Friday, August 8, 2014

Sit back and wave through the daylight

The most energy I could muster.
 I want to be a Vegas guy. I really do. But despite the fact that I like the idea of Vegas, I always fuck it up somehow. Lately, my move has been to fly into Vegas at 8am on Saturday for a one day only full sprint. Then on Sunday I would either find someone driving back to LA, or book a flight if I won enough money. If I lost everything. There is a $25 shame bus, that will drop you off on skid row at midnight and make you regret every decision you made in your life that got you to this point.
BUT THIS YEAR, I had some foresight. I booked a return flight home, because well driving home from Vegas is worse than toxic shock syndrome. 

Now I'm going to do something right now that will kill the tension of this story. The climax is that I get really ill in Vegas. But I am going to use this as a framing device for the story, every moment in time, I am going to assess a percentage of blame for me getting sick.

Virgin flight to Vegas 7:50 AM : 0%

Virgin fucking rules. Did you know that any time you fly to Vegas from LA (or maybe anywhere, I don't know) you get free drinks the whole time? Because why the fuck not? Virgin is awesome. They're like the good friend you have that is WAYYYY cooler than you, but they still kick it with you from time to time. Sure it's a 30 minute flight and they stand to lose maybe fifty cents per passenger in alcohol, but I have probably told 74 people about this in the last 3 days, that is a sound marketing strategy.

Cab to Mandalay Bay 5%

There is no Uber in Las Vegas. I have to assume this is because Las Vegas is the only place left in America with a lobby of Goodfellas that will actually murder you if you try to infiltrate one of their rackets. They probably get a 10% kickback from all of the cab business on the strip and will not allow any newcomers to challenge that natural monopoly. For this reason all cabs charge $20 a mile.

Jell-O shots at Breakfast 1%
Vegas is so strange. Whereas most places try to standardize pricing for alcohol, in Vegas, a beer will cost $12 at one bar, and 15 feet away at a taco shop it will cost a buck. These particular jell-o shots were...not good. They were too big. I realized, I don't actually like jell-o at all. I just like the idea of getting drunk off bright colored squishy stuff. Best to keep them small and potent.

Lazy River 1%
The guys were in terrible shape when I arrived, having been at Tryst until 5 in the morning. I don't think they were delerium tremens level hungover, but they were close. The fact that I was able to force feed them jell-o shots and convince them to get a beverage and join me for a few laps in the lazy river was shocking. Lazy rivers are fucking fabulous, and I think moving forward on my vacation planning are going to be requisite for any resort I look at. Oh, nice golf course, that's good. I like the steam room and 17 hot tubs. Swim up bar, nice nice. Oh you have Putt Putt? But what's that? No lazy river? Unacceptable, see ya.

Blackjack  1%

After a few laps in paradise it was time to hit the tables, I took out a couple hundred bucks and immediately doubled up, and I even went a little higher than that for a while, of course all of this house money would soon be spent recklessly, because the only way you leave Vegas up is if you gamble 20 minutes before your flight and have a hard out.

Daylight - 80%

Daylight was my first pool party ever in Vegas. I had been to the "guest only" pools several times, and sometimes those pop pretty hard, but this was my first real day club pool party. I imagine the breakdown of the water is as follows:
90% Chlorine, 5% urine, 4% semen, 1% h20.

And that was pretty much it...I drank probably 25 drinks in my first 8 hours in Vegas and was down for the count by about 8pm. I proceeded to sleep under a dinner table on the floor and contract strep throat.

The Spirit flight the next day is probably the remaining 13% of potential illness contributors, God that airline fucking sucks. They can try their hardest to rebrand, but I would still rather sit between two obese homeless people on a Ryan Air flight than go on Spirit.

The result of this trip was a missed day of work at 2 days of misery. 

But hey, many make it back from Vegas much much worse off, I consider the fact that I lived and didn't lose a substantial amount of money to be a victory. Maybe I should just avoid that place moving forward if that is my definition of a good trip.

Moving on.

Obviously the worst part about contracting strep throat (aside from the pain and suffering) was that it put in jeopardy my climbing of Mt. Whitney. You know 22 miles and 8000 feet of elevation gain is no walk in the park, even for people that are 100%.  It was looking very likely that I was going to miss the trip, until I called an LA doctor I used to date and demanded she write me a prescription for amoxicillin.

Though I was prescribed 3 a day, I have long believed that you can effectively "z-pack" any drug by taking 7 the first day and magically healing yourself. So I took 15 of my 30 pills in the first 48 hours and by Wednesday I was feeling half human again. Not wanting to explain to all my friends that I got sick in Vegas and had to cancel my hike, I said fuck it and drove to Lone Pine Wednesday night at 8pm. I arrived slightly before midnight popped an Ambien, got three hours of sleep, and started the most miserable day of my life.

4am- Some random hiking blog said I might need 3 liters of water (this is bullshit) so I got 4 just to be safe, a pack of beef jerky, a jelly donut a power bar and some throat lozenges. This is everything that I took on my 22 mile hike to 14.5 thousand feet. TOTES prepared. We started out hike at 4:17 in the morning. The FIRST fucking thing we see is a god damn bear.

A FUCKING BEAR. In the parking lot. Trolling for food. Now to be fair, this was a cute little teddy bear looking fellow. Likely a baby, but that means somewhere there is a mom around. We decided it best to skip the fun formal beginning of the adventure pics opting for survival.

5:50 AM - Mirror Lake Mile 2.8
Ok, so that first two-ish hours wasn't too bad. I couldn't really see anything (obviously I didn't bring a headlamp) and I kinda still felt like I was asleep. We watch the sunrise, and start to stumble upon a few campgrounds. This hike really isn't that bad at all. And well, we didn't get eaten by a bear.



The hike to constellation lake/base camp miles 3-6
Ok this kind of sucked. We started getting some serious elevation gain, and this "walking trail" is now turning out to be more of me on all fours climbing up rocks. I am also already through half my water, we started seeing people, they all looked much more prepared than me. They all have ski poles? Is this a thing? They look ridiculous.

Constellation Lake-
I am now at mile 6, it's like 9 am and I am out of water. That guy with the blog that said I only needed 3 liters was a fucking dick. Fortunately, Mt. Whitney is attached to a fucking glacier. So you can drink the runoff and it's icey fresh. HALFWAY TO THE TOP, let's fucking do this.



97 Switchbacks - Mile 6-9
Do you know what a switchback is? In hiking terms it's the equivalent of zigzagging up a hill in order to soften the elevation gain. Doing like 10 is whatever. Doing 97 fucking sucks. Doing 97 with no guardrail and being one slip away from certain death is terrifying. I made it to the top. My reward? Oh just two more miles of misery...and altitude sickness.

Altitude Sickness - Miles 10-11
I just finished the book Unbroken. It's about this badass bomber in World War 2 that went down behind enemy lines, fought sharks and eventually got caught by the Japanese and tortured for two and a half years at a POW camp where he gets hazed #whyweneedfrat. 

Altitude sickness is worse.

The most miserable selfie ever taken.


Imagine the worst hangover you have ever experienced. Multiply it by 10, add a migraine on top of that and the final stages of AIDS. Are you imagining that? Now that would be shit if you were in a dark room laying down with an ice pack. It is much worse when you have to climb two more miles across jagged rocks INTO altitude. It doesn't help that to subvert her fear of heights, one of my traveling companions was singing showtunes to take her mind off of things. The final mile or so I was in so much pain that the only thing that kept me going was the fantasy that I could throw myself off the cliff at any moment and END IT ALL.

Somehow against all odds. I made it to the top. It was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life, and I've broken out of the friend zone with a chick before, SO I KNOW DIFFICULT. Upon reaching the summit I fell asleep on a rock for 30 minutes at 14,500 feet. I woke up with sun poisoning. This day sucks.

It's not easy.
And do you know what the reward is for climbing the highest fucking mountain peak in the lower 48 states? YOU GET TO WALK 11 MILES DOWN. YAY, CAN'T FUCKING WAIT!

The way down - miles 12-22
 On the way up I kept thinking to myself, I'll take photos on the way down. Enjoy myself, heck, I might even make it to the pier concert in LA tonight.

NOPE!

Around mile 13 we ran out of water and we became severely dehydrated. I ran out of food, my feet started bleeding, and unfortunately altitude sickness doesn't magically go away when you start going down. The one thing you have working in your favor is gravity. Gravity is the tits. Even if you collapse from exhaustion, you fall about 15 feet closer to your destination. This would happen to me several times. Finally 18 hours after I began my 22 mile epic journey, I landed down at portal. I fell to the ground and started crying. It was 10 pm and I could no longer stand.

#proof

I had planned to drive back to Los Angeles that night but there was no way. I couldn't stand, let alone drive 200 miles. After a requisite Big Mac in Lone Pine, I drove to a flea bag motel infested with roaches and fought back tears as I applied aloe vera to the skin on my legs that was already beginning to fall off.

I woke up at 4 o clock in the morning and drove to work. I sat in silence at my desk for 12 hours hoping that if I stool completely still, no one would be able to see me. According to Jurassic Park it works with T-Rexes. Perhaps it works with coworkers.

It does not.

I will never climb Mt. Whitney again. I honestly don't think I would survive it. Or maybe if I wasn't so arrogant and actually prepared it would be a lot easier. Contrary to my previous blog post, altitude sickness is very very real.

I went to Seattle last weekend and got blacked out for 4 days. It was much much better. I think my adrenaline junkie phase is over. Somehow I've got strep throat again too. Oh well, I've been higher than you. Suck it.



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