Rant n Rave: PEOPLE CAN’T F(#@*&G WALK & Camp Mustache

Rant:

I just came back from a love­ly week­end in St. Louis where I got to hang out with friends and watch the best base­ball team on Earth play (the Car­di­nals, just in case you were con­fused at all).

A bit of back­ground: I’ve been a Car­di­nals fan since before I was aware of what base­ball was. I’m a 3^rd gen­er­a­tion Car­di­nals fan as both my mom and my grand­pa are/were fans. Float­ing around my par­en­t’s house some­where is a pic­ture of me at 3 years old in a Cards shirt. As much as we were huge fans, we lived too far away from St. Louis to be able to see a game in per­son, not to men­tion it can get pret­ty pricey. That changed in 2011 (5 years ago!?! what!?!) when I went to my first game on the 4^th of July. The Cards beat the Reds 1–0 and there were amaz­ing fire­works after the game (both in sta­di­um and on the river­front). I try and go back as often as pos­si­ble because I LOVE, LOVE, LOVE going to Busch Sta­di­um and see­ing the game in person.

I can tell you what I don’t love though: Crowds.

More specif­i­cal­ly, walk­ing through or with crowds. I’m not sure if the excite­ment of a game day blows walk­ing eti­quette out the win­dow, but I found myself squished against walls, bumped, almost ran over by a guy twice my weight, or forced to move around gag­gles of slow walk­ers hog­ging the side­walk. I think my favorite was when a girl stopped direct­ly in front of me to take a pic­ture of the sta­di­um and I nar­row­ly avoid­ed bowl­ing her over. She at least apol­o­gized as I careened by her.

But seri­ous­ly, how hard is it to remem­ber the rules of walk­ing? Going towards a place, you walk on the right. Head­ed away? WALK ON THE LEFT. See your friend and want to vis­it? Step off the side­walk OUT of the flow of traf­fic. (Unless you’re in Eng­land or anoth­er of its weirdo colonies, and then the rules are reversed. I had issues with that in Aus­tralia- one rea­son I did­n’t dri­ve there!)

One con­tribut­ing fac­tor might be the lack of clear paths in the sta­di­um. You have peo­ple gawk­ing at the real­ly amaz­ing sights, kids run­ning every­where, peo­ple com­ing out of the sta­di­um to grab food or drinks, some head­ed to the esca­la­tors, oth­er peo­ple mak­ing a bee­line for the bath­rooms.…. add all that togeth­er and it’s chaos. Throw in a very full cup of hard cider and my trea­sured pris­tine white Jon Jay jer­sey and you can imag­ine my stress as I nav­i­gat­ed my way back to my seat.

For­tu­nate­ly, I excel at wind­ing and weav­ing through the mess and arrived at the end of the week­end none the worse for wear, oth­er than a short­ened tem­per and a sore toe where some oaf squished it flat. I don’t think it was on purpose.

Even after deal­ing with all the dumb crowd walk­ers, I’m super hap­py I got to go. I had a great time catch­ing up with my clos­est friend from col­lege, got to see two games, had some incred­i­bly deli­cious food (gluten free caramel brown­ie sun­dae any­one?) and spent a good chunk of time out­side enjoy­ing the gor­geous weath­er and sunshine!

Rave

Com­ing up next week­end is more trav­el! This time, I’m head­ed off to Seat­tle to par­tic­i­pate in Camp Mus­tache! For those of you bums who are too lazy to click the link, it’s a 4 day retreat at the base of a moun­tain focused on hang­ing out with like-mind­ed indi­vid­u­als. It’s like the Chau­tauqua in Ecuador, but not on a dif­fer­ent con­ti­nent, and with more people!

I’m very excit­ed to hang out with famil­iar faces and meet every one else. This time, I already know some peo­ple so I’m not going in blind like I was last year to Ecuador ( a fact that made my moth­er incred­i­bly ner­vous. She feels bet­ter about this trip, but then again I don’t need to speak Span­ish for this one haa­ha). I’m thrilled to see Mr. Mon­ey Mus­tache and Paula Pant again, as well as one or two oth­er atten­dees from the Chau­tauqua. Bran­don from the Mad Fien­tist will be there and I’m excit­ed to meet him, as we nar­row­ly missed each oth­er in Ecuador. He’s asked for some feed back on the Lab (which I use all the time) so it’ll be real­ly cool to get to help him with that.

Not to men­tion.…. the oth­er 45 odd Mus­tachi­ans that will be there! There’s a Face­book group set up and we intro­duced our­selves on a post. I was THRILLED to learn I will NOT be the youngest this time! The bane of learn­ing about FI ear­ly is always being the youngest of the group no mat­ter where I go, but not this time! It’ll be great to con­trast our sit­u­a­tions (but not com­pare!!) togeth­er and see if I can learn any­thing from them.

I’m also look­ing for­ward to tak­ing lots of notes and shar­ing what I learn here. If I’m learn­ing stuff, that means oth­er peo­ple can learn that infor­ma­tion as well! I should have more than a few arti­cles from this trip detail­ing everything.

Over­all, I’m just real­ly excit­ed about this trip. 4 days in the Pacif­ic North­west [which I’ve heard a lot about but haven’t yet vis­it­ed] at the base of a moun­tain in a tem­per­ate rain­for­est is close to my vision of per­fec­tion. Add in all the great com­pa­ny and it’s going to be a great time!

 
Are you head­ed on any fun trav­els? Do you have a rant or a rave to share? Let me hear it!