After 3 months traveling around Europe, it was time to head back to the states for a few weeks for my some wedding festivities for my brother Graham and his wife Krissy. I flew from Copenhagen to St Louis and crashed with my aunt and uncle for a night. Coincidentally, my cousins Sam and Ben were also passing through town so got a chance to catch up with some family, which was great. Not going to lie, I was strangely a bit culture shocked getting back to America. I got a burger and a beer in the Detroit airport before my connecting flight and it cost $30! Apparently y’all weren’t kidding with all your inflation memes, I couldn’t believe the bill when I got it.
The next day, Graham picked me up in St Louis and we drove to Lake of the Ozarks for his bachelor party. We had 12 of his buddies and a great house right on the lake for the weekend and pretty much spent the whole time drinking beers, playing golf and watching football. Unfortunately my dad was unable to attend due to an upcoming knee surgery, so I also did my best Freddy impression and took on the role of head chef. This was actually pretty fun, as I hadn’t really done any cooking in months. Overall we had a great weekend.
After that I commenced on my own little adventure across America. I hadn’t really planned on doing extensive traveling during my time back in the states, but I guess at this point I can’t stop. I ended up visiting every city in America I’ve lived in since I was 5 over the 3 weeks I was back in the states. I spent a few days back home in Mount Pleasant, Iowa with my parents, then drove up to Madison, Wisconsin to visit my buddy Spencer and his family. Next I flew down to Atlanta for a week to see the whole crew of friends and old coworkers. From there, I had to make a quick pit stop in New Orleans to get a new passport, as I only had about 2 pages left in my old one which was not going to cut it. Met up with some old friends down there as well and went to a fun Halloween show with them at House of Blues. From there, I flew back to Iowa to hang with my parents for a couple more days before we headed down to Springfield, Illinois for the big wedding.
The wedding was a ton of fun, I got a chance to see pretty much all my extended family as well as a ton of good family friends that I hadn’t seen in a long time. Also got to run it back with my new friends from the bachelor party and met many more of Graham and Krissy’s friends as well as her family. We had an amazing time. Graham and his wife Krissy put on one hell of a party, with the best live band I’ve ever seen at a wedding. My only beef was that they wouldn’t let me get on stage and sing with them, but what can you do haha. At the wedding I was talking with one of Graham’s groomsmen about my upcoming trip to the Middle East and I told him we were trying to go to the World Cup but failed to sign up on time for any of the lotteries so we couldn’t get tickets. He responded with, “Oh, my buddy is in charge of tickets for US Soccer, he can get you tickets.” He put me in touch with him and sure enough, his friend pulled through and hooked us up with incredible world cup seats (lower bowl, midfield) at face value! Luck was in my favor yet again. Imagine if we’d properly planned ahead and got stuck with the standard tickets up in the nosebleeds.
I closed out my time back in the states back in Iowa for a couple more days and hung out with my good friend Sam. He took me on a true Iowa adventure of going coyote hunting, which was a very memorable experience. Whenever I tell people I’m from Iowa they always assume that I grew up farming and hunting, but I actually have roughly zero experience with either of those things. I went squirrel hunting with my friends one time in high school but that was about the extent of my hunting experience. So, after catching up with him and his wife for a bit over a couple Busch lattes, we went out in the middle of one of his cornfields with AR-15s on tripods equipped with night vision scopes and he started calling in the coyotes. More than enough fire power to make all my new European friends cringe 😂. Sure enough, we saw them start running in towards us. Keep in mind, I still had no idea what I was doing, but I was ready to unload on them like it was Call of Duty. The whole time Sam was whispering to me, “not yet, not yet, not yet.” Then, “shoot”. I started unloading and missed everything every time, but he shot one on the run from over 100 yards away, which was one hell of a shot. After that we tried to do it again, but the coyotes had apparently heard all the commotion from our last rampage and there were no more coyotes that were going to come near us for the rest of the night.
Overall, it was nice to take a couple weeks off from living in hotels and I really enjoyed seeing all my family and friends and doing some traveling around the states as well. After 3 weeks back home, it was time to head back out on the road however. Next stop, Istanbul!
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