The Night Before The Trip:
We got picked up by Mike who was taking us to his house in Merrick, LI. When we got there we walked to the bank to pool all our money together i his bank account.
The Trip:
The next morning his dad took us to the airport, and due to some "unexpected" traffic, we missed our flight. We learned that the weight limit is 50lbs, and we reached that limit after we removed Mike's tent from my duffel bag. So we were placed on standby for the next flight, which was supposed only 1 hr later. We bummed around the airport for a bit buying food and papers and laying by the terminal. We got real awesome seats on this flight - the original seats we were assigned were scattered, these were like emergency exit seats where we had tons of legroom, but wasn’t an exit seat.
When we got off at Dallas, Fort Worth, we had to leg it across the airport in order to make the flight, and we did make it with minutes to spare. We asked the attendant about out luggage and she said it would make it faster than we would.
On the flight to Tuscon Shiya sat next to KEVIN, who became his special friend. Kevin wrote a comic book about his friend Simon and their time they spent together in Tuscon .
I sat next to a woman who thought the condensation from the air vents (little drops of water) that were falling on us were holy water. And on the other side of me was a guy who owns his own construction business in Tennessee for 12 yrs and was traveling to his niece's graduation; he has 9 nephews and nieces, and 6 godkids. He is a cancer survivor and loves living life. He went on a vacaion last yr with 3 buddies and kayaked for 12 hrs a day for 3 days down the Mississippi.
We got off the flight and found out that of course our luggage missed the flight. So the baggage guy who happened to have been from Brooklyn gave us a $30 food voucher to spend while we waited the 2hrs for the luggage to come on the next flight. While we waited for the lugage we went to the the Hertz, the car rental place. We ended p with a mazda 3, unlimited miles, 3 drivers at an amazing rate.
We then went to Baskin Robbins and each bought an ice cream and some soda with our vouchers, I got this huge waffle cone filled with the classic chocolate flavor and a mountain dew – one of the best and by far the biggest ice cream cone I've ever had.
Our first stop in Tucson was Wal Mart – where we made a big shopping of clothes, a cooler, water guns, food, soda, machetes, and other essentials.
At this point we still weren’t sure where we were gonna sleep and decided to visit the chabad house right near U of A. but of course no one was home. Mike decided to call his grandfather to find out if any of his relatives were in Tucson – turns out his cousin lived a couple of blocks away so we walked over. Katy had 3 dogs who licked the crap outa us when came into her house. She hooked us up with some cold beer and we chilled there for a bit. We were contemplating our options and decided that we wanted to sleep on beds and have a nice shower for our first night, so we went to Days Inn, and after switching rooms only once, we found a room which didn’t reek from months old mildew or some other fungus.
