BoulderDash - Ignighter Road Trip Part 1
The Ignighter team is spending the summer in Boulder, Colorado and we’re extremely excited and fairly exhausted.
Dan and I left Wednesday morning on a 3-day adventure from NY to CO and arrived last night. We laughed, we cried, Dan snacked (a lot), I vomited (a little). The following is the first of 3 installments recounting our journey.
First some background on our wheels:
Finding a car to take on the trip was quite a hassle, but thanks to Dan’s dad for making many trips to Long Island car dealerships, we finally secured a great ride to have for the duration of the summer. We pimped out our brand new Civic with the same instrumentation that I would imagine an F-16 keeps on board,
We didn’t even have to pay $15 per checked bag!
a Magellan GPS and a Sirius Radio. The GPS was essential for reminding us to continue driving west on Rte. 80 (which we did for 97% of our drive across eight states).
Satellite radio was the fuel that kept our brains from shutting down which would have been the case if we had been forced to listen to Iowa and Nebraska’s radio programming - ever heard of a “corn debate”? Me neither. And at $6/month, the brain fuel was far more affordable than the more than $4/gallon we were pumping into our whip.
We learned that the Sirius Hits station currently plays a 7-song rotation, each song we had completely memorized by Des Moines. This was our soundtrack for the drive:
Fall Out Boy (featuring John Mayer) - Beat It
Leona Lewis - Bleeding Love
Nickelback - It’s Not My Time
Lifehouse - Whatever It Takes
Usher - Love in this Club
Flo Rida - Low
And our anthem for the trip:
Kid Rock - All Summer Long 
On a side note, does anybody know if this song has been released yet? I started to get the shakes this morning because my body wasn’t used to not hearing it every half hour and when I checked iTunes, it wasn’t there.
On another side note, you have to love any musician who is self-confident enough to rhyme “things” with “things”. And this rhyme isn’t just a one-time cop-out nestled between two other better rhyming couplets. It’s actually the refrain of the song.
“We were trying different things
And we were smoking funny things”
The song is amazing. One of the best things I’ve heard in a long, long thing.
OK, Now on to the trip:
The first leg was from NY to Chicago. We did it in 13 uneventful hours through NJ (land of Liberty and Prosperity), Pennsylvania (8 hilly, twisty hours of nothingness), Ohio (Rest Stops so beautiful and spotless that Dan actually ate a prosciutto panini off the urinal), 
Indiana (Gary was killer), and finally to Illinois.
Chicago is a special city to us since we went to college there and it felt great to be back in the beautiful windy city.
We arrived in Chicago at night and grabbed dinner and a beer with our old college pal Dr. David Davidson and stayed separately at 2 friend’s places who conveniently lived a few blocks away from each other. Both friends were incredibly hospitable and both places were gorgeous. Dan stayed at Jess Schneider’s sci-fi apartment complete with Delorian-style cabinets
and freshly baked banana muffins for our road trip.
I stayed with Dr. David Davidson in his big-ass apartment overlooking Lake Michigan.
In the morning it was up and out. After a quick deep dish slice at Gino’s East we were presented with a Frostian dilemma.
We ultimately chose Iowa, mainly because it was the most untraveled, but also mainly because we found ourselves in the Exit Only lane.
In Part 2 the adventure really heats up. We reveal the crime-fighting alter-egos we were forced to adopt along the way, an epic calzone, and a tale of a dead car.
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