Morrie and Danny got up at 3:00 am in Hopkinton to catch a 6:00 am flight at Logan. We got to Park, Shuttle & Fly by 3:45 am where we left the car. Besides our carry-ons, we were bringing only 2 duffles—a Greenshit record minimum. We tried extra hard to minimize luggage, in order to save the $40 for each 2nd bag, since most of the stuff we would bring would hardly be worth $80 a bag. I did this by not taking big water jugs and having Joey provide Danny’s sleeping bag and both our pads. United Airlines had switched our seats for some reason so Danny had a center seat and I was forced to a window in a different aisle. We had breakfast at one of the fast food outlets in the airport. Flight to LAX was direct, and we arrived at a record-early 10:00 am. Luggage came quickly (although we waited at the carousel unnecessarily for a piece that turned up in the oversize area). Joey picked us up and we drove to his house. Bobby was arriving at John Wayne around 11:30 am, so Sheryl picked him up. At the house, had a nice lunch and then got to work, as the first day of a Greenshit trip is not supposed to be fun.

Morrie had ordered a bikini top for his jeep, previously shipped to Joey, which was to require drilling 11 holes in the windshield frame to install a channel, and Joey purchased drill bits for this purpose. (I said he should get cobalt bits, because they do better in steel. Instead, he got a package of el-cheapo “Kobalt” brand drill bits, which were Lowe’s brand plain old steel bits.) However to my surprise, when I removed the fiberglass top from the front of the jeep I found that there were already holes in the windshield frame, in exactly the right place! Clearly someone had previously installed this brand of bikini top in my jeep. So installing the top took only about 10 minutes to screw the channel into the existing holes. In addition, for the first time since I got the jeep, we removed the back of the fiberglass hard top. It unclipped and lifted off easily but took 4 people to carry due to its weight. For the first time, I would do the whole trip taking none of the hardtop.

Instead of putting the soft top on his jeep, Joey decided to leave the back of his hard top in place, since he didn’t need to allow space in his jeep to carry the front of my hard top, and he didn’t think it was worth the 2 hours it takes to swap tops.

Joey did such a thorough job purchasing supplies in advance, that all we needed to buy today were some perishables, ice and gas. At Ralph’s supermarket, we bought 12 blocks of ice (I think 10 lbs each) and 10 lbs of dry ice. My thinking was that the dry ice would keep the blocks colder before they started melting, adding a day or so to their longevity. Total ice cost was over $50. Back at the house, it turned out that we had 1 block more than we could fit in the big cooler and small cooler without breaking them apart. Unfortunately the ice pick was buried in Joey’s jeep (seems like this always happens), and it was difficult to break the 12th block into sections using other tools. We finally got all the ice in, but there was only room for 4 beers in the beer cooler. I figured this would be OK as long as we remembered to replace a beer each time we took one out.

While driving around in the shopping malls’ asphalt parking lots my jeep’s tires squealed on the sharp turns. I was a little worried this meant my jeep was stuck in 4WD, but I noticed no other adverse effects for the rest of the trip. The squeals happened only on asphalt, so I suspected it was just the wide tires. Also Joey’s jeep suddenly started making a very loud, high pitched squeaking sound in the rear suspension on every little bump, even while just pulling in and out of his driveway. We didn’t know what was causing it but since it didn’t happen before he jeep got loaded up, I figured it was just a minor rubbing of some metal parts that came in contact when all that weight was added to the jeep. The sound continued for most of the trip.

After packing coolers and my jeep, we had a light dinner and got to bed around 9 pm. The plan was to get up in the wee hours of the morning so that we can reach the desert area early in the day.