Guess who's back, back again

Well the crew landed safely back in Tuscaloosa about an hour ago. It's going to take a while to get unpacked and settled back in to our typically sedentary lifestyle, so it might be a few days before our grand finale recap post(s?) get done. I'm doing this one from my phone...I'm not even 100% sure where my laptop is at this juncture.

TSDA Chronicles #15: Free Beers for the Road, Please

Thursday June, 4

We woke up in St. Louis this morning to frosty conditions: before we went to sleep we set the thermostat on 40 degrees just to see what would happen, and while the room never reached its full potential, it was certainly chilly enough to put condensation on the window.  After a delicious lunchtime feast at what could realistically be considered the best Taco Bell in America, we went to take a free tour of the Anheuser-Busch plant across town.  The tour was pretty similar to the Jack Daniels tour we took at the beginning of our adventure, except everything was much cleaner and it was a much bigger operation.  Another plus was that we got two of the freeest, freshest beers of our lives at the end of the tour, whereas in Lynchburg all they gave us was lemonade.  InBev or not, free beer wins out every time with these budget concious road warriors.  Additionally, Hayden informed us that Alabama picked up a "big time 5 star commitment" while we were touring, making this officially Hayden's most productive day of the trip.

  After the tour we headed over to the banks of the mighty Missisip and saw the famous Gateway Arch, which was about 10 times as big as any of us had imagined.  As usual, we parked very illegally...in the lapping tide of the river...and ran up for a turbo charged photo-op before getting back on the interstate to head on down to the land of the delta blues for dinner.  All told, St. Louis receives a B rating from the TSDA crew.  Points were docked for generally poor street organization and the dirtiniess of the river, and points were given for exceptionally cool monuments, super friendly fast food workers, and free beer.

After yet another 300 mile marathon through staight, flat, and generally uninspiring farmland in Missouri and Arkansas we arrived at our much anticipated 2 hour detour stop for dinner: Rendezvous in Memphis.  There was no wait for a table, and within 5 minutes of sitting down we were presented with our own pitcher of sweet tea, 2 slabs of ribs, and a bunch of bread, cole slaw, and baked beans.  The food was great and so was the atmosphere--which included a particularly prophetic looking picture of Coach Bryant in the stairwell--and after about 45 minutes we were back on the road headed to Hayden and Barrett's cousin's house in Nashville, our final stopover of the trip.

Gasoline Purchased Today: 30 gallons

Sleeping Accomodations: Hayden and Barrett's cousin's house in Nashville

Tomorrow's Destination: Tuscaloosa

Potential Stops en Route: Lunch

Potential Problems: I'm going to pistol whip the next person to play a Taylor Swift song

TSDA Chronicles #14: "We took a lot of pictures and we drove a lot"

Wednesday June, 3

Today got off to a  good start, and then quickly became boring.  On top of that, the Rivals recruiting site that Hayden spends 12-16 hours a day poring over was down for maintenance until ~1:30, so it's safe to say he wasn't in his most chipper of moods.  After leaving the hotel, we stopped by a local place called Gino's East to get an authentic Chicago deep dish pizza.  We then followed that experience up with one of our now-famous entirely free driving tours of the city, complete with Hayden calling out lane changes from the backseat and Barrett taking 300-400 pictures from the front.  We saw Michigan Ave., Soldier Field, the lake, and a bunch of areas that were used to film Gotham city for The Dark Knight movie.

After Chicago, it was a 5 hour drive diagonally across Illinois to St. Louis.  And there was not much going on in mid/southern Illinois today.  There wasn't much going on in the backseat today either, since Hayden seized Rivals' downtime as an excuse to be even less of a fruitful crew member than usual.  We arrived at our hotel tonight tired, hungry, and looking forward to getting some rest.

Gasoline Purchased Today: 14 gallons

Sleeping Accomodations: Hilton Garden Inn- St Louis Airport

Tomorrow's Destination: Nashville

Potential Stops en Route: Budweiser Factory, the arch, Memphis, Rendezvous ribs

Potential Problems: All nighter

TSDA Chronicles #13: Rock and Roll Hall of Free, Touchdown Jesus, and the Windy City

Tuesday June, 2

We woke up in Cleveland this morning, and we were actually surprised by how nice of a city it was.  Especially when compared to NYC and Philadelphia, Cleveland seemed to be really clean and easy to navigate without mass transit and/or taxis.  After spending about 30 minutes in a Burger King parking lot to finally upload a couple of days worth of blog posts, we headed downtown to see the much-fabled Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  Unfortunately for us, the price of admission was about $17 more than we were willing to pay.  So after sticking around for a few minutes to see famous peoples' guitars and play Guitar Hero for free in the lobby, we left.  On the short walk over to Browns Stadium, we walked past a harbor area where we saw a huge and out-of-place Cleveland Steamer.  The stadium was great, and we really liked all the plaques it had of people who have taken the Browns to the Superbowl.

We spent the next few hours on a particularly mindless stretch of interstate through northern Ohio and Indiana.  We stopped for dinner in South Bend, Indiana and ate at a particularly sketchy local barbeque joint called Frankie's.  While we were in town we figured we might as well go check out Notre Dame's campus, if for no other reason than to have an excuse to make a bunch of Lou Holtz jokes.  We got some snapshots of Touchdown Jesus and came away with a sense of sense of awe and wonderment that can only be experienced by witnessing first hand the stomping grounds of the most consistently overrated college football team of all time.

From South Bend it was only about 100 miles to Chicago.  On the way, we were able to snag our best priceline deal yet: a room at the 4th nicest hotel in Chicago for only $59.  So after checking in and spreading our crap out evenly across the hardwood floors and nice furniture, we left to meet up with some friends of mine who live in Chicago.  We first picked up Mike and headed to Wrigleyville to check out some bars.  Much to our surprise, the first bar we went to was an Alabama-themed one called The Houndstooth Saloon, and we thoroughly enjoyed being surrounded by Tide memoribilia despite being so far from Tuscaloosa.  We were supposed to also meet up with my buddy Jon, but unfortunately the Chicago mass transit system failed to make that happen.  

Gasoline Purchased Today: 31 gallons

Sleeping Accomodations: Hyatt Regency O'Hare

Tomorrow's Destination: St. Louis

Potential Stops en Route: Downtown Chicago, authentic pizza place, rest stops

Potential Problems: Boredom on yet another endlessly long drive

TSDA Chronicles #12: TSDA Tells Customs Whassup and Narrowly Escapes Certain Doom

Monday June, 1

Today was a great day.  Since we didn't have complimentary internet in the hotel room last night--and we certainly weren't going to actually pay for it--we didn't have anything to keep us up late and take away from our sleep.  We got an early-for-us start on the road around 10 AM and headed straight for Buffalo/Niagara Falls.  My mom's cousin Katherine...who also happens to be a fan of the blog...and her family live in Buffalo, and she and her husband Bill treated us to an awesome lunch at Anchor Bar, the restaurant where Buffalo wings were first invented.  Not surprisingly, the wings were awesome.  It was kind of tempting to order a cheeseburger or something just for the irony of it, but I'm glad we stuck with the theme of the trip and stayed cliche.  That makes us 3 for 3 on regionally indigenous foods so far.  The next stop is Cleveland,

 so it's a pretty safe bet we'll be looking to chow down on some steamer platters.

We left Anchor Bar with high morale and the GPS set on Niagara Falls.  For those of you who have never been, you can either view Niagara Falls from the Canadian or the American side.  We knew that we couldn't go to Canadia because we don't have our passports, but we somehow misread the GPS and pulled into the Duty-Free store on the American side of the Peace Bridge, half of which is in America and half of which is in Canadia.  Well, the thing about this particular Duty-Free store is that once you pull in it becomes a one way street into Canadia, and you can't get back into the U.S. without going through customs.  And, as the crew soon discovered, starting today, June 1 2009, you can't go through customs without a passport.  Yep, the law literally went in to effect today.  

So as we were headed over the Peace Bridge toward Canadia, I suavely pulled a quick U-ey on the bridge and decided that we would just have to brave it through border control.  The officer in the booth didn't seem to think very highly of our plan, and his displeasure really came through when he searched us and the pathfinder for weapons, drugs, and booze.  Luckily, all he found was a pack of cheese crackers and the big plastic skull from Shipwreck.  He even played a super fun game of 20 questions with us, asking friendly questions about where we were born and what we seemed to be doing in this neck of the woods.  It took a while, but we were eventually able to win him over with our kind eyes and confident smiles.  He ended up giving us some kind of non-compliance warning and letting us go, making that twice in the last few days that we have dug ourselves in deep holes with law enforcement and promptly fineagled out of it.  That brings

my popo sweet talking record up to probably about ten for twelve.  Barrett is one for two.  Hayden doesn't drive much in light of certain safety concerns.

We eventually did make it to Niagara on the U.S. side unscathed.  It was pretty remarkable.  True to form, we didn't pay for any sort of tour and we didn't stay for long, and before we knew it we were back on the open road headed for the city that has a tourism industry based entirely on Lebron James: Cleveland.

Gasoline Purchased Today: 15 gallons

Sleeping Accomodations: Cleveland Airport Marriott

Tomorrow's Destination: Chicago

Potential Stops en Route: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, somewhere to scam free WiFi

Potential Problems: It's Hayden's day to drive...and we'll be in Chicago

TSDA Chronicles #11: Lots and Lots of Driving

Sunday May, 31

So today was not one of our wildest adventures, so neither will it be our wildest blog post. We woke up in Portland, Maine to a brisk temperature of ~50 degrees and went to our favorite restaurant, Sam's, for lunch and to restock on essentials.  The water and sunchips lasted us about 2200 miles, although it probably would have been longer if we hadn't accidentally crushed them by stacking our bags on them one day.  So after reloading on gas, water, and food, we set out for the roadtrip's longest single drive yet.

We were pretty excited when we discovered that we were going to get to deal with tollbooths again every time we changed states or got on and off the interstate.  Nothing is as energizing and liberating as paying $5 to the state of Massachussetts so that you can drive for six straight hours on a federal interstate.  Anyway, the drive was pretty dull, although it did leave me wondering how people from this region get away with criticizing Alabama for being so rural.  I've never seen so many farmhouses and cow pastures in my life as we did in upstate New York.

We stopped for the night in Syracuse.  While parking and walking to dinner we once again got approached by a dude asking us for money.  After telling him all we had was plastic, he then boldly suggested that we just "buy him something, then."  We promptly shooed him away after that one.  I did notice, however, that all of his clothes were brand new and that in fact he still had the price tags on his flatbill and "stunna shades."  It was refreshing to see someone with their priorities so appropriately aligned.

Gasoline Purchased Today: 30 gallons

Sleeping Accomodations: Double Tree- Syracuse

Tomorrow's Destination: Cleveland

Potential Stops en Route: Buffalo, Niagara Falls

Potential Problems: No passports

Sorry for lack of posting

Our hotels for the last few nights haven't had internet...so posting hasn't really been a possibility. I already have everything written and pictures and everything, so as soon as I get internet I'll update. Sorry about that, check back soon!