California Trip
In 1994, the day after Christmas, I quit my job at Media Play and took off with two girls I'd never met before (Hillary and Eva) and went on a two week vacation to California and every place in between.
We started off by driving down to Las Vegas, Nevada where Eva is originally from and spent two days there with her family and seeing the sights, and yes, to gamble. I think the games are fixed as none of us won anything the entire time we were there. Between the 3 of us, we lost a total of $1.00, see if we ever go gamble there again...
From there we drove down to Los Angeles, California and had Pizza with Prophecy of Panic (it's a cool Techno/Rave group, check 'em out), and even got invited to play D&D with some Goths who recognized Eva. That night we walked through down town L.A (around midnight) seeing the sights and even a drug deal. We ended up staying in the worst roach infested motel I've ever seen in my life, you know, the kind they like to portray on TV. Comfortingly enough, there was a sign that said "No Prostitutes Allowed" right above the sign that said "Pay by the hour for your convenience". When I asked the owner about it he said that a lot of people come in just to watch the movies, and with three all night adult channels, who can blame them (No, we didn't watch the TV, the roaches were just too darn interesting)
After that we drove up to San Diego to pick up my friend John from the airport bringing our merry band up to 4, all jammed into an itty-bitty little red sports car with entirely too little room for four people with a couple weeks worth of clothing and stuff, especially for someone 6'1. From there we drove to San Francisco (actually too a different city where we stayed the night with a friend of a friend of Hillary's, and took the Bart (subway) to San Francisco where we took a day just to walk around the city and buy a bumper sticker for my car that said "Your Ad Here" (admit it, you want one too...) That night we went to see a Mortal concert in some weird abandoned warehouse (back in San Diego I think), great atmosphere.
The next day we went back down to some podunk town and picked up Rozz, Eva's former husband, and dragged him off to see Mortal for their last show ever before breaking up (until they got back together as Fold Z and later changed their name to Mortal again), back in LA. We were a couple hours late getting in, but there was about 7 bands, and we managed to catch the last 3 or so, including Prayer Chain and Mortal which started playing at Midnight (of Course). From there we went to Denny's and met some really cool people who volunteered to let us stay the night at their house. Eva left us because she had a new job starting that day in LA and needed to get ready for it.
From their we went to Universal Studios, and stayed at Chris' house (from N-Soul Records) who let us stay the night out of the kindness of his heart. Then we went down to Disney Land where I was hoping to meet my friend, Rachel (who wasn't able to go, but I did get to call her and she did send me some cool pictures and a teddy bear). Disney land was actually pretty cool and the lines weren't half bad as it rained most of the morning (just long enough for us all to decide that we would spend $5 each to buy a yellow trash pack with Mickey on it cut in the shape of a rain coat. It stopped 5 minutes later) It may be tradition, but if you ever go to Disney land, there is really no rule that states you HAVE to go on the it's a small world ride. You'll be scarred for life.
We stayed one more night with Chris and then left California for the trip home, swinging wide through Arizona and the Grand Canyon. I was actually wanting to do a 3 day trip into the canyon but my sentiments were not shared by everyone else. Unfortunately, we got in late at night and it had just started snowing. We took the first hotel available that had a swimming pool and settled on going in the morning. By morning, the roads to the Grand Canyon were all closed because of the weather. (I think the Canyon got filled with snow or something and they were just to embarrassed to admit it...)
We took that in stride and drove down to New Mexico where we stayed with another stranger, J.R. from the Prodigal Sons (another cool techno group :) and Joey (of Echoing Green, you guessed it...) We also watched Citizen Kane which was really pretty spif. We finally got back home on January 7th in need of a vacation.