New York A Winner Is You! (a tale of two cities)

I think it was when we were sitting in a Chinese Buffet late on a thursday night in New Jersey, when, remembering that we had to be in Missouri by friday afternoon, we realized how stupid everything had become. Not because the trip was a bad idea or we were anxious to get home, but because the four of us Kansas City boys just sort of looked at each other and said "what the hell are we doing here?!" There wasn't even an all-consuming reason why we'd driven this far in such a short time (we'd have to drive even farther in a much shorter time span pretty soon) - taking a road trip to New York was just sort of something we decided to do one day when we were bored; that's about all the subtext you're going to get out of it. Oh, also we were being oppressed by the old world regime and needed to strike out by ourselves in search of more fertile shores, but that'll come later. These next several pages are a monument to the overall ridiculousness that was our 2002 road trip to New York and several other places on the east coast; you'll find my (barely censored) journal and a good portion of the pictures we took along the way. Also, if you were involved in the road trip in some fashion and have pictures of us *cough cough Cait's friends cough* you'd like to see up here, scan them or just contact me at [email protected] and we'll talk.
Also, remember that you can click on some of the thumbnails to bring up bigger pictures. Fun times for everyone!

An Introductory note: Once we decided to keep a record of this trip we realized that it needed some sort of name. After much deliberation and a lot of really bad ideas (by which I mean Jon's ideas) we settled on the title "New York a Winner is You". Why did we do this? Well, mostly because at the time we liked saying the phrase "a winner is you". Hell, I still like saying it, all those weeks later. But where did the phrase come from? Look no further than an old Nintendo Entertainment System game known as Pro Wrestling. Built in the days when most video games were known for rather poor translations from Japanese into English ("someone set up us the bomb!", etc.) this game was really a defining moment for Engrish fanatics everywhere, thanks mostly to this phrase proudly displayed whenever your wonderfully stereotypical character tastes the goblet of victory. So now you know, and knowing is half the battle.