At this point, I feel like “the best part of traveling is coming back home” should just be one of my catchphrases – it seems fitting, considering how often I travel and how I’m always eager to come back home.
After a tough second half of January 2019, I can finally sit back and relax, as the rush is over – the National PUBG League is moving forward in full force, we have an insanely high-end team house, and to top it all off, our PUBG team finished the opening weekend of league play in first place overall after the first day and second place after the second day, out of 16 teams.
Sunday the 3rd ended up being an errands and work catch-up day, spending a big chunk of the afternoon driving around Beach Cities with two of my co-workers, then doing a bunch of operations and editorial work after returning to the team house. Sunday also marked the day that Jordan King returned to Nebraska – I dropped him off at the airport close to midnight so he would catch his red-eye flight. This wassn’t just any red-eye flight, though – he took a United Airlines flight from Los Angeles to Chicago O’Hare, then retraced his steps on a connecting flight from Chicago to Lincoln, Nebraska. He was planning on sleeping overnight on the plane and waking up fresh Monday morning to begin working again – I’m sure we can all guess how well that ended up working out.
After finishing up some final errands on Monday morning, I loaded everything up into my trusty pickup truck and drove back home to Las Vegas. Everything was decently uneventful – just the typical California traffic in the middle of nowhere up the mountains, plus a light drizzle. That is, everything was decently uneventful until I got to Baker. There was a massive collision right outside of Baker that backed up traffic to a standstill for a few miles. The funniest part is that people were presumably just following their GPS instructions, which were probably detecting massive traffic on I-15 S and were telling drivers to reroute to I-15 S Business, which is an extension of the freeway that cuts through the actual city of Baker… thus ensued a literal standstill throughout the entire city of Baker, and not just on the freeway.
I got a chance to plunder my SD card of photos I took throughout the week, and I have a few more highlights, the first being a photo of the Pacific Ocean that I took while touring a house in Rolling Hills, a gated city in the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
I also captured a glorious sunset from the rooftop deck of our new team house in Beach Cities… and also captured Jordan King taking a picture of his can of Red Bull with the sunset in the background.
If you’re a photographer, you know that most cameras adjust themselves such that, if you face it directly at an orange sunset, it looks a bit more dull than it actually is. That was the case for my photos as well, so I did some edits to the full sunset (I guess with these saturation edits, it becomes more “art” and less of an authentic photograph) to reflect the magnitude of what I recall seeing in person. However, I didn’t edit the saturation on the second photo, and that is still a pretty intense sunset.
Remember how I said it was drizzling during the drive? Eventually, the drizzle became an actual rainstorm, but the precipitation didn’t completely engulf the entire Mojave Desert. It was still the middle of the day, so the sun was strong – I managed to capture beams of sunlight penetrating storm clouds and illuminating the desert sand. I don’t think this photograph does the scene justice, but this was one of those rare times where I looked at something happening right in front of me and inadvertently said “wow.”
My next scheduled travel is between February 13-20 to Chicago. I am already looking forward to my next “the best part of traveling is coming back home” post.
My decision was a toss-up between the Toyota Tacoma and the GMC Canyon; the Canyon won because it had substantially better styling for the price (both on the exterior and interior) as well as interior luxuries and conveniences. With the mid-size pick-up truck segment evolving with vehicle redesigns in the coming few years, I’m hoping that Toyota can up the quality of the Tacoma enough that it becomes the leader in the segment in both looks and reliability.
As for my Canyon, I was originally planning on keeping it for about a decade – and if I had gotten a Tacoma, I almost definitely would’ve kept it for a decade, as those things tend to run buttery smooth for a long, long time. However, at this point, with electric vehicles poising to take over the market, I’m almost glad that I have a semi-unreliable vehicle, as it will likely encourage me in the next 4-5 years to just trade it in and upgrade to an electric pick-up truck (while if I had a Tacoma, I would likely hold onto it forever). 
