On a recent trip, one of my participants taught me a new phrase. When I asked him to be patient while getting out of the van, he responded with, “I’m patient… patient like a virgin!” I would like to thank all of you for your “virginesque” patience with me and my lack of updates. I’ve been on 2 sprout trips since my last update. The first was to beautiful Cape Cod and the second was a slow-paced trip to Pennsylvania to stare at the Amish people. Cape Cod was nice if you forget about the horrible weather and the participant who [View Full Entry]

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I’m sure a few of you are quite annoyed that it has taken me so long to make an update to my site… your patience is appreciated. So here I am in Brooklyn making an update on July 4th just to appease the masses and masses of my loyal followers (sorry if that sounds a tad cultish). The week before last I meandered my way on up to Lake George with a group from Sunday to Friday. I had some great participants on that trip so it was a lot of fun. We did have one blind participant so that made [View Full Entry]

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I have led 12 Sprout trips this summer and I have never once lost a participant. Considering the circumstances and other leaders’ experiences, it is quite an impressive feat. We put that streak to the ultimate test last week on the Amusement Park trip. We went to Pennsylvania and visited 3 different parent nightmare/child dreamlands: Hershey Park, Dutch Wonderland, and Knoebel’s Amusement park. We started out at Chocolate City, USA on Tuesday. We got to take a tour of the chocolate factory before we endeavored out into the 90+ degree sauna outside. That is when we learned wh [View Full Entry]

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I had one of my best Sprout trips ever last week. We stayed on a farm (well, it was more of a resort with a few animals) in New Hampshire for the week. The farm was great for a Sprout trip because all the activities and meals were right there and within walking distance. We spent the week boating around on the private pond, feeding animals, milking goats and cows, playing basketball, and swimming around in their 3 pools. We even had the option of picking eggs from the chicken coup and then the kitchen would make them however we wanted [View Full Entry]

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I have finally returned to civilization. I have spent the last 4 days in Catskill, NY… one of the areas up here in New York that is eerily reminiscent of certain areas in the south in that the cow population greatly outnumbers the number of human teeth in the county. Catskill isn’t all that bad though; they have a game farm to visit. For those of you who don’t enjoy the taste of barbequed road kill and don’t have any relatives with multiple titles (i.e. Cousin/Wife), a game farm is simply the rural vocabulary for zoo. Game farms aren’t your regular [View Full Entry]

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I thought I would share some pictures with everyone. Ireson and I went up to the parkway and watched the sunset and I got some decent pictures. I'm also adding a picture of Amigo, my dog. One of the reasons I really wanted to come back to Roanoke in the first place is to see him. Unfortunately he has lymphoma so he only has a few months left but it was great to be able to see him again! I head up for NYC sunday and lead my next trip Wednesday so more pictures and updates will be coming shortly! [View Full Entry]

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I’m sure that many of you were thinking last week that it wasn’t fair that I was on a cruise in the Bahamas while you worked your boring monotonous job… Trust me, it wasn’t quite the cruise experience I was looking for. Our participants had 14 accidents throughout the week so we spent the majority of our time cleaning up and bathing. We were cruising on the Norwegian Cruise Line’s Norwegian Dawn which was a really nice ship. There were something like 12 restaurants, 14 bars, a movie theater, 2 pools, a really nice gym, and 8 Jacuzzis. On the second [View Full Entry]

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I haven’t done anything remotely productive today… and it has been nothing short of divine. After a few months of living to the tick of an accelerated metronome, the feeling of having no obligations for the day has been quite a treat. I got back last night from my most recent trip to Atlantic City. I wasn’t exactly anxious to get back to prosituteville after my last trip, but I was relieved to have a much better experience this time. We actually stayed 20 minutes outside of AC in a town called Pleasantville (no seriously… it’s called Pleasantville). The hot [View Full Entry]

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Sorry it’s been so long since my last update. My life has been crazy and I just never really found the time to sit down, let alone type up an update. I’ve been on two trips since my last update… I went to Boston with a group of teenagers and I just got back yesterday from Atlantic City. The dynamics of the Boston trip were very different because the teens are generally higher functioning. I felt like I was more of a chaperone on a middle school band trip or something like that. We had a lot of fun in Boston [View Full Entry]

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Who says Disney is just for kids? I just got back and I loved being at Disney World and Seaworld. We left Tuesday and had a long flying day and arrived to our rental condos in Kissimmee. We stayed in these beautiful homes that overlook a lake and have a screened in pool in the back porch. I have no complaints at all about where we stayed except maybe that the water there smelled and tasted like shit. The majority of the participants were great this week, but we had a few that were just plain weird… a lot of psychotic [View Full Entry]

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