First off, congratulations to my cousin Vanessa Tobias, wait, make that Vanessa uhh. . . hmm . . . Vanessa something that starts with an S, and her new husband Phil. . . S. on an awesome and beautiful wedding.

The trip up to the wedding near Kirkwood, CA, which is just outside of South Lake Tahoe, made for the perfect PanAmerica training mission. The 15 hour 900-ish mile round trip gave me a few bits of insight so that I can better prepare for the big event.

I learned that once mosquitoes get in the car with you, they don’t want to leave, so you need to put the windows down for quite a long time to get them out. However, it’s worth putting up with the mosquitoes in order to close the windows when driving past the manure plant.

I also learned that when we are lucky enough to stay in a hotel on our trip, we should make sure they have A/C, fresh batteries in the smoke detector, and at least one f-ing employee on the property after hours (after hours being any time other than about 9:15 am to a little after lunch time). I’m no hotel snob, really. Rob, Trent and I slept on the dirt, in a trailer park, in 29 Palms, in the summer, and it was a thousand times more comfortable than Dante’s 10th Circle of Hell, the Kirkwood Mountain Resort. Seriously, I would like to never stop urinating on this building, unless of course, it was on fire and my stream had a chance of putting the fire out.