After the beating that Team AnastasiaDate.com and Team AsianDate.com took coming through Germany with the death of the Red Camaro,->ke248 everyone was excited about our hopefully easy day. All we had on the schedule was a flight to Reno and then a short drive to San Francisco. In actuality, we were headed straight into the longest, toughest and most exhausting day of the entire rally.

Continue reading to learn more about Day 4 of the 2015 Gumball 3000 Rally.

My night after dropping the Camaro off at the airport was more eventful than planned. Our missing journalist from Copenhagen had reappeared, and his story was unbelievable. After leaving the party he was mugged and kidnapped. He woke up the next day in a dark utility closet in what turned out to be a parking garage. He was tied up to some pipes. After making his way out of the garage and stumbling into the streets of the old city, he was picked up and transported to the hospital. Thankfully he wasn’t any worse for wear and he joined us in Amsterdam via a quick flight.

With out entire crew together once again, we met up in the lobby of our hotel to prepare for the Gumball->ke4396 Air flight. As we gathered, we were gifted with faux flight suits. The green jumpsuit was a bit comical, but it looked comfortable, and I happily went to put mine on. It turns out I wasn’t the only one to wear the suit, as AnastasiaDate and AsianDate had supplied a suit for every single driver in Gumball and there were dozens of us on the plain. Our own little air force platoon or drunkenness and debauchery.

I had heard tales of Gumball Air from the previous year’s rally, but I was not prepared for the mayhem that would unfold in front of my eyes. With some of the more vocal and party-focused members of Gumball taking their places up front, our party moved rearward. I located myself in the row directly in front of the event staff. I had hoped that this would give me a good view of the festivities, but keep me mostly out of harm's way if things went sideways. Turns out I wasn’t completely out of the firing line, as Gumball air has an open bar, and that was located at the back of the plane. Rather than finding myself hiding out in the back, I had a front-row seat to every single drunken denizen of the plane that wanted to stumble past for another round.

That galley wasn’t the only depository of booze on the flight either. After warnings that the 2014 flight had been run dry, several people made sure to hit the duty-free store before boarding so we had an emergency supply of drinks. Before the flight even took off, most of those bottles were already open and flowing. There were multiple rounds of shots through the AsianDate and AnastasiaDate teams before the flight had even finished boarding. It was also in this collection of bottles that I found my chosen poison for the flight.

Sultan Al Salud was sitting near us and produced a bottle of Laphroaig Cask Strength scotch. I have had a large collection of vices throughout my life, but there are few things I enjoy more than a solid belt of scotch. When I approached to request a small sample, the jovial prince proceeded to top up my 6-oz airline cup with the beautiful amber liquid. And that is when things start to go fuzzy for a few hours.

What happened as the flight soared over the Atlantic Ocean can only be described as surreal. Gumball Veteran Pritchard was running around in the nude waiving his member in the face of anyone who ever appeared to be dozing off, before taking a piss in the middle of the floor directly next to Dolph Lundgren and then passing out in the floor near the exit door. Beyond those antics, one of our PR team tried to stuff one of the AsianDate models into an overhead bin, various members of the peanut gallery were crawling across the seats like Spiderman to visit friends, dancing in the aisles to the various song blasting out of the confiscated PA system, and then there was the infamous pillow fight. Of course there were various new inductees to the Mile-High Club, and various ounces of “Amsterdam Special” were consumed across the plane as well.

Thankfully, as the 14-hour flight carried on the festivities slowed and some people even managed to get a few hours of sleep.

Those small winks of sleep would prove to be fruitless gains in the grand scheme of the rally. After our quick detour to Portland Oregon to handle immigration and customs, we landed in Reno to a fanfare that involved a local classic car club and a high school marching band. It was just as I always expected Reno to be, a smaller version of Vegas with that perfect touch of kitsch. After we all raided the Red Bull bar and the snack trays we piled into our cars for the four hour journey to San Francisco.

In hindsight, this was a catastrophic decision. After several days of long nights, and a long alcohol-fueled flight, demanding a drive of four hours to our final destination was borderline insanity. Every member of our party was beyond exhaustion. Most of us had been awake for well over 24 hours at this point, and the long desert drive to SF was taking its toll. It took multiple stops, several drive swaps and more than few close calls with catastrophe before we found ourselves standing in front of our hotel. It is little more than a miracle that there are not pieces of Gumball cars and drivers scattered across the Sierra Nevada Mountains after a horrendous collision.

But that is the name of the Gumball game. Drive all day, party all night, and only the weak and unworthy complain or stop. It was 11 pm by the time I made it up to my room, and I remember little more than my face touching the pillow before my alarm was wrenching me from the abyss the next morning to start the trip to Los Angeles.