Sights and Sounds

Must. Get. To. Bed.

I need to be out the door by 7:30 tomorrow morning to catch a flight for Vancouver, so I really ought to be alseep already, yet I feel compelled to blast Deadmau5 on repeat and bang out another blog entry, so here we are.

I’m still on the first leg of my journey, barely a week in, and yet it already feels incredibly eventful.  Highlights of the trip so far: near-death accident on I80 in Wyoming, the Truckee midnight blizzard mountain crossing of 2010, Stinson/Reyes, The Day of Nothing, reuniting with several Cornellians (Paul, Tom, Gabe), mac-and-cheese bake off, FREE ROCK BAND!, dinner with the Fosters.

I could write a paragraph or much more about each of those things, but since it’s late and I must sleep I’ll limit myself to this: WOW, HE’S ACTUALLY GAY (not that there’s anything wrong with that)!

Sorry, I should back up and provide some context.  An old friend of mine invited me into the city for a mac-and-cheese + jello shots dinner party the other night.  The jello shots were ok, the mac was delicious, but discovering that one of my oldest childhood friends was absolutely, definitely into other dudes (or, as he referred to them, boys) was the real reason I’ll remember that night.  I’m hesitant to even write about the episode here because although he’s clearly “out” in person, I don’t know how he’ll feel about me outing him to those of my readers who can read between the lines. Also, I worry about being seen as homophobic.  But, it’s the most memorable part about the trip thus far, so I just had to mention it.

Perhaps I’ll write more about some of the other highlights later, but for now I need to get to sleep in order to make my flight to Vancouver tomorrow. I heard that they just had some sort of big sports event up there recently?!? Something about curling, or something.  I’m just looking forward to checking out a part of Canada that I’ve never seen and doing some skiing at a mountain I’ve wanted to ski for many years.  I’ve heard that Vancouver is the “Amsterdam of North America”; I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds fun.  Hopefully it doesn’t mean that there are loads of fat, ugly hookers in the windows of downtown storefronts; that would be unfortunate.

From The Mountaintop

It’s high time that I dusted off the old blogging shoes and got my travel blog up and running, since I’m already in California and technically my trip around the world—beginning and ending in Chicago—has already begun.  However, I don’t actually head overseas until I depart SFO for CHC on March 13th.  Until then, I will be bouncing around between the Bay Area, Vancouver and Tahoe.

So, for the moment I’m in Kentfield, CA, blogging from the mountaintop, making final preparations for the real adventure to begin and tidying up loose ends.  And let me tell you: when you’re handing off day-to-day management of your company while making final preparations to hit 7+ countries in 4 months, there are tons of loose ends.  Some of them are fun/interesting, e.g. rounding out my wardrobe and supplies at REI.  Many others are not so much fun, e.g. getting my final crazy-expensive Japanese encephalitis immunization, paying bills, and ESPECIALLY preparing my 2009 personal and business income taxes.

I was hoping to go camping this weekend, up in Humboldt, but instead I’ll be staying in Marin to take care of business.  Fortunately, this means I won’t be spending any money on gas for 12 hours of driving and a camping permit, which is great.  I spent too much money while my buddy Colin was out here; I really need to tighten the old purse strings and keep myself on-budget so that I don’t run out of money somewhere in Africa.  I expect the next few days to be filled with a lot of (a) not driving (b) hiking (c) doing taxes and (d) tuna melts.