We made it to Sacramento.

Location: Sacramento
Favorite thing: Yelp
Song: Third Eye Blind, "Semi-Charmed Life"
Annoyance: Near-death experiences
Sue's Redbull intake: 2
Pee breaks: 3
Puke breaks: 1

Sue and I had our first close call. It was 15 minutes right out of a movie.  A really crappy movie where the protagonists almost die.

A few miles back, in Stockton, I was reading this month's issue of Marie Claire when I started to feel a little sick. I waited a couple of minutes to see if it would pass, but it didn't, so I asked Sue to please stop at the next rest stop. Then it happened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw something crawling up Sue Ellen's leg. Knowing Sue's phobia of anything resembling a spider, I calmly rolled up my magazine, looked down at the strange green insect attached to Sue's knee and said, "Sue, keep driving."

I might as well have said, "Sue, there's a poisonous tarantula having babies on your leg." The girl freaked out hardcore. We were going about 75 miles an hour and I didn't want to accidentally jam her leg into the pedal, so I started hitting the insect with the magazine with minimal force. This was not to Sue's liking. In between tears and screams, I could hear "Kill it! Kill it!" "What the fuck is it!?" "Did you get it?" "Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, kill it!"

I managed to knock the freaking bug off her leg, but it was too late. We were on red alert. I wanted to calm Sue down, so I ignored my instincts, grabbed some kleenex and picked the thing off the floor. It felt horrible. It was big and hard and STILL FREAKING MOVING. That's when I started to freak out.

Sue saw the panic in my eyes and she pulled a Chris Farley in "Black Sheep" - without slowing down, she veered across three lanes to exit the freeway.

We pulled into a gas station, got out of the car and started jumping up and down.

Unfortunately, it was my job to get the bug out of the car. Happy, I was not, but I did it. Then, because this particular place smelled like kitten vomit, Sue started making that wet sound that happens right before someone throws up.

With renewed urgency, we went into the gas station's little shop of horrors to use the restroom. I walked in first and almost immediately walked out. It was disgusting. I had to tap into some serious yoga skills to make sure that I didn't touch a single thing in that place.

Luckily, Sue and I survived both the mystery bug and the panic. We're now sitting in a breakfast casino restaurant. You read that right, Yelp, while mostly helpful, can sometimes guide you into questionable establishments. The food is good, but we're pretty sure that there's a gentleman's lounge in the back. My only question is, who strips at 11 o' clock in the morning?

Wish us luck.