Flipside 2004
Monday - The Long Hot Road Home

HEAT STROKE - FINAL BURNS - UBER PACKING - MENTAL BREAKDOWNS - MEGAPHONE RETURN - HIGHWAYS AND CIGARETTES

I had now been up for over 40 hours though somewhere in there XT forced me to lay down for a few minutes. Around 8AM after we came back from closing out Bak Sheesh, I decided the only intelligent thing to do was to pack up my entire camp before the impending heat set in. It did. By 11AM it was 108 degrees and 100% humidity. We were sweating as quickly as we could drink and it wasn't any levity in sight. The initial plans of Das Boose getting out by noon were quickly replaced by prostrate heat exhausted bodies strewn everywhere. The notion of actually getting in a car and driving 25 hours in that condition filled me with the willies. Thankfully Molly had gotten a decent amount of sleep and was ready to take the wheel as soon as we got outside of Austin. She however had just spent some time with Jeff who got bitten again by a fire ant and had to get injected once more with adrenaline. So, everyone was feeling a bit dodgey.

The drive home was one of my best. We were just awake enough to keep ourselves entertained, yet exhausted enough that everything took on a soft surreal edge. This however is not necessarily the best thing at high speeds. Usually you can shake off the early hallucinations, but at one point the combination of the tone of the highway, the shape of the headlights and the dead bugs shattered across the windshield just inside my focus, combined with the house music we were playing and caused a vision of Girlie Girl dancing in front of my car. Normally this would be fine and entertaining, but not at 90mph. The problem obviously was that in that state it was fine and entertaining, the hallucination locked in and I began to watch her just shimmying around.
We avoided death by immediately pulling into an Arby's and going through the drive-thru a number of times ordering more straws and ketchup packets. It's not a cure I would recommend to everyone, but it worked for us.
This was somewhere in Arizona. 12 Hours later we were home.
And Tradge Lamb is still missing.

WEDNESDAY/THURSDAY - FRIDAY - SATURDAY - SUNDAY - MONDAY
FLIPSIDE 2004 MAIN
GIGSVILLE