We’ve all heard the saying, “Stick with what works.” But what if everything you’ve done up to this point has resulted in varying levels of catastrophe as has been the case so far with this road trip? Say fuck it, and double down.

We started off the morning with breakfast on the Stanford campus with Fiona and Will. Technically, we ate breakfast burritos in a place called the “engineering quad.” As a quadriplegic with an engineering degree, I found the irony almost as delicious as the tasty wrap. After the hugs and goodbyes, I was still a little disappointed that I didn’t feel any smarter, but I guess that’s not how those fancy colleges work. Will said something about going to class and studying for hours on end, but what does he know anyways. I just hope Fi manages to do okay on her thermodynamics midterm after slumming it with us all morning.

Upon departing, we had a decision to make. Should we take Highway 1 up the coast for some extra sightseeing, or just hop on the 5 and book it home before anything else could go wrong? Of course, we chose neither. Instead, we decided to somewhat retrace our steps from this calamitous adventure, and punched the address to our original hotel in Bend into the trusty ol’ GPS and blindly took off in that general direction. To our surprise, it was an almost entirely uneventful eight-hour drive. Keyword: almost.

As we dipped down the northeast edge of Mount Shasta towards Klamath Falls, we noticed the gas gauge getting a little low and decided on a preemptive pit stop. Unfortunately, the door to the gas tank didn’t get the memo and remained jammed shut or 15 minutes for the girls to wrestle with. So that was fun. Then, about a quarter-mile before the Bend exit on Highway 97, the GPS thought it would be funny to freeze one last time just for good measure. Nice try, technology, but we still made it without you!

So now here we sit, back in the same place where this insane trip first began. It’s funny because the last time we were here, it was just the running joke between the four of us about what kind of trouble we might find ourselves in over the next week and a half. If we’d somehow been given a preview of it all, we’d never have believed it, let alone thought we could survive it. But that’s the gamble we were willing to take, and double down we did.