LA, the end... and going to see the doctor!

On we rocked, and rocked we on... shutup. Harbouring up in Malibu after the short drive from Santa B we got a quick mcdonalds and headed to the beach! Finally letting getting some use of the surfboard we had been lugging around in the van aimlessly for the whole trip, suffice to say Dave was delighted! Finally reaching the beach we were still all pretty spent from our antics in SB the night before and took the first chance we could to lie down. However this didn't impede Farzo, taking off down the beach without prior warning, disappearing on the horizon and not returning for a considerable period. Drowsiness and things not really worth remembering happened and next thing you know we were in LA!

We spent a nice majority of the evening driving around the city looking for a hostel and eventually settled for another dodgy motel towards the end of Hollywood Blvd. Two of us went into the check in desk and talked with the chinese guy behind the counter who seemed a bit sketchy but eventually let us stay! We had noticed a lot of trucks and camera gear in the parking lot of the hotel but we didn't really think anything of it. On the way into the room however we bumped into another guest of the motel who told us that Fergie was shooting a video over the next day or two in the same motel we were staying in! Suppose we were in Hollywood afterall :) None of us could claim to be huge fans of her music or anything but still lads, she is daycent!

We went into the rooms anyway and balmed for a small bit. Then got brushed up for another night on the tiles but on the way out we passed between two cars and a curly haired character wearing sunglasses who looked vaguely familiar. It eventually took Jamie to pose the question while we were leaving the parking lot "Lads, was that Slash?" (ie slash from guns n roses!) We got talking to one of the camera crew and he told us all that was going on, himself and fergie from the black eyed peas were filming a video for some new song they were bringing out!! The guy told us they would be around for the next day or two and said he would try his best to get us a meet and greet or whatever with the two! Totally unexpected but still pretty unreal!

Anyway, we bought copious amounts of some cheap vodka and headed towards the other side of Hollywood to The Viper Room, the club formerly owned by Johnny Depp and the one famous for River Phoenix overdosing and dying on the door step right outside! Dave had booked us all tickets for a gig that was going on there that night for a band called 'warner drive' (I think! Memory is getting hazy) After a fairly long stroll and taxi ride we got there and all I can say after going to the show is that rock n' roll certainly still exists! In California anyway. The night just had a real essence of 'fuck you i'll do what i want about it'. The main singer of the band, during the build up for the solo in 'whole lotta love' by led zeppelin, started tripping majorly on the stage.. Licking the guitarist while writhing on the ground in agony doing the 'ah ah ah ah ah ah' bit
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXKboDqiSbE <-- about two n a half minutes in]
for the two minutes. Then proceeding to go absolutely spastic for the rest of the performance! There was a massive fight in front of the stage between two absolutely cracking women tearing lumps out of each other and afterwards the scrawniest drug addicted looking performers in the band had some of the best looking groupies I have ever seen completely HANGING off them. The vibe in the place was just immense (definitely nowhere near Bandaoke in reardens on  wednesday though).

Afterwards then outside was just manic. Again, you had the best looking women in Hollywood absolutely hanging off these tattooed punk rocker type dudes who drove really strange muscle cars converted from really old models. It was all just a bit surreal! I felt like I was overdosing outside of there and the drink had well and truly been sweated out of me at that point!

 Dude doing his "having sex with the ground and orgasming multiply" act

Ja Biys

It was about this point we were starting to get narky and tired and wanted to go home so we taxi'd it back to the motel! (lies, that was just me being a tired unenthusiastic negative prick)

So we got back to the motel and as it just happened; Fergie and Slash had just finished filming and were going  for a drink afterwards in their famous person truck. We bumped into the camera man who we were talking to earlier and we got to party with both Slash and Fergie and their respective entourages for the night. Seriously living it up!! (Lies, that last paragraph never happened....ever)

Heres the video they made anyway... dont think it was particularly successful... but anyway

If you squint you can see our white van at some stage (also lies)

So the next day we got up, shook off the hangovers and took a trip down to venice beach! Probably one of the coolest places you will ever go... All sorts going on down there. Dudes selling rap cd's while playing it on their boombox. Girls walking around with snakes on their shoulders. About a million and one places to buy medical marijuana, not being advertised very medically! Basically its a pretty cool place with a lot going on! Myself and blake had a game of paddle tennis practically on the beach on these cool courts they had there, the game got so intense blake had to take off his shoes to keep playing. results of that can be seen below.. the lads took a sconce inside muscle beach, one of the most famous gym's in the world! There was also one of the coolest urban skate parks Ive ever seen down there with skaters doing absolutely ridiculous tricks. This place is just a hotspot for seeing weird shit. It was definitely one of the most eye-opening places I have ever been to. A place where the most artsy and creative people of LA meets gangster rappers in a pretty cool backdrop! Heres some pics anyway..

From Venice beach we took our travels back inland and said we would go get a look at the Hollywood sign while we were at it and it was still bright! Driving in LA is pretty hectic but we got through all the traffic etc. and on the way swung into the wildcard boxing gym owned by Freddie Roach. This is the gym where the (disputably) best pound for pound boxer trains and condition, Manny Pacquiao! We threw our heads into the gym on the off chance we might see either of them but to no avail. All we got was some pretty mean stares from ridiculously well built fellas hammering into punching bags and each other. So we left fairly briskly! Pretty cool to see the inside of the gym though which looks like it could be anywhere in the world. Just a normal day-to-day gym with people working out inside. Weird to think how Floyd Mayweather probably has a multi million dollar strength and conditioning facility in his own home where he trains and Pacquiao trains somewhere you could find off Blarney street. Thats us here anyway in the token group photo..

After that we went rambling around Beverley Hills looking at all the rich houses and doing the norm thing. Had a look at the hollywood sign, turns out its smaller than you would think. Still better than the Dingle one though.. 

Cant really remember anything particularly exciting happening after that so we went back to the Motel and got dressed and stuff for drinking again!

Blakes socks after his demolition by Roger Keverer

Rose and shone the next day after a pretty uneventful night wandering up the hollywood strip looking at all the stars on the ground and all that craic. Today was a poor day though as we were losing another two of our crew. Jamie and Scott were flying home :( So we packed up the van, yet again, for another adventure off somewhere else! The lads flight wasnt until the late afternoon so we took a cruise through compton just to see what all the fuss was about. No shootings or gangster related activity detected we headed towards Inglewood and tested our luck a bit further. Still with a few hours to burn we parked up in Inglewood and got the hurleys out to have a bit of a puckaround. A stupid idea? Yes, Had to be done? Of course. Pulling out our camáns in a dodgy, dodgy black neighbourhood of LA definitely wasnt one of our better moves! Wonder what Dr.Dre would make of that if he saw it! Probably would incorporate it into his next tune....

On that note we got our last picture of the hols as scotty owned the camera so no more visual aid from here on in!..

Dropping the lads off we decided to take another spin down to venice beach for a look around! It was here we managed to somehow blag our way into being in the audience for a Dr. Phil show being filmed the next day! That in mind we decided to kip up in the car that night and chance our arms at being on the show the next day! Cue some dodgy characters freaking us out, a strange man designing an imaginary recording studio for us and assigning us a band name and what our roles in the band were (crystal meth must be a hell of a drug), an encounter with a very dodgy fear dúbh on a bicycle and the James Bond incident! Way too much detail involved in that to explain at half 2 in the morning... So after running away from a couple of suspicious people we parked up in what we thought was a safe spot and eventually got some shut eye. Awaking in the morning looking forward to going on Dr. Phil we realised our parking spot hadnt been that safe, with police cars coming and going left right and centre! We managed to park outside the hollywood police station. 

That debacle behind us we parked up and threw in the best clothes we had left; soggy, wrinkled jeans and shirts that hadnt been touched since vegas. Suffice to say they put us at the back of the audience! Queueing up to get on the show we were delighted waiting with our free capri suns and ryvitas. We went into the studio and took our place at the (very back) of the audience and watched an episode on cyber bullying being filmed right in front of us! The initial thoughts of jeering everyone that came on were kind of blown out of the water when all of the guests were crying and talking about this sensitive issue we left a tad disappointed. Also disappointing was the hampers and DR. Phil memorabilia we were promised wernt given to us. The guy who said we would leave with "bags of stuff" and that it would be "just like christmas" was clearly a spoof... Either way we were on Dr. Phil which is still pretty cool! 

It was with that in our heads we took to the road back to San Diego and the last leg of the journey :( the road trip and J1 as a whole was coming to a very realistic end. On the way we swung by Huntington beach and Newport for one last ride on "the wedge". A spot up the coast from San Diego we had fell in love with over the course of the summer! It's basically a (slightly) man made wave that because of the dip in the sand and refraction from the wall next to it jacks up to a huge height just as it approaches the shore and becomes a massive wall of a wave. Waiting to absolutely destroy you! Heres a video just to give you an idea... 

What an unreal spot!.. I seriously fell in love with this place the couple of times we were here and would recommend anybody in cali to have a look. Its free and time consuming. Happy days!

Blake n myself there at the early stage of july!

Blake on driving duties we got a couple of cans for the final 2 hour furlong back to SD. (I still owe ya for those cans farzo)... Trip over. The car was returned to hertz and we were left to survive out in San Diego for another week or so with absolutely nothing to our names! 

Some unbelievable few weeks though, better than any holiday I have ever been on and definitely comes highly recommended!

Lads, do you reckon we could fit Dave in the bear box?

And onwards we went, next stop Yosemite National Park.. Leaving Vegas Mid-day we drove up through Nevada, touching on death valley and some serious heat, we rounded back west into California as it got mountainous and as the dusk settled in we started to spot signs for Yosemite so we knew we were on the right track! As what soon became a bit of a trend I was handed driving duties while everyone else went for a nap and I was forced to navigate through a heavily wooded mountain driving up hill by myself (thats a lie, blake stayed up to help but yeah...my blog)

After plowing through a couple of small little mountain villages that looked very abandoned and very similar to something resembling a horror movie we eventually started to see some campsites and warning signs for bears! So we tried to find somewhere to set up shop and park our asses for the night. (This is the part where I will advise everybody that is ever going to go camping in the future that you should really buy a bright tent) We turned into a campsite and drove around looking for a free spot to park the van. We saw a nice free spot lucky to still be available at 2 in the morning. Threw the van into reverse and landed it halfway over somebodys tent! Nobody heard anything bad and we didn't seem to roll over anything resembling a human being so suffice to say we made haste in getting out of there after that. However if your reading this and I have been misinformed I'm very sorry for killing your friend/family member.

So after that little mishap we found a patch on the side of the road where we rested up for the night! Myself and two others chose to sleep in the van while the rest of the lads chose to sleep under a massive blanket on the ground.. not the greatest idea with all the bear warning signs but hey, no one was harmed. Very early the next morning I was awoken by a sharp knock on the drivers window to the sight of two not so happy looking bears..

..only messing, they were forest rangers. (I know what you were thinking, bears cant knock, they dont have fists)Anyway, two lads that looked like poorly constructed villains out of a rambo movie stood facing me! This was the first time we would be woken up by some form of authority on our trip! And definitely not the last! After a bit of a scolding they turned out to be fairly sound and told us what we needed to do to get set up and where certain campsites were. We thanked them, jumped into the van and made our way ever more uphill! And our first site of what was in store came to meet us as we saw a break in the trees.

Truly amazing. A bit of a shame that we missed all of it on the way in due to night time driving but it was definitely present now.. NATURE! We were ready for some proper bear grylls shit..

The complete vastness and differing landscapes of granite rock meeting forests of green trees meeting waterfalls and rivers really caught me by surprise. Never being somebody to truly appreciate views and nature and all that craic I was honestly overwhelmed at the sight of this beautiful place. A bit more driving around and we saw some more unbelievable views and sights..

We drove around for a bit more taking in the scenery, getting supplies in the only shop for miles and setting up camp! After we set up our tent and had a good laugh at the bear box (a sizeable enough box designed for storing your food as it was bearproof and the bears know not to go near it).. seriously though, a bear box.

We met a group of girls who were packing up to leave and it turned out that they were j1ers as well doing a pretty similar road trip to us just in the opposite direction! So we exchanged tips on previous destinations and cursed as they drove away. Its cold up in the mountains, always nice for a bit of extra warmth. We decided to go explore a bit more so we said we would jump in the van and find some place to have a bbq!

We drove down the mountain a bit and turned in off the road not knowing exactly what we were going to find. Turns out, like everything else in Yosemite, it was just another unbelievable set of scenery. We found a bbq pit next to a beautiful lake shadowed by a 100 foot tall granite cliff face, completely vertical in its ascension. And the best part, it had a waterfall coming out of it! Yosemite truly is amazing. There is new and different sets of scenery waiting for you around every corner!

We chilled here for a bit and the hairy baby (aka Dave) used his wilderness skills to cook us an aul cheeky lunch! This was also the last known sighting of my green peace jocks (pictured above) which managed to go missing apres swim. If your reading this lads I would appreciate if you came home! You were my favourite pair of underwear even though I only had you for a month or so :(

After drying up and feeding ourselves we threw on some fresh gear, jumped in the van and followed the road as high as it would possibly take us, up to Glacier Point. We must have reached where we wanted to go because when we got there, parked up were some tour buses and lots of other cars! We parked up ourselves and walked up to where everyone was and yet again, WOW. We were at the highest peak in Yosemite where you could access easily and the view around was absolutely incredible yet again.

Scotty Mac caught us unawares with this photo but I really love it!

I was getting to like this place more and more and really starting to feel like I missed out on this nature craic! We found out some history about Yosemite from a park ranger but mostly just enjoyed the view..

I'm trying my best to describe how immense this place is but hopefully this video will give you a better idea of what I am trying to convey!.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XLgat1oV7hQ&feature=related

After watching a pretty epic sunset from up there we headed back to the tent to chill out, have some grub and general good times. Not all of us proved to be as useful around a campfire as Dave but we gave it a bash anyway! 

Fed and watered with a few arguments about hot dog distribution we built up a fire and with the help of some medicine and a few funny anecdotes from the hairy baby we decided to call it a night! Crawling into the tent we realised it was never going to work, between lack of space and Jamie's seismic snoring some of us would be resigned to the car for another night! I gladly took the opportunity and made a dash for the car. What none of us had noticed though was that the previous nights sleep had been about 2000 feet lower than where we were now and it got cold. Very, very, very cold. So cold in fact that I decided to crawl into a 3 foot bag we had gotten when we snuck into comic con! to get an idea of the bag it was basically made of plastic and would fit a small child..

Here's what it looks like!..

After an absolutely freezing night we woke up to some nettle tea made, of course, by the man of the hour Dave! I don't think we would have survived the wilderness without him! Myself and one of the lads took a drive really early in the morning to the outskirts to stock up as we were under-supplied and desperately needed some petrol! When we got back we packed up the car again and decided to go do a hike and then make tracks north to Tahoe. We chose to do a relatively difficult hike and one we thought would be nothing too strenuous. How wrong we were. 7 Irish chancers with absolutely no water, wearing vans shoes and not a piece of hiking equipment between us. Not to mention the summer of torment we had put our bodies through!

About a quarter of the way up we stopped to take this picture.. As you can see we were fairly spent!

It was about here that we lost one of the lads who claimed he couldn't go on. We won't name and shame him, just say he is affectionately known as the cat!

The hike took the best part of 3 hours and it was tough, steep and constantly up hill. Just to make things that bit more fun there was also sand for a stretch! Driving each other on we reached the top, encountering some people speaking as gáeilge on the way up which was pretty cool, if your into that sort of thing.

If you think we look tired above try this one..

However we had managed to conquer it! We decided to do a little exploring at the top as there was some pretty cool stuff around! (I'm not gonna harp on about scenery again, I think you have gathered I enjoyed Yosemite at this stage!)

As we were having a look around on top who appears but the cat! Convinced he would get too much of a slagging if he didn't do it he turned himself around and did the hike about half an hour behind us! Some going! We had a good look around the top and took a few pictures. One of the lads made a good point that it was good to see we had it in us to hike it after the summer we had put ourselves through and he had a fair point. Once we were finished here we hiked back down and debated going for a nap in the car before we struck off. We decided against it and muggins here was landed with driving duties! Yosemite was amazing and in my own opinion was the best experience of the trip as a whole. I would have loved a week here to do and see a lot more and do some real exploring however there was more to do and see! Nobody seemed too bothered about the fact that we never got to see a bear as people's eyes shut and we departed further north...

The Wally Drop

As promised earlier I said I'd post some videos of the trip!

This is the moment when our good friend wally met his unfortunate end.

(Had to be done really)

"How much to the Airport??"

So yeah. Didn't get back to this as soon as I had planned but things came up :P

So, Last time I threw something up we were heading towards Vegas.............suppose ill pick up where i left off!

Where was I!? Yeah, right, so we were tearing it through the desert on a completely straight and narrow road and a few eyes were starting to open! On the way we came across this really surreal backwater little village which was just off the highway and the people there were the real deal, "hillbillys" that were completely taken aback by an accent any way different to their own! Imagine how they thought the Irish accent sounded! Turns out the village was planted right on route 66 and there were only a few people left standing there to run the novelty restaurant, the feeling of isolation and abandonment really driven home when we took a look around the back of all the dilapidated buildings and came across a vacant and rusting funderland type theme park. It was a strange sight to see, especially with an idea of what we were expecting to see in vegas. However the camera was lost at this stage (a story we will return to later) so no pictures unfortunately but I think somebody got a video on their phone so will have a "route" around for that (pardon the pun!).

Anyway, foot to the floor on the way into vegas, desert all around us and the thermometer reading 110 degrees fahrenheit  it felt a bit like this.....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2pgWsYSyUA

.....well not entirely but it reminded me of it! So anyway we rocked over the Hoover Dam (where yet again the camera was still missing and moods were starting to get sour, so no pictures!) stopped off in Wal-Mart to load up on booze and supplies for the 2 nights we would be there and turned the van onto the strip and were nearly blinded by the neon and flashing lights and absolutely overtaken by the hypnotic vice the place gets you into, not to mention the heat! We pulled into the Tropicana hotel on the strip (cheapest, obviously) walked the considerable distance it took to get to our hotel room (the hotels are about the size of Ballincollig) and got ready to get togged out and go for grub in the excalibur buffet across the road! 30 quid all you can eat and it had been highly recommended to us by a Corkman who certainly knew and enjoyed his food! While we were getting changed/havin a few cans the mysterious case of the lost camera turned up in the hairy babies bag, which he previously denied, but anyway this was the moment he discovered it..

Clearly delighted we get a chance to show our guns off to the Facebook population. So off we went to excalibur for what can truly only be described as an ocean of food, and free milk! Something we had been lacking a serious amount of over the summer! So after trying nearly everything that was on offer there we waddled back over to the tropicana ready to tackle the nights festivities, or not. A can or two in everybody crashed!! Disaster! After trying everything to get a bit of life out of them I had no joy so... I got the idea, being the tight miserable so and so that I am, that I wasn't going to miss a minute of our two nights in Vegas so I jumped into the van and took a spin for myself down the main strip! It took half an hour to get from the end we were at to halfway down so I decided to turn it and go back, but on my way I decided to swing into the Bellagio for a sconce at the fountain and all that jazz. In typical me fashion though, when I pulled in I ended up in some taxi lane that was cordoned off by cones and I couldn't reverse as there was another taxi up my ass!

This is the entrance I'm talking about now but imagine it 100 times busier at 9 o'clock at night with every car horn in the world going off! So I said I would wait in the taxi lane and hopefully drive off peacefully, what I forgot however was that our van was a big white driving the kids to soccer practice type machine so it looked very much like a taxi! And seeing as I was in the taxi lane people started approaching it and opening the doors asking me to take them to the airport and to hooters and to god knows where. All I could do was keep refusing them and smiling! When I finally got out of that mess I took myself, very swiftly, back to the Tropicana and see could I get any joy out of the lads. After trekking through the Douglas sized hotel for about another hour I got back to the room and started jumping on the lads/beds. Eventually, and surprisingly, Jamie woke up!! However nobody else stirred so we got a couple of cans into us and went for walkabouts! Trying to get over the fact that you could walk around with your own booze and smoke away inside the hotels was enough for me and I was seriously running on empty so we left the Luxor(pyramid shaped hotel) and headed back to the room where I CRASHED.. And I mean that in no uncertain terms.

Vague recollections of the morning where I was attempted to be awoken for the breakfast by the lads kind of come back to me now but mostly I just remember swinging out, shouting certain curse words, and heading back to dream land! Apparently I missed a great morning in the pool where the lads had the banter with a couple of absolute babes and some other stuff happened but yeah, its my blog, f them.

Got up about 12 or so when the lads came back and today was when the real party started. It was Farraghers birthday so we went across to the New York New York to go on this rollercoaster he was obsessed with! In true gentlemanly fashion he wouldn't accept us paying our admission on to the ride as he had simply been delighted we came over with him! A present from the birthday boy, how bad! We hooked up with a couple of friends who were in San Fran for the summer afterwards and around 2 we were meeting some Irish dude from Dublin who was giving us free entry to clubs and limousine rides around Vegas for a fairly decent price so we hooked up with him and headed for Wet Republic! Talking to him he came across as a pure chancer but for all his talk he did seem to know a lot of people and was able to back up (some) of the stuff he was saying! We headed into Wet Republic with some problem with ID's but were seriously chuffed with the effort we had put in to get in there! Its an absolutely mental spot, as my description skills are lackin and I tend to ramble on I'll just lash on a video to give you an idea of how unreal this place was!..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kb5XVbeXhqs

Any place with that many hot women, good tunes and the pool as the dance floor is pretty alright with me! Highlight of the day had to have been when one of the lads who will remain un-named tried his arm with an absolute babe inside the pool and got nothing but half of what looked like the male jersey shore cast in his face! What happened next is way too funny for words however, the Irish guide guy who was about 5'8 and carrying a few came out of nowhere to get rid of all the guido looking fellas and send them back to the other edge of the pool! Other than that things ran pretty smoothly and Wet Republic is definitely a must if your in LV.

After the days boozing we went back to the hotel to get perked up and throw on the gladrags and into the stretch hummer we popped. However after a summer of torment to our bodies we were never going to look truly classy, vegas style....like

Free booze in the limo plus the general occasion got to us and we barely noticed the limo taking us away from the strip and away from any high rise buildings! When somebody finally noticed we were being told to get out of the hummer and were being sheperded into a strip club where we were forced to pay $20 in. Feeling a slight bit dis-honoured we shelled out the 20 quid anyway because even with that we were still getting a fairly decent deal compared to other people we had heard about! Time took a backseat but as soon as we we knew it we were back into the stretch and making our way to studio 54 nightclub in the MGM Grand. The night turned into a bit of a blur but you can be assured Farragher had a memorable 21st birthday night anyway!

We got up in the morning and tried to do the tourist thing around Vegas but did it pretty miserably. One highlight was getting into an elevator to the top floor of the bellagio and flynners heading into the honeymoon suite for a look at the Vegas skyline, with the honeymooners inside with him! Our heads were a bit too sore and the heat was a bit too much for us to be bothered so onwards and offwards we went for Yosemite!...