Perks of the job and a new friend

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One of the best parts of this job is meeting all the great people along the way. At every show and at every campsite, really everywhere we turn we have the opportunity to visit with wonderful people. When living in a mobile billboard for Backpacker Magazine likeminded outdoors people are drawn to you. Outside of the obvious perks of the job like travel and the opportunity to use and test new gear, we also view it as a way of collecting friends, which you can never have enough of.

Speaking of friends, in the past ten years of traveling Becky and I have collected numerous friends from all over the country as well as the world. As of today we’ve been on the road for just under a month and so far we’ve visited and stayed with friends or family in Salt Lake City and Bryce Canyon Utah, Boulder Colorado, Little Rock Arkansas and Cincinnati Ohio. This is such a great way to reconnect and see friends along our travels. It is another perk of the job. 

We picked up a new traveling mate this week! We’d like to introduce our Sylvan Sport Camper. Becky immediately named it Sylvester. It had been in storage in Cincinnati since last summer’s GOMT Ambassadors Kim and Brian had finished their tour five and a half months prior. They had been nice enough to meet us at the storage unit to give us a crash course on how to use the camper before we then all went out for a happy hour. Over a frosty glass of local brew we picked their brains trying to gain insights into what exactly our summer will entail. They confided in us their joys, successes, follies and frustrations with their summer while in our shoes. Like the anticipation of any great adventures, the more we learned, the thirstier we got to know more and to ultimately live the adventure. 

Having only 24 hours in-between our show in Cincinnati and our show the following day in Nashville Tennessee, we made it a priority to rise early the day of the Nashville show in-order to allow time to visit Mammoth Caves National Park in Kentucky. I know that a lot of folks love caves. Each to their own, but personally I just don’t get the infatuation with them. In my opinion if you’ve seen one cave, you’ve seen them all. My favorite part of some of the other caves within the National Park system is the land above the caves. For example in the Wind Caves of the Black Hills in South Dakota, the mountains and prairies above contain not only a pristine natural environment but also an abundance of wildlife including a herd of American Bison 500 strong. I would much rather see this than another stalagmite resembling a bowel movement after a night of bad Mexican food. That being said, I thoroughly enjoyed the two hour historic tour we took in Mammoth Caves. Our tour guide, a park ranger with the perfect balance of cheesy dry humor led us through the cave. A cave system which at this point is 400 plus miles long making it by far the longest cave in the world.