An alien planet in our own country: the I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco.

One night in LA, I went out with Gäb, Megan, and Abbey. Gäb and Megan are a boring old couple, so they bailed pretty early, leaving Abbey and me to worry that we might have to awkwardly initiate conversations with strangers [apparently we weren't enough to entertain ourselves]. Gäb and Megan had walked about five steps away from us toward the exit when two guys turned to us and one of them said to Abbey, "Hey, I like your bangs." Well, that wasn't as hard as we thought it'd be.

They ended up not being as interesting as just the two of us probably would've been - I spent most of the night helping a particularly drunk member of their group put an end to the hiccups he had had all night - but that's not the point of the story, anyway.

The point is that after a couple glasses of wine, I succeeded in convincing Abbey to drive up to San Francisco with me [especially convenient because she had a car]. A few days later, we were on our way.

We initially wanted to take the 101, since it runs along the ocean most of the way and we had heard it's beautiful - but there was a lot of traffic that day and our main priority was just getting up to SF, so we headed east to the 5, which promised a trip of six to seven hours. I just looked up some information on it, and the about.com guide says the following:

If you just want to get between Los Angeles and San Francisco as fast as possible, I-5 is the way to go. However, this fastest route is also by far the least interesting. Kids (and adults with a low tolerance for boredom) should bring something along to keep themselves amused.

about.com clearly doesn't know anyone from the Midwest. These two girls from Wisconsin and Michigan were fascinated the whole way - the area is just so completely different from the part of the country where we grew up. It seemed like it should be a whole different country - or planet, even.

Not in the Midwest anymore, Toto.

Oil rigs! We don't have any of those, either!

Road trip!

Out in the desert, we stopped at an In-N-Out, a relatively high-quality fast food place [hence the slogan, "Quality you can trust"] that's only in California and some surrounding areas.

After In-N-Out, I hopped in the driver's seat to take over for a couple hours. Normally this wouldn't be noteworthy, but it was my first time driving in a little over two years - yowza! I was slightly nervous at first, but after just a couple minutes, I felt comfortable in the driver's seat again and remembered how nice it is to cruise down the highway with good music and good company.

Wisconsin and California have a bit of a rivalry going when it comes to dairy. I generally like California and get along rather well with Californians, but I pretty much always feel compelled to make clear my love for Wisconsin dairy. I wouldn't make such a big deal of it except that California, a few years ago, made it a big deal by running commercials - including IN WISCONSIN - saying that "happy cows come from California" and showing cows shivering in the snow and then practically grinning cows frolicking about in green pastures. Oh no you did not. So although it was certainly a sad sight, I also felt a bit vindicated when we drove past [and smelled] this monstrous cow farm with not a blade of grass in sight. Happy cows, my patootie. [Of course, these were probably beef cows living out their last few days before becoming In-N-Out burgers, but still! They deserve happiness, too!]

We had been seeing signs for this place for a couple hundred miles. We just chose an exit to fill up the gas tank and only then realized that this place was also at the exit. We thought, "Oh, that's cool" - and then we saw this cut-out and shrieked a little and jumped out of the car and ran over to it. This is the kind of thing that makes the Great American Road Trip so great.

I was very pleased to see all the wind turbines along the way.

Coming into San Francisco.

We listened to the radio most of the time, and among all the country music, Jesus music, and Jesus talk [lot of Jesus out there], we finally found some fun Mexican music. We also almost ran out of gas. Woo, road trip!