Adventure Stories.info

Here is the scenario: let’s say you live on the West Coast of the United States and one of your best friends is getting married on the East Coast, about 3000 miles away. How do you go about attending the wedding?  If you are normal, you would probably consider the following: airplane, rental car, and hotel. Seems natural, right? Not if you are Darex.  In the summer of 2008, a mutual friend of myself and Darex got married in New York.  While I stuck to the generic airplane/rental car formula,  Darex did not.  His methods were something that I wouldn’t have even thought of, much less attempted.

In order to attend the wedding in New York, Darex bought a one way airplane ticket from his home town of Medford, Oregon to Syracuse, New York.  This seemed logical given that Syracuse was the closest airport to the wedding in Hamilton, New York.  However, when Darex arrived in Dulles Airport (near Washington D.C.) he found that his connecting flight to Syracuse was delayed.  Rather than wait in the airport, he hopped on a different flight to Rochester, NY.  To some this may have seemed illogical-after all Rochester is 127 miles away from Hamilton, whereas Syracuse is only 38 miles from Hamilton.  But Darex saw this not as a problem but as an opportunity to roller blade a greater, more fun distance to the wedding.

Yeah, that is right, I said roller blade.  Darex had no intention of renting a car to get from the airport to the wedding in Hamilton.  Instead he brought roller blades.  At 7:15 p.m. on the night of his arrival in New York, Darex laced up his roller blades, left the airport in Rochester, and began the 127 mile journey to Hamilton.  He shot for the Erie Canal, thereby taking a scenic route.  At one point he stopped at a Wal Mart to buy a compass, but his extremely efficient style earned him an escort out of the building by security.  I guess the security guys didn’t like the sight of a wild man shouldering a backpack and roller blading around the aisles of Wal Mart.

Once on the bike path along the Erie Canal, Darex was cruising.  He said he was roller blading so fast that he routinely passed people on bikes, many of whom were indignant about being passed by a guy on roller skates. You might wonder how such speed was possible, but you see these were no ordinary roller blades and Darex was no ordinary guy.  The skates were professional speed skating roller blades and Darex was a former champion ice speed skater, at one time an Olympic hopeful.  Still, one has to ask two or three times, just to make sure, “you mean to tell me that he roller bladed to the wedding?”

Actually Darex didn’t roller blade all the way to the wedding.  That was never the plan really.  He roller bladed until midnight and thoroughly fatigued, he found a secluded grassy area to curl up and sleep.  His backpack held a minimum of creature comforts, and in fact he had little with him aside from a couple changes of clothes.  So he was not well equipped to handle the mosquitos or the rain that began to pour down at 2 a.m.  Awakened by the rain, Darex put his roller blades on again and skated to the shelter of a service station where he met a guy who had been out drinking and gambling, and was willing to give Darex a lift in the direction of Hamilton.

Sometime about 3 a.m. the gambler dropped off Darex on the side of Highway 90 and Darex tried to sleep again.  But at 6 a.m. Darex woke up cold, hungry, and blistered, and he roller bladed into Syracuse and found a cafe serving breakfast.  At 8 a.m. Darex pulled the trigger on the next stage of his plan; he called a guy who had advertised a sport bike (crotch rocket) for sale on Craigslist.  Darex skated over to the guy’s house in Syracuse to look at the motorcycle for sale.  The bike was questionable in some regards but it ran well enough.  None of the blinkers nor the headlight worked, and the bike was definitely not street legal, but a deal was made.  To give the motorcycle an illusion of legitimacy,  Darex pulled a license plate off a wrecked bike in the guy’s shed and stuck it on his new purchase, then proceeded to a nearby bike shop to buy a helmet.

With a powerful crotch rocket in the hands of Darex, the remaining distance to Hamilton was insignificant; Darex arrived in no time.  The town of Hamilton seemed heavily patrolled by sheriffs, and Darex was reluctant to meet any of them considering that his license had been revoked long ago. Darex wasted no time in finding the house that he, I, plus a bunch of other friends had rented as accommodation during our stay in Hamilton.

When I arrived in Hamilton the next day and found my own way to our rental house, I discovered Darex in the driveway of the house, dissasembling his new bike with a handful of miscellaneous tools and a kitchen knife.  To Darex all tools are multi-tools, and by extension all adventures are multi-adventures, especially when a good friend is getting married in a far away place.  I was amazed by the story of Darex’s arrival, but not shocked.  After all, this is the same guy who once, on a whim, got on a bicycle in Chico, CA and rode 90 miles to visit me  in Davis, CA.  So while the story of Darex roller blading to a wedding in New York is an incredible story, it is by no means the only story about a guy who is basically an adventure story factory.  Darex’s return journey to the West Coast after the wedding was also a huge adventure,  but that story will have to be told another time.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 11th, 2009 at 1:55 am and is filed under New York, The DareX Files. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.