Day 12 - Reno to HOME!

Day 12

June 2^nd, 2012

Reno, NV to Ventura, CA

The Home Stretch

Last day.

Kyle sheds a few tears as we get into the car for the last time.

Our earliest take off – we were out of Reno by 8:15am. A big thanks to the Arnows for hosting us.

Drive highlights:

-       Kyle notices a mini-van with a Missouri license plate. NO WAY!!!! It’s the same dude. Steer clear. He’s certainly not the best driver. Didn’t see any egregious errors this time.

-       We passed over the California border. 

    Excited to see the beach for the first time since beach week in South Carolina. Speaking of which, oddly, we saw both a North Carolina and South Carolina license plate as we were leaving Reno. They had almost as many bugs on their cars too! That’s probably the first license plate from either of those states that we’ve seen since Tennessee.


    You know you're in California when you see super green and crunchy things, there's more highway cops, and you get passed on two separate occasions by Mercedes' going over 100 mph.

Everything from organic food at a gas station to wind mills!

    Time to make fun of our own state. Have any of you ever seen the SNL skit “Californians”? Well it cleverly makes fun of the way Californians talk, especially inserting “the” before the name of any highway/freeway and how all we do is explain how we got places in our cars and how there was traffic.” For example, “Ohhh my gawwwd. I took THE 101 to THE 405 but it was like totally crowded so I took a shortcut and cut across THE 10 to Santa Monica and then I bought some tangelos from this man that was selling them on the street corner. They’re organic. Nbd.” 
    Here’s a link to a video clip of the skit to truly understand better (Sarnow Credit): 


    http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/the-californians/1396627

-       

    We went to Subway as a sort of ceremonial last lunch before the last leg of the drive. We both guessed how many total subs the two of us had consumed over the trip. Definitely upwards of 12. That extra bacon Kyle cooked and brought from Idaho?  Yeah, that was a free add-on.

Subway thanks for all the good times.

-         Since we had woken up at 7am, Ali was pretty tired and opted for a Starbucks ice coffee. Well… that stuff is STRONG. Ali was switchin’ lanes on the wood grain, changing songs every 45 seconds, fidgeting in her seat, singing to Spanish songs. She definitely wasn’t tired anymore. Kyle doesn’t know if he is thankful for the cup of iced coffee or not. But he is glad no one nodded off.


    Pop quiz time!
    Where is this? We took this photo during one of our drives. Can anyone name where it is? Answer below. 

    No idea. We took this pic to just reflect the sad fact that even after seeing so many incredible corners of the United States, the majority of the US is beginning to all look the same. McDonalds, Motel 6, Arco, Chervon, Carl's Jr. (aka Hardee's) and a big highway full of cars. The things we enjoyed most and will likely remember most are the moments where we were somewhere we're we saw something we never had before. 

-       After about 350 riveting miles on THE 5 we turned on to THE 126. Home sweet home nearing and nearing.
    We started to get pretty excited to be home despite such a great adventure of a trip. We began to think about what we were most excited about.
    To stretch our legs? 

    To not eat Subway for months? 
    To not think of bathrooms in terms of “how many miles...?”
    To not be able to put life on cruise control? 
    To see the beach everyday? 
    All the above.

-       Got off at the familiar Seaward exit.

 Of course the last car we are behind is a minivan. 

Couldn't be more appropriate. 

    Pulled into my driveway at 4:20pm. Home. Safe and sound.

-        We made sure to note all the final driving stats. Lots of them. Pretty good numbers if we do say so ourselves. We have provided the dashboard shots just in case anyone thinks we're fabricating these stats :) 

Driving stats: 

We passed the 4000 mile marker in the middle of the drive. 

Average MPG for the trip = 43.2

We purchased 94.6 gallons of gas throughout the drive. 

Costing a total of = $372.65.  

Average price per gallon of = $4.015

Luckily we didn't have to fill up in CA because 

CA gas prices were by far the highest we'd seen.

Average speed = 60mph 

(Kudos to Poppa Farr for averaging 78 on his cross country adventure. 

We couldn't compete with that!)

Total mileage = 4193

Total running time in the car = 69 hr. and 59 mins. 

And we made it without killing each other! 

Almost 3 straight days in the car. Thanks Helga for treating us so well. 

At certain points, Kyle looked on the dash for a passenger eject button...Helga however didn't provide that satisfaction (see earlier "Ali had coffee").

The trip was incredible and it was such a great chance to see parts of the U.S. that we'd never seen before. Luckily we had no accidents and no tickets throughout the 4200 miles. We're very thankful for that! 

The only sad note we do have is for the families of the 348,762 bugs that we killed. Here is a picture of VolksWagen graveyard. 

Once Ali gets back to Charlotte in August she is planning on registering Helga in North Carolina and hoping to get the license plate "RUN-FARR" 
But Helga's homeland will always be California! 

MAP OF THE ENTIRE TRIP 

Thank you all for following the blog. It was really fun for us to write and keep track of all the trip highlights. It will be a fun thing to look back on and it is also nice to know that our friends and family are interested!(and the random readers in other countries haha)


Anyone out there thinking of doing a cross-country trip, it's definitely worth it!  Exceeded expectations.  Need any advice?  We can help with more than a few recommendations.


Over and out. 


Love, 
         Ali, Kyle, and Helga. 
              Oh and Bruno too :)

Day 11 Ketchum to Reno

Day 11

June 1st, 2012

Ketchum, ID to Reno, NV

RENO or Bust!

Morning started out with a lovely bike ride to town. Ali rode into town to send a few more postcards and check out downtown Ketchum one last time. Turns out nothing in that town opens before 9am...so my journey at 8:16am was rather desolate.

As Ali approached the condo to put the bikes back she could smell bacon from at least a ½ mile away. Kyle was up and at ‘em cooking up the rest of the bacon. mmmm....bacon.

We cleaned up the house, loaded the car with all the leftover food we had made and said goodbye to the Village at Greyhawk. Again- THANKS to the Beyer family for letting us stay there! 

Drive highlights:

Can't really call this picture a highlight.  It's on the not-top-ten pics of the trip, but yes this is what Northern Nevada looks like.

-       Within the first hour of the drive Ali awarded the trip’s Worst Driver Award to none other than a guy driving a mini van from Missouri. We were on the 93 South which is a one lane road for the majority. This minivan and Helga were stuck behind a big truck going about 60. There is a sign that says “passing lane in ½ mile.” So Ali doesn’t get to bummed about the low speed and just waits for the passing lane. The lane approaches and she sees the minivan pull over to the left; not on to the passing lane, but all the way over to the oncoming traffic lane over the double yellow line. Completely unnecessary since a passing lane was just provided. He’s lucky he did not get taken out by a Mack truck. We quickly passed the minivan so we didn’t have to deal with anymore of his malarkey.

Nevada! Two for two on not-top-ten pics! Woooo

Someone needs to talk to the state government of Nevada and tell them they need to work on their "Welcome to Nevada" sign. Just because we were not entering the conventional way (route through Las Vegas) does not mean we don't deserve a warm and colorful welcome! Couldn't even spare us a penny slot casino?

Ali broke the speed high clocking in at 93mph. As soon as we switched, Kyle quickly stole the record back by going 94mph. Boys will be boys. This dangerous competition was then ended for the sake of abiding by the law. Kyle won.  First California plate spotted in Yellowstone, now the Speed Record.  *noted*

 Speaking of 94 – that was the temperature during the majority of our drive through Nevada. We actually hit 98 degrees for a few minutes so we had to obey the rule we had created... play a 98 degrees song. NOOOOOO!!!!

    Since neither of us had any on our iPods (shocking) we had to YouTube a song of theirs. The first hit was the song “Heat it Up.” Seemed appropriate. Turned it on and… Kyle recognized the beginning.  It's one of the hits from NOW 3.  After a few choruses, Kyle started dancin' and singing along to make the best of it.  Luckily, the rule only stated we had to listen to one song....and the only audience was Ali and the Nevada desert.

        We passed an intense high security prison. There was a sign on the freeway that said “Within 10 miles of a maximum security prison – hitchhiking prohibited." That’s fine. We weren’t planning on giving any convicts a ride. Only cause there’s no room in the back seat.

-       We missed Shawn Devilla and his amazing roadtrip DJ skills. Satelite radio is great and all but…. Kyle’s NPR tolerance is much lower than Ali’s and we both swear that everyone 5 times we changed the channel the same 3 Adele songs were on the goddamn radio. ADELE is following us everywhere. This was confirmed when Ali was reading TIME magazine’s “100 most Influential People” article and they featured Adele saying, “Turn on any radio station in the world and you’ll probably hear Adele. Go to Mars right now and I’m pretty sure if there is life on that planet, they’re playing Adele.” Anyways, shoutout to DJ Deezy. We miss you.

-       The drive through northern Nevada was so uneventful that Kyle took his first nap. 

    Since Ali knows NPR would have put Kyle to sleep anyways, she snagged this precious hour to listen to some nerdy Satellite stations. After about 45 mins, she was sick of hearing that the Facebook IPO has disappointed everyone. I get it... I get it, invest in Myspace.

RENO

Pop quiz: 

Guess who this is?

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SARNOW!

 Could recognize that hair flip from miles away.

Wazzzzzup Sarnow. We pulled into Sarnow driveway and were greeted by him and his lovely parents Mrs. Arnow and Jarnow. There house is up in the hills only about 30 mins from the California border.

 

We got to catch up with Sarnow, throw the frizzzzz for a bit, and then were treated to an absolutely delicious dinner – grill and chill style.

Jarnow grillin' 

Jarnow chillin'

 

During dinner we got to see a pretty impressive sunset from the Arnow’s back balcony. Check it out – Nevada provided some serious competition with the Cali sunsets.

Oh and Shawn showed up for a bit. 

Nice button-down Mr. Banker.  
Put some Rogaine on that chest and get back to me.

Then to top off what was already a great night – all three of us went on a night hike about 1.5 miles up to the top of a hill behind Sarnow’s house. We could see out over all of Reno from there.

After chatting about the good old days at Cate we looked down at the city center and realized there were fireworks going off outside the casinos. Pretty sweet timing.

Driving stats: 
Miles: 542 miles
Horrible drivers sighted: 1
Total mileage: 3674
MPG for Ketchum to Reno: 44.8

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