A day in the life of a Pyro.

So I didn’t really sleep last night. I stayed up till like 6:30 am or something crazy. Then I finally crashed for a couple of hours. When I woke up finally at 8 (Batch was supposed to be there in 30 min) I still had not packed anything. I threw a bunch of crap in some bags and got dressed. Batch ended up showing up almost 15 minutes late. Which was good in a way because I needed a little bit of extra time to finish getting ready. Besides I don’t think any of us were actually expecting to be on the road by 9.

So we cruised over to Scott’s, packed everything in the truck, and hit the road. We didn’t get far before we made our first stop, Penfold’s in Temecula. Breakfast, YUM! So we were getting out of the car when all of a sudden Chris starts laughing and pointing at this van. We couldn’t figure out what he was laughing at until we went over and looked at the van. There were two dogs sitting in the front seats, and it totally looked like the dogs were driving. It was hilarious. Scott ran back to the truck and got his camera to get a picture. It was great.

We finished breakfast and headed out again. Next stop… Pasadena. Scott needed to buy a backpack at the Apple Store. Since his laptop is such a behemoth it won’t fit in a regular backpack he had to get one that was made especially for it.

Back on the road again we saw some cool signs on some buildings and trucks. The first one we saw was a “0% Off all Furniture” sign. I thought that was rather humorous. I was too slow with the camera though so I couldn’t catch a picture of it. Then as we were cruising alongside a truck I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye that was pretty funny. Trucks always have a compartment on the drivers side of the truck that has a label “Fire Extinguisher Inside”. Well this one was a little bit different. It read “Fire Putter Outer Inside”. I thought it was pretty funny so Scott slowed down next to the truck and I snapped a couple of pics. The next one I found was also on a truck. This time it was on the back of the truck. The sign was two arrows. One pointing to the left side ot the truck reading “Passing Side” and the other one pointing to the right side of the truck reading “Suicide”. I thought it was cool too, so out came the camera again. You should never try to pass a truck on the right side.

After several “I think it is right over this hill” and similar comments we finally got to our scheduled lunch stop. “Harris Ranch” a place known for their beef. Basically they have their own cows a couple of miles away. So we got seated and started to order. Scott and I both ordered burgers and then Batchelor goes and orders chicken strips! We proceeded to give him a bunch of crap. We came all the way to this beef place and he orders chicken… what are we going to do with that boy? Oh well. It really isn’t that big of a deal, but it is fun to give Chris a hard time about it. Then when we were nearly done we discovered that he had also never tried A-1 Steak Sauce. So we forced him to try some. I am not sure if he liked it or not, but he didn’t seem to hate it or anything.

Finally after about 8 hours we arrived at our hotel. Courtyard by Marriott at 299 Second Street. The hotel was only two blocks from the convention center so that was a step up from our long walk last year. We got all checked in and headed up to the room. So what do we do when we get there? We drive 8 hours to San Francisco and all we can think about is getting online to check our email. We are so bad. After spending an hour or so trying to sort out network issues with trying to get our wireless router to work, which we never did get to work, we decided to go and get some dessert.

We decided on just desert because we had eaten such a late lunch that we were still kinda full. I looked up the directions to the Cheesecake Factory. It is on top of the Macy’s building. I was going to write down the directions, but Scott seemed to think we didn’t need to. so we were off to walk to dessert. Little did we know, we were in for a longer trip then expected. The Macy’s building was in Union Square. Just under a mile away. Well we kinda took the scenic route. We walked in a gigantic circle around it. Overall we walked probably close to 3 miles to get there. We took some cool pictures from the balcony. After our long walk we were a little more hungry than before. We ended up splitting an appetizer and a meal between the three of us. Then we ordered dessert. Only, the guy came back and said that they didn’t have any strawberries for my strawberry shortcake. This was unacceptable. I ended up getting a goblet of strawberries and a scoop of ice cream. Phew.. That was a close one. I wouldn’t have been very happy if I walked all that way to miss out on my strawberries.

While we were eating we called Ryan trying to figure out exactly what the difference is between espresso and coffee. He wasn’t real helpful with that. He told us it was kinda like the difference between beer and everclear. We also talked with him jokingly about him flying out and meeting us. We left the Cheesecake Factory and headed back to the hotel. We decided to take the short way back this time. While we were on our way back Promo called again and was seriously considering flying out in the morning.

We made it back to the hotel, surfed the net for a while and talked about the plan for tomorrow. Then Ryan called again and told us what time he would be there. I can’t believe he is actually going to fly up here. He is flying from Ontario and then took the BART to Market Street. BART stands for Bay Area Rapid Transit. Basically it is a train that goes back and forth between above ground and subway style.

Ok well that is all for now, but we have a big day ahead of us tomorrow.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 5th, 2004 at Jan 05, 04 | 7:30 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.