I don't want any more beauty! I just want a martini!
Man. Where to start with the Road Trip of \o/.
Well, I would like to state first-off that troyswann is the best road-trip companion EVER. For one thing, her car was FILLED TO THE BRIM with yummy food (which I, in my hormonal state, proceeded to paw through and take one bite of everything and then put it back-um, sorry, Sal!) and blankets and sleeping bags and pillows and everything a traveler could possibly want, and music mixes for every mood and time of day--she had gone to SO MUCH EFFORT to have all these nice things and it was amazing. Also, she not only let me keep her up WAY past her usual bedtime on a nightly basis, but then she STILL got up before I did in the morning and washed our omnipresent Cuervo-and-Coke glasses from the night before and made tea for both of us and generally made everything lovely. And just… I know this is stating the exceedingly obvious at this point, but I feel the need to reiterate that Sal is made of 1000000% awesome and I truly don’t know how I could adore her any more. We laughed a LOT (frequently over ridiculous things; this is actually a pretty fair representation of our less-coherent moments) and talked about Shakespeare and writing and art and kinks and fandom and relationships and HUGH and our embryonic Screenplay That Will Make Us Famous And Get Us Interviewed on The Hour and oh and everything, and made it all the way to the third day before we just filled the disc changer with Headstones CDs and let it ride while we shouted all the lyrics, and we quoted HCL a LOT (if I had a nickel for every time we went through the "You OK for driving?" "I'm good" thing, we could've paid for the whole trip with that), and watched Live Free Or Die Hard and "Easy Money" and "Red, White, or Blue" and "The Deal" and "Mountie and Soul" and Hugh interviews and vids and various other things from our hard drives, and we subsisted primarily on martinis and Cuervo and tea and All-Dressed chips and the occasional steak, and Hefnered around in our Hefner pajamas every night, and got a lot of strange looks and stopped to pee a lot and made sexual innuendoes a lot and carried Sock Puppet Joe around with us a lot and giggled a LOT and got MORE strange looks and generally had way, way more fun than pretty much anyone else in our vicinity. It was EXACTLY what I wanted from my Road Trip of OMG New Decade, and it was wonderful, and I'm so incredibly grateful to Sal for being so game for this madness even though we technically just met less than a year ago and road trips are not her first choice of entertainment. It is a good thing I like Sig so much or I would just keep Sal locked up in my basement forever because I love her kind of a crazy lot, and five days in a car with her just made me love her MORE, and it was not nearly, nearly enough time.
And that is the overview. ♥
And now some pictures, with narration-not AT ALL dialup friendly:
Day 1 we hit the road from Sal's house around 9:30 a.m., heartlessly ignoring Toby-dog's subtle hint… which came in the form of him lying down next to the car as we were loading it up. (Awww. ♥) That put us in Jasper for lunch, and I liked Jasper, even if it is a little touristy for my taste--very reminiscent of Estes Park in Colorado, actually. There I had a delicious sandwich, while SP Joe looked on:
Then, thanks to some questionable signage and our own limitations and possibly some kind of spatial rift, after a twenty-minute brief detour north (in a south-y kind of way), we got going in the proper direction toward Banff, and stopped at the Columbia Ice Fields along the way:
I've never really seen terrain like that; it was stunning and very intimidating. There was a funny (to me) advertisement in the bathroom for the Banff Gondola, which basically amounted to, "Feeling small among all these huge mountains? Take our gondola and look down on them!" I think the "As is your rightful place, mighty human" was implied. Why do we feel the need to do that? Funny.
SP Joe was just enjoying the fuckin' moment:
After that it took us approximately 97 billion hours to reach Banff, but it was at least a gorgeous drive:
Immediately upon our arrival, we tossed our stuff at the hotel and made for the nearest steak and martinis. Mmmm.
SP Joe overindulged, of course:
And then we headed back to the hotel and saw the FLASHPOINT PREVIEW OMG, and watched an ep of dS, and went to bed.
The next morning we had a brief foray onto LJ:
Yes, that is me reading Sal's journal while she reads mine. Hee. /dorks Then we headed up to the Banff Springs Hotel, which is AMAZING-built in the late 1800s, I think:
So that was pretty awesome, even if the parking machine ate Sal's money and our lunch was sort of hideously expensive (but DELICIOUS). (This was also where Sal went to great and evocative narrative lengths to describe to me how a Saskatchewan berry tastes, despite the fact that I was, even at that very moment, CONSUMING said berries. Heee heee hee. ♥) We were unsuccessful in our Daniel MacIvor stalking, but did have a different kind of victory: we were poking around in a bookstore when suddenly I hear this SQUEAL from Sal behind me. "What the hell are you--" I said, turning around, then, "*SQUEAL*!", for lo, there on the sale bookshelf, for NO APPARENT REASON, was a brand new copy of Hard Core Roadshow! I STILL do not know WTF it was doing there, because it's been out of print for quite a while and I certainly had to do some work to track down my own copy USED, so. Clearly the fannish gods were smiling on Sal. *g*
From there we proceeded south toward Waterton Lakes Park, and that was honestly one of the most beautiful drives I have ever experienced. Like so:
It was also raining:
so that was the perfect moody backdrop for listening to the audio track for HCL, which is exactly what we did (thank you, zabira! ♥). This was also where Sal saw a four-eyed deer! Or at least two deer standing at such an angle as we came around a corner that they appeared to be one deer with four eyes. Hee. (Sal to me after we passed, when the adrenaline was setting in: "Okay, my thoughts went like this: first of all, OH MY GOD, DEER, and second of all, WHY DOES THAT DEER HAVE FOUR EYES?" Heeeee.)
By the time we got to our hotel it was POURING and MONSOONING, and we got completely soaked carrying our stuff from the car to our room, which was the cause of much hysterical laughter. We dried off and grabbed a quick dinner at the hotel restaurant before it closed, then Heffed into our Hefs for the evening and settled in with our beverages to watch Live Free Or Die Hard. Which I thoroughly enjoyed, even if I had to call shenanigans on a couple of occasions. Hee. (Also at some point I discovered the video for Paul Gross' version of "Santa Drives a Pickup" lurking on my hard drive-THANKS, sansets!-and we watched it with half-covered eyes and laughed our asses off and agreed that it was a good thing PAUL was having such a good time. Hee. We also watched the "Tiny Teddy" video, which Sal had never seen. GUH.) And then, after much chatting and snickering, to sleep.
And OMG, this is taking me longer to type out than it took to OCCUR. Hee. I will have to finish this tomorrow. *is suddenly very sleepy*
Well, I would like to state first-off that troyswann is the best road-trip companion EVER. For one thing, her car was FILLED TO THE BRIM with yummy food (which I, in my hormonal state, proceeded to paw through and take one bite of everything and then put it back-um, sorry, Sal!) and blankets and sleeping bags and pillows and everything a traveler could possibly want, and music mixes for every mood and time of day--she had gone to SO MUCH EFFORT to have all these nice things and it was amazing. Also, she not only let me keep her up WAY past her usual bedtime on a nightly basis, but then she STILL got up before I did in the morning and washed our omnipresent Cuervo-and-Coke glasses from the night before and made tea for both of us and generally made everything lovely. And just… I know this is stating the exceedingly obvious at this point, but I feel the need to reiterate that Sal is made of 1000000% awesome and I truly don’t know how I could adore her any more. We laughed a LOT (frequently over ridiculous things; this is actually a pretty fair representation of our less-coherent moments) and talked about Shakespeare and writing and art and kinks and fandom and relationships and HUGH and our embryonic Screenplay That Will Make Us Famous And Get Us Interviewed on The Hour and oh and everything, and made it all the way to the third day before we just filled the disc changer with Headstones CDs and let it ride while we shouted all the lyrics, and we quoted HCL a LOT (if I had a nickel for every time we went through the "You OK for driving?" "I'm good" thing, we could've paid for the whole trip with that), and watched Live Free Or Die Hard and "Easy Money" and "Red, White, or Blue" and "The Deal" and "Mountie and Soul" and Hugh interviews and vids and various other things from our hard drives, and we subsisted primarily on martinis and Cuervo and tea and All-Dressed chips and the occasional steak, and Hefnered around in our Hefner pajamas every night, and got a lot of strange looks and stopped to pee a lot and made sexual innuendoes a lot and carried Sock Puppet Joe around with us a lot and giggled a LOT and got MORE strange looks and generally had way, way more fun than pretty much anyone else in our vicinity. It was EXACTLY what I wanted from my Road Trip of OMG New Decade, and it was wonderful, and I'm so incredibly grateful to Sal for being so game for this madness even though we technically just met less than a year ago and road trips are not her first choice of entertainment. It is a good thing I like Sig so much or I would just keep Sal locked up in my basement forever because I love her kind of a crazy lot, and five days in a car with her just made me love her MORE, and it was not nearly, nearly enough time.
And that is the overview. ♥
And now some pictures, with narration-not AT ALL dialup friendly:
Day 1 we hit the road from Sal's house around 9:30 a.m., heartlessly ignoring Toby-dog's subtle hint… which came in the form of him lying down next to the car as we were loading it up. (Awww. ♥) That put us in Jasper for lunch, and I liked Jasper, even if it is a little touristy for my taste--very reminiscent of Estes Park in Colorado, actually. There I had a delicious sandwich, while SP Joe looked on:
Then, thanks to some questionable signage and our own limitations and possibly some kind of spatial rift, after a twenty-minute brief detour north (in a south-y kind of way), we got going in the proper direction toward Banff, and stopped at the Columbia Ice Fields along the way:
I've never really seen terrain like that; it was stunning and very intimidating. There was a funny (to me) advertisement in the bathroom for the Banff Gondola, which basically amounted to, "Feeling small among all these huge mountains? Take our gondola and look down on them!" I think the "As is your rightful place, mighty human" was implied. Why do we feel the need to do that? Funny.
SP Joe was just enjoying the fuckin' moment:
After that it took us approximately 97 billion hours to reach Banff, but it was at least a gorgeous drive:
Immediately upon our arrival, we tossed our stuff at the hotel and made for the nearest steak and martinis. Mmmm.
SP Joe overindulged, of course:
And then we headed back to the hotel and saw the FLASHPOINT PREVIEW OMG, and watched an ep of dS, and went to bed.
The next morning we had a brief foray onto LJ:
Yes, that is me reading Sal's journal while she reads mine. Hee. /dorks Then we headed up to the Banff Springs Hotel, which is AMAZING-built in the late 1800s, I think:
So that was pretty awesome, even if the parking machine ate Sal's money and our lunch was sort of hideously expensive (but DELICIOUS). (This was also where Sal went to great and evocative narrative lengths to describe to me how a Saskatchewan berry tastes, despite the fact that I was, even at that very moment, CONSUMING said berries. Heee heee hee. ♥) We were unsuccessful in our Daniel MacIvor stalking, but did have a different kind of victory: we were poking around in a bookstore when suddenly I hear this SQUEAL from Sal behind me. "What the hell are you--" I said, turning around, then, "*SQUEAL*!", for lo, there on the sale bookshelf, for NO APPARENT REASON, was a brand new copy of Hard Core Roadshow! I STILL do not know WTF it was doing there, because it's been out of print for quite a while and I certainly had to do some work to track down my own copy USED, so. Clearly the fannish gods were smiling on Sal. *g*
From there we proceeded south toward Waterton Lakes Park, and that was honestly one of the most beautiful drives I have ever experienced. Like so:
It was also raining:
so that was the perfect moody backdrop for listening to the audio track for HCL, which is exactly what we did (thank you, zabira! ♥). This was also where Sal saw a four-eyed deer! Or at least two deer standing at such an angle as we came around a corner that they appeared to be one deer with four eyes. Hee. (Sal to me after we passed, when the adrenaline was setting in: "Okay, my thoughts went like this: first of all, OH MY GOD, DEER, and second of all, WHY DOES THAT DEER HAVE FOUR EYES?" Heeeee.)
By the time we got to our hotel it was POURING and MONSOONING, and we got completely soaked carrying our stuff from the car to our room, which was the cause of much hysterical laughter. We dried off and grabbed a quick dinner at the hotel restaurant before it closed, then Heffed into our Hefs for the evening and settled in with our beverages to watch Live Free Or Die Hard. Which I thoroughly enjoyed, even if I had to call shenanigans on a couple of occasions. Hee. (Also at some point I discovered the video for Paul Gross' version of "Santa Drives a Pickup" lurking on my hard drive-THANKS, sansets!-and we watched it with half-covered eyes and laughed our asses off and agreed that it was a good thing PAUL was having such a good time. Hee. We also watched the "Tiny Teddy" video, which Sal had never seen. GUH.) And then, after much chatting and snickering, to sleep.
And OMG, this is taking me longer to type out than it took to OCCUR. Hee. I will have to finish this tomorrow. *is suddenly very sleepy*