That's All Folks!

Tuesday morning we woke up around 10:00, packed up like nomads one last time, and headed out to our last meal together before Meredith and I headed back to NC. I found a breakfast place near USC called Jacks N Joe that had good ratings on Yelp, so we headed there for some grub. 

"The Pudgie Elvis"

   Meredith ordered the house specialty: "the pudgie elvis" which was 2 pancakes covered with bananas and a peanut butter sauce. I had an omelet with tomato, avocado, bacon, and cheese and it was delicious! During breakfast, Meredith and I almost got into a fist fight over a $4 debt she claimed I owed her. I know it was only $4, but after 12 days together, it didn't take much for us to get sassy with one another! Allison finally made us compromise and split the huge debt 50/50. sigh.


Also during breakfast, we learned that there had been an earthquake in Virginia! How crazy that there would be an earthquake at home when we were in California.

this picture makes me laughhh

   Once we finished breakfast we headed to LAX and said our goodbyes. It was hard saying goodbye to Allison, especially since she had no clue what she was getting into and was feeling nervous about everything. I wanted to pack up that little ninny in my carry-on and bring her home, but my bag was just too full already (seriously...I had a pair of shoes in my purse). So we hugged one last time and it was so long-farewell! Meredith and I hopped on our plane and got back to Raleigh around 11:30 pm Tuesday night. (Shout-out to my loving hubby who picked us up that late and had to work the next day!)

   Every time I think back on this trip I still can't believe we did it! It seems so surreal. 3000 miles, 12 days, and 10 states with NO major issues! I can't believe we didn't have a flat tire, run out of gas, get in an accident, or get a speeding ticket the whole way! It was really a seamless trip which is shocking considering how little we had planned as far as hotels and stuff to do the last half of the trip. Even though the 3 of us didn't always see eye-to-eye, we actually got along really well for the most part and had a blast along the way.

   There were times before we left that I considered backing out because of the expense and being away from home for 12 days, but I am so glad I decided to go. It was a once in a lifetime kind of trip and I am so thankful to have had those 12 days with Allison before she moved away from me! Allison is such a strong, brave, amazing person to be able to move thousands of miles away from family and friends (for the second time!), and I am so lucky to have had her as a best friend for 13+ years now!! I know she will do great things in California and I can't wait to hear about all her adventures...and hopefully about more celebrity sightings!

Smell ya later, CA!

Now I'm back to my not as exciting life in Raleigh, that'll probably be the end of my blogging career! Thanks for reading : )

Love,
   Stacey (aka Ninny Sea Buscuit)







  

This ones for you AlLAson!!

we shall call this: "fake excitement"

Allison has been bugging me to finish my blog...so here goes!

We left Vegas on Sunday...let me re-phrase, we crawled away from Vegas on Sunday at a snails pace because apparently the entire state of CA goes to Vegas on the weekends and heads home at noon. Meredith drove us the 45 minutes to the California state sign and after taking the lamest state sign to date, she bribed "never one to turn down a dolla" Allison to drive for her for an "hour" (which actually turned into the rest of the way).

After about 5 hours we started to see the smog covered mountains and we knew we had finally made it! 3,000 miles later we had finally reached Los Angeles!! Woo-Hoo!

We checked into the O-hotel right in downtown L.A. (thank you once again Hotel Tonight) which was a "boutique" hotel and had recently been re-done. It was really nice, but made us feel reallly dumb when we couldn't figure out how to flush the toilet or turn the A.C. on! L.A. is too smart for us southern-folk.

bar downstairs in the lobby

 Once we got all that figured out, we headed out and walked to a near-by sushi restaurant that I can't remember the name of and have no pictures of...at this point in the trip, I was over carrying my big-ole camera around all the time. The restaurant had a real sassy-chef who had lots of rules for how you ate your sushi which was kind of weird, but the sushi was AMAZING, so we let it slide. After dinner, we walked around downtown looking for a cute dessert shop and stopped in Bottega Louie to look at their amazing dessert bar. It was way too crowded so we left, but as we were walking by, Meredith spotted our first celeb!! I told them at the beginning of the trip we would see at least one celeb on our journey and they both laughed in my face and called me crazy! Whose crazy now?? BOO-YA!

Hey Mitch!

If you (sadly) don't know who this is, it is the guy who plays "Mitchell" on the TV show Modern Family. I felt kind of bad taking his picture, but not bad enough not to do it! If he had been eating with his on-screen hubby Cameron I definitely would have gone in and asked for a picture with them! We all acted like total dorks after seeing him and immediately called someone to tell them about our exciting celebrity sighting! 

We continued walking around and finally found a cute dessert shop to stop for some yummy treats and old school games like Jenga. 

Once we finished dessert, we headed back to the hotel (and yes, I insisted on the same route so we could see Mitchell again) and chilled out for the night. Allison and I laid in bed and worked on our blogs while Meredith headed to a secret location for her nightly chat with her BF. I was working on my Grand Canyon blog and gave Allison a healthy dose of the giggles when she saw my "Troll Spray" picture that went with my blog, and while laughing she said "You are funnnyy TO ME" (you really have to hear the way she says it to appreciate it) which made me have a laughing/crying fit...something that seemed to happen a lot on this trip. It was times like this that made me realize how much I'm gonna miss this little lady over the next year!

Monday morning we walked to a vintage store Meredith found that was supposed to be really cool, but it ended up being a little further than we thought. This was really was not fun because I chose to wear a pair of Meredith's shoes that day (hello blisters!), but it was a cute store, and there was a Pinkberry next door, so all was well in the world...until the walk back to the hotel. youch!

yum!

Next we decided to go to Venice Beach which was about a 30 minute drive from downtown...and shockingly we didn't get lost on the way! L.A. driving really was not as bad as I thought it would be, but I'm only judging from 48 hours, so I could be very wrong. Traffic was definitely bad, but I feel like people didn't drive as aggressively or fast as they did in Atlanta and Texas. 

   We hung out here most of the afternoon, mostly because none of us had any ideas of what to do next and it was close to 5:00, so we didn't want to attempt getting back during rush-hour traffic. We walked around on "the boardwalk" which was mostly just sketchy looking stores and medical marijuana evaluation centers. We decided to go grab some dinner to kill time and ended up going to Larry's, which was actually really great!

   Allison ordered a salad that was supposed to have figs in it, but she never found those darn figs! Meredith and I ordered pizzas and they were awesome! We talked about how we couldn't believe this would be the last time we would eat dinner together on the trip...or at least a year for that matter. We also made Allison a little sad by contemplating an earlier flight the next day, but we had puppies and husbands to get home to! We ended up keeping our original flight time though, so Allison had every last second with us!
   After dinner we were walking back to the car and I realized it was almost time for the sun to set, so Allison and I decided we would go sit on the beach and watch it...Meredith opted out to go sit in the car. Silly ninny! It was a little chilly out, but it was a beautiful ending to the day!

love you sea biscuit!!

What happens in Vegas....yea, nothing really happened there.

our hotel in Vegas

We got into Vegas around 7:30 pm and checked into our hotel, GreenBlue Club 36, which was basically a fully stocked apartment and only cost us $10 more than the crap-hole we stayed in in Williams, AZ. This place was nice! It had a kitchen with a stove, dishwasher, full-sized refrigerator, washer dryer, plus all the items you needed to cook, do laundry or run the dishwasher. 

I think we were all overly-enchanted by this because we've been living like gypsies and haven't seen a real kitchen in the past 9 days. 

     Generally, we are all in pretty foul moods after being in the car for any length of time at this point in the trip, so we were all kind of blah and slow to get moving. We finally got all prettied up and headed up to the MGM grand to count cards and win millions playing black-jack like what happens in the movies. Clearly that is what happened...that or Allison and I watched Meredith pretend she didn't know how to play and win $30. I know how to play black jack, but haven't played in a while, so I wasn't really ready to jump into a $15 minimum/hand table quite yet. Allison and I decided we would start winning our millions at one of the Wheel of Fortune game machines, but we ended up looking like fools when it took us 10 minutes to figure out that they were touch screens and we both walked away with what we started with. Well, that's a lie…Allison won 30 cents!!! Take that MGM!!

   We collected our bags of money and decided to find a down-grade casino that would offer us $5 black jack table buy-ins. We went next door to the Tropicana which was a bright room that smelled of the tanning bed and was filled with sad looking middle aged women in flamenco dancer costumes serving drinks. Meredith and I sat down at a $10 black jack table and ordered up a round of free-drinks. We picked an interesting table with a dealer that had a strange hair-lip and 2 twenty-something guys who were both beyond drunk and about to get in a fight over absolutely nothing. The most drunk young man was escorted away from the table, and the less drunk one stayed at the table and attempted to have a therapy session with the dealer about what went wrong. Hair lip took all of my money and most of Meredith's rather quickly, so we walked over to the bar to people watch and ended up doing the electric slide with a group of elderly adults and a homeless man. Only in Vegas. Unfortunately Allison was on camera duty this night and we have approximately 4 pictures to show for it. 

Vegas...sorry bout' it!

   From here we down-graded once more to the Hooter's casino next door because they were advertising $3 black-jack hands and I was ready to win my money back! We waited about an hour to get a seat at the one $3 table they had and then we stayed there for an hour or so. I had much better luck here, but did not succeed in winning my $40 back. I did not however, not lose any more money, which I consider a success. The whole night was just kind of blah…none of us were really feeling it, so we got a cab back to our hotel around 2:00. I had really been looking forward to Vegas the whole time because I've never been there, but at this point in the road trip, we were all losing steam and motivation and are just tired! But it's hard to really experience Vegas in 1 night anyways, so I'll definitely have to come back and win my millions another time. 

  We had toyed with the idea of driving from Vegas to San Diego, staying there a night, and then driving up the coast to L.A. but decided we would rather just drive straight to L.A. and have a full day on Monday to just relax and not be in the car. L.A. here we come!!

(Anywhere but) Amarillo by morning

   We set out from Dallas around noon on Thursday and headed for Amarillo. Allison and I were skeptical about what Amarillo had to offer us, but Meredith insisted we were in for a good time. Meredith was wrong. Amarillo is the creepy butt-crack of Texas. We stopped to get gas just outside of Amarillo and decided it was definitely the town that "The Hills Have Eyes" was filmed in. We spent a good amount of time contemplating why there are so many songs about Amarillo…only to assume it's because there is NOTHING else to do there but write songs about it.

The only fun thing we had planned in Amarillo was Cadillac Ranch on Route 66, which is an art installation that was created in 1974 to show the evolution of the tail fin on Cadillacs made between 1949-1963. So basically it's 10 really old Cadillacs half-way sticking out of the ground that people steal parts off of and spray paint. So never ones to forgo a touristy activity, we went to the local Weird-mart…I mean Walmart to buy some spray paint. We arrived at Cadillac Ranch around sunset which was unplanned but beautiful! We found the perfect spot to paint "Nins love L.A." (our nickname for each other since high school has been Ninny, FYI), but apparently one of the other tourists did not share our sentiment and de-faced our artwork with frowny faces about 2 minutes later. Eh well. 

Ninnies with our beautiful artwork! 

message to my hubby!

Our tainted masterpiece!

      

   Once we were done there, we went and checked into our hotel and decided we would go get some dinner at "The Big Texan Steak Ranch" after being lured by the promise of a free 72 oz steak and the giant cow out front. What can I say, we are easy to please. We sat at the bar, ate dinner, played hang-man, and drank our Texas sized beers through straws (keeping it classy). 

Clown face hayyy

  

After dinner we wandered into the restaurant's gift shop where we found the most amazing item that has ever graced the the face of the earth (that is a fact, not an opinion). The TEXAS TURD BURD. Why does this exist? I don't know. What kind of poo is it? I don't know. Why didn't I buy this? I DON'T KNOW! biggest. regret. ever. Meredith and Allison couldn't quite grasp the sheer magnificence of this un-identified fecal creature, but we still speak of Turd Burd fondly and often. Sigh.

I'll always love you turd burd

    We left Amarillo on Friday morning and decided to skip over the Teec-nos-pos stop and drive 11 hours straight to arrive at the Grand Canyon at sunset. This was a LONG day, but we somehow managed to survive 11 hours in the car together and were still speaking to each other when we arrived in Arizona. It also helped that once we were out of Texas, the scenery was beautiful! 


    All of the hotels near the Grand Canyon were way over-priced, so we decided to stay an hour south in Williams, AZ for the night. It was raining in AZ when we arrived, so that pretty much ruined any hope of watching the sunset at the Grand Canyon, not to mention that would be another 2 1/2 hours in the car there and back, so that plan was quickly nixed. Instead, we did what we do best…sat in our hotel room, drank until we had the giggles, played cards, and watched Jersey Shore on the computer. "When in Williams" as they say. 

   
    Saturday morning we walked around the small downtown area of Williams, which actually up-staged Amarillo if you can believe it, and marveled at how great our hair looked in the non-humid Arizona air. It's the small things that make us happy.

classy.

sassy honey badgers

   Once we did a little souvenir shopping, we drove an hour to the Canyon that is Grand. We did not have a happy welcome to this grand place…in fact, it is the closest I've come to pulling out my mace on someone other than Meredith and Allison the whole trip. So when you arrive at the G.C., there is a sign that explains the price of admission for different groups. We found something that said "non-commercial vehicle per person- $8." That sounds correct, right? So I pulled up to the booth and handed this troll of a man $8 in cash for Meredith and Allison's debit card to put the other $16 on. The conversation unfolded as follows:

Stacey- "There is $8 in cash for one and the rest will go on the card." 

Troll- (in the most disgusted and attitudish tone EVER) "Where did you get $7 from?? It's $25 per car" 

Stacey- (in a confused about why he can't count tone) "Sir, that is $8, we thought the sign said $8 per person."

Troll- "Um no, it's $25 per VEHICLE." (insert the most slow, condescending tone you've ever heard…as if he cannot comprehend how we are not understanding this) 

Stacey- (insert my own condescending, angry tone) "Ok, we didn't know that, we don't work here. Maybe you could just explain it in a better way. Are you saying $8/pp AND $25 per vehicle??"

Troll- "No, it's just $25 per vehicle, you are not a bus." 

 
 All I can even do at this point is just hand him the card, mumble about what the attitude is about and shake my head in disbelief. This post will never do justice to the rudeness of this man…we were all stunned by what had just happened. We drove off and immediately regretted not filling his troll booth with pepper spray ALMOST as much as not buying the Texas Turd Bird. Almost. 

2007

   So after that lovely welcome, we were all psyched to be at the Grand Canyon! I had actually been to the G.C. before in 2007 with Adam and his family, but Allison and Meredith hadn't ever been before, so that was fun. When you first see it, it's almost hard to look at because there are so many dimensions and colors that it makes you cross-eyed, and being cross-eyed while standing 5 feet from the edge of a bottomless pit is not ideal. We were dressed in work-out clothes and tennis shoes, partly because we planned on hiking, but mostly because my Grandmother emailed to tell me we would most likely fall to our death if we didn't wear proper footwear. At any rate, the canyon was as grand and beautiful as it was the last time I saw it. We spent about 2 hours walking around, taking pictures, and being chased by overly aggressive squirrels which caused me a bout of PTSD (fun (?) fact: I was bitten by a squirrel when I was younger). And we finally got the elusive jumping picture we had been trying for since the failed Mississippi sign attempt…success!!

flying ninnies!! 

meredith was skerrred

allison being chased by the squirrel

   Allison also insisted we have the novelty "I'm falling off the rock" pictures, which I must admit, are a good time. 

After about 2 hours we were all hot and hungry like honey-badgers, so we headed back to the car and hit the road for the 4 1/2 hour trip to VEGAS BABY!!