Saturday, July 26:
We left Las Vegas on Thursday after observing what appeared to be a bizarrely quintessential American Dream complete with money, power, and sex, all in the most unlikely natural landscape: the desert. Redeeming the weirdness was our waitress at a delicious Mexican restaurant who told us about her experience carpooling with her two children from Michigan to Las Vegas earlier in the year along with a stranger to save gas money. This reminded us of the great benefit of a company like Zimride, which ensures you know enough about the person you will be carpooling with to create a mutual trust even before you meet them. Because it employs the social networking profile system, you can go as far as choosing a person to ride with who likes your type of music.
The drive from Las Vegas to LA was tough: the driver’s smacking themselves to stay awake, the filmmakers frantically logging and cutting footage for the next day which included an 8:30 call time with ABC World News. The ABC producers requested not only an interview with our team, but also 20 minutes worth of clips from our trip. With 9 million viewers, Ben and Trevor decided it was worth the discomfort of staying up most of the night compiling footage.
Friday’s interview went smashingly, and we then picked up Margaret’s friend and Zimrider Lien to talk about the vast quality of life improvement that comes from carpooling, as opposed to driving alone, to her job at the Getty Museum. We all then went to a delicious dinner and met two Zimriders Casey and Craig who will be traveling to San Francisco with The Change We Seek.
Saturday morning, the team said goodbye to green gal, Margaret, as she flew (air travel now seems so boring now) back to NYC to return to her “real life” of eco-journalist. After a few SF interviews, the rest of the team will be doing the same Sunday evening: Trevor and Ben to movie making in LA; Cristina to studying Economics in her final year at the University of Seville, Spain; and John to scaling Zimride from his new Palo Alto office with partner Logan.
But, the time spent crossing the US and meeting young green entrepreneurs will not soon be forgotten, nor will the footage be misplaced. In fact, we all look forward to reliving the experiences vis-a-vis a bomber documentary to be released next year and submitted to film festivals, as well as further adventures, local and cross continental, carpooling. As long as communities are formed in vehicles, among new friends with common goals and destinations, The Change We Seek will forever continue.
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