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"Well dude, all I can say is this ... bite me."
Leila and I drove around to James’ place at about 12.30pm and hollered up at his window until he came down. He tossed his packs in the trunk and we headed on to Wallingford, where we would pick up John.
John Peterson. This whole epic is his responsibility and his alone. He started it anyway. I don’t call him the dark overlord for nothing. He’s a dangerous guy. Even the lunatic fringe consider him to be something of a madman. I really really should have known better. Nevertheless ...
We picked up John at his place and left with him shouting last minute instructions to Marti about how she might keep Eric, their eldest son and general threat to the community, under control while he was away. The trunk bulged alarmingly with all the crap jammed in there as our subaru wheezed up route 15. John spent a great deal of time on the way to the airport describing how incredibly dangerous cacti can be.
"Dude, know your vegies. In Arizona there are three basic types ... hurt, maim and kill."
Cool, as if on-sighting multi-pitch giants wasn’t hazardous enough. We got to the airport and, after saying goodbye to Leila, we fought our way through a series of security checks and long lines. The flight to Baltimore was dull but short. There we had more security checks and more long lines. The flight to Phoenix was dull and long. There we found Andrei, the mad russian, waiting for us. He had flown in from London and despite his eleven hour flight was looking pretty chipper. Standing around waiting for our gear to excrete from the mysterious lower levels of airport intestine I realized that I was feeling sort of small. Make that short. All of these guys, John, James and Andrei, are abnormally tall. Being freaks of nature they were over-sensitive about it and were prone to pre-emptively pilloring my shortness (I’m 5’11"). Poor bastards. I put up with it for a while and then just started attacking random knee-caps until they shut up.
Our stuff finally belched up from below, we hijacked a ride to the rental company John had chosen and took possession of a Chrysler van. With all our tonnage loaded there wasn’t a lot of room left. Still, we weren’t too uncomfortable. With John behind the wheel we drove dementedly fast down to Tucson. Along the way, John pointed out each of the 162,765 saguaros that we passed and gave a qualitative assessment of each.
In Tucson, we arrived at Gary Sax’s small adobe hut at around midnight. Leon, who had flown down from Seattle the day before, was also there. It was great to see all these guys again, everybody was really psyched and our animated conversation tended to center around the coming days of climbing. It was late, we had an early start to make, so we threw down our sleeping mats and bags and crashed on the floor. 
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