Long Weekend   
09:39pm 18/02/2009
  Mom and I went to my brother's house over the weekend to visit. Pretty much the entire trip was one clusterfuck after another...

Hotel #1 had roaches and non-working phones/hairdryers/televisions.
Hotel #2 didn't have room for both of us (mom stayed there, and I stayed with Nick for a few days).

On the day we were finally ready to leave, the Grapevine (one of three ways over the mountains to get the hell out of LA) was closed due to snow and dumb people in overturned cars. The 101 (the runner-up way) had high wind advisory, and neither of us wanted to drive sideways, so we took option number three: the 14 to the 58. These highways take you out past Edwards Airforce base, into the picturesque Mojave desert, and also past the tiny town of the same name.

We shared the two-lane highway surrounded by miles of flat sandy scrub with about a thousand other people, none of us going more than five miles an hour. This means that by the end of three hours, we'd gone fifteen miles, and had finally arrived in Mojave, The Town Where Everything is Sticky.

Mom and I stopped at a Denny's to have dinner (it was almost six by then; we'd left at two) and figure out what we should do. Mom said that at this rate, we'd have to drive most of the 5 (the quickest way home) in the dark, and that we'd have to rent a hotel room again, and that there was no way in Hell we were going to stay in one of the many seedy joints Mojave had to offer. So we went a little ways further, to a quaint little town called Buttonwillow, and got a room at a Super 8 motel there. It was the nicest, and least expensive room of all three hotels we'd stayed at.

We left at noon the next morning, and I drove most of the way home in the rain, at some points with so little visibility that it felt like we were underwater. There was still a lot of traffic, since we hit the 80 at rush hour, but we still managed to get home at around six in the evening.

Now mom has pneumonia and I have a headache that won't die no matter how many pills I shove at it.

Bugh.

And now, a map.



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