plane trips and road trips and weather, oh my

Pop quiz:

Who sang the kick-ass early-90's hair-band ballad "Cherry Pie?" If you guessed Poison or Whitesnake, nope, you're dead wrong. It was Warrant!

And this is just one of many fun facts you learn on a road trip. But let me back up to the beginning.

So I have to thank my friend Shaun for not only giving me a ride to LAX on Friday morning (at the crack of why-the-hell-am-I-up) but for also having hot Starbucks waiting for me in the car when he arrived, which I had fully intended on buying him. So Shaun is pure concentrated awesome in my book, not that he wasn't before but this just sort of seals it. I adore that guy.

I end up at LAX well before my flight, fly through security (for whatever reason, whenever I wear my Batman t-shirt at airports, security peeps seem to like me a lot more, I don't get it either but I'll keep doing it until the charm wears off) and have some time to read my book (I'm still reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies) and have breakfast before my flight takes off. And I thank God every time I fly that I am built like a Hobbit because I was squished beside a window and a very nice southern gentleman who happened to be completely unaware that he possessed elbows, but I still made it through okay.

So my good friend Pepper picks me up at the airport, yelling "GOOBER!!" at the top of her lungs over near baggage claim, so loud that about five other people sort of stop in their tracks fearfully, as if it's a war cry from Willy Wonka. Goober is my nickname that only Pepper calls me, because everyone else just refers to me as "spaz" or "that little retarded blonde girl". Or "Little Crane," which is the nickname my kung fu instructor gave me after watching me do my kung fu forms once, and I kid you not, he paused as he tried to give me some sort of helpful advice and what he came up with was, "Try it again...but without flailing your arms so much."

Yup.

Pepper and I head off to a surprise dinner, meaning that the restaurant was a surprise, not the fact that we were eating dinner, and lo and behold, how much do I love this girl, because she took me to Pops off of Route 66 in Oklahoma. Pops is one of those restaurants that I can't really explain... except that it has a huge neon soda pop bottle outside and carries more than 500 different brands and flavors of soda, served alongside burgers, fries, shakes, and patty melts.

Did I say yum already? Because YUM. And Pepper knows I'm a root-beer-aholic, so I was in heaven.

That Boy I Adore drove in and met us at the restaurant (Pepper: "Do you think he might have missed seeing the restaurant from off the road?" Me: "No, because I think the neon glow-in-the-dark fifty foot tall soda bottle THAT YOU CAN SEE FROM SPACE might clue him in."), then we stayed the night in OKC before spending the entire next day driving, then crashed (not literally) at a hotel in Gallup, New Mexico. The next day we were off again (after eating breakfast at a Cracker Barrel, am I the last person on this planet to discover how awesome Cracker Barrel restaurants are?) and then we landed in Los Angeles late Sunday night.

And then we woke up Monday morning to rain and clouds and I just about died of happiness.

Hello, autumnal Los Angeles! How I've missed you!! Keep that rain coming!!

So I will post road-trip pics in a day or two...but I hope you all had lovely weekends and that wherever you are, you are enjoying autumn to its fullest :)