I wanted to get to Sarasota after all that stupid Spring Break stuff and before the Summer tourist season, but I shouldn’t have worried. The only way going to Florida could be more boring than visiting Sarasota is if you spent your whole time sitting in a bush. Seriously, the place sucks, so of course there was no Spring Break action to begin with.

First, there’s the crappy architecture. I thought this whole architecture thing was retarded until I visited here. It’s so bad that I actually noticed. It’s a bunch of pink buildings that look like the inside of a cow’s stomach. Seriously, the place is like cow vomit. There are also a lot of dumb awnings everywhere, like people are going to move to place that’s sunny, and then avoid the sun. I tried to set fire to one of them, but stucco doesn’t burn so well. And of course I was forced to kick some old guy in the shins when he came over to yell at me.

That’s the other thing. Yeah, it’s a cliché and stuff, but Florida is full of old people. I mean, I saw one cute guy and he turned out to be 45 or something and wanted to take me back to his condominium. That’s so lame. Like, a well-off, youngish 45 year old can’t afford a swank hotel?

Anyway, I ditched him at the Cha Cha Coconuts bar and took a cab over to the Backroom Saloon. Jesus, even the gay bars suck in this town. Just a bunch of old cranky dudes with their “life partners” sitting around drinking bourbon. Seriously, when I go to a gay bar I want tight abs, lots of dancing, and “you go girl” enthusiasm. I don’t want cottage cheese thighs in tight shorts with gray pubes hanging out. Yuck.

Well, I’m in Florida, so I figured I should go check out the beaches. They would be nice if it weren’t for all the condominiums right next to them and all the old guys in banana slings walking around. Not to mention the spinsters attempting to wear bikinis. I mean, that gave me no chance, ’cause I’m a hot girl just laying out in a one-piece and all these fogeys kept trying to talk to me. One guy wouldn’t go away and I had to give him a wedgie with his speedo.

It was pretty surprising that the bright point of my visit was golfing. Really. I mean, it sucks that people take all this nice land and build a bunch of stupid golf courses on them, but I never realized golf was so fun. First of all, they give you a big blunt object and you get to hit this ball with it. Second, it’s pretty much okay if you hit other people with that ball as long as you call out “fore” before it hits them. At least it’s supposed to be. By the seventh hole, the course staff asked me to leave. I only hit 23 people and I called fore each time! That last caddy totally deserved to get knocked out, too, because he was helping his golfer cheat. And it’s not it’s that hard to get a golf cart out of a lake. Ever heard of a tow truck?

Last night I sat down with a bottle of Jack, some room-service nachos (pretty good!) and some cable and had myself some good quiet time. Of course I’m here today in the Bradenton Airport nursing a bad hangover, but it’s worth it as long as I get the hell out of here.

If you want to have a ton of fun, then stay away from the bread factory I went to. It’s just ovens and big bowls and stuff, and no, no one told me that a bread factory is just a big kitchen. Like, I have a kitchen at home people. I don’t need to go see one. Sure, they give you free bread, but it was too hot to eat. Gee, thanks a lot.

It smelled pretty good, I guess, but it was still pretty stupid and there are a few crabby
old ladies wearing hair nets. Did you ever notice that hair nets make people look like they’ve got a big mole in their forehead? Me neither. Until I went to a bread factory. Actually, two of those ladies did have big, ugly, hairy moles on their foreheads. I think the hair nets were just to cover them up.

Luckily, there’s lots of other stupid stuff in Philadelphia so I didn’t have to spend my whole trip in a bread factory. During my two days in Philadelphia, I learned a lot. For instance, there’s this supposed rule that says “You broke it, you bought it.” Who even decided that that was gonna be the rule, and since when does it apply to Liberty Hall? See, I went to go see where our Nation (America) was born, so I visited Liberty Hall. Of course, yeah, it’s just a bunch of rooms, albeit with some nice wood panelling. But c’mon, I live in a house with rooms. I don’t need to pay money to see more rooms.

Then, this tour guide (yeah, like that’s a position of authority) tells me that I can’t drink in there. And it wasn’t even like I had a whole bottle, it was just a carton of cranberry juice mixed with vodka that I was sipping from discretely. Discretely! But no, this jerk, who had probably the gayest moustache I’ve ever seen, tries to take it from me. And I’m not about to let this douche take my vodka, and then I kicked his ass sort of. Actually, I got in some really nice blows before we fell over and knocked down a bunch of stuff. Yeah, these security and cops showed up, like it wasmy fault.

And this guy’s all like, you broke my bell. Oh, did I break your precious bell? Who cares about a bell? Well, a bunch of people apparently. They said I broke it, but that’s just wrong because it already had a big crack in the side. And why do you even need a bell still? My phone can make bell noises, but I don’t use that as my ringtone because bells are annoying. Either way, the expense account department at Axes & Alleys is gonna be pissed when they get the bill for that bell. Ah well, that’s why I’m a field reporter, so I can be out of office. That way they can’t yell at me.

I found this neat thing outside after the guards threw me out on my ass (literally!). They have these tricycles that float on the water! It’s the most amazing thing, ever. You just walk up to the guy, pay him some cash, and ride out onto the river. Of course there’s a catch, though. You can’t just go around knocking other tricycles over with that handy pole you found in an alley after coming out of Philadelphia’s most exclusive night club. Oh no! That’s just wrong. And they won’t refund your money.

Now, I’ve gotta go check out the Amazon jungle and see if that’s cool. I hear there are
some temples, and some naked tribesmen, and a group of folks who don’t even have a concept of the past. I bet you can slap them around and get forgiven pretty quick. Sounds exciting though, because it’s in South America, right near Mexico where they invented nachos.

Back at the bus station, I was playing poker for vending machine sandwiches with this guy who said his name was Eddie. After I cleaned him out by winning two tuna fish and one ham-and-cheese, he told me a really weird story about how aliens came and abducted him and put a microchip in his head. He even showed me his scars. But when he offered to show me other stuff, I hit him in the jaw with a hot sauce bottle and went to catch my bus to San Francisco.

I was really excited to be heading out to the City by the Bay. Not because of Alcatraz or gay, Chinese hippies, but because I had six hours of McLaughlin Group podcasts on my D-Vice™. I just love the way he says “bye bye” at the end of each show. He’s old and wrinkly, but, hell, I’d shack up with him just because he’s so weird. I mean, can you imagine what it would be like if he took you out to dinner? I bet he drives waiters nuts.

Then I got to thinking about what Eddie told me about the aliens. Questions danced through my mind; you know like the watusi or the mashed potato. Were there really such things as aliens? Real aliens, from outer space, not the Mexican ones, which are from Mexico. I figured I would need to make a stop in Roswell, New Mexico. Back in 1947, an alien space ship crash landed there and the government lied about it. It seems that the same type of big-headed gray aliens have been coming to Earth for years to abduct people and stick medical instrument in them, kind of like dentists, but not as scary.

Unfortunately, the bus stop was thirty miles from Roswell. It seems that New Mexico is made of desert, which is like the beach, except that there aren’t any oceans nearby and there definitely aren’t any cute life guards. So, I hitchhiked for a bit. Showing a little leg worked, and I got a ride with this guy named Colonel Stevens, who told me he worked at Groome Lake and said he was in Roswell to visit relatives and not for any official purpose. He had a stupid mustache that kind of made him look gay.

Speaking of gays, I was supposed to be in San Francisco, which seemed like it would be more fun than a bunch of sand. So, I had him drop me off at the airport and I bought a plane ticket with his credit card. Maybe I shouldn’t have had his credit card, but since he totally tried to look down my shirt I stole his brief case and it had his credit card in it. I bought myself some cool stuff from the airport gift shop, too, including a decorative Las Vegas spoon made of melted poker chips.

I looked through his papers on the plane, but it was just a bunch of boring crap about “reverse engineering of alien thruster control nozzles.” Sounds stupid. Why not regular engineering? Well, I didn’t solve the mystery of aliens, but did you know that in the first class section they totally give you these awesome hot towels to put on your face? I took two and then stole all the magazines from the chair in front of me. They also give you a ton of liquor without checking your ID.

I made it to San Francisco okay, but I had to listen to this fat dude bitch about how they charged him for a second seat just because he was fat. I was pretty happy he was sitting across the aisle. It was worth it, though, because the guy sitting next to him ended up clocking him around the second hour. His name was Mark and I got his phone number before we disembarked. I’ll probably meet him at one of those places in San Francisco with a Spanish name in a couple of days.

So Roswell was pretty cool, because had I not gone there I wouldn’t be able to read this great magazine I took. It has an article about turtles and turtles are way better than aliens any day.

Grand Canyon, AZ – So, here it is. I’ve come to the most well-known geological feature in the United States and I’m looking over the edge. There’s a river down there at the bottom. There’s some very high canyon walls. It’s most impressive. But, you know what? I’ve got a problem with it. All the stupid families.

I’m visiting one of the things in nature which holds the most impact for visitors, and there’s a bunch of snot-nosed, whiny little brats running around. How the hell am I supposed to enjoy this grand, natural beauty with these rug rats everywhere?

Earlier in the day I paid for a mule ride tour and hike of the canyon. Things were okay for about the first ten minutes, but then this noise kept bothering me. Finally I looked around for it and it turns out a kid two mules behind was playing some handheld game. That was the noise. Okay, I can deal. I’ve been a bored kid before. But then we get to the bottom and these two elementary school kids start whining. They’re tired. They have to pee. It’s no fun for them. One of them kicked their mule, which was great because the thing totally kicked him back. That kid got knocked right into the Colorado River. It was hilarious. So hilarious it made up for all his crying.

Then I took a whitewater rafting trip down the river. This was so awesome, I couldn’t believe it. Yeah, no nachos, but it was really exciting and the guide was so cute. Of course one of those stupid kids had to ruin all the fun. We stopped near some of these awesome Navajo adobe ruins and camped out in front of them. While me and the guide are having some adult fun in one of the upper storeys of the Navajo city, this little bastard starts up crying about his lost cards. They were from some cartoon show and he wouldn’t shut up. So of course Jeb, the guide, had to go down and help out. And I didn’t get any action!

They couldn’t find his cards, so the kid had a huge tantrum. He’s whining into the night, throwing smores at his parents. Then, all of sudden, he runs off towards the adobe structures. We didn’t pay him any mind, but ten minutes later we hear some crackling. As we look over, we notice that stupid kid kicking the city and beating it with a huge branch. That whole building came down.

Well, about ten miles down the river the next day, I got him back. My raft came up right next to his, and I sent it tipping over with my oar. They couldn’t find that little pissant for two hours. He got stuck between to boulders in the river about a mile downstream. It was awesome. Made up for the whole trip.

So, yeah, I would recommend the Grand Canyon. It’s beautiful. Just go in the winter when there aren’t any families around and you won’t have to deal with all the crap that I did.

Glacier National Park, Montana – My friend Thom told me I should check out a glacier before they’re all gone due to something he calls climate change. I looked it up and it turns out there are glaciers in the United States. So one of my editors gave me $25 for a bus ticket out here on the border with Canada on the condition that I mock Alberta during my visit. I just gave it the finger, British style, so that’s taken care of. Well, I don’t see what the BFD is. Majestic beauty, largest reservoirs of fresh water on the planet, blah blah blah. It’s a big hunk of ice and there are plenty of people who could, I don’t know, use fresh water that’s not stuck up on top of a mountain somewhere.

That’s another thing. I read in the Encyclopaedia Britannica that most glaciers are found on mountains. So you have to do a lot of stupid hiking through nature to get there. After you wear yourself out stumbling through wildflowers and other junk, the payoff is this big blue thing covered in dirt. That’s right, glaciers are dirty, just like the grubby nature lovers standing around gawking at them. And they’re too blue. Blue makes me angry.

Getting angry helped me prove another point. This one nature princess was going all Gaia Theory on me and wouldn’t shut up, so I kinda shoved her. Into a crevasse. Which brings up another point: you could die going to a glacier. They’re dangerous with all the crevasses in them and ice rivers flowing under them into hidden lakes. If there’s one thing I really hate it’s too many crevasses. I lost my beef jerky in one.

They’re also really cold. That’s another way to die; from cold. For instance, you could go scuba diving in those lakes I mentioned; but when I went, one guy got stuck, got that hypothermia thing, and died, all while I floated there watching him. I thought maybe all the thrashing he was doing would keep him warm, but it just ripped up that fancy thermal suit of his.

So, glaciers move, which is something else I read. They get warmed up by the sun and the ice melts and the water gets through all the cracks to the bottom of the glacier and it starts sliding around. Boring! Sometimes they flow into a lake or the sea, which is actually kind of cool because the ice makes a lot of noise and you can see the stupid thing falling apart right in front of your eyes. It’s sort of neat that glaciers move all those rocks and reshape the land. Then you get awesome-sounding topological features like moraines and drumlins. But when I think about it at the end of the day, there are better ways to move rocks around. I got one of those rock tumblers from Spencer’s Gifts which does it in two to three days.

The only good thing about my trip was the nacho stand near the Jackson Glacier. Except for the fact that I had to eat them in the freezing cold, and the melty Velveeta they used pretty much froze instantly, and the missing jalapenos on the top, it almost made up for coming out here in the first place. I thought of writing another book called Nachos of the National Parks, but when I got home I found out it was the only nacho stand in any of our national parks. That sucks, you know? The Department of the Interior should have a little more respect for one of our national foods.