Epic Mountain Adventure - the Peripherials

The days around Ella's Epic Mountain Adventure - Blowing Rock day and Boone Day - were pretty hectic too. Lots of wild stuff going on!

The stage at Goodnights Comedy Club

Date night!

For Mothers day this year we got tickets to go see Dave Attell, one of our favorite standup comedians of all time. The show was Friday night before the Epic Mountain Adventure, and it did not disappoint. It was quite entertaining! The opening acts were great. Dave, well, he's getting a bit old now, and I think he's sober so he's not as pissed off and funny as he used to be. Plus he wore a hat and jacket through the whole show, and I think that made it a bit harder to connect with the audience. Some of the other fans in there turned out to be loud jackasses, so that kind of ruined it for everyone. Dave didn't seem like he was having fun up there, at least at first. But that could just be my perception. could have been because the show started before the sun went down, but since we're old too that worked better for us. It was still pretty hilarious and we had a wonderful date night.

Then saturday morning Ella and I went to Blowing Rock, and Sunday was Boone day. Needless to say I was pretty tired by the time we got back to Raleigh. It's a 3 hour drive each way to the mountains.

Monday I had to fly to Cincinnati and back for work! Met some co-workers at the airport at 6:15 AM for an early flight. We just had the one day there to do some meetings. I claimed to be working remotely from the office in Ohio!

Bengals Stadium

Home of the Reds

Some things I didn't realize about Cincy. It's right on a river, with a huge downtown. We saw the stadiums for the NFL Bengals and the MLB Reds from the plane and in the rental car, and they are only about a block apart. I'm hoping the next time I have to go up there (not scheduled) it can be when the Reds have a day game, I'd love to go. Huge baseball fan.

The return flight got delayed, and of course we didn't know that until we were through security already. I do have friends in Cincy that I would have gotten together with had I known it was going to be such a late flight. Instead we just hung out in the airport, and got back to Raleigh about 11:30 pm. That's a long day. Seemed really long because the sun didn't set until long after 9 pm. Here in Raleigh we got sunset about 8:30 that day.  Still eastern time zone, but cincy sure is farther north and west. That was unexpected.

So the moral of the story is that a great show and a fun trip were immediately surrounding the Epic Mountain Adventure. If you think that sounds hectic, you're right. If you're concerned about how much we've all had going on around here lately, you're right. I have been stretching in a lot of different directions lately. It's fun and exciting to me, and I've been looking forward to this part of the year for a while. Now I'm getting tired, and ready to settle down for a long hot summer of Ironman training. Time to start getting some of the long weekend workouts done.