off the road again

i got back late last night from what could only be described as a road trip. if travelling over a thousand miles in the course of four days doesn't constitute a road trip, i just don't care to go on one. any more driving and i'd be getting paid by the mile, like a trucker. since i ridicule any gay guy in a trucker hat, that career option is out.

all in all it was a great trip. that is, it was a great trip despite adversity. for your entertainment and mine, let's make a list of the things that went wrong. they are, in order:

1. amanda got into a fender-bender before she even left new york. she called me wednesday evening, after i thought she'd be well on her way, to tell me that she'd been in an accident. i thought that i was going to have to drive to myrtle beach by myself, and i was going to shit myself. literally.
2. though i was in charge of the music for alyson's wedding reception, i didn't bother burning the huge playlist i'd made onto disc until 10:30pm, the night before we were scheduled to leave. as i reached for the laptop to burn the cd's, i realized that terry had taken it with him to chicago. fast forward twelve hours: terry is overnighting cd's he's just burned from northern illinois to our hotel (make that motel) in myrtle beach.
3. amanda and i rolled out of bed around 9 o'clock the morning we were supposed to leave. it's a nine-hour drive and we didn't end up making it out of town until noon. oops.
4. it rained--LITERALLY--the entire way from baltimore to myrtle beach, interspersing periods of mist with periods of torrential downpours.
5. upon arriving in myrtle beach, after a dandy wrong-turn courtesy of yours truly, amanda and i finally located the street on which our hotel was to be found. but there was no hotel to be found. if we were to believe mapquest, our hotel would've been sandwiched between the comfort inn and something called the "beach comber" or the "sand dune" or "xanadu III." by asking the front desk worker at the comfort inn we discovered that our hotel was not, in point of fact, in myrtle beach. it was in north myrtle beach, a town located 15 miles and 30 minutes away from myrtle beach. it has identical roads, so mapquest didn't catch the error. after 9 hours in the car, we were in the wrong city, stuck in beach-trash traffic. amazingly, amanda and i are still friends.
6. along those same lines, alyson discovered that she'd booked her rabbi--now drunk from the rehearsal dinner--a room in myrtle beach, not north myrtle beach. she had to drive him to his hotel at midnight, amidst his protestations that he was ok to drive. a drunk driving rabbi. oi!
7. it rained every day we were there. there were, luckily, enough patches of sun for us to get seriously tan/burned.

so, maybe seven crazy things happening during a four-day road trip that includes the beach and the wedding of a close friend isn't so bad. i didn't wreck my car, i didn't spend too much money, i got a tan, and i came home with a beach towel that says "wet t-shirt myrtle beach" (see picture below). i'd say it was quite a successful trip, indeed.