Craziest. Vacation. Ever.

"Write about your craziest vacation."

In the average year of Our Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety six, I went on a trip across the United States, or half way across if you want to be all google/maps about it. I had recently visited Austin and fell in love. Not a month later I had decided to move away from my entire family and lifetime worth of friends. To be here in this city that I still love and still reside in feels odd. I never expected to live in Texas. Then again, all the other redirected Austinite's most likely didn't predict to be here either. I do find myself wanting to leave but it is never for good. I haven't found an elsewhere that replaces home in the last 13 years. Austin is home for me. Sidetracked? I feel your pain.

So I went on the thousand mile plus trip with my then girlfriend (soon to be wife and eventual ex-wife), her brother and our two cats. With everything we owned hastily tucked into the miniature nooks and crannies of an old orange 1971 Volkswagen Beetle and faded blue 1982 Honda Civic Hatchback we trekked West. Our tiny, overloaded cars couldn't go over 60 mph without fear of expiration so the trip very quickly became the slowest drive in my 19 years of living. We were given a going away party by our friends the night before we planned to depart. I don't remember the specifics but lets just say the party was on a Friday night. The three of us had drunkenly packed and barely cleaned out the place we were leaving. We left that Saturday around noon which was for us, very early in the morning.

The trip started off well. Spirits were up and every highway mile checked off at a smooth 59 miles per hour. I had been given a "going away present" by a friend of ours and I was the only one who was aware of it for the first few hours of the trip. Before we hit the M.i.s.s.i.s.s.i.p.p.i. border, I told Emily that Justin had given us three hits of acid. Emily and I took two and attempted to see how long we could keep it from Ian. That plan of secrecy lasted around two hours.

Things started off fine and manageable. I blame it on the lack of sleep really, and not the drugs potency for the turn of events throughout the day/night. All three of us were well into the peaking stages and no one needed to ask if you were "feeling it yet". By the time we arrived in Baton Rouge Louisiana the effects of the LSD were staggering. Finding a place to eat became our mission though none of us were hungry. It just seemed to be the right thing to do. We found a truck stop that didn't look too menacing and decided to stop. I crawled out of the little VW to see that the cars once dry and rusted orange paint coat had turned into a live entity. Have you seen the horrible live action movie Spawn? Well it looked exactly like Spawns cape. The entire cars body was covered in a churning, mixing mass of wet red paint. I stared at this until someone (Emily I think) pulled me away in fear of being noticed by the Normal People. Ordering our food was challenging and resulted in whispers and mumbled one-liners for answers. We might as well had been intergalactic aliens trying to dine out for the first time since we crash landed on Earth. My gumbo might have been good though I wouldn't have known. The seafood was alive and teeming in the large white ceramic bowl of tomato-based red sea that was gumbo. I watched silent shrimp breach the surface, come up for air and gracefully dip below the surface. I eventually swallowed two spoonfuls of the stuff and thought it tasted good but wasn't hungry enough to continue.

The rest of the trip was full of continuing neurotic patterns. Emily mentioning that we had been driving uphill for the entire trip really set things off in a bad direction. It was maddening to only be going up. I remember desperately craving the feeling of descent; the sight of a hill, anything to break the monotony of the steady climb. During the night driving, the hallucinations really came alive. We all witnessed things in our vision that didn't exist. Shadow people constantly dodged between cars and ran along the sides of our two car caravan. Giant driver-less humming hoopties would float past us only to disappear in our headlights. Gods eyes were in my headlights. Enormous hands and spiders smashed down on the highways in front of us. Distant house fires and tornadoes were witnessed.

The things we saw on the 24 hour trip weren't due to our minds matrixing patterns in the hard to see night sky or any other kind of natural phenomena. It was, what I can say now with a lot of experience, pure LSD and Delirium; a combination that is more powerful that any hallucinatory drug mixture I had ever taken before or since that trip.

I remember kissing the ground when we finally made it into Austin. I remember feeling that we had been through hell and back. I remember crying and I remember saying that I was going to write about it all. I read Fear and Loathing a short time later and felt overshadowed. None the less, the trip was insane, self induced and no one was harmed. This was the craziest, best, worst trip I have ever taken.