St. Murphy was certainly smiling down upon us yesterday. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong…almost (hey, the car’s still running and we’re still alive…that’s the important stuff, right?)

Felicity chose to minimize negativity in her recollections of our trip, which is definitely a personal step forward for her, but on the way home, I made a mental catalog of all the things that went wrong:

Felicity had a bad night’s sleep, so she couldn’t drive. She usually handles all the freeway driving and leaves the cities to me.

We both stayed up a little too late the night before, due to last-minute excitement related to our big site redesign.

So we left an hour late. And that made me anxious because I knew people had talked about meeting us in Oakland, our first stop. So I felt compelled to tweet about this (OK, I was technically driving, but to me, sitting in bumper-to-bumper non-moving traffic is not exactly driving).

The closer we got to Oakland, the longer the backed-up traffic from the East Bay to San Francisco looked.

We had no time to sit down and eat in Oakland, so we had to gobble granola bars and such.

It took so long to get to San Francisco that we saw 4:20 PM come and go from the Bay Bridge…still not even in San Francisco!

The crowds were so huge, we had no chance of finding anyone (or they us).

I deliberately didn’t get high beforehand, because I expected lots of smokeouts that didn’t happen. So I wasn’t even high on 4/20, wah.

Felicity was very upset due to not eating (I was apparently running on adrenalin).

Couldn’t eat in a crowded restaurant with my Jedi robes on, so froze on my way back to the car.

Sat in almost two hours of inching traffic just trying to get out of the city…it was insanely maddening.

Went to our favorite Arby’s for Jamocha shakes to cheer ourselves up…and they were closed!

A Calmer Perspective

Any one, and certainly all, of these incidents would have turned me into a twitchy, snapping, barking blue meanie at any time in the 25 years or so that I had been off cannabis. But due to my carefully planned use of Canna Caps yesterday, though I never did end up getting high, here’s how I can remember my 2013 4/20:

Even though we left late and I had to do all six hours of driving, I had enough energy due to taking all the right pills.

The MAPS “flea market” was pretty amazing.

Even though I had no data service in the Oakland location, I still was lucky enough to meet up with fellow redditor ThrowaKeeper, who is a very cool guy indeed.

Since he lives nearby, ThrowaKeeper was able to give me some great ideas for beating the traffic back to SF. Instead of sitting in 5 miles of heavy traffic, we took local streets, looped around the freeway and came back south, getting on the bridge approach in only 20 minutes!

We did think to bring the granola bars, anyway.

We were happy and together at 4:20, and then KFOG played “Smoke Two Joints” for us again.

Even though we didn’t get to meet anyone at Hippie Hill, I managed to at least notify people electronically of our progress, and heard from one person directly through reddit.

I relived a great moment from Woodstock.

We had a great dinner.

We had a lot of great ideas for our book and website all the way home.

We had ice cream and shakes at Wendy’s.

TL,DR: Enjoying life is all in how you look at things. And speaking of looking…

If you want to see more pictures, here are everybody’s! And here’s what the crowd looked like moving: