It was around this time that we achieved one of the greatest accomplishments that we wouls achieve on the trip; getting our money paid back. I haven’t mentioned before this that earlier in the year, before we started our trip, an old friend called me up and said that he was in big trouble and needed money. Long story short, I was a nice, trusting guy and I think I lent him about $1000, which was half of the money that I had saved up for the roadtrip. In return, the friend promised to pay it back before the beginning of the summer. I later found out that Chris had lent him that much money, too with the same promise that it would be returned by the beginning of summer. J must have been in pretty big trouble…

So anyway, if you hadn’t guessed, when we left Massachussets Joe still hadn’t paid us back. We started the trip with only half of what we had wanted to. We did, though, talk to Joe as we were leaving and he assured us that he could wire us the money while we were on the road. So all through Virginia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisianna we had been calling him and calling him trying to get it back.

Finally, when we were somewhere in Oklahoma he had finally gotten it together and we picked it up at some Western Union in Oklahoma. What a victory! For us anyways… I think J had to get it from his parents, which meant that he had to fess up to something… He probably got in trouble and we never heard from him again.

Anyway, to celebrate, we took ourselves out to an actual sit down restaurant in Oklahoma City. (I think that this was actually the first eating out that we’d done. I was wrong about the time in Little Rock).

And it marked a turning point in the trip, too. we no longer had to be quite as stingy as we had been up until this pont. Eating out would become more frequent (although most of the time it was fast food), we eventually started buying comic books once every two weeks or so, and maybe a llowed ourselves some other splurges that escape me right now.