Day 1 - Goodbye Golden Gate

I didn't get much sleep before heading out because I spent most of the night packing. That, and the fact that around 3am Dano showed up with some friends and started snorting coke. I'm definitely glad to be away from him!

Anyway, I got up and packed up the car with help from Jeff, Jim and Sarah. By around 10:30, most of it was done and it was time to head over to Crepes on Cole for a farewell breakfast with K-Stars. It was all I could hope for. Sam was serving huevos rancheros, which were delicious as always, and was exactly what I was looking for. Most everybody was there including all the people who did so much to help me finish the marathon the week before, so I definitely had to say goodbye. Overall though, it was a relaxing breakfast and Mike tasked me to gamble at the casino when I got to Reno. Everybody at the table gave me $1 and told me a number and my goal was to put down their bet at the roulette table. I figured, why not. I don't like to gamble really, but it would be fun.

After the tearless farewell that included promises that I'd come back (I will, don't worry), the Google gang headed back to my place to finish loading the car so I could take off. I said goodbye to them, Maia, and Vanessa (my two awesome roommates) and hit the road just after noon to head over the Bay Bridge along I-80 to Reno, NV.

There was a lot of traffic getting out of the city for some reason, which was frustrating, not because it took so long, but because I couldn't use cruise control and so my leg was starting to cramp up. The joys of a marathon the week before :-). I made one stop in the middle of the central valley to have some In-N-Out burgers for the last time. Yeah, it was a hard choice between that or the truck stop in Colfax, but the timing was such that I had to stop in the valley. Getting out of the car, I was hit with an awful wall of heat that had been hidden beyond the clear windows of my air conditioned shelter. I know, I have to get used to it since I'm no longer in San Francisco where the weather is perfect year round.

Anyway, on my way up the mountains, I realized, while passing all the slow trucks, that my car was doing a lot of work lugging all my crap up the hill. Now, since my car was well under 1000 miles at that point and wasn't broken in, I slowed down to pace the trucks. I don't want my car to fall apart early and I wasn't in that much of a rush. I also noticed that when using cruise control to go up the hills, the electric engine wasn't used very much. So, going up the hills I took off the cruise control and manually throttled the car to use up the battery so that it could charge up on the way down the hill. It looks like another sign that the hybrid system in the Civic isn't well integrated. Oh well.

After crossing the mountains, blooming with lush forests around Lake Tahoe, I descended into the Nevada desert. I drove in to the Grand Sierra hotel and casino where I had a priceline reservation for the night. Since I didn't want to leave my bike unguarded in the parking lot, I took it in with me to check in and go to my room. Suffice it to say, I got some interesting looks. But then again, most of the people there had more crap than they could carry and were going to spend a vacation sitting in front of blinking lights giving money away.

After throwing my stuff in the room, I went searching for food. There were a bunch of restaurants in the hotel from the all-you-can-eat buffet to the fancy seafood place to the wine bar, there was a good selection. After a lot of hemming and hawing, I decided that the pumpkin ravioli couldn't be ignored so I took up a spot at the bar and ordered some wine with the pasta. I eneded up talking to the guy beside me, who it turns out is an exec at a small start up company in the area called Altairnano. They have a process to create batteries that can charge in 10 minutes and have virtually no thermal stress. He explained the basics of the process is that the anode, which is normally a graphite sheet, gets diffused in the lithium so that the electricity doesn't need to work its way through the layers of graphite to charge the cell. It sounded really intriguing and could be good for cars. He sent me to documents about the company, but unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to go over them yet.

It was getting late and I was still tasked to gamble so I had to say goodnight and hit the casino floor. After watching a few games to make sure I knew what was going on, I sat down to play. On the first spin, I placed everybody's bets and, lo and behold, Jeff won. After playing a few more spins, including one win, I called it a night, up $35 including Jeff's win. It really made me see how people can blow tons of money in those places. The chips just abstract you away from the fact that you're betting real money so each play, you can throw down a lot of money when it feels like you're just randomly putting chips down.

*Disclaimer* This post was written over a month after the trip, I figured it just makes sense to put a different post for each day