New England Tour '09

Starring

Rob Clarke

Rich Patterson

Tim Layton

Brooke Stevens
&

Johnny Etchemendy

Ever since Tim and Rich moved out to the East Coast I've been going through some major Rich & Tim withdrawals... That's why Rob, Brooke, and Johnny decided it was best to go out and visit. Listen to our tale.

The very first whispers of this trip began at Rich's Park City home right before Rich & Tim were leaving our mountain paradise. We were sitting around the bar, there was probably some joking, I seem to remember everybody drinking root beer (except Brooke... She was drinking poisonous Diet Coke instead.) Now I'm mostly guessing at this point, but I seem to remember the conversation going something like this:

Tim: "So when are you guys going to come out to visit me in Boston?"

Rich: "They'll come visit me in New York before they visit you in Boston!"

Tim: "Rich, you can come too, because you have a car."

Rich: "Tim, you're always on top of your A game, aren't you?"

Tim: "Yep. That's me alright."

Johnny: "I've never been to Boston."

Rob: "Me either!"

Brooke: "I want to come too!"

Johnny: "Pass me the root beer."

Tim: "Here you go Johnny. I love sharing delicious beverages."

Rich: "Oh no, you drank all the root beer and I'm still thirsty."

Brooke: "There's still lots of Diet Coke."

Rich: "Gross!"

Rob: "That's just wrong Brooke... We take our beverages hetero."

Tim: "I know I only drink beverages that are hetero."

Johnny: "Anyone that drinks Diet Coke is a communist!"

Brooke: "Good, more for me."

Johnny: "Well, I guess we'll have to go to Boston over my fall break since Rob doesn't go to school anymore and Brooke's going to have to miss school no matter when we do it."

Rich & Tim: [Together while jumping in the air for a picturesque High Five] "Yeah!"



And that's how the ball got rolling.


Now I'll briefly summarize the ensuing weeks leading up to the trip:
It turns out it's more difficult to coordinate 5 schedules than you'd think. First it looked like Rob wasn't going to make it, then it looked like Brooke wasn't going to make it. I got sad about the difficulties so I decided to just buy my plane tickets and hope for the best.

I finally found a cheap flight and the times looked right, but I couldn't get a hold of Rich to confirm plans. Instead of waiting for him to call me back I decided to just buy it anyway and hope for the best. I then emailed my itinerary to Rob and Brooke and said, "I'm going, are you?" (I didn't actually say that.)

In the end, my flight out worked out with Rob's schedule and my flight back worked out with Brooke's schedule, so it was win-win for Johnny.

Now the journey begins...

Rob and I flew out of Salt Lake at 11:55pm Thursday, October 8th. While sitting in the SLC airport Rob pointed out an incredibly overweight guy with white hair covering 97% of his body. Turns out Karma is a bitch because Rob was stuck sitting next to that guy for the entire flight to New York. Fortunately for Rob 260mph tail winds lend to a much faster flight across the country. The consequence of our speedy flight was that we had to wait at JFK for 3 hours before our flight to Syracuse instead of 2 hours.

The main message to take away from JFK is that there are some super weird people in that airport from 6:00 to 9:00 in the morning, including an out of shape tool in his daddy's suit with a crotch to his knees and a Russian Canadian with a gold lined shirt.

We arrived in Syracuse without incident, but when we reached the passenger pick up Rich was nowhere to be found. A quick phone call informed us that he was "20 - 25 minutes away." Loosely translated, that means "I'm 30 minutes out at least..." 31 minutes later, Rich Patterson arrives and the vacation begins!

We spent the rest of the morning and our early afternoon commuting out to Boston which is about 4 hours away from Syracuse. (You see, we flew into Syracuse so that Rich didn't have to drive all the way out to Boston by himself! (And because it was $100 cheaper...)) Nothing terribly exciting happened on the car ride from Syracuse to Boston other than getting some lunch at McDonalds where Rob got his flirt on with some old ladies sitting at the table next to us.

Enter Tim

We got Tim on the phone and he said, "I'm so sick of studying, come pick me up at school!" This didn't seem like an unreasonable request, except that Boston during rush hour traffic is the worst. Also, Google Maps doesn't always know which intersections you can and can't turn left at. Luckily Rich is a fantastic driver and Tim is a fantastic "walk across to the other side of the street so we don't have to make several U-turns" guy.

After dropping our stuff off at Tim's place it was dinner time. Dinner Friday night was awesome! For anybody familiar with the Provo pizza scene there is a place called Nicolitalia Pizzeria. The owner, Nick, has parents that live in Boston and he's modeled his restaurant after his parents restaurant, Nicola Pizza House. Nick gave Rob his parent's restaurants address and we went there for dinner Friday night. This place was awesome! We walk in and there are a few people ahead of us. Eventually Rob makes his way to the counter and the woman behind him asks, "What can I get foh ya?" to which Rob replies, "Well, Nick told us we had to try the steak sandwich..." The woman raises an eyebrow, looks at Rob questioningly and asks, "Nick who...?"

Rob: "Nick from Provo, Utah."

Woman [who we learn is Nick's mom, Mary]: "Oh my lord, Bobby, these boys here know Nick Junior!"

Bobby [who seems like just some random guy in the front of the restaurant]: "You guys know Nick Jr.? I raised that kid up."

Mary: "Oh YOU raised 'im up? You guys tell Nick that Bobby raised him up and see what he says."

We ordered a whole bunch of food and sat down. While we were waiting our friend Valerie Funk, who also lives in Boston going to graduate school, joined us with one of her roommates in tow. Introductions were made, food was brought out, feasting began.

We reminisced about all the good times at Nico's in Provo and just had a good time, but then as we were getting ready to leave Nick's mom asked us to sit back down and wait for a minute. A short time later she came out with some free cannolis that were AWESOME! We visited with her for a little bit longer, paid, and took off.

It was a really fun experience and it was even more fun to see where Nick Jr. got all his inspiration for his pizza place in Provo. (Not to mention how amazing the steak sandwiches were!)

The night was still young and we didn't have to pick Brooke up from the airport until midnight, so Tim brought us over to his friend Emily Lewis' place. Now, for those of you that know me, I don't always have the easiest time getting to know new people, but Emily and her sister Brittany made it a cake walk. They were very warm and invited a bunch of cool people over and it was cool. Conversation even came easy because not long into the visit someone mentioned that I had dated Valerie before she moved out to Boston, and in a place where the YSA Mormon crowd is so limited, this became a VERY interesting topic of conversation. I had the pleasure of fielding questions about the new cute, mysterious, tennis playing girl that just recently moved in. Valerie, you're welcome ;)

The only other item to really take not of from this visit was something that turned into an inside joke for the remainder of the trip. Rich, I'm sorry, but the world needs to hear...

So Emily is in charge of some sort of education conference out in Boston and was recruiting people from neighboring stakes and states to come. She was even attempting to recruit Rich to come back from Ithaca the next weekend to attend. Well, they started talking about which states had representatives trying to get people to come and one of the kids mentioned North Carolina. Rich, who is either genuinely interested, or feigning genuine interest asks this kid, "So is there a large... contingent...cy... down........" then Tim jumps in, "He's trying to say, 'Are there people there?'" Rich then looked slightly abashed, put his hood on and said, "I'm just going to put my hood on and think about what I've said..." He took it with grace and we loved him even more for it.

Well, unfortunately we had to leave our lovely new friends, but on the bright side, we got to pick up Brooke Stevens!

Brooke flew in, we drove to the airport, we picked her up. Exciting story right? Well that's just the beginning of the fun! Now that all 5 of us were reunited we went to a coffee shop, ordered some drinks, sat down and just chilled. Sadly, I hadn't had any sleep in two days and was kind of cranky... We eventually went home and got some sleep. I was lucky enough to be sharing a futon with Rich all night and it's just so easy to fall asleep with his comforting presence right next to you.

Friday morning we casually woke up, got ready, and made breakfast plans. As it turns out, there was a really good breakfast place right next to Tim's place called The Breakfast Club. The downside is that it's small and always busy. Eventually we accepted seats at the bar, which if you've ever seen the Seinfeld episode where they sit at the bar in the coffee shop instead of their table, you'd understand the difficulties in having a group conversation. So I talked with Tim through breakfast since he was the only person I was sitting next to and it was lovely, because there isn't a much better breakfast conversationalist than Tim Layton.

I wasn't about to let my inability to converse with everybody else get me down though, because we had big plans for the afternoon! We were heading up to New Hampshire to pick apples in an orchard and then up to Maine for a seafood dinner, finding a hotel, watching the sunrise the following morning come up over the Atlantic. (We hit 50% of these goals... That's not awful, right? Let me tell you about it.)

So we were meeting up at Valerie's apartment to head of to New Hampshire. We got there right when she told us to, but nobody else did. That was cool though, because we got the grand tour of her place. I'll be honest, Valerie's place is the sweetness. Back yard, cool roof porch, scary basement... Rich even found a left handed hockey stick blade that Val said he could keep. Very productive tour for Richie.

Yadda, yadda, yadda, we left for New Hampshire. Our car (Tim, Rich, Rob, Brooke, Johnny) left a little bit before everybody else. I wasn't paying attention when this decision was made, so I don't know why we did, but trust me, it happened. Since we left before everybody it seemed like a good idea to get some gasoline and some Peach Rings. (Peach rings are those gummy, peach flavored, rings covered in sugar.) Brooke and Tim have some sort of uncomfortable relationship with these things and we had to get them. I thought they tasted fine, but they apparently didn't meet Tim & Brooke's very steep expectations so there was a dark cloud following us up to New Hampshire.

Even Rich was affected by this turn of events. He was getting a little snippy with cars in his way. There was one car of girls that was trying to cut him off and he wouldn't have it! He stuck it to them and cut THEM off. As I turned to apologize with my very apologetic eyes and gestures (and to see if the girls were good looking or not) I discovered that it was Valerie and her roommates! They caught up to us when we stopped for the damn Peach Rings! This funny coincidence breathed life back into our saddened car. So much so that I thought it would be fun to suck on some fruit snacks and throw them at Val & co.'s car. Okay, I was just going to throw stuff, but Tim made me put them in my mouth and it's a good thing he did. Had I not put them in my mouth they wouldn't have stuck on the side of the car when I threw them.

The remaining Peach Rings became our primary ammunition. I put one in my mouth in preparation to throw, but traffic got in my way. It's okay, I thought. I'll just keep sucking on it until they get close again. This was much harder than I thought. You see, my method of eating Peach Rings is sucking on them until all the surrounding sugar is dissolved, then I chew them up and swallow them. Well, as the sugar began to disappear I began to feel the years of Peach Ring eating reinforcement coming back to haunt me. My mouth wanted to chew, but my heart wanted to hurl the candy at the black car shadowing us. Rarely have I had to fight such an intense inner battle that mattered so little, but fortunately for everyone my heart prevailed, I stood up outside the rear passenger-side window, I took aim, and released. I had to compensate for windspeed because we were traveling at freeway speeds. I threw it far in front of they enemy vehicle. It sailed over the top of Rich's car and began spanning the distance between the vehicles. It starting losing velocity rapidly. My inner struggle to save this peach ring seemed to have been in vain, but wait, it was going to be so close! Just a little further! SPLAT!!! Right on their windshield! Now, you'd think that this little peach ring's journey was over, but I tell you, it was just beginning. It was most fortunate that I had sucked on it for so long and given it all the slobery stickiness it needed. The forces of nature tried to blow that poor peach ring off, but instead of leaving the vehicle completely it began to roll. All the moistened sugar acted as an adhesive. The peach ring rolled up over top of the car, rolled all the way across the top, rolled down the rear windshield and finally found it's resting position on the rear windshield, but hidden behind the rear break light. It was a shot of beauty.

You'd think that a freeway food fight couldn't get much better than that, right? Well, just when we were celebrating our obvious superiority and white SUV with a cackling woman came screaming up next to us and they opened fire. There were other people in our party that we were unaware of joining the battle against us! Bastards!

"Tim, I need more peach rings!"

"We don't have anymore!"

"Dammit!"

"Take this snickers bar!"

"Burn in Hell white SUV people who I've never met!"

Snickers misses by a mile...

"I need more!"

"We don't have anymore!"

"Dammit!"

It was kind of downhill at this point. Everybody was out of food they could part with so the battle kind of wound down, but it wasn't entirely over...

I was looking out the window and saw a guy in a green car drive by and he gave me the shifty eyes as he drove past! I thought, who does this guy thing he is? Then something spectacular happened. His window slowly began to roll down. There's no way... do we know this guy? Stuff starts flying out of his window at us. Yes, that's right, we started a freeway food fight and random spectators began to participate! If nothing else was accomplished on that trip we at least gave Utah a good name and people on the East Coast are going to remember the dark green Honda with the Utah plates and the freeway food fight they started.

The remainder of the trip to the apple orchard was without incident. We all had a good laugh when we got there and then decided apples needed to be picked. The way this business worked is that you bought a bag and could fill it up. We bought a huge bag and decided to share it between Rob, Rich, Tim, Johnny, Valerie, and Brooke. As we started to enter the orchard a small sign caught our attention.

No Running
No Climbing in the Trees
No Throwing Apples
No Moving the Ladders

Can you honestly expect us to read a sign like that and NOT do every single one of those things?! We started with Tree climbing. Tim climbed the first tree and I thought it looked way fun, so I climbed one too. This led us into breaking the second rule. Tim and I started throwing apples back and forth at each other, but we didn't want to waste them, so I'd take a bite, throw the apple, Tim would take a bite, throw it back. Everyone was jealous of our obvious greatness at the top of the trees! I figured it would be best to share our top of the tree spoils with the rest of the crew, so after I took another bite, I tossed the apple down to the peons below. I could tell by the look in their eyes that they worshiped me and Tim. Even our half eaten apples were received with praise and acclimation to our stunning presence. It got so bad even that the occupants of the other vehicles became exceedingly jealous of our position of dominance and began hurling apples at Tim in an attempt to knock him out of the tree. I learned that day that when Tim is sitting regally in an apple tree there is nothing that can dethrone him. He was like Samuel the Lamanite preaching repentance and no matter how many objects were hurled at him, they could not touch him. That was until one touched him...

Well, moving on, yes, we ran through the orchard even until we found a ladder and then Tim grabbed it and he moved that ladder so hard! If you look at this picture closely, you may notice that in this section of the orchard the trees really aren't much taller than Tim is... It didn't matter to Tim. He was told he couldn't move the ladder so he moved the hell right out of it! It was right around this time that Brooke, Rich, and Rob all disappeared in an attempt to find the most delicious apple of all the orchard. It was so depressing because we couldn't find them. Luckily we had a ladder we could move around and look over the tops of the trees. We found them over by the Gala apples where Rob found the tastiest apples of all the orchard!

After everybody picked all the apples they wanted we sat down at some tables and drank some locally bottled root beer and cream soda and ate peanut butter cookies and naked apple bread. Eventually we decided it was time to start our voyage further northeasterly into Maine. We said our good byes, told Valerie to save us some apples for pie making on Sunday night when we got back, and took off.

The trip to Portland, ME was mostly uneventful. We decided to drive up HWY 1 because it didn't require any tolls and it was a more beautiful drive according to Tim. It was. The downside came when we ran into some sort of crazy traffic and it made our 2 hour drive into a 500 hour drive. Night came. It's difficult to truly appreciate the beauty of Maine in the dark, but it was still fun to chill and talk. To pass the time we played a little iPod game my pal Andrew taught me. We made a new playlist composed of songs that everybody chose. I started so I picked the first song, then I passed the iPod over to Rob. Rob then added a song and passed the iPod over to Tim and this went around and around the car with everybody adding a song each. It was neat to hear everybody's different but similar music choices and it certainly follows along the spirit of communal equality, right?

Well, hours and hours later we make it to Portland. Rob utilized the greatness of the iPhone and found us a place to eat right on the ocean that had raving reviews about its seafood. J's Oysters was the name and we eventually found it. It was a dive of a place chilling back on the pier away from anywhere you'd be able to see it from the main road. That being said, it was great! Even later in the evening it was packed full of drunk people and the food was really really good. I'm not much of a shellfish person, so I had the grilled haddock, but everybody else had some variation of lobster or scallop I think. It was kind of pricey, but it was a fun little place to eat in.

The next obstacle we needed to overcome was finding a place to sleep. We saw several places on our way up to Portland so we figured we'd just drive back that way and find somewhere. Well, there were some complications that we don't need to go into detail about... (Hey! Tim asked me to find a road closer to the beach and I did! It's not my fault that it circled back towards Portland, was dark and scary, and had NOWHERE to sleep! okay... it was kind of my fault) Eventually we decided that the best idea was to just drive back to Boston and sleep there.

So Sunday!

Church was on the schedule for Sunday morning, but we were a little bit late, missed the sacrament, couldn't find a place to sit, so decided the next best thing we could do with the day was drive down to Rhode Island and walk along the cliffs.

Once we got to New Port we

parked next to Salve Regina University,

walked along the cliffs. It was a BEAUTIFUL day!

Decided to get a sandwich on the wharf,

and decided to come home.

It was awesome, but there was one little story I need to tell about Rhode Island. You see, something that Rich and I have in common is that we love to bet. Something we don't have in common is the distances and heights we can jump. As we were walking down to the wharf to find somewhere to eat there was a segment of sidewalk that was torn out. Rich, in his handicapped manner of betting says, "Johnny, if you can jump that gap I'll give you five dollars." Rich rarely asks for anything if I CAN'T perform the task at hand, so what's the harm in trying. Short story short, I cleared the gap and Rich lost his "bet".

On the way back to the car we passed the same segment of missing concrete. Rich says, "I'll give you 8 dollars if you can jump it the other way." At first glance you'd think, Rich has to be an idiot! but I haven't given you all the information, so lay off Rich, will you?! You see, it was slightly downhill the first time, so on the way back it was slightly uphill. For you physicists out there I don't need to explain that it's more difficult to jump a set distance that is slightly elevated to your starting position versus jumping the same distance with your starting point being the elevated position. Well, I thought to myself, I can get Rich to offer me more than that! so I said, "Come on Rich, double or nothing!" My own words cursed me... I didn't mean double or nothing, I meant double, period. Well, I couldn't make it, but I had an audience building up so I had to try. Rich got his five dollars back and I'm scared that I've wizened him up to betting. No more easy money for Johnny...

When we got home we went over to Valerie's place to make some apple pies. They were delicious. We also played some Champion Catch Phrase and a game of Secret Partner Rook. It was a good evening and it was great to catch up with Val since we hadn't really had much opportunity to talk until then.

We left Val's place kind of late, but our night wasn't over yet. It turns out that Brooke and Rich made some sort of bet about a concert or some such nonsense and it ended with Brooke losing and having to swim in Walden Pond at night during the trip. I know what you're thinking, That doesn't sound like much of a punishment. It sounds... transcendental even. Well, I'd tend to agree with you, except Boston is kind of cold in October... Brooke is a woman of her word though, so we drove out to Walden Pond and Brooke took a little dip. Side note: I've not seen Walden in the day time, but at night it is incredibly serene and beautiful. I wish Brooke wasn't so cold that we had to turn back to the car so early. It would have been fantastic to just sit there on the edge of the pond and enjoy the company of the silence.

Monday was a sad day. It was the day that Rob had to go back to Utah. We figured that it was a good day to spend in Boston since Rob left at 3:00. We drove into downtown, walked around some of the parks and down by the river. Boston is certainly a beautiful city. It was getting closer to lunch time and we wanted to grab some sandwiches before Rob had to leave so we got back to the car and decided to take off. The problem was that the Boston Half Marathon was Monday, so we got into town, but we couldn't get out! A drive to the airport that should have taken us 20 minutes turned into 2 hours... It was awful. It also got worse...

We were trying to use the iPhone to get directions to the sandwich shop. At first it was giving us accurate directions, unfortunately, the GPS wasn't very accurate and we didn't know the streets well enough so we missed our turn. Usually that isn't a HUGE issue, but it is when the only way back is driving through the entire airport, paying 3 tolls and getting lost in the back roads trying to find another way there. This is how I'd summarize the feelings of everyone in the car:

Rich: Angry that my directions weren't good enough and that he has to drive through all this garbage!

Brooke: Silently supportive. I think Brooke just felt the tension and didn't want to contribute

Rob: Slightly amused that his last moments in Boston were the worst moments in Boston

Tim: Angry that his city and my iPhone betrayed him!

Johnny: Mad as fire at iPhone for telling him streets to go down that you couldn't go down! Get it together Google Maps!

We ran out of time and had to bag lunch with Rob so that he didn't miss his flight. We got him there, said our frustrated good byes, and headed back towards Tim's neighborhood. The four of us were still hungry so we got a quick cheap lunch and decided naps were in order. (Actually, Brooke went to see a high school friend or some such Tom Foolery...)

After nap time the tension was gone and it was time to get the rest of our evening planned. The North End, that was the place to be says Tim! The North End is the Italian sector of Boston. All the authentic Italian restaurants and pastry shops and the like are there. (Also something about Paul Revere or something... I wasn't paying too much attention) We took the T out there, found the preferred restaurant, Giacomo's, and got in line. Tim and I took off for a minute to go get some cannolis for after dinner desert, and met a cool lady from some Central or South American country, but I can't ever remember. Tim will know.

Brooke and Tim have a friend named Austin that joined us, as did Val, and dinner was fantastic! Rich and Brooke had this Butternut Squash Ravioli that was so good it made you wanna go home and smack your mother! All the dishes were fantastic (and pricey...) and we had a nice old lady that was our server. Wait, did I say, "nice old lady?" I meant to say a firecracker of an old woman that didn't take any guff from anybody. She even got mad at us if we were looking at the wrong side of the menu when she was telling us what was available. The food was good enough to make up for it though.

After dinner we walked down to the pier and ate our cannolis. Miraculously there wasn't a soul to be seen other than ourselves. It was really quite a beautiful evening and a fantastic way to end our last night in Boston. And the cannolis were fantastic!


That's pretty much where our trip ends. We hung out at Austin's house for just a little bit, talked, took Valerie home, headed back to Tim's place, and crashed. Tim had school the next day so we said our good byes, Rich took Brooke and I to the airport, and we headed back to Salt Lake...

It was really quite an exciting weekend and it was super awesome to see Tim and Rich again. I really do miss them a lot. Rich is one of my best friends in the whole world and it's been rough having him so far away. (It's been great for my grades, but that's beside the point!) As for Tim, it was extremely unfortunate that I didn't really get to know him until such a short period of time before he left for grad school. I really am grateful that I got even that small opportunity though. For any of you that don't know Tim, he's about as real as it gets. He's a real winner in my book. Thanks for putting us up the whole weekend and taking so much time out of your busy schedule to chill with us for the few short days that composed New England Tour '09