| This picture was taken minutes before we took off. The crew: Amir and Nam. The car: innocent Alice. Notice our healthy skintones and bodies...those changed by Day 7. |  |
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Nam turned out to be useless company at times (see below), so I had to buy another travel partner. Meet our "homey", affectionately named D after the jumpy waiter in some restaurant in southern California. |  |
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Here we are just before leaving California into Arizona, and look what the weather reduced us down to: it was so hot and so dry that we had to go to a Big-K on the way and buy wife-beater shirts. All we needed now was a mobile home, some fishing poles, and empty beer cans and we'd be bonafide white trash. |  |
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We stopped in the middle of nowhere Texas to take a pee-pee break on the road, and I saw a nice-looking cactus. I walked over to pick it up and the chunky little thing stabs me with hundreds of hair-like fuzzy spines that were near impossible to remove! I got pissed at it and decide to get back at it by kicking it. Unfortunately it was hot and I couldn't think properly...and so I kicked it barefoot. As if I wasn't in enough pain, the vicious thing stabs me with its larger, sharper, and longer spines. After getting two bloody holes in my foot (looked Dracula had bit me there), I decide to burn him. I plugged in the car cigarette lighter and attempted to scorch my new nemesis, but I forgot that cacti are the most juicy, lucious plants around. Damn it, he was impregnable. So you know what they say...if you can't beat 'em, join 'em (or at least eat their children). Hence my willingness to be in this picture with the cactus. |  |
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More of Texas. Looks pretty, right? Not after 15 hours. |  |
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When one drives across the country, a journey that takes over 50 hours, one would like another person to talk to. I thought Nam would be that person. This is the person Nam turned out to be. |  |
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Who is that bastard and why am I giving him a ten dollar bill? In New Orleans, he made a poorly-worded bet with me, I stupidly accepted, and then I realized the poorly-worded part made a world of a difference. Fearing the thugs that he probably would have called if I didn't pay up, I paid. And made a Kodak moment of it. Why I'm smiling in this picture I'll never know. |  |
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In Fatlanta, Georgia. Pictured here is Centennial Olympic Park against a backdrop of Ted Turner's little company headquarters. |  |
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In Clemson, South Carolina at the local Hooters, here is Nam with Cinderella, the waitress who wouldn't/couldn't look at you when you talked with her. (Oh now she looks!) We took our revenge by looking away in this picture. Yeah, we got her back real good. |  |
And that concludes CC-USA 2001. Stay tuned for CC-USA 2003 when I return back home.
I hope.