Cincinnati, OH

What a way to start out the season.
First off, the crew is AWESOME!  We are having such a great time together.  Great attitudes, open arms and happiness makes for a great season with good people.
Our training week in St Louis was held at the CIty Museum.  If you haven't been there, it's basically a playground that is open to adults only at night with a bar inside.  Tommy and I bonded in the caves, crawling through hot pink/green/yellow tunnels, where we laughed, screamed, squeezed through tiny openings and yelled for each other because we couldn't keep up with one another.  Lex, Tina and I went for a morning walk under the arch to get some exercise.  I brought Lexi to an anusara yoga class with a previous Kashi DOC yogi from '08.  All four of us and Dave, the Kashi guy, went to the Cards game at Busch stadium.  We had a fun week!  We're all excited about one another's presence on this tour.  And exploring the country together.
We drove to Florence, Kentucky (our hotel's location outside of Cincinnati) where we spent our evenings drinking wine in the hotel lobby and chatting about our lives.  We chose a day for a hike down in Red River Gorge, recommended by Brandon who is from KY, and spent the day sweating and breathing in the fresh air.  I drove the crew home as they slept.  I felt like the Sunie-Mama I've missed over the past few months being off the road.
As for Kentucky, my goodness are people SLOW.  Haha.  I don't mean this as an insult, it's just so different from the North East.  I knew to expect this, but I'm always surprised anyway.  I found the service was nothing compared to NYC.  I went into Dick's Sporting Goods and had to search for someone who worked there to help me with shoes.  Once I finally found someone, she just pointed in the general direction to where I should go.  She wouldn't take me there or help me beyond that.  I was shocked.  Ha.
The crew and I went out to Newport, KY for a lovely dinner and over to an event that was being help in Cincy along the river.  Wow!  The people there were on the prowl.  I have never seen such tight clothing on rather large bodies and such an odd sense of style.  The style was like LA 5 years ago.  It was hysterical.  We were all very entertained with this.  What a preview for our weekend ahead!  Hahaha.
On Thursday, Brandon flew into Cincy and we had a day and a half to spend together before his family swept him away to their homes.  It was such a pleasure to have him.  He offered me a little break from work, you can imagine all the work that goes into a tour - especially the beginning preparations.  We had a really nice time talking and laughing with the crew, walking past what used to be beautiful countryside full of frogs, crickets and birds and is now filled with parking lots to Wal-Mart, Panera, Steak and Shake and any other chain store you can think of, and eating popsicles to cool us off as we watched "Crazy Heart."  When his Dad came by on Friday, I sent them off with big bags of Kashi and Burt's Bees.
The event went well.  Unfortunately we were directly in front of a stage, so we spent a lot of time smiling and screaming at people to be heard.  Come Tuesday I didn't have much of a voice left.  But the weekend went smoothly and the crew quickly got to know one another's work ethics, which are all awesome.  I'm so proud of us.  We did such a superb job and banged out gift bags like crazy.  The response from the consumers was fantastically positive.  It could have been miserable because of the heat, music and being in Cincy, but we laughed the whole time.
So excited about this summer...