Clay's parents recommended that we go up the canyon to watch the meteor shower instead of the salt flats. Mary and her orange 1982 VW Vanagon, Patience, arrived in the late afternoon. We all piled into Patience and then picked up Chris, and the four (five?) of us sped off at a strong forty miles an hour up the mountain to our viewing location.
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It took forever for poor Patience to make it up the hill, and the cars behind us were frequently frustrated into passing us over solid double yellow lines. So that was interesting. We passed ski lodges and kept trying to get to somewhere that was more isolated, less lights, higher location, better viewing, whatever.
Eventually we were like, "Okay, we've climbed high enough, let's park the van on this shoulder here," and then noticed a few cars ahead of us and a sign that said [P] for parking. They weren't making a lot of light, and apparently were also here to see the meteor shower. So we pulled up, taking in the last spot available, and set up shop.
Mary made us all dinner with ingredients from Patience's fridge and using Patience's stove. It involved ghetto thai peanut sauce, broccoli, and peanuts. I am not entirely sure what else was involved. (It was dark.) It got seriously cold during the night, and I put on my green peace hoodie and huddled in the front seat of the van, where the wind mostly couldn't get me, and tried to peer out from the passenger window. I could see the lower end of the sky, where the Big Dipper and Cassiopia were, but I couldn't actually see Perseus or Andromeda, so it was not an ideal viewing location. Eventually, Mary convinced me to get one of her sleeping bags from the van and huddle in that while sitting outside with her, eating our food. I pulled my boots off and instantly climbed into the sleeping bag before my feet had the chance to get cold(er). We sat there for a while and just watched the sky.
Eventually, other people and cars began to leave. We speculated that they likely had jobs or other obligations or simply didn't want to sleep on the ground, which I feel is a totally valid decision for them to have made. I don't know what time it was, but I started getting sleepy and climbed into the back of Patience and fell asleep.
I was woken up by Tomko, who needed me to unzip out of my sleeping bag and use it as a blanket to share with him, because we had failed to bring enough blankets. I remember waking up again, rolling over. Sleep, then there were voices. Sleep, then there were bumps, and it was clear the car was moving. This jogged me awake because I remembered setting an alarm on my phone to 4:00 and it hadn't gone off.
I grabbed my phone, but apparently it is just junk and the alarm didn't do what it should've. It was 4:23, and we were half-way back to Salt Lake City, where Chris was getting picked up.
Oh yes, Chris! Chris has accompanied us since Baltimore, but the entire time he was in search for a ride to Alaska, with the strong possibility that he could get a ride to Alaska from Portland. During our mission, he had a number of failed attempts to find a way to Alaska. A girl was supposed to give him a ride from Lincoln, NE to Montana, where he would get a ride with someone else driving from Montana to Alaska, but the girl flaked out and never called him back while we were in Nebraska. Then there was someone who might've been able to give him the ride to Montana but coming from Denver (our next stop-over), but there were timing problems with when we were going to arrive and he was going to leave and the girl on Montana was going to leave. From Salt Lake City, he was looking at an option where a woman in Reno needed to get her two cars to Anchorage and would pay gas for someone to drive them there, but she never called back either. Wtf, people, why do you post these things if you're not actually going to go through with them?
While we were in SLC, Chris had been staying with a very nice couchsurfer and apparently continued his search for a ride to Alaska. There was someone leaving Portland on Sunday, but Tomko and I weren't planning to get to Portland until Monday night or Tuesday. But he found someone who would give him a ride to Portland very very early Friday morning.
So hence, Mary and Chris woke up to drive Patience down the mountain to find the guy who was driving from SLC to Portland, leaving at five o'clock in the morning. So it was dark and I stumbled out of my sleeping bag and was like "whaaat?" and then figured out what was going on.
We dropped Chris off and then began on our next mission: Fueling Patience.
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