cattleman's, which is a steak place. I ate a lot, and somewhat regretted it. Then we drove back to my work to wait for Pick, this took a while because the game went into overtime (and Oakland lost). After that we took my car to Alamo and spent a half hour filling out the forms. It was only then that we found out that Sweet didn't have to have come (to be an eligible driver) since he lives locally, we just needed his driver's licence.

I stayed up late, trying to get as much done beforehand. To me it always seems like there are all these little things that have to be done before you go away for a few days. My big problem was how was I going to tape all my shows correctly? Since I had five that need to be on separate tapes, and only two VCRs, that was a bit of a quandary. In the end I decided to tape them all and then copy the shows to their appropriate tapes when I return.

All right, so finally we left, me a bit tired after five hours of sleep. Turns out none of us slept more than about 6 hours. Pick was the first driver as we headed out. It's pretty much a straight shot to Iowa City from San Francisco via Interstate 80. We picked up lunch at In-and-Out and drove through Sacramento and then Reno.

Halfway through Nevada it was five and we needed to get more gas, so we stopped to refill (and a much needed bathroom break) at this gas stop. It's kind of strange to see slot machines in the Mini Mart, but this is Nevada, where gambling is legal and it seems that there are places to gamble everywhere you go.

I took over the driving and we sped onwards through the rest of Nevada. We stopped to eat dinner at about 18:30, already it was dark. Then we kept going to Utah and Salt Lake City, where we went to a motel to sleep for the night. The temperature was about 20F, much colder than Concord, which was around 50F. We drove right past the salt flats, not seeing much in the dark. By the time we stopped it was 23:30 local, having crossed a time zone. We were dead tired and pretty much went to sleep immediately.

The first day has been great. We talked a lot, about many a subject unfit to see in print. But I had a lot of fun listening to the Daves talk while I chimed in occassionally. We listened to some of Pick's music collection, which for the most part is a bit too 70's and alt-rock for my tastes. I got a bit of motion sickness, but I didn't throw up and it went away when I started driving. All in all it was a good first day.