Hi friends! As you probably gathered from Dyl’s post yesterday, we’re back on the road again! I’m super excited to finally be back out there, but I have to admit it’s definitely been very different from last year already, and I don’t think the fact that vacation has started has totally hit me yet.

The last few weeks have been crazy stressful between work stuff, social stuff, my apartment stuff, and everything in between. We had our gorgeous and perfect friends Mallory & Eamon’s wedding last weekend as well, which was a completely amazing time but admittedly made prepping for the trip a bit more of a challenge. I had a few plans in mind to help streamline packing, posting, and things to see, but wound up executing almost zero of it. We also decided to suck it up and BUY A DRONE, but we just haven’t had any time to test fly it or learn how it works. All told, it was down to pretty much me stuffing clothes in a suitcase at 6am the morning we left, but we made it and I’m excited for what’s to come!

CIYB2: BUCKWILD stops & points of interest — the literal LEAST i could do to prepare for this trip

Like Dyl said, we wound up leaving for Columbus right in rush hour on Friday, which was not the most fun drive but at least inspired some confidence that the next many drives would be better than this 8-hour, east coast traffic, night drive. We made it to the city and fell asleep almost immediately, then woke up bright and early to a beautiful, cool morning and hit a couple fun things around town before we left.

A few months ago, I began doing some freelance work on the side for the Ohio Machine, a major league lacrosse team based in the Columbus area. It’s been a really fun opportunity to give the brand a kind of visual overhaul and create a new look and feel, as they’re a fairly new organization and they’re still trying to establish their presence in the league and in Ohio sports (though they did win the MLL championship in 2017!).

i made these!

The Machine play out of a huge facility called Fortress Obetz; it’s a relatively new athletic field and complex that was formerly the site of the Columbus Motor Speedway. The field is bordered with a ton of recycled shipping containers, and just inside that outer wall, you walk through the back of the grandstands to get to your seats. One of the projects I got to work on for the Machine was creating banners for the back of the grandstand to greet the fans and establish the field as the home of the Ohio Machine. It was definitely a challenging project, as anyone who’s tried to open a photoshop file of a 50-foot-tall banner on a computer will tell you, but it was incredibly cool to be able to work on something so large. Since we’d be in Columbus, I thought it would be really neat if we were able to pay them a visit and check out these banners in person. Spoiler alert: it was.

just lookin the other way like ohio state do ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

We got incredibly lucky as the field was hosting a peewee football game and was therefore open. Seeing them in person was very special. It’s always really fun to see your work in real life, but to see something that large, and seeing it in context, greeting people walking in and out of this stadium every day, was just totally wild. Loved every second of it.

After that, we had a little bit bigger stadium to visit. Dylan gave the overview of that, but essentially it wasn’t quite as easy to hop on the field as it was in Norman last year. Even though THE ohio state university was already over in state college for their big gameday matchup in the problematic bowl, the stadium was still hosting an event and therefore wasn’t a total free for all. We met some really kind ushers who convinced us to come see inside anyway and we did, getting pretty close to, but not on, the field. The scale of massive football stadiums is borderline meaningless to me (doesn’t take much to be bigger than Nickerson, BU what up), but it was another cool environment until I remembered that urban meyer existed and got super bummed out about it all.

you know where i go when we dancin/christmas in wiscansin/and gettin drunk in the mansion with you*~

From there I took the wheel and pointed us to Wisconsin! I’m anticipating a substantial amount of grey skies and rainy days this trip, and Madison did not disappoint. We were in town for maybe four and a half minutes before the skies opened up and it began pouring. Being in a college town, we figured it wouldn’t be too hard to find a sports bar to post up and watch the tech game. The bar we wound up going to definitely had TVs, and most certainly had some Wisconsin character. No fewer than 10 people in the bar were wearing sweats and slippers, they sold personal pitchers of titos for $10, and every other TV had the Brewers game on (to the point where we almost couldn’t get the tech game on). It was a good time though and a cute bar, and we most definitely did not set off the fire alarm when we tried to leave through the door we came in from, so why would you even ask that?

I’m typing this from the car, 45 minutes outside of Minneapolis, where we’re v stoked to eat at Revival again, go to the mall of america again, and get Dylan a suitable jacket since he forgot to bring one so WHO’S THE DUMMY NOW :) Plz follow along with us on the gram with #ciyb2k18 and we’ll check back in soon. Go birds!