We stopped at Wendy’s and got Baconators™ and coffee. After
dinner, we headed to our Airbnb, which Ollie had diligently organised
while I had been texting, like Romeo. We were actually sponsored by
Airbnb, which meant we got to stay in some amazing and some slightly
unusual places. The first place Ollie had booked was perfectly lovely
by daylight, but we arrived in the dead of night. A plethora of eery wind
chimes directed us towards the door. As we crept forward, hoping it
was the right house, we tripped over the carcass of a dead pigeon
and screamed ourselves hoarse like we were being killed. It was a
shock alright. Once we plucked up the courage to head inside we
noticed a decorative skeleton on the wall and suddenly out of the
darkness loomed a terrifying figure! It was man-ish and big-ish and
sitting-in-a-chair-ish! But it turned out to be just an average
mannequin sitting fully clothed in a believable position in a chair,
absolutely nothing to be alarmed about!
In the morning we looked outside and realised that we had slept in
an incredible house in the middle of the desert. It was the Joshua Tree
National Park, which is a cool name. It kind of made it feel like I was
meant to be there, like it was calling me, by my name. We set out into
the Mojave Desert towards Las Vegas, where Ollie had again booked
us an incredible place to stay with beds and a pool. We drove for
hours. It was truly moving to look down at my phone and my
messages as the glorious landscape and the sweeping skies sped
past us. Suddenly I looked up and realised the sun had set
spectacularly over the desert and the stars had come out and we
were entering the bright lights of Las Vegas, which blocked out the
stars. We were hungry and tired, and then it hit me, like a carrot cake
to the face, that I had forgotten to find us somewhere pleasant to eat
and the boys were furious with me. We had to go to Wendy’s again.
Not the same one, of course, but they are all pretty much the same
except for location.
The next morning, I tried waking Joel and the others up. Joel is like
the human equivalent of my left eye, he takes a while to wake up. He
is like a caterpillar inside a cocoon, but if you give him the right amount
of time, he will emerge like a butterfly ready to fly into opportunity. It