So I'm back from The Race Across America. It was amazing.

It ended up being a bit like what I was expecting, but not totally. Here are all the pictures.

I ended up being embedded with a team, and the rider, James, was a great guy. The first night I showed up in San Diego I was walking around some banquet looking for James, because I had previously only seen a picture of him, and when I ended up finding him he gave me a big hug. I thought that was pretty cool. I'm all into hugging.

He's not a big guy. I'm actually a big bigger then him, but he weighs like 5-10 pounds more (of muscle maybe?). I so got to meet him the first night and get a little bit of pre race interview time in.

We arranged to meet up tomorrow morning at 5:30 AM (Pac Time), we switched to race time (eastern time) right after the race started. So I meet up with him and head over to the starting line.

James ended up having to use the bathroom at the starting line. Unfortunately James has a condition that makes it so he really doesn't know when he's going to have to go next, and when he's gotta go, he's gotta go then. I did know that this condition existed before I started the race, but I guess not all the team members actually did know that. But all in all we probably stopped on the rode for 100 bathroom stops...but more on that later.

So the race gets started.

To be blunt, comparatively our team was pretty Ghetto. We had a team of 5 people and 2 vans. We had our team leader who was super awesome, our 2nd in command who was also the mechanic. Then we had 3 misc. other people. Other teams had doctors, cooks masseuses, and RV's. He has squat. I'm telling the absolute truth when I saw that every camera crew we came up to looked at my situation and said, "Man, you totally have it worse then any of us."

The race goes all day and night. The crew was spilt into two shifts, day and night. I stayed on both shifts because I really didn't want to miss anything. Unfortunately me being on two shifts meant two things. First, I never got to sleep (1-2 hours a night. Second, there was no room for me in the van. So I ended up sitting on James toilet which was a bucket with a hole in it. I spent hours and hours sitting on that thing.

Oh, and the crew named me Fottoh. Said sorta like I'm Italian. And they made fun of my everytime I asked them to do something twice or gasp....ask for a re-enactment.

Here is the view that I saw for hours on end. So, as for that toilet. It was basically a bucket with a hole in the top with and we placed a plastic bag in it. Normally I'm not one for littering but we all refused to be stuck in van with bags of shit in the van with us so we ended up perfecting the art of shit tossing. That's when you have a plastic bag full of shit, you place some gravel in it, and then you fling the bag around for a bit and let go. Sorta like a shit catapult.

I was never the one to actually throw the shit catapult because it seemed to be one of those things that people thought would be a pretty damn funny idea (which it is) until something goes wrong and someone gets covered in shit. I did not want to be that person.

One of the crew members, Dave however has a real problem with shit. The smell of it revolts him. Even just talking about it can make him nauseous. One time when we were doing the shit catapult he happened to be downwind and the smell really caught him. He got pretty damn close to throwing up.

But on the way back we were talking about the shit catapult and he started to get pretty grossed out about it and almost threw up in the car. So I threw my camera in his face and started taking pictures of him almost yakking. Here they are. 1, 2, 3, 4.

The other thing about Dave is that when he was younger he was doing a bicycle jump where the seat of his bike broke off and he ended up hitting his testicles really hard. He has to get a bunch of surgery on them and stuff so now he has really large testicles. Here's a picture.

So to be honest because I didn't sleep at all the days really blended together. It's really hard to know what happened where and when.

Basically I spent a whole lot of time in the van following James. During the it's best to follow the rider in the van, that was if he needs anything like water or food (James only eat powdered food the whole trip) you can give him whatever he needs. But at night it is super critical that you never leave the rider for safety reasons.

It was really great to see America. We really were moving at the right speed to be able to see things, but unfortunately since we kept going at night I wasn't able to see half the things we passed. I know that we passed that huge radar array that was in the movie Contact, but I didn't get to see it because it was at night.

It was oddly inspiring to just be sitting in a van and watching James peddle. The time actually did go pretty quickly. Shooting from inside the van got pretty repetitive so I eventually stopped doing that so much and I got better at asking the crew to drive along side James while he was riding and I would hang out the van and interview him while he was riding, and at times we would ride in front of him for a couple minutes and let me setup up some pretty shots for him to pass through.

Because I spent so much time with all the guys it started getting really hard to think of what to ask them on camera. I mean how many times can I ask James "So, how you feeling" after he's been biking for 30 hours straight. It was really hard to keep the questions fresh. But also it became pretty obvious that asking the questions was indeed helping if for nothing else but for mental alertness and you know, you always gotta put on a good game face when you have a camera in your face.

I ended up bringing my homemade LED light to the shoot, and it worked really well. It was funny not only did all the camera people really love it but people actually came up to me on the street to ask me where I got it and stuff. A lot of people would like to buy one from me, I just need to figure out if I can really start making enough of them. They really take a lot of time to build.

James unfortunately ended up having to give up about halfway through the race however. The Race has a rule where if it looks like you're not going to able to finish the race in the time allowed they they force you to disqualify. We were still doing okay, but getting a bit too close to a possible disqualification and one of the race officials basically told us that we had to have a really good day to make up for our lost time. However that one day that we had to really show our stuff just sucked. It was in Kansas where it's the flattest part of the race but the headwinds were just horrible. James was only getting like 9mph and it was killing him to maintain that. I know that actually some teams ended up taking that night off even, but that wasn't an option for us. So James had to push through that but it was evident that that wasn't enough so he stopped the next day.

Stopping was super emotional. First off, the night previous to that James got his first full night sleep so he actually must have felt pretty good when he got up, and he probably did have at least another good day of biking in him, but really everyone knew that we were making the right decision.

The team leader wrote up a really nice speech, he got some cake and we had a nice little celebration. We were all really proud of James. I actually cried which surprised me.

After James wasn't in the race anymore there was a time that I was one of the vans with 3 of the crew members and they started going off about how they would make a sitcom about the whole RAAM situtaion. It was really funny stuff and I knew it was totally the wrong thing for me to be tapping this on tapes that the editor will be watching but I really wanted a copy of that for myeslf. It just seemed to sum up the whole experience really well.

So then things changed pretty radically for me. I had to get ahold of the producers to let them know that James wasn't in the race anymore and I had to get pickup up.

There was a McDonalds in Pratt Kansas that was giving free food to all the race teams so we decided to meet there. First off it was super cool to be able to get free food at McDonalds (just order whatever you want), second the Assistant Manager was super nice and her husband is a butcher and she said if I ever come back I can give her a call and she'll grill me up some really great steaks. I believe that she'd do it so I really want to do that sometime.

It was pretty surprising how cool all the McDonalds employees were, that's something I'm really not used to.

So I got picked up by the B Unit team. Originally the plan was to drop me off with another team but that ended up not working out for a lot of reasons so I basically became part of the B unit team for the rest of the shoot. That was nice because it really changed the dynamic of the whole trip for me. I was still in a van but no longer sitting on a shit bucket, and I had a hotel room every night.

So things got a lot more comfortable. As B Unit we ended up doing a whole lot more driving around, looking for riders and people to interview on the road and getting as many pretty shots as we can.

It was fun because I was now with a group that had time to stop at places and talk to people. So that was a lot of fun.

We went to tractor pull, which is the one place I almost got beat on the on trip. Some white trashy guy didn't like me filming him, that that's okay because after that happened another white trashy guy came up to me and told me that if he started anything with me that he has my back.

I've never been to a tractor pull before. And they are either simply about having a soupped up tractor pull something heavy across a field, or they are infinitely more complex and I'm really just not getting it. But it seemed pretty stupid. Or actually, more just like an excuse to a bunch of people to get really drunk (and threaten to beat up Jewish camera people).

So that tractor pull was pretty cool. But while leave I saw something truly wondering. A guy who owns a General Lee. Here's a picture.

The guy actually bought the car from Hollywood and restored it. It actually was one of the ones on the show. And it had the working horn. One of the coolest things I've ever seen.

The guy was actually pretty cool. He just gets a kick out of driving it around and letting people take their pictures with it and stuff. He was loving the attention we were giving him.

So becoming part of the B Unit was really fun. I was suddenly with a fresh group of people in different van so just the novelty of that alone was great. Also, rather then being in a van with bike people I was now in a van with all film people, so you could just imagine how dorky the film conversation was.

I learned my lesson about talking about bikes in the other van. Once for small talk I posed the question about what the greatest technical achievement for bicycles in the last ten years has been and that conversation lasted like an hour and half. After that I didn't ask any more bike questions unless the camera was rolling and it was totally necessary.

It never really got boring in either of the vans. I really enjoying meeting people and getting to know them and stuff so it was a great chance to really get to know some new people. I must have spent like 40 hours awake with each person.

Another thing though is that it was a professional situation though and I make sure to really censor myself in business situations. I just know I have a really weird sense of humor and I've learned it could actually turn people off when they don't know I'm joking, which I'm told happens a lot actually when someone first meets me. So anyway....I'm really careful to stay professional. Also I almost never mention this website. But I guess it's pretty easy to find it online if someone does a search for me.

I leant my xbox to my friend while I was out of town. I modded my xbox. It's really cool. I have a chip in it that lets your run software in it other then what micrsoft allows a normal xbox to run. So basically now I have an xbox that can run other peoples software. People write software that make it so you can backup your games onto your xboxs internal hard drive so you can simply store games on your hard drive, you don't even need to use your original DVD's anymore. And hard drives load faster then DVD's anyway, so it actually runs better.

Besides using the xbox for games people wrote a media player for the xbox and that you can network to your computer network and use it as a media player. It plays all the movie and audio formats on your TV. It's a really cool way to archive media because you can fit like a whole season of show on a single DVD if you compress all the shows with DIVX or XVID or something. It's really amazing how much people have gotten this $150 machine to do. I tell all my friends about it and they are think it sounds cool, but even my mom was amazed when she saw it.

Besides putting the chip in it I decided to add an external hard drive activity light to it, because I have so many LED's sitting around anyway. I ended up burning myself doing it when I grabbed the soldiering iron instead of the screwdriver at one point. But it works and I think it's pretty cool. Since I used the same LED as my camera light it's super bright, too bright. If you have the xbox at eye level in a dark room it's actually pretty annoying. I keep my xbox on the floor though so it's not a problem. Also I think the idea of a blinding light on my xbox is pretty funny. At least I'm not posting any pictures of it.

I got some roller-skates from ebay a few months ago. I was trying them out at my place and I fell on the marble floors. I fell ass down but I caught myself with both hands on the marble. I actually didn't hit the marble. I totally caught myself. But the shock of catching myself really went up into my arms and I had some really bad nasty bruises. It hurt for a few weeks but I'm fine now.

Anyway, I didn't want those roller-skates to kick my ass so I borrowed some pads from my friend Brooke and tried skating again. I knew that I was going to hurt myself, I had no doubt, but I didn't want to give up. So I end up going down an incline, faster then I wanted to be going, and catching myself on a pole. I was going too fast however so when I grabbed the pole I ended up going face first into the pole.

I actually barley got hurt. My nose hurts a little bit and I look like I got into a small fight with a cat, it's really not bad at all. But I do think I'm going to give up on the roller-skates, and I am pretty disappointed about that.

I met a cool girl at a party the other day. I think we're going to be going out again pretty soon. But I had a really good time with her at the party. We ended up leaving and taking a walk for like an hour around silver lake, climbing fences and everything. I was impressed that she wanted to climb fences.

I saw The Terminal, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Spider Man 2 today.