Just Another Typical Weekend, Except Not.

The young man takes a small sip, and slowly replaces his beverage onto the napkin. His eyes return from their glazed-over state to watch the bubbles take their turns popping near the surface of the dainty champagne styled glass. Losing interest, his gaze rises to the scene around him. Dozens of people walking by his table, all in a hurry, all on the way to somewhere, late for something. Cell phones, laptop cases, briefcases, all abound. A constant ambience of city noise infiltrates the man’s table at the small Italian sidewalk cafe. The people are all inches from him, yet miles away. He is oblivious to it all, in a different mental place from them altogether. He catches the eye of his companion across the table. She then follows his line of sight to the street sign located on the corner. On a green background, written in white, are the words “Broadway Avenue, New York City.” The reality of the situation hits them yet again, as it has all day, and their giddy laughter attracts bizarre stares from the passersby.

This is exactly the type of thing I wanted to do before I left. Total spontaneity, total out of control snap decision making, total randomness of outcomes.

So last Wednesday I was up at Chumash, and I eventually left up. Big. Second biggest trip ever at $632.

I only have three days of classes each week, so four day weekends allow a lot of options. So for once, I decided to do something with the time. For once, I decided to actually spend some money, do something incredible, and in the process, knock a few things off my life’s list of things I want to do.

There’s one person I tend to call when it comes to spontaneity. She is someone unlike anyone else I know, and even though we disagree on some major issues, for some reason we get along amazingly well. I mentioned the fact that I’d had a pretty ridiculous night at Chumash, during which just about everything worked out in my favor. Even as I tried to leave for example, my friend talked me into max betting one more machine, and a four of a kind landed me another few hundred dollars. Just a truly amazing pile of luck was stacked upon me that night. So we pondered, where could we go for the weekend, and what could we do. Eventually, she landed upon the idea of visiting a city she’d never been, but was at the top of her list to go to. Although I’d been to New York once before, it was about eight years ago or so, and piled into a cross country trip of a million other places, so I really don’t think I was old enough or aware enough to truly appreciate the city.

Obviously, I eventually agreed to the idea. The main factor was of course how much the trip would cost. My main contribution would be the plane tickets, and she would pay for lodging, while most other expenses got split. At first, it really didn’t seem like it was going to happen. Plane tickets were pretty ridiculously expensive, which makes sense, given we were trying to leave the next day, or even that night. Eventually though I stumbled upon a pretty great deal. For $230 each, we’d be able to red eye it Friday night and arrive 9am Saturday morning, and then fly back and arrive just before midnight on Monday night, in plenty of time for my Tuesday morning classes. Well, almost. The catch, was the flights weren’t out of Santa Barbara or LAX, but instead, Las Vegas. Vegas is about a six hour drive from SB, but for a reduction in price of around three or four hundred dollars a person, we decided it would be worth it.

A few clicks and a duffle bag worth of packing later, wham, I’m in the car and headed for the state line. Now, this really isn’t the type of thing most people do on a regular basis, if at all. All I can say is they’re missing out. I was actually originally supposed to be attending a wedding and then travelling across part of the Northwestern U.S. to Yellowstone and a few other places, but due to the inability to miss summer school classes, I was unable to go. Being a bit bitter, this was part of the reason I decided to take a vacation anyway. In five weeks I potentially won’t be taking any vacations for quite a while, so given I had a sudden influx of money out of nowhere, I figured splurging was merited.

I’m quite aware I’m spoiled rotten. Never was it more evident than on this trip. Just the fact that I was able to consider it as an option shows that I’m very lucky. This was one of the reasons I wanted to share the experience with someone else.

So, fast forward to later Friday night. We have a 1am flight to catch in Vegas. We leave about 4:30pm, figuring we’re golden, might even have time to sightsee a bit, or grab some prime rib (her favorite). Survey says, errrrrrrrrr. For those who have never driven from LA to Vegas on a Friday night, it’s a real party. A party with you and about a gazillion other people doing the same thing. We actually at least smartened up enough to cut across through Santa Clarita, Palmdale, and Lancaster, but although this avoided most of the garbage through LA, there was no avoiding the mighty 15. This was actually the worst I’d ever seen it, as a few accidents in the vicinity of Baker brought things literally to a standstill. Then there were the literally DOZENS of cars on the grade between Baker and Primm sitting on the side of the road having overheated. The reason being of course, it was HOT. And I do mean, HOT. No air conditioning was being used at least in our car to avoid such a fate, but with the outside air feeling like a heat wave, having the windows open in the 90 degree or so heat (at night even) didn’t help much. It was just a swelterfest. Me being the soon to be professional navigator, I was constantly doing calculations as to what our average speed needed to be for the remainder of the journey in order to get to the airport on time. For a while, I really thought we were screwed, and was doing the mental preparation of “well the money wasn’t even in your wallet until two days ago anyway, pretend you never won it” but was still pretty bummed. As it turned out though, the luck from the previous evenings kept on running. The traffic opened up pretty much just in time, and we busted through Primm and Jean at record speed after the grade ended. We decided to park at the New York New York Casino, not only because it was funny we were going to the real thing, but the fact that their parking structure is huge, free, and close to the airport. This was the first of many strategies used to save money during the trip.

We arrived at the ticket counter to find a decent sized line, and finally got to the front right at the 30 minute deadline for the flight’s boarding to begin and the computers to be closed out. As Murphy’s law dictates, when in a hurry the gate your plane is leaving from will be the furthest possible. Luckily due to the late departure time of 1am, there was basically no one in the airport and security took like five seconds. I ended up on the aisle, which has never been my favorite (I’m a window man), but at least I wasn’t in the middle (she was, but was in between two guys and apparently was far from minding). Ah, I forgot to mention we flew JetBlue, which was a first for me. Coolest thing by far is DirectTV on the plane at every seat, with like 30 channels of live TV to choose from. Between ESPN, the Game Show Network, and MacGyver reruns, I was kept pretty busy. Of course, I also tried to sleep, but we managed to get a loudly crying baby in the row behind us, and that made it pretty impossible. This was only the beginning of problems involved with trying to sleep during the trip however, will go into more detail later.

At this point in time, it had been about twelve hours since I’d decided to leave Santa Barbara for New York City, and I was somewhere over Kansas. The most common thought in my head then, and throughout the weekend, was “Wow, I’m really here, I’m really doing this, how much does this rock.” I tapped her on the shoulder as I’d done about five thousand times in the last hour and whispered “Dude, we’re going to NYC!” with a huge grin.

The party was just getting started.