OMG MOVIES

Jinnah in a fit of awesome made stop-action movies out of the first 3 days of the trip. He attached a special hacked camera to the windshield that could take a picture every 10 seconds all day. Then he set it all to music. The first 10 seconds of the first movie is a little funky, but it clears up. The direct sunlight washes it out a bit. But it's still totally awesome.

man overboard! wait... again?

In PITTSBURGH, Baby. YEAH.

Arriving in style, rocking out.

we have arrived

Pittsburgh!

After a long trek, we've made it to the Steel City!

Next up: Senators vs The Penguins

The Hoons!

The final days of our journey bring thoughts of home and things familiar, of where we've come from and where we're going. It was in this spirit that we decided to visit the house in which our own Vincent Hoon spent his teenage years. Chicago to Pittsburgh could have been a straight and dull road, but we opted for a memorable detour through Lafayette, IN.

We met Vincent's parents (Jeff and Patricia), his three siblings (Matt, Deborah, Juli), Deborah's husband, Tim, and even the family dogs, Barrett and Beau. We had a fantastic dinner complete with vegan options (thank you, Jeff!) and wonderful desserts including a Google cake (thank you, Patricia!).

It was a reminder that one of the pleasures of traveling is coming home.

So from all of us on this crazy RV adventure: THANK YOU, HOON FAMILY! Please come visit us in California. We look forward to returning your hospitality.

Our Final Destination

Hey guys.. remember Chicago?

So, uh what day is it? Looks like we forgot to recap yesterday's crazy shenanigans in Chicago. It seems like a million years ago doesn't it?

Do you remember Saturday night, when we rolled into an RV park in the middle of a corn field in Kellog, Iowa? There was a campfire and some questionable music which probably made everybody else in the RV camp our bestest friend. Oh man then Jinnah cracked out his illegal stash of Four Loko and destroyed my liver (but doogle's urine has returned to normal again, thanks for asking). Good times. I'm so glad that I was able to maintain my dignity (edit: not so much) and I've mostly regained sensation in the left side of my body.

Anyway things settled down sometime between 3 and 5 am with a few of us sleeping under the beautiful Iowa October sky, so full of stars. It was great. Do you remember those awesome 5 hours of sleep we got before Neal started hollering at us? It was hilarious when Jinnah started driving the RV around before half the people were in it and boy, Neal sure has a big voice in the morning! My head felt so awesome and people had a bounce in their step for sure.

And then, what a day. We drove all the way across Iowa, then pretty much all the way across Illinois to wind up at Revolution Brewing in Chicago at 3 PM. Issao is a great driver, I just wish he'd drive a little faster. Sometimes he would stay below 80 MPH for two or three minutes at a time and we'd all be sad. Remember how much fun it was to drive through Chicago! People were so happy to see us they were pointing and honking and everything. After we stopped a bunch of traffic and parked our RVs across a slew of parking spots we went in to the brewery to meet up with Brian Fitzpatrick and about 10 other folks from the Google Chicago office.

Man it was so great to see Will Robinson, we were afraid that he wouldn't come because his in-laws were in town. But then he brought not only his lovely wife Lauren, but her parents too. I know.. brave, right! I don't think they were too worried.

And remember how happy that bar was to see us? But remember how sad folks were that they only had California style pizza? I can't believe they let us order deep dish pizza from a different restaurant and have it delivered. It might have something to do with the ridiculous amount of beer we were ordering on one of their slowest days of the week. Or maybe Jelena just gave them a lot of money. Either way, that pizza was gooood. And the bacon fat popcorn. And those little sausage things. What was with that lard dish, though? Yeah I don't know either. Either way, heart attack!

And how about that sweet Data Liberation shwag Brian brought for us? Boy that was cool. Remember how many people had to wear those shirts the next day because they were out of clothes! And oh man I almost forgot those retardedly huge tubs of popcorn, those things are a tub of death. We liberated a lot of beer from the bottle with those openers he gave us. And Will gave us an awesome pink princess shot glass. Remember how we gave it to Jelena and now her new nickname is Princess? Haha, she didn't remember that this morning either.

Yep, I had a great time in Chicago. I'm glad that we got the chance to meet some folks from the engineering team there. I remember meeting Kelly, Nathaniel, Tony, Jacob, Paul, and a bunch of other people. If I had less to drink I probably would have remembered more names. I'm going to have to go back to see them again! Maybe next time I'll actually be able to see the office itself. I hope they let me in.

Then I was sad that Jinnah and Astrid had to leave to get on a train to a plane right after the bar. I sure did have a fun time hanging out with them. And doing double shots of caffeine. Wait no, I didn't like that part - whose stupid idea was that? Wait, it was mine? Wtf, stop me next time. Anyway don't forget that Jinnah and Doug are supposed to have a shirt-off next time we all get together. That's going to be great, isn't it? What do you mean you don't know what that is... oh you weren't there. Ok, that's a story for next time, along with our trip to the Hoons. Haha, Vinnie what were you thinking?

victory is ours

And so are the thirty sliders...  non non nom

Onward to Tim Hortons

With Doug at the helm and me as his copilot, it's fitting that the most perfect sign imaginable to a Canadian on the go appeared before our eyes. Our massive RV had too much inertia to exit the highway in time but worry not, for our beloved Canadian chain has expanded throughout much of Ohio. We're now eagerly looking forward to our next stop, where we'll enjoy a taste of home, at Tim Hortons

White Castle

We're getting back to the region of the world that a lot of us come from. Things are starting to look a little more familiar. The trees. The stores. The White Castle.



An order of thirty burgers is now pending.

To Pittsburgh in the lap of luxury

For various personal an professional reasons (namely, killing my colleagues would negatively impact my personal and professional lives), I opted out of the RV and into the lap of luxury, flying to Pittsburgh First Class! But worry not, second class travelers, I have not lost touch with the common person. In both SFO and PHX, deprived of a premium travelers lounge *scoffs*, I was forced to sit with the plebes. In Phoenix, people were actually watching a football match in the waiting area - it's like being in for realz America!

Basically what my flight was like

In all honesty, though, aside from being a lot faster and having co-passengers who smell marginally less like vagrants, the first class flying experience left something to be desired. The food was woefully vegetarian hostile, although a piping hot chocolate cookie made the food situation a little better. The man sitting next to me, a fifty-something video poker player with some kind of digestive problem that tied him up in the lavatory for extended periods of time, left me longing for my fun and relatively digestively sound colleagues.

Now I'm in the Pittsburgh office enjoying some breakfast with a side of green tea. GWS RVers, I'm looking forward to our emotional reunion amid fists of ice-based fury!

Dear Diary

We crossed into our 9th state yesterday afternoon and after an amazing visit to Council Bluffs (see earlier entries by a couple of my other personalities) trotted halfway across Iowa to Iowa's Best Burger Cafe and Kellogg RV Park. If they have the best burger in Iowa then that is a sad state of affairs for the heartland of America.

Apparently there was some drinking last night (more evidence in earlier entries). The aftermath was not pretty. We filled a 40 gallon drum with the remains. Somewhat surprisingly most people were rather chirpy this morning; perhaps they were still drunk. I slept quite well in the tent, despite:

• being rudely awoken by a drunken lout who fell over one of my guy ropes while putting up his own tent (while being egged on by other drunken louts), and
• it being 3 degrees (in the sensible scale) overnight; extra layers helped.

I still have no voice and have started to communicate by grunts and sign language. It's challenging to communicate complex concepts this way.

I had this vision of Iowa being dead flat. It turns out it is not so much dead flat as undulating. Still not very exciting though. We have just crossed The Mighty Mississippi into our 10th state (Illinois), heading for a brewery in Chicago, where I intend to have Chicago style pizza (when in Rome, and all that). And beer. We will wave goodbye to a couple of good friends and welcome a new friend.

One more night of camping and we will hurtle across Indiana and Ohio before finally arriving at our destination, where we will watch a strange sport where men dress up in padding and hurl themselves across frozen water chasing after a mutilated ball. These people are strange. I intend to blend in by pretending to be Canadian: I hear they love Canadians.

The Cross Country Blues

Around the campfire at the "Best Burger Cafe RV Park and Gas Station" of Kellogg, Iowa.

Encouragement from the end of the road

Dear wayward travelers,

Here's what awaits you in Pittsburgh. There are showers too. (no promises about vegan-friendly food though).

desudation, you will survive! (you just might be very hungry)

We're WEBSEARCH, bitches.

This post bought to you by Four Loko, Glenfiddich, and Ardbeg.

Four Loko

A text to my girlfriend:

Have you had Four Loko before? Sweet Jesus. My urine smells like alcohol. If I make it to Pittsburgh alive, I'll be surprised.

like hobos around barrel fire

Fire.  Its awesome.

Where the magic happens

I apologize for being nostalgic so early, but it already feels like a long time. When was it that we pulled in at 2 a.m. to the parking lot of The Bellagio again? I vaguely remember going for a run along side the beautiful south rim of the Grand Canyon on one morning and that blurs a bit with eating delicious steak and barbecue in multiple parts of this country unbeknownst to myself until this week. Not to mention all the grand time spent in a moving house while talking about general shenanigans and the future of web search. But what we just did 2 hours ago tops everything else so far. As unicorn trainers, we are touched forever.

Unicorns are the bread and butter of today's society - our daily lives depend on them in virtually every single aspect - but yet the vast majority of us are hardly aware of the reality that unicorns live in. Some of us even spend most of our lives commanding, training and managing hordes of unicorns to make sure that in a majestic coordinated dance they deliver the answers to fulfill the dreams of the people in the world, but yet, we remain shamefully unaware of the concrete existence of these unicorns, their daily lives, what they eat, what they feel, their families and their connection to this mundane world.

Today we fixed this. We saw where the unicorns live and it was awesome in the most biblical sense. There are so many of them that if you knew, you would be worried about what conditions they live in, but you should rest assured - they are treated just like they deserve. The unicorn's ecosystem is ample and comfortable, neat and powerful, and there are lots of blinking lights too - the perfect environment where people's dreams can be fostered and delivered on a massive scale. A very generous unicorn biologist led us in this safari. We saw a huge range of unicorn species, associated flora and fauna as well as expert veterinarians on the field treating ill unicorn from minor injuries to life-saving surgery with extreme love and care. We even got to see some of the unicorns that we've been psychically training every single week for several years, but we just know met, and they instantly filled a space in our hearts.

From this day, we are all changed. Now we've met the unicorns, where and how they live, and we will always think about them when we lead them to fulfill people's dreams.

Thank you unicorns.

Blinky lights

Like the vast majority of google engineers, I'd never seen one of our data centers in person. For one thing, they're mostly not easy to get to - they're big facilities which need a lot of space and generally aren't close to things - and for another, they don't really do tours. We had an appointment in the Council Bluffs facility for 3pm today, and four days of driving later, here we are.

Chris Russell was kind enough to show us around the facility there, and [ALL INTERESTING DETAILS REDACTED]. It was genuinely stunning, like seeing the future in person.

A datacenter tech helped us locate one of the GWS, which was sitting blinking on its rack like all of its many fellows, happily processing [REDACTED] queries per second. Until today, I have to admit, whenever I imagined a gws I always imagined it as a little white square on a diagram with "GWS" written on it, underneath boxes for frontends and network gear, in front of boxes for the rest of websearch. Now they all have faces, it seems so much more personal. Even if it's mostly all the same face.

As an SRE I think about gws in terms of number of units and machines, geographical facilities, machine configurations, performance profile, and so on, and I spend a lot of my time worrying about their individual health, and working on ways to make them all stronger and tougher. But mostly I think about multitudes. The rest of the group, all engineers, I suspect are more used to thinking about gws as a singular entity, the one they code and build and run on their desktops. Seeing the facility is different. As well as the machines themselves, it's a reminder of all the construction and physical labor and day to day work of the techs which makes it possible for that code and all those jobs to come to life.

I think everyone resisted the overwhelming urge to poke the machines or maybe unplug something. But we were all thinking it.

Two out of three vegetarians agree...

I don't usually eat meat, but when I do, I prefer Arthur Bryant's.

Epic OMGWTFBBQ Win

Sorry doogle, but Arthur Bryant's was quite possibly the best barbecue I've ever had.

On to Iowa!

Arthur Bryant's

We rolled into Kansas City, Missouri, at about 10:30 this morning, after camping the night in Topeka, Kansas. Our destination this morning is an early lunch at Arthur Bryant. This place is known to have the best BBQ. I'm pretty sure there is absolutely nothing vegan here. I'm going to get a drink.

Kansas!

Fourth state of the day! Meat grows all around me. This cursèd game with symbols has devolved into a drinking game. We are eating in an airplane hangar tonight that has been converted into a steakhouse. Insanity has gripped this death R.V. Lord help us all

Technical Difficulties

RV #1 (callsign Primo) endured various technological hardships today. We let our gas tank get too low, putting the generator into shock and leaving us without air conditioning through the midday sun in Oklahoma. We eventually debugged the RV, cooled off and were able to charge our electronics.

The internets also failed us. At first we thought Jinnah's "unlimited" sprint mobile data plan had been maxed out by too much starcraft the past few days. I spoke with a tech stop phone support guy (discovered that cell connection from Oklahoma to India is rather weak and that Jinnah's ldap is pronounded "Juliet Delta Hotel") and escalated the issue by explaining that we had *SREs* without internet. It turns out, our data plan was fine, and the same weak phone connection was responsible for keeping us internetless.

We've prevailed despite the trials. Justin, Dave, and Vince have even succeeded in blending in with the locals.





Up next: Steak for dinner in Wichita and BBQ for breakfast in Kansas City. Doug, Neal and I are catatonic with excitement.

Oklahoma City and the Game With Strange Symbols

We're now passing through Oklahoma City during rush hour ... with a man at the wheel who has not yet driven the R.V. The occasional car is honking at us. I fear for my life, and so begin preparations for my imminent demise.

Others prepare for their fate in a different way. They play a strange game with symbols. New rules are being continually created. The net result is that the collective score continues to decline. With all hope of victory extinguished, we have reverted back to drinking scotch.

If anyone knows a place to eat in Wichita, let us know ... in the event that neither the R.V. nor this game consume our souls.

Oklahoma!

Day 3.  Went to sleep somewhere in Texas.  They tell me we're in Oklahoma now.  It must be true, I saw a tree.  And a tumbleweed.  People are playing strange games with strange symbols I can't decipher.  My one remaining reference to reality is the Beatles playing on the speakers.

I think I'm navigating next.  The directions say to go straight for 8 hours, then turn left.  And go 6 more.  This country is big.

Crossing into Texas

Ma chérie,

The trip has been long and hard. Supplies are dwindling. My heart aches to be reunited with your sweet smile. This morning -- so that my fellow soldiers could shower and wash dishes -- I dumped our grey water. It was an easy task, but I still dread the day we need to dump the black water. It sends shivers down my
spine.

This morning, with a glass of 18 year old Glenfidditch in my hand, we crossed into enemy territory. The heart of meat in America: Texas. The battle is joined. I have but scarce moments to write this missive before a barbarian horde of ranchers descend on me -- aiming to beat me senseless for the T-shirt I wear: "I'm vegan and I heart you.". It has a picture of an elephant, but I fear this will not cool their angry hearts.

Wish me luck. I miss you dearly.




P.S. attached is a picture of our encampment from last night. Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

East to Google, Kansas!

10 am, and we're rolling out from an RV campground in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. We arrived last night with our bellies full of beer and enchiladas, expanded the RVs and settled in for the evening. Neal, Bill, Doug and Issao slept outside which gave us plenty of room in the RVs for a comfortable evening.

Jinnah and Neal rousted folks out of bed at 8:30 AM and got things going. We drew straws to figure out who would be swapping into which RV, dumped some tanks, filled up some other tanks, lost some people, found them again, ate some breakfast, divvied up the wifi equipment, backed over some stuff we shouldn't have backed over, then put the hammer down on I-40 East.

Google, KS here we come!

Sadies of New Mexico

Around 6:30 p.m., we were getting hungry. This led to the inevitable inter-RV phone call. Where to go? I called a friend (Breanne) in San Francisco. Annie got a reply on a random appeal on twitter. The answer is the same: Sadies. So, here we are -- enjoying a huge feast of Mexican food in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This was soon followed by an empassioned debate over where (or whether) to sleep.

Things I am looking forward to

A hot shower
A stationary bed
An 8 hour sleep
Being to able to talk (I lost my voice)
Stars

GWS is Cutting Edge?

Or at least, GWS is living on the edge. We walked down to a protrusion that hangs out over the canyon. As one somewhat concerned (peeved?) middle-aged woman said in passing: "Our tax dollars are going to have to rescue them." She apparently had little faith in our 1337 r0x scr@m6l1ng sk1llz. I guess we showed her.

Inside the beast

Adios Grand Canyon

We barely got to know you. We rolled out of Vegas at 5 AM after a hearty breakfast and some successful gambling and drove east past Hoover Dam and into the rising sun. 300 miles, approximately 5 hours, one security checkpoint (they don't want you to blow up the dam, apparently), a gas stop or two and some heroic driving by Issao got us to the Grand Canyon by 10 AM. A couple of hours checking out the colossal hole in the ground and and now we're back on our way to Albuquerque. No casualties yet. The road ahead is 800+ miles of flat on I-40 but leads to the promise of some very tasty ribs in Kansas City. Stay tuned.

Note: 1 casualty. We accidentally left Jonathan at the gas station and drove off without him. Epic fail. Might be time for the buddy system?

Vegas, Baby

Shortly after 2am, we pulled up at the Bellagio in Vegas and tried to get valet parking for the RVs. They only laughed a little. Then we parked ourselves in the back.

Three crazy hours later, Yaron and Bharat are a little wealthier, Jelena is a little giddier, and we're back on the road. No casualties yet.



The rest of what happened in Vegas really should stay in Vegas.

That's not a good sign

And they're off!

At 3:15pm, Gws-team debarked on our ridiculous RV trip across the country. After a painful instructional video from the 80s, we're all certified RV drivers, and equipped to handle the open road. Time to enjoy the next 3500 miles!

Next stop: Bakersfield-ish.

RV "Tesla" hitting the road.

No backing out now...

At 1pm tomorrow, we roll out.

Just by signing up for this trip we've evolved from 16 coworkers to 16 co-conspirators. It's going to be cramped in those RVs. It's going to be exhausting driving 3000 miles in 6 days. We'll get bored, and annoyed, and we'll test each other's patience. But by surviving this ridiculous exercise, we'll have stories and friendships to last a long, long time. At least that's my hope.

"It ain't an easy job, but when you bring your team into Pittsburgh and you ain't lost a one of 'em, there ain't a feeling like it in the world..."



I'm excited.

We has a route!

After much deliberation and optimization for fun, we have a proposed route! Issao is confident we all share the same definition of "fun". We'll find out soon enough.

The first night, we'll have an interlude in Vegas and then drive until morning to reach the Grand Canyon. Over the following days, we'll also hit Santa Fe, Topeka, BBQ in Kansas City, a data center tour in Council Bluffs, and the new GWS office in Chicago.

Of course, that's just the Plan of Record. I'd love to swing by Canada or Mexico while we're at it. We may find out whether Gcards can be used for bail.

Tomorrow we're stocking up on snacks and liquor. Here's just the list (so far) of beers I'm supposed to procure: Breckenridge Brewery, Guinness, Natty Ice, Dogfish Head, and anything from Fort Collins CO.

Yep. It's going to be epic.

The Time is Nigh

Today was our first RV Stand-Up Meeting. Everyone is doing stand-ups, so why should we be left out? The meeting was a high-energy 15 minutes of craziness. Still some debate on the route we're going to take. It may come down to an air hockey match.

Added to the trip: Astrid, Jinnah, Justin

Lost: Robin