T minus 21 days

Well I’m in Los Angeles now… and I’ve been running errands in the morning/early afternoons, and in the evening I’ve been playing Warhammer Online at Howie’s Game Shack in Westminster Mall.

The trip over was certainly an adventure. I had decided I couldn’t wait any longer and I ended up leaving Colorado Springs at like 9 in the evening just to get a head start on my half-cross-country trek to Los Angeles. I made it all the way to Golden, CO, when one of my tires decided to go flat on the C-470. I’m hauling a 5′ by 9′ rented trailer from UHAUL with my motorcycle in it, and as I go over a bridge at the speed limit of the freeway, my steering wheel starts to vibrate slightly. My tach starts to rise and my speed slowly drops. 70 miles per hour. 65 miles per hour. 55. 45. When I hit 45 I had a split second moment of alarm, then I pulled over to the side to figure out what’s wrong. As I’m slowing down I realize what’s going on, as I smell rubber burning and my car feels like one of the wheels is oddly shaped. Yep, I have a flat in the front right tire. I pray to God that my spare is working, and sure enough it’s ready to go, sitting underneath all my crap in the trunk. This was the second time in my life I’ve had to replace a flat on my car, the first time being in my high school parking lot while I was still driving my first car. This was, however, the first time I had to do any freeway shoulder-side emergency maintenance, and getting out of your car while big ass trucks zoom past at 75 miles per hour during Denver rush hour (read: not Los Angeles bumper to bumper rush hour) can be pretty intimidating. Deep breath, wait for a big space between cars… and go. I ended up switching to the spare tire, throwing the busted one in the ramp trailer with my bike, then I proceeded to pull off the freeway at the next exit (Kipling Parkway). After calling the shop (thanks SSgt(S) SAS & Mr. RG), I found out that I had fortunately enough gotten off the freeway and right at a Big O tire store. I ended up spending $500 to get all my tires replaced–Subaru recommends that all tires be replaced if the tread depth between old and new tire is more than 3/32″… mine was almost double that. I pull into the shop at about 7 AM, tires come to the store by 11, and I’m out by 12 PM… half the day gone thanks to my roadside mishap.

So I’m going 75 MPH, eastward down the I-70, even though I have a trailer and there’s a sticker on these UHAUL trailers that say “Speed 45 Limit” on them. I have a little MPG display in my dash that I can switch to and see how much fuel I’m burning to move forward. With cruise control on, I was watching myself do 12 MPG, and stupidly pass by Grand Junction, CO without topping off my gas. I cross into Utah, expecting Green River, UT to be like a few minutes away, I’m thinking to myself “yeah, I’ll gas up at Green River, right before the 109 Mile no-services zone.” Nope. I switch my hud to the display that shows me how many miles I can expect to drive on my current fuel reserve. 120 miles as I cross the state border… “okay”, I think to myself, no problem getting to the next small town with a gas pump to refuel. 110 miles. 100. Concern on my face, I pass a sign that says “Green River 67, Thompson 34″. Now I think, alright, I’m going to gas up at Thompson. So I’m putting along, every couple of miles seeing signs for Thompson getting closer. Eventually I see a lone Shell sign over a hill, and suddenly my engine starts to sputter. At first I think it’s another tire problem, which would be extremely shitty seeing as how I’m literally in the middle of nowhere, and a lone gas station is up the road, first one I seen since I crossed into Utah. Then I’m wondering if it’s something worse, seeing as how I’m towing a few hundred pounds of motorcycle and trailer behind me in my little Subaru Legacy 2.5L GT. I look at my gas gauge… quarter tank. I look at the mile estimator… 50 miles. No gas light. No check engine light. I’m now praying to God that I can make it to the Shell station at Thompson so I can at least get help… possibly. I climb over a hill and my engine sputters hard, and then I realize that I’m actually out of gas (this happened to me once before on my motorcycle back in Colorado Springs). For those that never experienced running out of gas on the freeway, it feels like your car just starts engine braking, i.e. you downshift once, put your car into gear, let the clutch go, and experience your car braking without you actually applying brakes. So I go over the hill, then when I get to the top I put my car into neutral and coast down the other side. Great, I think to myself. Then I look ahead and see that in order for me to get to the gas station I need to go over one more hill. So I put my car into drive once I reach the bottom, and I start accelerating. My engine starts to brake again, and this time it actually feels like something is stopping my car rather than the rapid but steady slowdown I experienced back in Golden, CO… as if I were driving into a wall of water and suddenly created alot of drag. I pull off to the side of the road, and I’ve got the gas pedal all the way down, just trying to get to the top of the hill. I think the 30 seconds it took to get to the top of the hill, with the gas pedal down, and my car sputtering forward at about 10 miles per hour, were some pretty long 30 seconds (not the longest) in my life. My car would surge forward at 10 miles per hour, then would slow down. Surge, slow down. Each time my car slowed down I was praying it had one more surge in it, just to get over this hill. And eventually… the car comes over the peak. I put it into neutral and coast down the freeway exit ramp, I do a “hollywood stop” at the stop sign at the bottom of the ramp turning into the road, then continue to coast right down into the fuel station, right up to the pump. Wow. Thank God I made it… I know I’m being watched over and my ass just got saved once again.

Sure enough, I had run out of fuel. As soon as I put that filthy 90 octane gas into my car, the engine revved up like a champ and I was on the road again going to Green River. Lesson learned, I would fuel up at half tank from now on, because apparently my gas needle and mile “guesstimator” are not always correct, what with the recently changing driving conditions my car was experiencing.

The 2nd day of my trip wasn’t so bad. I spent the night at Washington City, UT, (which has an awesome Holiday Inn Express, by the way). Las Vegas was hot, as usual, and normally would not be a concern except today I was hauling a trailer with a motorcycle, so on those uphill climbs I was in the slow lane with the rest of the trucks. Once again learning the hard way, I noticed during my ascent of a mountain during the previous day that my engine temp started rising, and I figured out that simply dropping my speed and turning off my AC allowed my engine to keep under the H line, in a more normal range. I tried to keep it under 3k RPM, 2.5k being the ideal from what I noticed. At times this meant going up a hill at 25 miles per hour in CA. Then once I got into Los Angeles, I realized that no one obeyed speed limit signs… not even the trucks. So me and my trailer were going above the speed limit, but still at the speed of traffic, even though trucks and autos with trailers were supposed to be doing 55 MPH max. Oh well, when in Rome. Because I think it’s more of a hazard if I’m the only jackass on the right side doing the speed limit when everyone (trucks included) was doing at lest 65-75, 10 to 20 miles above the limit for trailers.

All in all I got here unscathed, and I have to say I’m pretty happy about that. That was last Thursday afternoon. Since then I’ve been running errands, and I’ve tried to space them out to one or two a day so I’d have something to do each day, at least in the morning. Since then, though, I’ve replaced my rear brakes, got my oil changed, got my emissions inspection, got new Cali plates, met a girl who hasn’t called me back, and played a shitton of Warhammer at night in Westminster. Also hung out with Alvin, Kyuu Hee, and Janet over the course of last weekend. This weekend… I dunno. I want to go out, and I might end up lone wolfing this shit for the first time because it’s getting boring playing games all night.

By the way, when I left LA in 2004 all I saw were fat office chicks… now I’m back and good lord all the girls are smoking hot. Even the older ones (read: mid thirties). Hell I saw what had to have been a lady in her late 50s, even she looked cute… great shape, nice face, and took care of her silver hair. I’m amazed and how different this town got… it’s like all the fitness that I expected to see in CO, I end up seeing here in Los Angeles. Just goes to show that the world changes all the time, continuously. It’s one thing to know, it’s another thing to see and understand.

Anyway, I’m done blah blah blahing here for now. Gonna go look for some adventure in the Cali sun.

Hasta, cavrones.