It’s 2:17 am on Oct. 30, 2010. I’m writing for you from the seventh floor of the Braggs Towers in Washington, DC. I am equal parts exhausted and excited to be here.

We left Haigis Mall a little after noon and got to the Hotel at nine. Three hours before Nick O’Malley and Adam Miller staggered in, having violated their ethics by buying gas from British Petroleum and endured every conceivable misfortune along the way.

We—Bobby Hitt, Jeff Bernstein and myself—talked about drugs and listened to Jeff’s iPod on “Random” the whole way down.

I guess I should back track a bit. On Sunday, I was feeling horrible. I got back to my apartment at midnight—really early for me, actually—after a bottle of Jeagermeister, four beers, the last part of a bottle of “Boone’s Farm Wild Cherry Apple Wine Product” and about ten minutes spent with a hot red headed girl who I think was named Nora—the music was really loud—and who was interested in talking about journalism with me. I imagine she woke up, discovered an unfamiliar name and number in her contacts and just deleted me. (Nora, if you’re reading this, do you want to have coffee sometime?)

To make a long story short, I got into bed, felt nauseous and before I could make it to the bathroom, vomited on myself. I haven’t been feeling good since, but on Sunday I couldn’t hold water down until 11 a.m. I headed downtown to get some food when I felt like I could stomach it and afterwords I had sometime to kill so I went into Amherst Books.

A great store, full of rare and wonderful things downstairs and just wonderful things up. There it was, waiting for me. A book I had been seeking since that lazy afternoon in St. Petersburg, Fl over Spring Break my Sophomore year: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” by Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. I bought it on the spot, not caring that I had spent over $70 just a few weeks before. What the Hell, I’m a local hero now.

Flash forward to Thursday night. Between watching an episode of “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” on YouTube, packing and cleaning, I need to decide what books to take with me to DC. Packing books for a trip is always important to me; I have to choose books based on the lenghth of the trip, who will be traveling with me and who else is in the car. My computer and its stuff takes up a lot of room in my bag, so I’m limited to one large volume (Mark Feldstein’s “Poisoning the Press: Jack Anderson, Richard Nixon and the Rise of Washington’s Scandal Culture”) or two small ones. I decide to go with two small ones: Roy Blount, Jr’s “Hail, Hail Euphoria” about the Marx Brothers movie “Duck Soup” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”

I have to take that book. The ultimate journalism road trip. We can’t recreate it—we do need to cover the story on The Mall and being drugged out of our minds won’t do anyone any good at all if they’re trying to restore their sanity. But we could talk about drugs.

We also talked about which celebrities we could get to write Bobby Med School recommendations—Bill Crosby, Barack Obama, Hugh Laurie as “House.” Anything is possible.

Arriving three hours before we can check in did have some advantages. One of which is that, fortuitously, there’s an International House of Pancakes right down the street. The Amherst, Hadley and Northampton area has always been missing two things: the ability to get milkshakes in Antonio’s and an IHOP. Well, now we were right down the street from one and God said that it was good and we were hungry.

Yum. Nothing more needs to be said about that.

With yet more time to kill we headed to the movies: “The Social Network.” It was pretty good, but there’s a scene in the beginning where Mark Zuckerberg is talking to his girlfriend, Erica Albright and he’s being condescending to her because he goes to Harvard and she goes to Boston University. Now the real Zuckerberg aside, I can’t help but wonder how the interaction would be differen t if Erica was a University of Massachusetts Amherst student instead. It was set in 2003/4, approximately at the height of the ZooMass era.

Just a bit of idle speculation. I’ll take UMass over Harvard any day of the week.