DAY 4 – SEPTEMBER 2, 2009

I love Bend! So clean and beautiful. I woke up before Shawn, surprise surprise. And worked out in the “gym” … but it was cool, because one machine had pictures of all the different things you could do on it, so I did all of them. The only bad thing about it was it was like all windows, so people kept looking in and staring. Annoying.

Then we went river raftin! Ohmygod it was so much fun, I decided I will move here and open a bar, and be a river raft guide. We were with a dad and his two girls, in 6th and 8th grade. They were cute. I was kinda scared when I saw the rapids, I must admit. They were class III’s. But we had a guide, so I felt more safe than the day before. There was a photographer too, on shore taking pictures, which I am dying to see, but I went on the website, and the “recent photos” are from July! So they are way backlogged. I wont see them for a month! So I don’t want to see them at all. Hmmph. The rapids were called Big Eddy, and now I want to be a river rafting guide.

Oh yeah, before rafting Shawn got plastered on one shot of Fernet, and ran to the burrito shop and inhaled a monster burrito. He looked possessed.

After rafting we went to this other Mexican place and I got bomb ass shrimp fajitas and he got shrimp tacos. And chips, of course. The margaritas were gross, the strawberry blended ones were better than the traditional on the rocks, but still too acidic.

That night we went to some coo local bars, got drunk and yelled at each other.
Damn it feels good not to be logging burps though. Although I feel guilty, because the data wont be as accurate as it could be. But I guess I should just let go of that, right. Sigh.

DAY 3 – SEPTEMBER 1, 2009

September, woop woop!! Not sure where the summer went, or 2009 for that matter… but whactcha gonna do

Yesterday we drove 313 miles, total time 8.5 hours, average speed for the day 36.82mph, which includes all the stops. Pure driving time, our average speed was 52.45mph.

We just left Redding, on the 5N next stop Rogue River … we want to go river rafting today. Oh yea, and side note re the burps, it was getting too hard to keep track of, because there were so many burps and I didn’t always have my trusty log, so we decided to only log the burps that occur while driving. But I can figure out the fraction of our total time consisting of driving time, and use the same burping rate to predict the burps that occurred while not driving. Unless one of the covariants with burping is in fact driving. Hmmm … uh oh, this calls for some further thinking and analysis. Maybe we need to start a separate documentation of non driving burps? I will have to get back to you on this.

The burp logging is quite interesting, I am seeing patterns already. Twice he has burped triple burps, at a point of noticeable de-elevation (like we were right at the sign that says so). I also noticed him yesterday on 10 minutes intervals pretty consistently, for about an hour. Also after a recent consumption, they always come in at least double burps. So the logging is working. We need answers here. This is important stuff. We were joking how my new job should be rolling around the country collecting random irrelevant data, “field research,” if you will. And having people want to buy it! Don’t you want to know the probability of passing a deer while burping at the same time, on various freeways throughout the US? And the standard deviation of the temperature, speed, and type of music most likely to result in double, triple, or quadruple burps? Well, you should.

We just passed Weed, the city. FYI.

Wooohoo, just passed Oregon state line! I used to always get out of the car and do the splits over the state line as a kid. Haha, any excuse to do the splits I liked. Or cartwheels or handstands.

I’m glad we took this car instead of the rental, because we have Sirrius radio and the ipod hooks up. But also the navigation gives points of interest so we can see random places near us that we might miss otherwise. Hoot. And it tracks all our route, so I know how many miles there are to go. Like right now we are 30 miles away from Rogue River. I cant wait to river raft. The brochures look so fun.

I hate when trucks try and pass trucks on a two laner.

We took a slight detour to stop at the Oregon Vortex, House of Mystery!

HOOOOT’N N TOOT’N, HUFF’n n PUUF’n!!!!

Okay I am a little Blog-back-logged, I must admit. We ended up going river rafting on the Rogue River, just us two, it was Very Terrifying! I thought we were going to die, and everyone heard me scream, I think. How embarrassing.

First it was chill, we got some beers, got fitted for life vests, even bought an underwater camera. But the guy at the shop told us where to stop, because they had to pick us back up. There are many points along the river a person can stop, you know, depending on how long they are going, how experienced they are, and how good-looking they are.

He told us that a lot of people miss the stop that we are supposed to stop at. It was supposed to be a restaurant, on the left hand side. But a lot of people miss it.
So I am thinking that it is very small, and we will definitely miss it.

Shawn doesn’t seem to mind, he just pees off the boat, paddles every now and then, probably looks at his reflection in the water (doesn’t work, I tried it). There were some big rapids that seemed scary at the time. We were in a kayak/canoe two-seater type boat. He kept hitting my paddle with his paddle, which was really annoying.

Long story short, I was extremely cool, calm, and collected. We made it back, and that was that.

We drove on to Bend that night, I had to drive, because Shawn was too tired. We stopped to eat dinner at a pizza place. And by dinner, I mean food for a family of 8 growing football players. I cant even write everything we ate it was too much. Lets just say we both left feeling like we wanted to vomit. The pizza was called a cougar pizza though, which was cool. I gotta pic too. It was also in a trailer park, just to orient you.

We got to Bend around 11 PM, got a room at the Pheonix Inn & Suites, right in downtown Bend. Its pretty huggy, Shawn saw a deal online which said you could get 50% off a room, so he asked about it over the phone, and they were like “yeah , okay!” So we got a one bedroom suite, with a big bathtub/Jacuzzi in the living room. I used it. Alone. Yeah. Sucky, right?

Then we watched a movie about Mary-Margaret. Quite disturbing. If you are interested, Google ,”mary margaret bulimia”

Here we go!

Today we left on our HuggyBear Adventure #2! 8 days and 8 nights on a CA/OR road trip. We plan to focus on Northern CA and Oregon. Our last trip covered Southern California coast. Bend,OR is our highest destination, where Shawn has family and friends. I am not sure of the route or the agenda, we are going to take it as it comes!

Shawn rented an SUV for the week from Payless Car Rental. It was only $250 for 9 days and unlimited miles! We drove all the way to LAX to pick up the car to find out that we cannot take the car into Oregon. Why? Because when you PayLess, you GetLess!!

So we went back home to pack up Shawn’s car instead. He was all packed, but I hadn’t started yet. I found some chicken cubes in the fridge form Whole Foods and ate all of them but 3, and put the container back in the fridge to sit there for a week. But I wasn’t really going to do that I was going to finish them all tonight. Shawn got some cool kind of beer that comes out of a can all frothy like how beer comes out of the tap. Yumeee. I wonder how they do that.

I packed up my bags, put on my pink Palmilla hat, and grabbed a bottle of Fernet, Hoot Hoot! We left at 11:00 p.m. I noticed that the gas tank was on empty and did not want to run out of gas like we did yesterday on Sunset Blvd in the Cougar at 5 pm with people yelling out “Great Job, Buddy!”. LOL. But Shawn didn’t want to get gas yet, he wanted to get on the freeway first, for about 5 exits, and then get off and get gas. I didn’t like that idea, but luckily for me, Shawn immediately took a wrong turn, so he was forced to exit and turn around a million times. We got gas in North Hollywood and re-set the car mileage to 0 so we can track our mileage. We are going to track everything about the trip. Everything right down to how bad the smell of poo is, at any given time. We just passed all the cows on the poo pasture so we thought of that. I made an excel workbook called Trip Data to collect as much data about the trip as we can. We are even going to document everything we eat! An exhilarating and nail-biting read, no doubt! Hmm speaking of Shawn is eating almonds I better document. Brb.

Ok its been documented. He took the bag on his lap and started eating the almonds. Then after a few minutes he put the bag in the back seat to try and pretend like he was done eating them. But all that changed was he had to reach back to the backseat and grab handfuls every few seconds! LOL. Sometimes he will try and sneak food without me documenting it. So the numbers may be a bit off. Ill have to analyze the data assuming only a 90% documentation rate. Only for him, of course.

When we first left in the car, I was wobbling my head a bit, because I was flipping around my new hair cut and watching it sway in the reflection of the car window. But Shawn thought I had immediately fallen asleep, and thought I did one of those sleeping head things that you do on cars and airplanes. I hate those, but this wasn’t it! He was like Oh My God you Are Like A DOG! YOUr going to fall asleep before we get to Studio CitY!

Now its 12:40 AM. Shawn says we want to drive to Redding by tomorrow as early as we can. I don’t know what Redding is, but I guess its supposed to be cool. We wanna get past all the lame shit during the night . On the way back from Bend we will hit the Northern California Coast and the Mendocino stuff.

We stopped in Kettleman city for gas and Shawn wanted to take his contacts out so he could see. Good idea, seeing while you drive is usually a good thing. Once we were driving at night and he blurted out “Man, I wish I could see right now”

At the gas station we got water, monster energy drinks, and sprite light to drink. And a map of California to guide us, a bunch of scratch off lottery tickets, and a clip on night light thing for my computer, so I can blog in the car at night. At first when I opened the light, it snapped in half immediately, so Shawn went to get another one and that one worked for about 5 minutes and then it just shut off. So now its in the backseat somewhere and I have the car light on. Shawn said it will ruin my eyes if I try and read things in the dark, but I have 20/20 vision, because I eat carrots!!

Now that I looked at the map I have better idea of our route. Straight up the 5 more or less, into Oregon, then back down the Northern CA coast. I guess he already told me that, but now that I can envision it, its different. I like maps because it’s good to be oriented. PING!!!

We have driven 250 miles, 11 miles away from the World Famous Anderson’s Pea Soup, Home of the Free Cheese. I don’t think it will be open but Shawn does. We already passed Harris Ranch, the official halfway mark between LA and SF. The cow smell wasn’t as bad as I remember it, and definitely wasn’t as bad as it was on the previous poo pasture that we passed. Shawn usually stops at harris ranch, someone in his family used to do something with the meat, so he would always stop there as a kid. I usually stop there on this drive too. That means I have stopped there probably about 2 times total. But once me and high school best friend Claire, drove from SF to Harris Ranch, just to stay there for 2 nights. We were with her dad and step mom, and we stayed in a 2-bedroom suite. Oh yeah, and they are all VEGETARIANS! So, it was very odd. I didn’t find it weird at the time though. But we went to the restaurant and they all got like salads. I wonder why they wanted to go there. Harris Ranch as the goal destination. They have good lollipops in the store though.

We just got to Andersons … closed. I win. LOL we got out and took pictures in the face cut out thing. It was 68 degrees. We put the timer on so we could get in the picture together (there are 2 face cut outs). That one was the best one, because we are looking at each other, its funny. You’ll see. I also changed my hat to the black Palmilla hat. It fits better. I don’t know why though, they are the exact same hat. Supposed to be, at least.

Back on the road now, 3:13 AM. Hmmm, I wonder when we are going to stop. Shawn chugged a Monster, so he is probably not going to sleep for a while, then tomorrow he is going to be sooo tired and want to sleep ALL day and make me drive, while he sleeps and drowns in his drool. I just know it.

Oh yeah, the lottery tickets! The first one I scratched I won 6 dollars! One kind was really complicated and not fun. It was so hard to tell if you won or not, I bet when you take it into the store for your prize, the store workers cant even verify that you won. Or people probably don’t even know when they win, so they accidently throw away the winning jackpot ticket. It was so hard, and caused way more than normal lottery scratching debris which is still all over my lap and the seat. There were 3 of those bad ones, I won 4 dollars on one though so all is not lost. So $10 up total, woop woop!! I made a lottery worksheet to the trip data. I love the trip data. I’m trying to compile as much info and track everything. Shawn’s burps even got its own worksheet. That will probably have the most data too!, it might need a second page. We have to note the time, temperature, song playing, and time since last consumption and what that consumption was. Then we can run some regression analysis and truly understand the correlations and possible causes of his burps. If we get enough data, maybe we can isolate the variable that causes him to blow out the smell of his burp immediately after the burp. I call it the burp n blow. Its really gross when you are close enough to actually smell the blow. And then when you're not close enough to smell it, its still gross, because you can just anticipate the smell of the hot burp blow. Ew. Now he just told me that he picked his nose. I’m not tracking that though. Brrr its freezing in here now. It feels like 50. He’s been doing more double and triple and quadruple burps too, so we need to figure out what correlates with those and why. I’m envisioning some exploding pie charts.

I think well stop soon. Some things I want to do on this trip are: GO ON A LLAMA TREK!! I saw it online. You go on a trek, and a llama comes with you, and carries your lunch for you in a backpack, he wears it! I really want to do that. Shawn said there are llamas everywhere up here, even llama farms. So only time will tell. I mainly just want a picture with a llama carrying my lunch in a backpack. I wonder if you can ride them. They are probably weak malnourished llamas though, so they can only carry backpacks, not people.

I also want to go wine tasting, go kayaking or river rafting down a huggyriver, huggy a tree, go hiking, go through the big redwood that you can drive through, go in a cave, and ….. everything else that is fun that I don’t know about or forgot about. Good restaurant in Napa I want to go to, that is all vegetarian and has a strawberry pizza. Shawn’s stepdad told us about it, but we forget the name. Yume sounded good though. All vegetarian or vegan so its healthy too. Shawn says its now 64 degrees. Soo sleepy and cold I hope we stop soon.