Well, ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Greetings to the listeners, this is Jonah Goldberg, a host of a Rem podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

Here I are again, so I am back in a hotel. This time, yesterday, I was leaving Medicine Bo, National Forest in Wyoming.

I am now in West Des Moines, because we got the wedding this weekend, and it's been an adventure.

The van life thing, for example, the machine is great, it's really impressive.

We haven't completely put it through its paces yet. When we went camping, one of the things that we had to...

It was sort of a good beta test kind of thing, because it made us realize, okay, here's what we're missing, here's what we don't know how to do.

The weather was kind of great getting up into the mountains, and then we got some sleep and snow and sideways rain, and all that.

But we slept in the van just fine. We had a nice meal, we ended up having to cook it in the van, in part, because I got this really fancy portable grill from Nomad.

It's really cool looking, it looks like a nuclear suitcase bomb, and I bought these shmancy coals, and I just could not get them lit properly.

And then the rain came in, so we didn't bother to keep trying, and I had to cook it on the induction stove inside the van, which was exciting.

So we had steaks and sweet potatoes and salad in the van, and it was great.

And we had this, I really wanted to make the dispatch meetup in Des Moines, even if it was just a surprise visit with Zoe and Pippa, to thank people who would have appreciated.

But the whole trip got delayed, because Starlink didn't send all the equipment to the conversion van place, so we didn't have internet for this thing, and for whatever reason, state farm kind of screwed us.

So we didn't have the final approval on the insurance for hours after we picked up the van, we just had to wait around in a parking lot forever to hear from state farm.

So there's a lot of that kind of comedy of errors kind of thing.

Man, did I like getting off the highway in Wyoming, and actually seeing some of the real state, you get this impression of the country when you're driving across country, that the country looks like what you can see from the interstate.

I know that's a cliche, but it's true, and even though intellectually, I know it's not true.

You just think about where you live in relation to whatever interstate you're closest to, and then extrapolates from that about how much you don't see about the real nature of where you live, if you're just basically staying on and off the interstate.

And I've driven in the interior of lots and lots and lots and lots of states, but it's just you get a mindset when you're driving across country.

And so since I had sort of hauled ass to get out to Portland, and we were kind of hauling ass between vacation spots still get back, it was just great to sort of get off the main road, go up into the hills and in Wyoming.

And if you've never been to medicine bow or that area, you know, it's sort of outside of the hour from Laramie, something like that.

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