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March 27, 2000
Monday - Salt Lake
Monday - Salt Lake City to David's House Montana, 500 miles on interstate 15 and
highway 90.
Clean underwear situation: critical.
Last night we checked into the downtown Super 8. The clerk didn't believe that we didn't have any discounts, so he gave us the Bay Area Resident special rate, which he invented on the spot. $45. Sweet.
The guy behind me in the checkin queue said he recognised me. 'Nah, man' I said, trying to blend in with the local lingo, 'I'm from California'. 'Yeah Dude' he says 'Where from?' This guy's a big fair skinned black guy, but he's looking a bit red in the face. 'Ugh, Mountain View' I say. He squints a bit and says 'You hang out at Bentleys? I'm from Oakland.' (Which is about 20-miles from Mountain View). I notice that his eyes have a marbled sheen, and his breath is a bit stale. 'Nah, nah' I say.
It's not good when you're in the middle of Utah and some drunk wanders up to you and could plausibly actually know you.
It turns out that Novell's geek conference, BrainShare, is in full swing downtown. It could be that this guy was some kind of deranged LDAP programmer who'd decided to shun the corporate hotel at $120 a night and had spent the $75 saved on beer. (LDAP = The thing I work on, which Novell have adopted as their native directory access protocol in an attempt to save themselves before Microsoft actually manages to ship a decent network operating system.)
We walked into the downtown area to check out the lay of the land. The business district was totally dead, but the adjacent blocks were filled with hotels that seemed quite busy, as most of the bars and cheaper restaurants were open. We happened upon the 'Dead Goat Saloon', a real dive bar with upstairs music venue. We had to queue at the bar whilst a real authentic american character ordered a round of drinks for his buddies. Dark leathered skin, full straggled beard, aged full length waxed coat, cowboy boots, roll your own pouch of baccy, having a robust discussion with the huge barmaid... of course he's from fucking Norfolk and he's trying to make use of his frequent drinkers card that he'd been hanging onto since his last visit in the early eighties.
We had an all right meal at Squatters, a local brew pub restaurant, but we had a table too far from the TV showing the Oscars, and the waiter wasn't very interested in finding the remote to fix the TV near us. So, we repaired to the hotel room to watch the results there. Best bit was the bloke from London for American Beauty.
A number of complete strangers said 'Wot's up man?' as we walked back. It turns out the correct response is the ponderously recursive 'Wot's up man?'
We didn't get to sleep very quickly... It could have been the altitude, 4000 feet, or the gas resulting from the chemical reaction between the three pints of pale ale and the sausage calzone I consumed.
We'll be driving all day... so I won't get to play savanna panorama today.
Posted by John at March 27, 2000 12:00 PM