One of our first stops was Greenville, South Carolina. We got to spend some time visiting our friends Scotty and Savannah. We all met in college and Scotty and I were fraternity brothers at SigEp, and Scotty and Savannah got married this past year and moved into Savannah’s grandmothers house. They are in the process of remodeling and you can follow along on their instagram. We were able to stay for a few days and had a great time in both Traveler’s Rest and Greenville.

On our way back to Sarasota prior to heading out west, we made a quick stop in Jacksonville to visit Sam’s friends from high school, Tommy and Natalie. Tommy, Natalie and Sam rowed together for Sarasota Scullers for several years, and coincidentally also raced against Sarah and her team Atlanta Junior Rowing Association before they met in college. They live in a pretty cool spot near the St. John’s river - we had only been to Jacksonville once before so we didn’t have a great understanding of the layout of the city.

On our way through Texas, we stopped in Austin for a couple days to visit a few friends and get a taste of the city. When we arrived, we went straight to Austin Terrier to meet up with a couple friends from college, Eduardo and Santi. It was a nice dog-friendly spot, where Ravioli got to meet his new dog buddies Griffin and Jimothy the Corgi. After lunch, we headed to Zilker Park to have a few beers while loungin in that tExAs SuN (cue Khruangbin stuck in my head & hopefully yours).

Santa Fe, NM was a stop we were pretty excited about. Our good friend Tony had moved there after graduating from Georgia Tech, and we had been wanting to visit him for a while. We got to stay with him and his girlfriend, Becca, and their two cats, Oswaldo and Penelope. Oswaldo really took a liking to Sam. The first morning we were there, Sam and I went to the OG Pantry for breakfast (there are two now), per Tony’s recommendation.

Towards the end of April, we attended Bequinox, which is the LA regional Burning Man event. At around 1,500 people, this event is tiny in comparison to the main Burning Man, which is about 80,000 people. We had never attended any of these events, so we thought this smaller scale one would be a good test as to whether or not we would like the main shindig. We joined Sam’s aunt Gale and her group of friends in California City (seemingly the middle of nowhere) on a small piece of land recently purchased by the organizers of this event.