#also my friend said boothill is hot so i decided to get him for her

[allpromarlo]

pulling for robin on my first acc and boothill on my second…..real romance

[manawhaat]

What's your best vacation memory? ❤️

Oof… there are a couple that stand out from my childhood but I have to go with the Vegas/Pioche trip I took with my dad and my middle sister in 2015.

This is FUCKING LONG so if you feel like reading about it for 6 hours then there’s more under the cut and I’ll throw in some photos at the bottom because this trip really did just make me so happy. 

I had joined a photography scavenger hunt group and participated in a couple of rounds (and got some rad photos!) when they decided to hold a meet up. It was held in Vegas and they had classes and photo shoots and group trips out to different places in the surrounding area. I decided to go and booked a hotel room fro the last day of the meet up, but then my mom died. The meet up was about 2 months after that so when I was trying to figure out if I should still go, etc, my sister and my dad said they’d go with me.

On the way there we drove through the desert because we always do and my sister and I played the Alphabet game. It was the most intense game she or I have ever played. We were on x by the time we got into the middle of no man’s land and I managed to get it on a random XTRA semi truck that was parked in the middle of a salt flat. She got it as soon as we got back onto the main road on a car licence plate that was ‘xmasgft’. We went back and forth getting one only for the other to get the same letter seconds later. It was crazy. I was on Z when she was on Y and at one point she started saying ‘oh shit oh fuck oh shit’ and I started to panic thinking we were about to get into a car accident or something… when she stopped panicking I asked her what her problem was and apparently we’d passed a billboard for Zoomanity and she was panicking that I was gonna win. Her panicking distracted me and I didn’t get the Z. She ended up getting her Y and immediately after I found another Z on a sign that said ‘construction zone’ and it was the best ‘fuck you’ and the most victorious win of, like, anything that I’d experienced up until that point. It was fantastic! 

When we got into town I never did make it to the meet ups lol. I saw one person I know from the group while walking out of the hotel, but that was about it. I didn’t really have it in me to branch out and go to the meet up functions by myself so I didn’t. Instead I hung out with my family. We went zip lining over Freemont street and walked around, we went to the Mob Museum (which was fascinating), we did the Mandalay Bay Aquarium, and went out to the Hoover Dam. I’d never been and it was really cool, it was a gorgeous day and it we took a bunch of cute pictures there.

We’d all made a pact that we were going to do the controlled free-fall that they offer at the Stratosphere but when we got up to the top and watched a few people do it we all collectively noped out lol. We ate at this restaurant near the Stratosphere called The Peppermill that is FUCKING FANTASTIC. The food was good but the ambiance. Holy shit. It was like Vegas in the early 80s threw up in there. It was so good. Just neon lights and mirrors and tacky carpet and too many potted plants. The waitress was your classic sassy waitress, which only added to the experience, and my sister ordered the ‘mammoth pancakes’. It came with two and the plate weighed like 4 pounds! 

We did a few other things but I remember just being in a good mood the whole trip. I had gotten a throw pillow with Dean’s face on it before the trip and I took it with us so we could sleep in the car comfortably and I remember taking pictures with the Dean pillow like everywhere we went and it became a funny sort of adventure with him. I was also talking to a guy on my dating app that I was like, legit in love with. Everything about him felt so perfect and I remember telling my sister that if he magically transported to Vegas while we were still there that I’d 100% marry him.

This was also the first time being in Vegas since I’d turned 21 (that Vegas trip was a fucking nightmare!) and this really made up for it. I got drunk downstairs at the hotel and won like 80 bucks on a machine, which was the most I’d ever won at that point, so we had to stop and play that machine at every casino we saw it at. My sister and I had also been on a Ghost Adventures kick before that and there’s a very specific sound that one of their devices makes and the elevator at the hotels all made that sound, so we were constantly making it and giggling at it. All in all, it was just a lot of fun and a lot of like, solid bonding and enjoyment of the experiences we were having and who we were with.

Keep in mind, ^^^^THAT’S ALL STILL JUST VEGAS! ^^^

Since we’d been on the Ghost Adventures kick, we stayed in Vegas for a couple of days and then drove out into the desert toward Pioche, Nevada. The Ghost Adventures Crew had done a paranormal hunt there at the Overland Hotel that is notoriously haunted (rooms 10 and 14, specifically).

I remember the drive being a nice clear day and the type of desert started to shift a little from what we’re all used to so there was some cool scenery. Now, we were on this trip in like April so I packed for desert weather in April, but what they failed to mention to me was that Pioche was in the HIGH desert, which didn’t really mean anything to me until we made it around a ridge and saw fucking snow!

We pulled over and played in it a little bit and then finished the drive and, lo and behold, it got more snowy. So when we finally arrived in Pioche I had to walk my happy ass through snow in leggings and sandals and a tank top with only a light jacket. And the next day, I only had shorts or a different pair of equally as thin leggings! It was terrible, but in a funny way.

The town of Pioche is fucking TINY! The population is literally barely over 1,000 and even when we were there we couldn’t figure out how it even held that many people! So we checked into the hotel and managed to get room 10 (one of the most haunted ones) and walked around. It was an old mining town so we checked out the remains of the tram, we went down to the Boothill Cemetery that had wicked old graves that were like, really old western graves of people who’d died in like the early 1800′s in saloon shootouts.

We had food at the only diner in town and while we were walking up a truck drove by goin’ extra slow. The driver was a good ole country boy- he was super hot- and in the back of his truck bed were…. idk, 15 or so fucking BEAGLE PUPPIES! I fell in love, I legit chased his truck down the street lol. It was like, the most amazing thing I’d ever seen.

So we hung out in the tiny place and when night fell we went downstairs to the bar at the hotel and hung out. We talked to one of the hotel staff who actually appeared in the episode of Ghost Adventures and we talked about the guys on the show and she was just really down to earth and funny.

Then, I got shitfaced.

I remember sitting at the high table watching my dad play pool with some locals while my sister was talking to some guy who’d also been on the show (and was a regular at the bar). At that point, I was really drunk and really lovey, so I decided to drunk dial everyone I knew to tell them I love them. Only, I didn’t get reception in the hotel, so I walked my happy ass out into the freezing night, and kept walking almost two blocks down to a little bench outside of the run down fire station and sat outside for over an hour, in the snow, in leggings and sandals, calling everyone I knew to tell them how much I loved them.

My sister finally came looking for me and dragged me back to the hotel while I was still on the phone, and I was able to make one more call to a friend. Drunk!me thought it would be a GREAT idea to finally confess that I had a crush on him and wanted to make out, so I told him that, and when he asked ‘uh, what?’, my dumb ass said it again, clearer and louder so he wouldn’t miss it!

Before he could respond my sister figured out what I’d just said and snatched my phone away and hung up. We went back inside to get my dad and then we walked up the street to the other bar in town and while we were walking my dad started throwing snowballs at us, so I fuckin’ took off. In my entire life I’ve never run as fast as I did that night lol. I ran so fast that  only stopped after my drunk brain could register the flash of neon I’d passed. So I turned around and was a few buildings away from the bar and when I looked for my sister and dad, they were still at the other end of the street a good 2 football fields away!

We went in and played shuffleboard and hung out. They paid the bartender not to give me anymore drinks and I then crawled on the bar and tried to convince him to give me more lol. I ended up going to the bathroom and the signs didn’t say ‘men’ and ‘women’, they said ‘John’ and ‘Mary’ and I freaked out because, Supernatural, duh!

When we left the bar later that night, with me even more drunk than before, my dad started throwing snowballs again and we ran down the street. There was a kind of boardwalk that we were running on and we didn’t realize it ended with a staircase so I jumped into the road and ran down the asphalt but my sister ended up, in a full sprint, leaping off the end of the boardwalk and crashing into me. She was so graceful and when she was in the air it was like she was  in slow motion. So when she landed we were howling with laughter and then we rounded the building and there was a big ass dog right in our faces! I freaked out just because I was shocked but it ended up being friendly and sauntered off, but drunk me was already laughing at my sister’s majestic leap so I started laughing even harder that I’d gotten so scared.

I ended up peeing my pants and we went back into the hotel and I tripped going up the stairs, resulting in more laughter and more pants peeing. We finally got to the room and I changed and we went to sleep. The room (and hotel, itself) were pretty creepy, and because we knew it was haunted I was already on high alert. They went to sleep but when I tried to, and every time I closed my eyes, I could feel someone standing at the side of the bed staring at me. I kept smelling and feeling little gusts of wind in my face, as if someone was sitting by the bed staring me down and was smoking a cigarette/cigar and blowing the smoke in my face. It was incredibly unnerving because it didn’t stop not once all night, so I ended up staying up all night watching tv, hoping I didn’t see anything or feel anything else.

The next day when I showered I couldn’t shower fast enough because it felt like someone was watching me shower and we thanked the hotel staff and left. I slept on the drive home and at one point when I woke up my sister asked if I’d heard from my friend. I said no and was really confused and then she asked if I remembered calling anyone last night and then it all struck me and I was mortified the rest of the ride home. When I got home I decided to just be straight up so I texted him saying that I’d meant what I said and was open to either going that route, if he was also interested in me, or just staying friends. He ended up ignoring me for weeks and I had to talk to a mutual friend about it. Now it’s just water under the bridge, but a hilarious memory. I even wrote a fanfic about the whole trip to Pioche! (I think some of the details in the fic are wrong/exagerated, and I’m not totally clear on some of the details that I’ve recounted here as they differ from the details at the end of that fic, but it’s all as accurate as I can remember without asking my sister for more clarification.)

All in all every part of the trip was just FUN. We didn’t ever have a moment where things went wrong, we didn’t have bad experiences. We weren’t stressed. It was exactly what my soul needed after spending years watching my mom battle with cancer. It was a bonding retreat and everything about it just soothed me and filled me with so much joy and the memories I have of that trip will last a lifetime.