October 20, 1999 Festivities

	October 20, 1999 Bonfire at Pescadero Beach, The Car Incident, The Ticket. [back]
I had an interesting evening. At 10pm, I drove to Pescadero Beach with some friends to bonfire (since when has "bonfire" been a verb?). On the way we stopped at the Lucky supermarket at the corner of 92 and highway 1 to get marshmallows, hershey's chocolate bars, and graham crackers. The fire was fun. We had an ex-boyscout of some sort with us, so we were slightly more successful at getting a large fire going than we were last time. Of course, it helped that we had wads if newspapers and a lighter this time...
	The marshmallows were good. It was a warm night, and the moon was bright enough that we cast well-defined shadows on the rocks.
	This is Jeremy. He's holding water. Scott's in the foregound, and Peter is on the right.
	This is Emile. He had Smores for the first time tonight. I guess they don't have Smores in Russia.
	This is Peter. He left early (with Emile) to go back to work.
	This is Beverly. Beverly freaked out when sparks flew onto her from our raging fire. I have photos, but I won't put them up here, because they're sort of silly.
	On the way back from the beach, we decided to drive really fast. I hit the chip-limited speed in my car. At the exact moment I hit xxx MPH, we heard a pop followed by the sound of rushing air (very loud). It sounded pretty bad -- I thought my car was done for. It turns out that even though these cars are supposed to go fast, the plastic piece that protects the front bottom of the car and diverts air from the engine compartment can't stand up to the wind pressure at xxx MPH. We're posing with the plastic part on the left.

	After that fun diversion (I somehow got the plastic piece out from under the front skirt of my car), we drove back home. Highway 1 goes from a speed limit of 55 MPH to 40 MPH just before Half Moon Bay. Unfortunately, neither I nor my friends knew this, but a cop sitting on the side of the road with his fancy radar gun did, so I got a ticket for going 59 MPH in a 40 MPH zone. I asked the cop if I could take a picture of the radar reading because "I might as well get something out of this." He chuckled and said that no one had ever asked him that before.