Preparations for My Trip to India........

First things first, define procrastination. If you'll look it up in the dictionary, most likely you'll find a picture and me and Drake. We've known about our India trip for months now and still we left our preparations to the last minute.
I arrived in Ventura on Sunday, the day before our departure. We meet up at the mall and get right down to it. We're buying toys and underwear for the 23 orphans that we'll be spending time with while there in India. We go to Target, FootLocker, WalMart, Sports Chalet, Fry's, back to WalMart, and finally back to Target. Now we've got everything we need, now all we need to do is eat and organize everything in our luggage.
We get back to the house and deal with the eating situation first, of course. Our plan is to leave the house in the morning at 6:15 am. We're most likely not going to get too much sleep but we'll have plenty of time to sleep on the plane so we're not too worried about that. It's around 1 am and I start thinking about everything that I'm going to need to start packing when it hits me. When planning a trip, what is the number one thing you have to take with you? Toothbrush? Underwear? While these things are very important, its still not what I'm referring to. Let me rephrase the question. When planning an INTERNATIONAL trip, what is the number one thing you HAVE to take with you? That's right, my freaking PASSPORT. The very same one that is calmly sitting in a small pocket in my backpack which is in TAFT!!!!!

Taft is 2 hours away, we're leaving in 5 hours, we still haven't even touched anything to begin packing, so we have to leave now. We jump in Matt's car, the Lexus, which will get us there the fastest and the safest. As we're pulling out of the driveway I ask Drake how much gas we have, he takes a look and sees that we have plenty to get us there and back no problem. We decide to take the 33 back to Taft because even if you don't drive really fast its still faster and shorter. A bit more dangerous but when has that ever stopped us? Its been raining all weekend and we soon find out that there are a lot of little mud rock slides that have fallen in to the road which give us little obstacles, but nothing we can't handle. Drake is pretty tired, kind of delirious, but getting the job done safely so far. He looks down at the dash and notices a new light that has been illuminated. Yup, its the gas light.

When Drake has glanced at how much gas we had he read the gauge wrong thinking we had close to a full tank we in reality we had close to an empty tank.
So now we've found ourselves right in the middle of Ventura and Taft with no close gas station, no cell phone reception, and no time to run out of gas. Somehow Drake manages to use what little fuel we have left very efficiently on the up hills and coast our way down on the down hills. We make it to the Texaco station in Maricopa with the needle pointing well below E.
So we book it the rest of the way to Taft, grab my passport, and head back to Ventura, this time on the much safer Interstate 5. At this point Drake is beyond sleepy, he's unable to complete full thoughts or sentences and claims to be seeing things on the road that aren't really there. After the "face out the window scream" and the several slaps to the face that I deemed necesary to give him at random times we decided that I should drive. When we're driving through Oxnard I get a voicemail informing us that our flight from Chicago to Brussels has been cancelled due to a massive slow storm in Europe. I call the airlines and they tell us the soonest they can get us there in by the 25, Christmas Day, yeah right.
So we arrive at the house in Ventura at 6:05 am, still not having even packed a single sock. So we get right to it, pack our bags until they're full and hope that we got the essentials. Our plan was to leave by 6:15 but we agree now on a much more realistic 6:45, to make it there early enough for our flight leaving at 9:50. Our buddy Kevin shows up to take us to LAX and we take off. You know how we don't like things that are too easy and how we love a challenge, so what does that mean? More hurdles. We run into a detour and also traffic. But we arrive at LAX at 9:15. We don't necesarily have to make our flight to Chicago since we will most likely be rerouted anouther way.
After talking with some not-too-pleasant representatives from American Airlines, we find out that all flights to Europe are cancelled and they will be sending us through Hong Kong flying stand-by with Cathay Pacific.

Hong Kong here we come..............