Summit Journal

Friday, 11:20AM – somewhere over America
Summit travel plans got off to a bit of a rushed start. We almost missed the plane from Buffalo, due to the airport being further away from Hamilton than I remembered. I’m certain that they moved it when I wasn’t looking. All of this meant that we arrived at the airport about 25 minutes before the flight was supposed to take off.

Anyway, we were too late to check our luggage, which was cool because they gave us little yellow tags to put on the luggage which meant we didn’t have to deal with searching for it in carousels, etc. They just put it in the cargo hold before we got on the plane, and when we got off in Philadelphia for our first stop, they handed the bags back to us. Sweet.

When we boarded the plane to Los Angeles, we were told we could just bring our luggage straight onto the plane and store it in the overhead compartment. I guess it pays to be late sometimes.

Everyone has been amazingly nice to us, from the US border guard who smiled and chatted with us at the Queenston Lewiston Bridge, to the airline check-in lady who happily gave us our yellow luggage tags despite our obvious inability to follow the rules of air travel.

The flight has been relaxing so far. We should be in LA in three hours. I’m glad to have the laptop with me. Being trapped in the plane has given me a chance to do some stuff I’ve been meaning to do for some time. I went through 20 pages of dA interviews about commenting that I did back in March and highlighted the interesting bits. I have a better idea of the article I’ll write now. Maybe this thing will actually get done? 😛

Saturday, 7:42AM – Rowland Heights, California
I’m sitting in an upstairs office at my uncle’s house right now, on a very weak wifi Internet connection. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to post this now. It might have to wait until later.

Since I last wrote, lots of stuff has happened. We landed in LAX on time, then found our way to the rental car place on a shuttle bus. It was insane in there. The lineup was practically out the door, and there was a girl making balloon animals to amuse the kids. The line moved pretty fast though because they had about 15 agents booking people into cars. I kinda hoped they’d run out of Hyundai Accents and give us a Alpha Romeo Hesi-style, but we got a Kia Optima instead. It’s a pretty decent-sized sedan, and much better than the Accent that I had been expecting.

Driving to the Summit was an adventure. We didn’t know the address. I guess I should have written that down, eh? But we followed a combination of directions that my uncle and the car rental place had given us and we found it alright. It took a few tries, and about one and a half hours due to the insane amount of Friday afternoon traffic. They aren’t kidding about Los Angeles traffic you know.

The Palladium is kind of a neat place. It’s all done in art deco style, and I mean original art deco from the 1930’s. It’s pretty retro, to say the least. Parts of it smell rather moldy, but that’s no big deal. The summit looks good. There are booths and sponsors everywhere. There’s free Red Bull for anyone who can stomach it. I had a can and it messed me up real good. I felt all anxious and hyper for about 2 hours. Remind me not to drink that stuff anymore. I met lots of cool deviants so far, which is kinda the point I guess.

After the summit closed for the day, we headed on the road to Uncle Wayne’s. Traffic wasn’t bad, but we took the wrong freeway ramp and ended up on some freeway to San Bernadino. After an hour of driving that way and not seeing anything familiar, I called Wayne to find out where we went wrong. He got us sorted out again, and we headed back the way we came. At one point, the traffic stopped entirely in both directions, and we could see emergency vehicles up ahead. Soon, a huge helicopter showed up and landed on the freeway to evacuate accident victims. It was pretty cool, but scary. I hope those people are ok. I guess regular ambulances would just get stuck in traffic here. It’s great they have helicopters for this kind of thing.

We finally made it to Rowland Heights and had a vegetarian Chinese dinner with Wayne. It was very good. After dinner, crashing was in order. I felt like I had been up for about two days in a row, so I hit the pillow and fell asleep instantly.

Today we’ll be heading to the summit again, and then to some party afterwards. I’ll keep you posted.