Since we got back from our respective colleges in May, a few buddies and myself had been talking about making a trek to the promised land at some point during the summer to pop our White Castle cherries and to document it for this website. Of course, with the impending release of “Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle” a few weeks ago, this feeling was intensified over the course of the past few months. We just needed to taste those beautiful, little burgers.

Now, this trip to White Castle had been a dream of ours far before the release of the aforementioned movie, but the nearest ones to our quaint, little town of Yorktown Heights, NY were in Yonkers and Nanuet, which are each about 45 minutes away. Not too far you say? Well, yes, you are probably right. But hey, all of us are lazy and cheap, so the trip never materialized until August, 12, 2004. No one was really ever willing to drive 45 minutes there and back for some burgers. What damned fools we were. Prior to this trip, the only White Castle any of us had ever had were those microwavable ones you can get from 7-11. You know, those ones that come in a two-pack and make your stomach feel like the gorillas from the movie Congo are jumping around it and smashing Tim Curry into every organ in your body.

At about 3 p.m. on that fabled Thursday, I started IMing a few of my other unemployed friends and threw out the pitch for a dinner trip to White Castle. Needless to say, after sending them the link to < a href="http://whitecastle.com">WhiteCastle.com (where you can view every delicious item they offer), the guys were more geared up for this adventure than the Ultimate Warrior at an all you can eat anabolic steroid buffet.

So, we rounded up the troops and decided to head to the Yonkers locale for a feast of epic proportions at White Castle. Little did we know, this White Castle craving would turn into a 138-mile journey that would change the way we looked at the world. Well, not really, but we did end up driving a total of 138 miles for cheeseburgers that probably shaved a good 3-4 years off of our lives (7-9 for Nick Camia and Phil Desisto). But, like Dennis Leary once said, who needs those years when you’re 84 and crapping your pants. Sacrificing a few Depends diaper-wearing years for scrumptious White Castle burgers are fine with me.

Myself, Camia, Morano and Birney hopped in my whip, the beautiful and elegant ’95 Mitsubishi Diamante (freshly soaked from leaving the windows down during a monsoon), and thus began the Fellowship of the White Castle.

The Diamante was on empty, so we pooled together seven bucks and put nearly a quarter tank in the car, guaranteeing us that we could at least make it to White Castle in Yonkers if we didn’t end up getting lost. Ha. Hindsight is one funny son of a bitch, let me tell you.

And off we went to Yonkers with cheeseburgers, French fries and chicken rings dancing the Electric Slide in our heads. Boy, were we excited about what was to be our virginal experience with the fabled White Castle. This would be an eating experience that could even surpass the “Shaq Pack” Burger King feast of 2002. Now, that’s saying something.

Well, we made it to Yonkers, and that’s when the directions off of WhiteCastle.com started to get peculiar. We made it about halfway through the list of streets we had to make turns on when things started to go awry. Forget “Lost in Yonkers,” because Richard Dreyfuss is full of shit (Credit to Jeff Daniels in Dumb and Dumber). This looked a lot more like the video for DMX’s song “Ruff Ryders Anthem.” We took about 17 wrong turns and started to realize why DMX refers to his Yonkers hometown as “Y-O, home of the brave.” Apparently, being brave has a lot to do with not wearing shirts, J-walking across busy roads and rolling blunts in broad daylight. But hey, that’s cool in my book.

Sadly though, we had yet to find White Castle. Our departure from Yorktown was at 5:30, and it was close to 7 p.m. now and our stomach’s were rumbling. I looked back at Birney and Morano in the backseat and I swear to god Birney’s head started to look like one giant cheeseburger. His eyes were turning to sweet pieces of onion and cheese was coming out of his mouth.

No such luck though. The street that White Castle was supposed to be on was about as short as Joey Lawrence’s singing career, and just as fucking shitty. The damned thing was about 20 feet long with one house on it that looked like it belonged to that old school WWF wrestler the Junkyard Dog. Truly a disheartening experience. To top it off, my cousin who is staying at my house called and told me that we locked him out of the house by accident. So we cut our losses, bolted out of Yonkers and headed home with our heads down and our stomachs empty.

But on the way back we decided that we would not give up, and once we delivered the key in Yorktown and rendezvoused with our soon-to-be fifth Fellowship member Phil Desisto, the quest would continue to Nanuet for an easier to find White Castle. We refused to give up, the day was ours!

But, first we needed some more gas. The seven dollars wasn’t cutting it, so we had to stop on the trip back to Yorktown to refuel and prepare for our trip to Nanuet. Thankfully, we decided to go with 15 bucks this time, and my car still has just under a quarter tank to show for it. It’s not like I didn’t admit that we were cheap, anyway.

It was now 7:30 as we rolled back into my driveway, but spirits were still up. We knew by the end of the night that White Castle would fill our stomachs and eventually decimate our toilets. With Desisto now on board and better directions in hand, we departed for the White Castle in Nanuet at around ten to 8 p.m..

This drive was longer than the one to Yonkers, and included going over the colossus that is the Tappan Zee Bridge. The other thing that was going against us was the lack of a radio in my car, and the hunger that was starting to drive us insane at this point. Topics of conversation ranged from the infamous cold war between two of our friends in 2002 over stripper fellatio, to the glorious film that was 1987’s “Harry and the Hendersons.” It was getting that bad. When hunger causes conversation about movies starring BOTH John Lithgow and a Sasquatch, you know things have hit rock bottom. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I drove us right off the damned bridge and into a watery grave.

But then, 45 grueling minutes after our second departure, it was there, standing out like a beacon in the night.

After all, our trip was just like that classic film.

I was playing with my golden retrievers while looking at the website and the directions to Yonkers earlier in the day as the intrigue built. This was just like the beginning of Rocky IV where Creed is playing with his golden retrievers in the pool as he sees a news clip of Ivan Drago’s wife talking smack about how they would take over the boxing world and destroy Rocky. Alright, so maybe just the part about the golden retrievers was similar, but dammit, we climbed that fucking mountain just like Rocky and a little part of each of us died in Yonkers a la Creed at the hands of Drago. So I definitely feel that the “Dragohhhhhhhh!” was in order.

Anyways, we entered the Castle and prepared to order our feast. In all, 40 sandwiches were ordered between the five of us, with some soda and French fries thrown in there for good measure. You name it, we ordered it. Hamburgers, Cheeseburgers, Jalapeno Cheeseburgers, Bacon Cheeseburgers and Chicken Ring sandwiches were all over the place.

James Brown might as well have come out and started singing “Living in America” right then and there in the White Castle itself.

We all pretty much agreed that the Jalapeno Cheeseburgers were the tastiest, with the Chicken Ring sandwiches coming in last due to their blandness. Don’t get me wrong, they were money, but the burgers were what dreams are made of. Or at least what intense bowel movements are made of.

In the end, Camia and Desisto were the eating champions, taking down nine and a half sandwiches each. Truly a Herculean feat. I only had six, but I’m willing to bet that my stomach resembled Yoda’s home planet Dagobah a lot less than Camia and Desisto’s did afterwards. The war being waged in their stomachs must have looked like Fallujah on a bad day, to say the least. But fuck man, no matter what, it was worth it.

Desisto and Camia were so overjoyed with the experience that they tried to con the workers into giving them a tour of cooking area of the store. Despite their best efforts in pleading that they “were on a school trip,” the employees did not budge.

Although he didn’t get the VIP treatment that he had hoped for, Desisto was still able to take home a little souvenir in the big drive-thru order menu banner out in the back of the restaurant. I don’t know how the man did it with nine and a half burgers sloshing around in his stomach, but he somehow jumped up and pulled down the banner with everything he had left. The White Castle burgers must have been fuel to him like the adrenaline is to those parents who have lifted cars to free a loved one that was stuck under. The Ultimate Warrior should have looked into this before going ape shit on “the juice.”

So our American Dream of White Castle had concluded as we hopped back in the Diamante and prepared to leave Nanuet behind, but the memories of our Fellowship of the White Castle would live on forever.