Hey guys love your videos. Thank you so much FOMA do it you've got to get this even it's Even if Alex's company they take every other Friday off. He's always working. Oh From Virginia. Hello, Virginia. So I guess the Sun's definitely down there It's pretty funny. I don't want to wear sunglasses. I just want to get this brightness up All right, just bear with us until we figure this out. How do I crank it?  Oh But you're All right, Ben we are on max brightness apparently it's just bright outside today. Hello dreams Morocco all the way. I still haven't been to Morocco. You said I gotta have to do that soon, but yeah We're getting there. Anyway, so you want to break the ice for what are you gonna talk about today? I've been thinking about Morocco today. I You know sometimes when you move to new places or new chapters of your life and you just Fall in love with something new like when I was in Morocco, I did When I was in Morocco, I didn't really I didn't do any hiking or exploring outdoors And when I moved here, I always start thinking about what it would be like to go back to Morocco and do some hiking in There and explore the mountains and I've been thinking about Mount Tupacal this morning I've never been I've never done Mount Tupacal in Morocco.  I mean, let's be honest And I was huffing and puffing badly You beat me up now my husband and I are going next week wish us good luck best of luck Oh, all right. Definitely. Yeah, is it tough to get in right now? I feel like everywhere is yeah What's the situation like I'm assuming that you're are get you're both Moroccans and Obviously holding an American passport probably I Think it should be fine because I was there in December to see my family for Christmas It's just with all the international travel though. They definitely like you had to have your tests and everything done or if there's So easy to accidentally start talking about COVID. Yeah Yeah, oh He's not Moroccan. Okay It was it was fine for me. I feel like Everyone was pretty understanding and it was good when I went back in December and I'm sure things are a lot better right now Just remember you went through France though and you wanted to see somebody Yeah, I wanted to see my sister and They wouldn't let you out of the airport. No friends. Yeah, you I was so bummed because a I've never been to Paris before And my sister just moved to Paris back then and I really wanted to go see her and see Paris but really just see Paris but They said no you can't get get into Paris or literally just spend the night at the airports in Charles de Gaulle airports and it was pretty it was a fun adventure even spending the night at the at the airport because they had These little airport capsules just small tiny little rooms And it was it was fun to you to try that it looked like Hollywood squares But with just you know beds in them and you know, you couldn't see them from the outside, obviously Yeah, well dreams safe travels and enjoy Morocco My co-workers asked me when I was leaving to Morocco They said what is the best meal or dish or food that you want to try when you go back home? And I said I want to have Hawaii It's like my favorite soda And I love Hawaii Hawaii is like the best soda there is You're not confused. She's not talking about the state of Hawaii. No the drink It's a drink called Hawaii. It's like an orange cream soda tropical soda tropical soda tropical soda So what did you think about it? I thought it was tasty But I guess it was just one of those like some of the ingredients were not FDA approved So there wasn't no bringing that back. I think I asked some what at some point I asked one of the groups and I said why is There's no Hawaii here in the US and they said that it's not going to appeal To to the flavor or to to the public here and then For that yellow number five or whatever the heck it is. Oh my god I could give like my my my soul to get how I I've got it. You got a fan.  You know what? No, I was dreams was saying that I was the best I know Hawaii is the best like every I think every Moroccan would agree that Hawaii is the best soda But your other one is the Ronnie that you'll get from the Chunks of fruit in it, which I was okay, but it's just like the give it to you in this little teeny-tiny can I love I'm like, well, I feel like I need more if I'm gonna chew on my drink I would like there to be you know a leader of it at least but Ronnie is not a Moroccan drink per se. It's more popular in the Middle East. There is also pretty good Format format we should the if I get any how I saw that when my parents come here or someone Will make sure to send you a little one I'm not the approved either all that dietary fiber Okay But let's see other than that then to the other thing that I get I can't make sense of is the yogurt Soda that we come across I'll be done with it after that That's the one that I'm not even like ready to try that yet yogurt soda. Yeah It's not yogurt soda. It's a yogurt to drink. It's not so that's carbonated. It's carbonated yogurt soda Yoda, that's what it's called. Okay My god, I'm so thirsty. I've been drinking the whole day okay, so Anyway, welcome. Welcome everyone. We've got three people watching when we were walking to this spot This is becoming our usual spot to you know film our Livestreams we were thinking what are we gonna talk about today? What are we gonna talk about today? No, there was a plan and I wanted to bring up was How to become confident in the outdoors? Yes, and that would include in my mind And I guess we both have the opportunity to experience this a bit differently But um for me that was growing my my backpack my my gear list, etc So that I felt like I had the right material or the right equipment to go out places as with any hobby Getting started is expensive, right? Like if you were to start skiing you got to go buy all that stuff or you have to rent things every single time you go And you never feel a sense of ownership nor do you get familiar with stuff nor do you develop an attachment to it So getting shoes that I was comfortable to start wearing that were meant only for hiking Which already to have more than one pair of shoes was difficult for me Yeah, um and then I have a backpack and I found that a backpack in the beginning I thought was fairly obvious and I just grabbed a regular one and then I realized that a regular backpack isn't quite it I've really come to like backpacks that have the ability for a bladder So I can carry my water internal when I need to rather than having to fish out water bottles all the time I'm getting ahead of myself But I mean gear to that extent stuff that enables you to go out and be familiar for you though you were saying it's well, so The reason I thought we would talk a little bit about confidence or gaining confidence in the outdoors is first of all I receive a decent amount of messages on on Instagram from people asking You know, how do you build the confidence to go outside? How do you acquire the necessary skills because for me personally? It's not something that I grew up doing because there are a lot of people they grew up going outside hiking and camping or hunting with their Families or friends, but it's not something I feel like it's it just it's not something that I grew up doing and I had to learn the Little bits that I know right now and I so and so I thought we'll talk about the little things that you can do in order to become More confident and go out and explore the outdoors whether you are man a woman a couple or just Solo is what I'm trying to say Okay, so we've got mark. We've got Mike in the dreams You guys should try trip to Virginia beautiful hiking spots here with extra Cicadas so I'm from the East Coast actually I vaguely recall there being like seven year cicadas Which were like the cicadas that came around like once every seven years and they are Monstrous they're huge is what I remember like almost like locusts like you would go out and you'd find them underneath the stairs and my Like by my apartment and such but I remember those cicadas are 17 years now is that what it is? It's not seven or we did I miss I Want to see if I missed a statement jiggle don't shake the screen be a story about what happened the last weekend. Oh, yeah I will know we'll definitely tell you about this week. Oh my god. Thanks for reminding us format It's so embarrassing, but we will share that Hike with Mike. I feel most comfortable in the woods. I don't feel comfortable in crowded cities Even though I was born in New York, but I have lived in Florida most of my life Yeah, that's I honestly when I I think when I moved to the States I was so impressed with big cities because I used to live in Chicago before moving to Arizona and in the beginning I loved I loved going to New York and I loved going to San Diego San Francisco LA in the beginning But then later on it's just I don't I mean I enjoy when we go last time we went to Seattle's probably two months three months ago I enjoy it, but I don't I don't get the same joy and peace that we get from being outside I feel like for me is a difference between metropolis and the city because even like Phoenix is a big city But it's a different type of city metropolis to me are like big tall buildings made of steel You know big parks that are really tightly packed and Every time we go out I always find that I see a lot of homeless people and that usually like something I don't approach as much here and it makes me just kind of stop and think differently for a bit and But I do like that everything is within walking distance in a big city Yeah, public transport buses and trains, etc. I like very much Okay, so back to confidence in the outdoors. We're so bad that this Yeah, there's one podcast Going off topic about it. There's a podcast that Alex introduced me to it's called stuff You should know and it's basically just two guys just like us and you They're not subject matter experts about anything really in particular But they just choose random topics and they do heavy research and they come in and talk about the topic And I love, you know that you learn something new all the time But man, oh man, they just dragged the conversation for hours and hours until I fall asleep most of the time Anyway, so that's just to say that that's pretty much what we do all the time. Just keep on dragging and dragging things So, okay, so back to confidence in the outdoors Yeah, so I kind of was thinking at least for someone who's New you just want to go and hike or backpack and go in the back country And maybe do some backpacking out there. I think a good place to start is To do it with the with people It probably is not the best idea to just jump into something that you're not familiar with and not comfortable with It's probably a good idea just to start with a group of people friends that you trust I mean, nowadays, it's it's easy to find people to do activities with but it's tricky It has to be a bunch of people that you trust because we had the pretty Interesting experience one time when we joined the group that we don't really know And at some in the beginning we thought we're gonna be hiking as a group But then at some point they just did their own thing and we were on our own without a map, which was stupid So really one of the things is Pick a good group of people find a good group want to be comfortable You want to be comfortable and you want to be very good at communicating with this group of people whether you already know them or you don't You know, don't try away from saying that you're not comfortable with this This is my speed. This is my physical Level of fitness and make sure that you really communicate and set expectation with the group you're going with I don't think you have to you don't have to overburden it so much all the time But in the beginning though, you certainly want to start with somebody around your skill level for the first or second We had a time where we did a pretty long hike with a group of friends across the superstition ridgeline here We made sure we knew one of our friends was gonna be a lot quicker than us You know, don't plan to travel back with us. We'll go drop our cars off separately So there was no expectation for somebody to be like waiting or to be not because it's like playing golf You don't want that feeling that you're constantly being rushed Push like behind you or being pushed or pulled along And keep it small too You don't need to necessarily go hike three four days on your first time if you want to get out Just make sure you're good for it go out for a night If you want to go camping and if you want to go out hiking go out hiking I'd probably would say don't do a hike and camp the first time Because it's just kind of dipping your toes into the water at that spot But that's one, you know, I mean and if you end up liking anyone to go out on the next day of the weekend or whatever you can But baby steps in that regard, but just be honest with yourself about your growth and your comfort level if you try to prove something to yourself You could actually end up having a bad experience that might deter you from even following through on it more in the future Definitely Comments from Mike hike with Mike if you want to be confident and comfortable dressed for the climate and weather You will be and whether that you will be in another Tip test out all your gear in the backyard before you test it out in the field and that's that's a very good tip And yeah, so probably we'll start with talking about gear So now in the beginning where you're just starting it's kind of overwhelming to be honest Even for me was overwhelming the beginning when I went hiking with this group and they have all of these Equipments that I'm not familiar with and it takes it just what I'm trying to say is that it takes time to acquire all the necessary Equipment and all of the fancy gear and sophisticated gear But it doesn't have to be like that in the beginning just start with what you have So when you know that you know, you need the ten essentials of hiking make sure that you have them They don't have to be Lightweight equipment. They don't have to be sophisticated the brand names. Just go with whatever you had Don't don't wait until you acquire all of the expensive and sophisticated the gear and then That's the benefit though too of starting off with small trips and such It's gonna like the difference again between the confidence and hiking from the exposure standpoint like you're what you're doing versus the equipment that you have We were kind of talking about earlier stuff that you would be helped out by would certainly be just having good shoes in my opinion You don't need to have 15 backpacks I know now that we've started hiking I've got a 20 liter bag and I got a 30 liter bag I got a 40 liter bag and I got a 60 liter bag and I got stuff that can hold a Three liter bladder and a 1.5 liter bladder Got two sets of hiking poles that I'll use that I have stuff for friends all that stuff We've just kind of accumulated a little while years. Yeah, because you end up at REI sometimes you just end up spending too much money But things that are helpful though for your experience like to me again a good backpack You want to be able to bring food with you You want to make sure that the bag is not gonna rip and tear open and they can hold some water You wanted to be able to take a little bit of weight. You don't need to take a million things So also make sure you have a little bit of room though for just a sweater So that you can dress hot-cold and I would say Last thing that I was excited about when I was getting going was insoles If I hiked for too long actually and I didn't have the right shoes my feet my knees started to hurt. I got some insoles Much better. Last thing you want to do is be halfway through your trip at night Realize you're not happy with you. Yeah, and then you have to deal with you the whole way back That's not that's not fun. So yeah, and then the other thing with gear I remember in the beginning like one my first backpacking trip. I think I literally I didn't have a water bladder I didn't have the right. I just took like a big jug of water But the point is to have enough water and then don't try away if you have friends who are into hiking and backpacking See if they are willing to borrow See if they are willing to lend you some of their gear for you to try out. It always helps like remember Sarah and Ghee they gave me their backpack I tried it a couple of times and then with the sometimes with the cooking gear and food on the trail in the beginning You don't I was a little bit overwhelmed with all of the cooking equipment. I didn't have a jet boil I didn't know what's the right equipments in the beginning So instead I used to to take with me just like food that I don't have to cook like the tuna tuna cans and fruits and snacks and that was enough in the beginning So you see what people are doing around you and then you get more comfortable I figure out your own good ideas when you steal somebody else's exactly just see what they have to do Get some lessons learned from them and then to act accordingly and there are also You can also rent gear from companies like REI or from Local Outfitters like here in Arizona. We have the the hike shack. You can definitely go in there and say Okay, I'm gonna go camp for one night I want to try a sleeping pad and I want to try one person 10 or two people 10 I'm just gonna, you know rent a couple of gear from them to see what I like what I don't like Some people like to camp in a tent some people like to camp in a hammock So it helps to to rent some equipments and try before you make a big purchase and they can be expensive too So it's nice to try to give the cheap stuff a try off the bat one at a time and figure out What do you like rather than trying to jump in too far and then realize you bought something that you don't like And you're stuck with it for a while when we went mountaineering enjoy the rock climbing The groups and such one of the big things was always like don't buy your own rope You go with somebody else who has a rope because it is expensive and you do slowly build your stuff up And then when you feel like you've taken it seriously you've developed that habit You know, you know, this is a hobby I like then you can commit to that next level of financial investment Yeah, because because sometimes some people go camping and backpacking and they just I mean they they were willing to try But they realize it's not the thing for them. They they don't like it They don't enjoy it. So it doesn't make sense to to spend that much money Like even with rock climbing because when we did rock climbing, I mean, we want we were willing to try But we didn't know if we really liked it. So for more than a year We were just tagging along with other people and we didn't commit to buying our equipment until later But and with all those things too We got to the spot where Yeah Oh like where we were buying ropes and other things to the effect of that where people wouldn't say bring them And you would find time to get rides and they go out. I feel like I'm just about to talk in a circle I really forget what I was about to say. So let me see the comments. We've got our Moroccan friend dreams I completely understand the small steps into getting used to hiking. I actually enjoy hiking but not camping though My husband loves camping. I just can't you're giving me more courage.  I mean our story in a couple minutes Oh, yeah, I teach you perseverance as well I Yeah, stay tuned that courage over here because we gotta make room for the next thing. All right, Mark I saw actually up above too that FOMAT was saying that he never goes into REI to get stuff Unless it's below below Mark love the tips. That's what we have started with here in Minnesota going to state parks three five miles trails I did camping hike and hiking on the rim last weekend go. Yeah That's what we're getting Here until we tell you but I think that's a good tip from Mark about choosing small trails Definitely, you don't have to go on crazy 20 miles a day or 10 miles or you know, just start small Milage that you're comfortable with Three five miles sounds like a good number hike with Mike starts off with state parks first Which have many amenities and later on you can move on to more wild areas. That is totally true I remember when we went to Valley of Fire State Park, it's just like 45 minutes from Las Vegas Just felt like luxury camping. They had showers and they had restrooms and it felt great I think it's good to to have access to some luxury sometimes Format I never go into REI and by something I wasn't planning to never know I did not buy an Ospreay at Atmos AG 65 this weekend. That's the bag. I did you I think you did I think format. I saw one of your videos the backpack looked like Alex's backpack No, I think that was straight up sarcasm He totally did is okay. Nope. I never do that. I never go in my god We went we went to REI this weekend. We'll get to do a story from this weekend, but we went to get bear spray That's it. What did we come back to? I don't want to say the number But was like three big bags of gear that we didn't really need. Well, I see I wanted to get a hiking shirt So I got a shirt I bought myself a pair of oboes shoes because I needed some ankle support shoes for for hiking in Kilimanjaro So I took him out to the room this weekend I hurt my foot before we went to so I was happy to have them to keep me stable All right, we've got dreams. Sorry. No. No, we were looking at kayaks We saw it on the clearance area a rooftop camper, which we're gonna talk about a little bit We have so many didn't get it Yeah, but man, we're looking at what it means to be a car camper Versus a hiking camper. I don't think I've ever cared to differentiate the two. I will share how I feel about it I don't think however, I'm gonna be a big fan of car camping Okay, so we've got a question being in Arizona Do you start hiking in particular temperature as I am sure it gets pretty hot there? Well, we had last Live was it last week?  We went to a mile hike We went for an eight mile hike midday here in Arizona. It was a bad idea So definitely like and we talked a little bit about Hiking in the desert. So here for people who you know who likes to hike in There are some people who really like to like in to hike in the degrees temperature like this guy. I'm okay with the heat I don't mind that at all. I don't I don't enjoy I don't enjoy but a lot of people usually start early in the morning He's very calm to start around 3 a.m. 4 a.m. 5 a.m. Some people do it midday We're gonna try to do one tomorrow morning.  Yeah. Yeah, I think we're gonna try to go to a user or something Okay, hike with Mike. Hope I'm not hugging the conversation. No, no hike with Mike I always appreciate all the tips and then they help us with you know talking points and you have a lot of experience So that really helps so bring it on. I will be quite the la la association the flow oh The flow I can't see too difficult. Can you read for me? Sure. Sure. I was gonna keep on going then Yes, I did a backpack died.  This is about the time tenor hammock So I was gonna say Look like I'll do the tent hammock thing in a moment here the to kind of like keep on sprinkling in hard recommendations every now Then recommendation for this five-minute span Grab a cheap pair of trekking poles. Oh, you might not use them a lot of people bring trekking poles along and they just like Clickety-clack forward with them. They don't really use them to hike But that's fine because in the beginning that's not really the problem They're solving for you They help you have confidence so that you're not gonna trip and fall over going down a mountain is just as important as going up And you'll find that you can hurt your knee or your ankle pretty good on the way down once you're exhausted or fatigued So to have those trekking poles gives you some of that confidence if you're crossing a little stream of water Yes, you don't want to fall in or if you're going down so even if they're cheap 50 30 20 whatever dollar trekking poles are a big Stick you find in the woods. Yeah, take one It really does give you another point of contact on the ground and it'll make things familiar anyway tent or hammock I like hammock a lot when it's nice outside. Man hammock is low maintenance. I got this much camping stuff No under quilt necessary, you know overtarp if I'm if it's really nice out I just going out nowhere. You can make it real small the quilts and the tarps are tarps Obviously you can bring a little bit more for us Ten camping is great though because we're we both get to carry some part of that equipment And it's the stakes in the poles are a bit of a pain There's not always trees that we can attach up to yeah here in the desert either, but I'd say in that regard Tent camping is really is really where my priority is But also we kind of like spending the time like you know if you're in a hammock You can't sleep with the other person in the same area and sometimes can be a little bit Unpersonal, but I do know they make two-person hammocks. I've never tried one though and they remind me of that With the blades of glory thing with the hot dogs What's wrong with this picture? I just like double hammocks would work for me I don't understand so many references I'll pop put a link up to blades of glory. It's though. Okay, so so so we're I see a few people joining us We're talking about how to gain confidence in the outdoors Gear and experience right and feel like you're learning. Yeah. Yeah So really I don't know if you guys know but REI What does REI stand for? Recreational equipment equipment incorporated. Yeah, so REI is a big store for gear here in the US for people who are not from the US and So side selling gear they have you know biking hiking kayaking fishing Everything that you can think about really so social events No, I'm trying to say on top of the the geese selling gear. Oh, okay They have classes. They have a lot of classes and I find those classes to be really helpful So they have hiking classes and then they have backpacking and kayaking so many When it's snowing or areas with snow, they take people out to give them a snowshoeing classes, too So it's a good place to start if you feel like you're not confident to do it on your own And you don't have friends who go out hike and backpack It's something worth checking out classes with REI If you are some of them are free and some of them you have to pay But most of the class where you go out with the group you have to pay for them If you are an REI member, they are cheaper compared to if you're not a member and Some of them are women only some of them are even for kids to teach kids how to ride bikes and how to go Kayaking or sailing and stuff like that. So I think those classes are very helpful They even have classes to teach you about hiking in particular areas actually Since we're doing Mount Kilimanjaro this year Two years ago, we went to one of their on-site classes where there was just a person who hiked Mount Kilimanjaro before and They told us everything pretty much everything that we need to know about the climb and it was all free So we were sitting there. They gave us information about the the mountain They gave us information about gear that we need and then towards the end They try to sell you something but you you will definitely walk out of those meetings with something new that you learn But and with it, it's worth saying then and I know you've covered it to some the REI experiences are twofold There's the lecture series that are you just go in and you sit and you listen to somebody You're in the store Then there's the ones that are out the ones that are outside are usually money the ones that are inside if you But two different levels of commitment usually the ones that are outside also require you to sign up Because there's limited seating but the ones that are typically in the store typically they won't fill up But now it's different with the pandemic They still like format said they have online classes yesterday Sometimes I just joined their classes to learn more and you know just acquire more knowledge I was listening to their class yesterday about how to choose the right hiking shoes and it was good It was free and I think I asked them the other day Obviously, it's different from one state to the other but starting to open up to on-site or like classes in their store I'm glad I'm glad Mike or a mark that you are also familiar with Blades of Glory So Okay, so What else how far we got 31 minutes? We could start telling our story. Maybe we'll wait a couple more minutes And then we'll tell our story about the weekend You guys are awesome. We have five people watching I've seen Alex that I read I'm really starting to look forward all the time to these live streams Okay, so we will still continue talking about gaining confidence in the outdoors But what tell us tells in a comment. Do you want to do you want to know the story quick hiking lesson? Oh, I broke my shin grab the iodine tablets. Yeah, okay, so story time you want to start off or do you want me to start off? Okay, so last weekend Okay, not too long ago we We sold our car.  How about now? How about now? Oh, there we go All right, I got it back you got it back. I got it back. Oh god. There we go. Sorry about that Okay, so we're back. So what was the last thing that you guys heard? So that was our story. What a wonderful trip, right? That was amazing end of story. This wasn't that funny Okay, why don't you? So the car Sold the car the end and that's how I lost my right foot What a story Okay, you know what you said you tell the story. Okay, fine. I have this bug bite That's bothering me so much see she's off topic again. She can't help. I'm sorry. Okay All right, I'll start up So we sold the car that we had in order to get this new car and I'll dance around what the car is again Don't tell what the car is because I'm making a video. Yeah, we drive the mystery machine from scuba-doo and Needless to say it's four-wheel drive So we we were excited to go out to the mcgullen rim this weekend and we checked the temperature obviously was like ah 60 degrees All right, 60 degrees like let's get out hiking. It's 95 100 something here during the day Arizona I'm talking about the temperature. So, you know We're about to make a temperature mistake Needless to say we love so we fill up the back of the car with a tote That's got all of our sleeping stuff in it and we pack everything and and surely we pack the the tent, right and we pack the 40 degree sleeping bags Because bad spot because this is how it goes usually when it's very hot in Metro Phoenix That means that up north is very pleasant So I even put my charcoal Sandals and my shores and then towards the end.  I'm like, I'll grab another light sweater Yeah, he was like I just take a light sweater and I'm like, okay fine. I take a jacket So anyway, we started off on our two-hour drive two hours from Phoenix where it's a hundred and five degrees and we get up to The McGullin room and it's like 50 which isn't bad because it said six. Well, that's fine But but they're also like 30 mile an hour winds out up there on the road. It was cold Anyway, so we get there and the wind is ripping off of the rim Right and you're trying to take pictures and we're just looking at the trees Just remarking it like how much noise you can hear. It's so crazy It's like you are in a different world You can't even tell it's Arizona and the trees are about to fall from how windy it was So anyway, so we just said but the plan was we're gonna go there We're gonna camp for the first for the first day was it Saturday? Yeah, we wanted to poke around lightly and then the real hike was gonna happen And there's a very nice hike called the rim trail.  It's just horrible Then I found the park ranger just talk to him quickly Honestly, we always have the best luck talking to any ranger anywhere. They're always so awesome They're always so awesome to as I know if they are just awesome across the border. We're just lucky I'm just always behind a be be given a little So we camp here. I don't like campfires. He said no, you can't like campfires today I was like, yeah, so he said he said there's no possible way to have fire and we brought wood with us It's like there's no possible to do fire. All of the campgrounds are full All the regular ones all of the regular ones and I'm like, I'm giving him the puppy I said, where can we captain and then he was very nice and kind to us that he said Oh, there's this area and I can drive all the way there. You just follow me Country you're like, oh great. Literally he drove 10 miles with us So I'm not on the highway like again like we're going like 20 miles an hour on dirt road And and I was just so happy because he was very kind and he would stop every now and then to make sure that you know We're getting there. You're gonna find the spot. It's a little bit secluded But you will like it and add a lot of people So we just followed him followed him and then we found the campground for the night. It was pretty nice It was it was probably about Five miles from where we were planning on starting our hike the next day actually So it did cover a good amount of ground that we needed to cover anyway And we decided to go after we set down there We pitched our tent and I brought an air mattress because again I was excited for the first time try to car camp and I'm she's laughing We don't do this like we don't do car camping especially with the car that we had Let's see how glamorous. Yeah, we're bad at being honest. I don't like it I like backpacking and going to the wilderness and camping there You so you brought the whole mattress?   I'm saying you're like I think I'll grab my other second sweater So I was wearing a jacket like the if you guys watch the last video that I shared about cooking with the jet-boil pen That's the jacket that I was wearing. That's that's actually the adventure we're on But so anyway, so we set off then we leave our tent there Stake down to the ground tied a nice little fisherman's knot and then a figure eight on a bite not on the bite Just regular figure eight pass through To keep it tied to rocking these blew away while we were and then we left and we left So we went out to this little lake and we walked around and we're cold my foot still hurt a little bit from like I said an injury. I had just something dumb. I did I mean, I don't even know it was my foot just started hurt the other day Do a little hike you get back to the campsite after this little hike. We went to a lake. It was nice It was fine. It was small. It was it was a nice just easy what's half a mile hike Yeah Yeah, it was just downhill to a lake where they have a lot of bass fishing and then we drove to where we were gonna Start our hike the next day Oh, it was so windy there to the point where like if you wouldn't even join me out I walked out to the edge of the cliff and was like standing with this lone tree that was just shaking somewhere It was it was so windy and he just wouldn't stop telling me that he wants to go to the edge of the rim And it just looks like the Grand Canyon rim, but on a different skin scale So he goes there and I'm watching him from far away and he's like just dancing dancing and then the car Even the car with the wind. I feel like the car is shaking right and left. Oh No, you guys most the audio again. I wonder if it's a problem with with the phone That's hilarious, you know, what's sad I would have done the same thing because I can't stand camping I need a mattress. Oh, the story is gonna get much better. Just just wait It's a good thing we started at 31 with the audio outage is not an ability to tell a story quickly hike with Mike I don't mind car camping in wilderness areas where there are miles and miles of hiking trails And I treat the car campus base camp to return to after hiking all day lost. Oh, can you guys hear us? Okay now? Okay, perfect. Here we go. So I'm gonna I'm gonna power through here anyway So we get back to the campsite ever we went out we checked out the place really windy not a lot going on It was still it was cold though I walked out there my hands were freezing holding the camera by the time I was done It was so windy and it's cold breeze coming off the top of the rim So we turn around we go back to the campground and we sit down and he was like, all right Let's cook some burgers burger time. Yeah, because we wanted to cook some food We wanted to sit down sure enough test out the the inflatable mattress and it's a twin So it's about this big so I sleep and then the cake the tent is about this big So needless to say if any one of us just farts the other one just fell right off the bed Right like you're just trampoline the other person off of so you got to get rid of that put down the bed Oh, so that was just a big waste of time Meanwhile Habiba grabs this wonderful jet-boil pan that we oh, yeah She sets it down pulls up the jet-boil thing and she starts getting ready to cook food Which he has a video is very good. Yeah, the last one video And they're delicious burgers Meanwhile though, we're sitting here just trying to like psychologically like Let's get ready for bed like we were trying to like pump ourselves up because he was getting cold It's really cold down needless to say crawl in the bed about eight And we're both just laying at each other trying your best like two little worms to like share body heat somehow But from two different entire sleeping bags So what did we have like us so I had my jacket and then I had probably t-shirts and then I had the insulated The omni heat right base layer and then that's a Columbia thing and then I packed socks And then I just had my regular pair of pants on and two little light sweaters on and we climbed into our 40 degree bags Yeah, so we didn't sleep on the mattress. We pulled our regular backpacking bedrooms the the sea to summit bedrooms There's not I think I have a pretty good one It's like rated R 3.4 or something or years are 3.4 years like 2.8, but they're kind of thick Mine's like an inch and a half years like yeah, but they're good But that's the one that we take camping and I like them. I don't like sleeping on a match Yeah, they're great They can press up to about this big obviously have to take a little bit of effort to roll them up But they're by all means great bed rolls But anyway, so we go to bed and the ambient air temperature overnight drops down to about 15 I think when I remember getting up around three in the morning, it was 18 It was but it was cold. So for me. He was kind of comfortable He said but I was I was really miserable and that's the that's the one mistake We always pack our 20 degrees back And now we have a car with like hundreds and hundreds of extra cubic centimeters of space We're like nah, let's bring the 40 degrees no need to over complicate We pack the 40 degrees and oh my god when I went to bed. I was not comfortable like oh my god I can feel my knees are getting so cold like literally my knees my My upper body was good, but my knees are going to freeze the breeze was ripping through the side of the tent and To the point where yeah, it would steal heat from anything So if you're pointed toward the side of the tent or not toward the other person either your butt We get cold your knees would get cold. Yeah, so we went to bed around nine. Yeah, I'd say we went to bed about yeah So we went to bed around nine I think I fell asleep for about 30 minutes and then from how uncomfortable I was I woke up and between 9 30 up until 11 p.m.  Literally. I can't fall asleep. I can't do anything So it's like, you know what? I can't do this. I cannot do this. I'm gonna go to the car Yeah, she was she was she was contemplating leaving me there I ended up actually sleeping in the tent for the night 30 till about so I go to the car I go to the car and that's where the adventure begins. I go to the car I'm in my sleeping bag and I think it's going to be any better and it's not any better I'm just sitting there dying in the car instead of the tent You said you started the car at some point I started the car. I started the the heat like the the hot air is not coming out And I'm like, okay today is gonna be the end of it for me So I I opened this this audio book There's this audio book that I started listening to the 12 rules of life I listen I listen and listen and all he's talking about in these rules of life is how to to be Resilient and then stand strong Facing any adverse events in life, and I'm like, I'm gonna kill you if you were a person So I listen to that audio book for like how long I don't know God knows how long So I'm then I fall asleep I fell asleep for like 10 minutes and I woke up again, and I'm so shivering I'm like shivering shivering and then I found this bag of cherries. That's just then I was like Well, I have to distract myself somehow and I just grabbed the whole bag of cherries and like one cherry And I'm surprised I didn't come when I found her at the end of the night I came over I was like wow if I'm a little chilly and she's not in the tent with me anymore It's probably bad for her and the car's not on so I knew you're bad I ate the whole bag of cherries I was surprised you had to learn to juggle all the pits by the time we had nothing else to do Because like there's no way for me to distract myself and then around probably 2 45 a.m. Is when I fall asleep for 30 minutes I fall asleep for 30 minutes. I close my eyes and then someone is mocking on my window That's me because I stepped out because obviously I had to do the thing guys do at 3 o'clock in the morning and Just by standing out there doing that for a period of time with my life I was like wow I got pretty cold just standing out here I was there for a while because I was doing I've been holding it Come over I knock on the on the car to be with just wakes up, but she's just sad Why did you wake me up? I barely just slept That was just like oh man. Well, this is pretty bad. I could tell this wasn't working out very well He got in the car and he's like She was like well we climbed Kilimanjaro and climbed the seven summits look at us on the mongolin rim dying Right because we packed t-shirts. So what do we do? We're dragging the story on so I'm just gonna get on to it We left at 3 o'clock in the morning and drove home That's how it played out. We didn't do the hike We did not did nothing on that stuff.  We left at the camps burgers. We ate burgers. They were delicious burgers Let's be honest But we were thinking like if we go hike down there and it's still this cold We were certainly not prepared even to hike with that sort of gear like oh my gosh So when when Alex told me we should probably go home 3 a.m. I was I just felt like my my heart was never happy But I had this I would I had to say like none I don't think you would have said it to me, but I was definitely like I think this is the thing But they were so we drove home Everything at home and everything got put away and now we've got our weekend trip coming up this weekend We're gonna make it up to ourselves. We're gonna make it up. It's gonna be better home freeze peak Hopefully twice this weekend is our plan Not necessarily all like up down up down, but we're gonna go hike that area is our plan Oh, yeah, well when we were in Idaho too, we went snow we love We just like goofballs this weekend is our problem. We have cold gear that we love I told I said this story is too embarrassing to share so I tell you Exactly, that's I tell him this is embarrassing. This is a bad reflection on us and he's like well No, but it was funny like it's it's memories like this that matter the most if you gotta be ashamed of some of the stories You can't laugh at them then then yeah, you're gonna be fixing your mentality to not enjoy it at some other point too You got to be able to laugh at yourself. So let me read some of the comments here Those burgers looked so good Format I I agree. I think they were so good. They're oh, yeah, they were perfectly inside They were the thin ones I should say which I think was good because we were a little concerned that the jet-boil pan meant mostly for Like boiling water you we were happy to get the jet-boil specific pan It dissipated heat the right way because if you get like a cast iron stove You're gonna run out of fuel before you get the cast iron, you know pan hot But I say the jet-boil thing work well though I think it was the best part of the trip. Oh the other best part of the trip Oh, yeah our vehicle the cardboard box. No, no not the car So five a.m. We get to the gas station and I'm like I'm dying from being called no No, I feel more comfortable. I go to the gas station goodness that part I go to the gas station to use the restroom and then my eyes are half asleep Like you just imagine and my hair looks like I'm coming from a horror movie And I'm walking out and then I see in front of me and lately I'm starting to realize that my I don't see as well as before so I need to go fix that anyways So I'm standing outside of the gas station. I'm looking. I was like, what is that?  He's nice. They're right in the gas station. I'm like is that a statue? What's that? And I'm just looking and then I Alex is like, what is she doing there? So he came out and it's just like three of them and they they're huge and they're just sitting out there That was also Pictures of them, but yeah, there's a little elk with big fuzzies Right there I've got a picture of him standing right next to like you know the 87 octane sign right there like just In the gas station parking lot and I'm over here like gosh Habiba you're like we're back to civilization She's on Instagram doing stuff again, and I'm like she's thinking I was like, oh my gosh That's an elk. She's doing something for you for real. It was amazing. Okay, so hike with Mike. Oh my god I clicked reports. I'm gonna report you.  I'm cold when it's in the 50s. I'll be honest I grew up in a really cold house Or at least being able to tolerate cold. I am fine to be honest with you typically with extreme temperatures I got no beef in either way. I can I can deal with the extreme heat. I can deal extreme cold I'm okay with both. I don't like heat Cold is fine. I was we were joking about how when I grew up back home It's not that we had like a built-in AC and heat system in the house So many times I would change my clothes for school underneath my blankets Remember, yeah, I do this Okay, so let me see The first trip Mike the first trip my son and I went on this year got down to 30 at night When it's cold and I car camp I bring a pee jug I don't have to go out into the cold to pee at night I can't tell you that story. That story I'm gonna go live one of these days It's a good one See she's scared cuz it's possible. No, it's a good idea. I think it's a good idea. I start to tell the story No, yes, the jug the pee jug is such a good idea And then there's even the they make the the chiwis for women to use like the the go girl Actually did the giveaway last year. It wasn't used. It was new. No, it was a new one Yeah, but I think pee jug is a good idea, especially, you know when it's cold out I'm gonna people use them more importantly I think because you put your heat into it and then you can put that heat back into your bag Like sometimes people would boil water and then they would take it and throw on the bottom of their sleeping bag So it would stay warm all the time. Yeah, but I wish there was a video diary. Good luck. Great story It would have been hilarious eating those cherries and talking to the camera Oh, I know but I should have but but I was so exhausted and in pain that's my mom My mind wouldn't sorry. We are outside in our community So it's it's a new skill that we have to acquire now that we're trying to commit to having like that sort of content available as well It takes a different mindset to take an unhappy moment and to push through it And that's why you released that little video the other day too when you were hurting after We were in Sequoia National Park and we released Format By the way, so since we're here format is our first Member on the YouTube channel So thank you format for being very supportive And I hope that you enjoyed the Sequoia behind the scenes right because that's just me filming Habiba while she's in pain Not caring because why the content comes first and we didn't we didn't stick with that this weekend But we totally should have yeah, we should have but I was I was really tired We should get a little car mount so we can put the GoPro in the corner of the car But the thing is to it's like we both got a camera and then we got the GoPro and it's like all these little things require Time like maybe there's if you have any good car filming stuff Like maybe like a suction cup to put on the passenger side window With a wide angle like your thing like so that we could just kind of like capture that sort of candid stuff That's a really good idea. We just need to do it to do it Okay, so format I had planned to go back back in this weekend But but my wife expressed an interest in trying cabin camping.  That's all the things we do for love. Yeah, that's so sweet And I gotta say I think it was Mike earlier I never wanted to be the type of person who like called it camping if I went out and just drag my house into the woods I don't like that's not for me But like Mike was saying I think earlier with calling at home base That's what I'm talking about I would still take a tent and call the car camping the thing we do the night before the night after if it's crappy area We're going way off into the middle of nowhere. You just want to pull up and go sleep It's nice to have a little mattress with some beds some privacy because you're up above your car rather than perhaps down on the ground But also it means that we can perhaps stay there Someone left a Barbie here. There's another one Apparently it wasn't a very good story I wasn't saying anything That's my sign that I'm rambling on and on is what that means no keep on anyway I agree though that we were looking at these car top campers now We saw it at REI and there's something you can put on top of your car And that just kind of folds out and has a little ladder that you can climb up on top of your car And these some of these aren't very big you can still fit up a bike up there or a kayak or something like that Which we'd be interested in doing and I'd like to do that I think because this would have been a nice spot to go car camp for the start still bring the backpacking camp to go hike out Into the wilderness camp for a day or two then come back But to have the ability to start your day at the beginning of the hike rather than wake up at home Gather all your crab up stop by the grocery store pick up some gas drive for three miles and then get there at noon If you left like a human being or at 10 o'clock if you got up at 4 30 because let's face it He's still drag your butt That would be nice and I'd really like to get one of those plus we could just go on extended trips I'm I think you're on board. It's just they're not cheap, but I think we're gonna try to do that at some point Yeah, yeah, definitely. No, they look like a good auction mark. What's part of the rim? I think you're probably thinking the Grand Canyon, but this is the Mughal and rim. It's in a paste on It's not the Grand Canyon. I thought it's him from what you're saying earlier that he's on board with it being The Mughal and rim because they have different sides too. No no no no because obviously the Grand Canyon There's the north and south room. This is just the rim This is just one rim, but so we went to the visitor center area, which it's not called. It's the Mughal and rim visitor center, right? Yeah, so we pretty much get there you hang a left off the main road Obviously, there's a look out to the right you hang a left and we went probably about 15 miles down We're not 15 maybe it was 10 miles I guess with the the Rangers said I think it was like campsite 717 or something like that Yeah, there's so many opportunities for camping up there in the Mughal and rim format That's a good story for the member section the P story. Oh, there you go. Do you want to hear it? That's FOMAT's way of saying tell me tell me tell me tell me All right, we'll put the video together for for you FOMAT. Yeah, it'll be a reenactment We don't have like It's gonna be like just Alex sitting down and telling because there's nothing to see Right, and there's no way Habiba's gonna tell the story about herself. Although you tell it better than I do Oh my god Half the time I'm sleeping for all the good stories All right, you lose a lot of heat when you open the tent up to go outside that is so true and oh my god, I feel like The worst decision to make or the hardest decision to make is when you have to go to the restroom and you are sleeping and it's called outside It's like life altering decision if you're the type of person that can just jump into the pool You're the type of person that can go outside and pee immediately. It's just you know, you got to do it So rip the band-aid off many nights I held it the whole night because I didn't want to go outside of the tent I will say though. Oh man There was the night to where you lied to me about us going outside and I was convinced for a year that I might have had a Dream that we went outside and I got a cactus stuck to my foot anyway For me though if when you're setting your tent down one of the most important things that you can do with your tent is Draw out the wind area You don't want to let the side of the tent blow up right up against the side of the tent because well I keep moisture and other stuff will evaporate off there make it cooler inside if you keep that rain Tart pulled tight with those stakes and the little strings and the cords that are on the outside You keep that frame away from the inner core of the tent.  I love you guys Thank you Really nice. I was a even Monday. I told Alex. I'm really I can't wait for Thursday to be here This is becoming really fun for for us to do. Okay Hike with Mike a lot of times misadventures are the best adventures and that video was the best when Alex said I'm gonna use both cameras. I died I don't remember I was gonna say that in in the Sequoia video because like you were using the GoPro and the other Oh, oh, you watch I told you don't film and then you said no, I'm gonna use both cameras I Gotta get vertical for Instagram. I gotta get a horizontal for YouTube. I was like, all right, buddy Let's let's get some pain going. Oh mark Mark Nelson is from Phoenix. All right.  Oh, what side of the grid? All right, sorry about that Okay, because I would think that's people who are not from Arizona. They probably would not be familiar with the McGowan That's just my assumption. But anyway, so what area of Arizona are you in mark? Yeah, we've always looking for somebody else to motivate us to get out again We're not necessarily speed demons all the time, but if you want somebody who's willing and we've got a Cardboard box now. So we're willing to meet you anywhere at that point. All right So hike with Mike my car camping is I drive my truck to the campsite and set up my tent So use my tent. I just have a place to park my truck and then I go out. Yeah That's what we did when we went to Glacier National Park and it was nice because they are all worried about Food storage because of their activity in the park So it was nice to have the car as big storage. I say Apparently doesn't mean it's actually entirely safe either So it's really nice when you have a rental car because they get into that not my fault. All right. I haven't we have a new friend right here Francisco esquivel. Hi. I have a question. I saw a video of you and you Did ice climbing I'm planning to go to Alaska and I would like to do ice climbing Go for it. It's it's the best my Favorite activities It was unique in that sense too Like it was an exotic thing because it's not something we have available to us all the time I will say when we went to Alaska And I guess we're trying to get too lost on it, but we've hit 60 minutes. So we're fine. We have time today We just have to go to the gym and train for Kilimanjaro. We've been doing the treadmill for two hours or whatever Anyway, so ice climbing there are glaciers everywhere in Alaska not everyone is necessarily a mountain worth of weight But when we went to like Whittier, there was like the 27 glaciers tour like literally you go on one hour tour You see 26 glaciers. Can you believe that but with this though? We went to matt news could glacier for that ice climbing area, which is just a bit north of anchorage Probably by about an hour and a half. You can take the long way. I guess to Denali that way the long way But they just took us out there and you had to pay a little thing for a company I'm sure you can put up the name of the company nova nova adventures They are so good. The guide was really nice and knowledgeable We're still friends with him and their price was very reasonable compared to prices in in Alaska and they do other stuff too I think they do rafting as well But uh, it's nice. I think the glacier now they don't let people out there on their own the glacier Obviously a big big tall area of ice you only really see the top and a lot of the ice on the front You'll see is like it's like liquid. It's moving. Obviously. It's ice. So it's not moving fast but I mean over hundreds of years, etc It's got motion it'll recede and melt and once you get onto the thicker part though of the glacier It's gonna be hundreds of feet deep at that point and as a result of that water sometimes has to drain from the top to the bottom And drills these little holes down through people have been falling into them and getting in a lot of trouble or dying dying I mean that's so they started to shut it down But the ice climbing was great crampons were a lot of fun They took us on some light stuff if you do have a little bit of mountaineering experience You heard me like we're talking about trying to figure out earlier to hold the rock down If you can just be familiar with some of your knots and on such Yes, so now I was gonna say even if you don't have experience rock climbing or mountaineering Go for it. It's very straightforward because they do the knots for you. It's it's no it was just like Yeah, it was just like a figure eight knots It's you're not going to do any really difficult walls most of the the two three walls that we did were And it was just you and I I think they took us on two or three special spots If you had a group of five or six though, you might not do a lot of climbing For a half day on the glacier because you have to get there get back, etc But um the experience was fantastic To be honest with you and I would say definitely definitely follow through on it Yeah, so so definitely check it out Mark grew up in phoenix moved out 20 years ago to minnesota Okay, so I think that's why I got confused because I you said minnesota. That's why I kept going with minnesota But ever done before any recommendations so recommendation like we said with the with ice climbing The company is going to provide you with all the necessary gear including crampons the helmets Even the boots So really all you have to worry about is your backpack and then being warm on the glacier because even if it's summer We did it was it july july or between july and august It's still very cold on the glacier and then depends on the on the weather outside. You can get chilly So definitely make sure that you have some sort of athletic Pants and then even some layer underneath like underwear pants And then make sure you have some down jacket or fleece jackets You don't really need a rain jacket and then wear gloves Definitely gloves and then sunglasses for sure Because on the glacier the reflection of the lights really makes it hard to see people say sunscreen as well Because obviously the sun does damage to your skin that way as well I agree totally though with the gloves gloves Some lightweight ones with the pants though certainly don't dress like you're going on to a snowmobile Big and baggy is not the way to go here because you're gonna have really sharp shoes on that'll catch and rip everything You want a couple of layers of tight stuff and I don't necessarily mean spandex I don't mean that type but but you don't want baggy stuff You want something that you're a bit mobile in but that's pretty close to your skin Otherwise you're gonna catch it on your legs every time you step and you're not gonna have fun Yeah, so it was pretty funny for us when we were in alaska Especially the day we went ice climbing because the day before Um, I don't know like we shared the story before but we were up in alaska for one month And we were working from up there the plan in the beginning was to only spend four days We ended up spending one one there and by way of planning for four days We only packed like just not too much close for four days So the day before ice climbing we went on this hike and it was crazy raining And so all of our clothes were wet so on portage pass We didn't have any clothes to ice climb in so we kind of just went to to the public laundry Very very early in the morning and then we had to to wash and dry everything including our shoes Like literally I threw my insoles out insoles and I threw I literally threw the merrell My hiking boots into the dryer because otherwise I wouldn't have anything to wear They gave us boots anyway, so just like two dummies Two dummies who leave the campsite at 3 a.m Hey, but we felt committed to our cause there And you'd rather in those cases have the confidence and comfort going into the adventure being prepared than like God I'm going to be miserable all day. Yeah Francisco if you have any other questions This is just like what I have in mind for right now But you have any specific questions let us know mark we used to camp at tonto creek near the horton creek trailhead That was the one we wanted to do you're gonna start at the top and go down and then back up Was our plan? Yeah, that's that's what we wanted to do on sunday, but obviously just like They're having enough luck with it. We're gonna go do it again. I mean this. Yeah, you can't be bested by it Yeah, okay, so dreams don't ever use a gatorade bottle. We go biking and my husband for some reason keeps using gatorade Okay, he probably starts out with the blazer freeze and then he ends up using the uh lemon lime rush I'm sure at the end Oh my god No, because that's the same thing too is after this story that we are not telling you about right now Something similar to what you're alluding to you will learn that's about to you was about to it didn't happen dreams You will learn that also women women also use gatorade bottles. I don't Just kidding. I'm just kidding. Mark Nelson used to live 75th avenue bell Minnesota went career change Sisters still lives in Arizona near Prescott. Oh nice. We love Prescott Now Prescott was the area that we went to to when we when we went Climb rock climbing on our own for the first time because we used to go we go with we went with a group We took classes and usually someone sets up the anchor for us to do top rope climbing But the first time we set our own anchor our ronald was in Prescott Okay, so let's see No purex laundry is what dreams are saying there I use or microsane. I use a purex laundry jug. I was like, all right gets that some of that bleach left over Just just so there's no mixing up the cause there.  Thank you so much Um, and I label what it's some masking tape So you can see the labels are just something very obvious So we'll be doing a live regarding our content going to laska. So I'm sure we'd be happy to do so I don't know if we've had a plan to cover it so much. Obviously. There's a lot of content there So much. Yeah, right, but we I don't think we really wanted to hijack all of our stuff because we're still trying to build and just talk to people Yeah, we try to beat them over the head with just that one thing Um, we would feel kind of like we were doing a disservice to it, but if people want to hear about that We're happy to talk about it. We're happy Because I tell I was telling Alex that I mean, we really enjoyed this live chat and we were really happy to see people watching But at the same time, I don't want us to make it All the time about us, you know what I mean? I don't want it to be We're doing this and we we wanted to be an open conversation where you know, you share your stories I mean, I'm loving all of the stories. No mobile in minnesota, florida It's it's fun to hear what other people have to say and also learn from from each other I don't want it to be just like we're doing Kilimanjaro But if you guys want us to talk about it, we'll talk about it. I talk about it all day Because I say just last night actually we saw our original flights were canceled and we finally got our money back for them and booked our Our new flights to Kilimanjaro just last night again So we've got all that and we've got to figure out probably we're going to go back to our doctors for the last round of stuff We need to get medicine for or Vaccines for but other than that. I think our trip is bookended now We have to figure out when we're doing a safari somewhere in the middle there But really getting there and such is the big stuff and we've got that scheduled now But I was so bummed yesterday because the initial flights Well, we we we booked the first one with turkish airlines and they just canceled the flight like not because of the pandemic I did just cancel it And this the flight that I got yesterday was double the price And I was so bummed because the first one literally a round trip was 800 dollars and I was like, yes, that's a steal That's definitely why they canceled it. I think that's godly why they canceled it. They were like, whoa Well, it's time to make money again Francisco. Thank you so much. You guys are awesome. I appreciate all the info Recommendations to stay hotel cabins airbnb. I haven't booked my state um, man, that's a Well, it just depends. Where are you? Where are you adventuring? Huh? I wanted to show this picture. You're talking about the snowmobile I have a picture that I want to hold up at some point. Yeah Francisco, you know what? Send me a message Send me a message on instagram if you have instagram or send me an email on we are trekking pals at gmail.com People was just talking the other day about how do I talk about getting plans for Alaska because Alaska content's been doing good Yeah, but um, she was literally talking about making a video about all the stuff you're asking right now My short and quick if I could yeah, yeah, it's just uh, Alaska traveling regions everywhere's far apart So don't plan to be an anchorage and ensured and until Keaton all in the same day It's not happening and you're probably not going to want to make three or four mile drive everywhere Again everywhere's far apart. So plan. Here's what i'm doing in this area. Here's what i'm doing in this area Here's what i'm doing in this area plan to hit the whole region and do everything there before moving on If you have an out and back maybe you can be smart and mix it up So you do a little bit on your way out and back in but yeah traveling takes time You're gonna need a car as a result of that my is my opinion And especially because highway one on alaska takes you from anchorage down to seward And for most of the time around the water there if you cut right across the lake It takes like five minutes or the inlet of water, but you have to go around and it's a one lane highway There's an accident.  They're helpful when you when you have to handle it something like that So yeah, just send me an email francisco. I I always do this like whatever if you have questions just send me i'll send you recommendations and Also, I I received some messages from some people saying that They were having a very hard time finding rentals in alaska right now I think you're saying everywhere right now glacial national park grantee tones yellowstone like all of the big Uh hot destinations for summer People are having real hard time finding rentals. They can't find cars. They can't find RVs.  I don't know um, okay so Your videos are so helpful Your video was the first that popped up when I was searching travel to morocco during pandemics So keep up your great work. Thank you. Thank you dreams. Awesome. Thanks mark. I see you're saying you're gonna step off I'll say bye to you since I see your stuff and uh, yeah, I'll tell you We'll maybe we'll try to sneak some kilimanjaro stuff into our next area And then we'll just see if people are okay with it or not But uh, we're happy to talk about some of that stuff.  Absolutely. Maybe different video sequence only pre Sure. Yeah, kilimanjaro content differently. Go ahead. Sorry. Yeah. No, I was just gonna say I know we we usually say that for these lives we go for one hour So if you guys have to drop off totally understandable, but we'll just Hang out here for a little bit more and see if there are any questions and then by the time the sun is down, which is Not too long ago. Not too long Which is happening pretty soon Yeah, so Yeah, and then we'll get to our gym stuff that we have to do anyway So so that's part of the training that we do for kilimanjaro We just go on the treadmill and we have different intervals on an incline The last one was uh, it was pretty hard two hours. I made up a pretty rough schedule actually So we'll ease it up this time. Yeah, let's do that dreams My moroccan friend is saying let us guess the type of car There you go Don't don't watch any of the instagram stories. They might be leaked from time to time. No, there's nothing So, yeah, you know what since we have seven people here if you guys if you guys the Want to guess the type of the car leave it in the comments. Maybe we can do like Some gift card or something like that tech on titans or we can do like A gift card But i'm not going to share right now the answer. We'll just take the guesses write them down You have to write down for me. I just wanted to show. Oh, here's a little video of habiba sitting in a pot of water on the side of the road Can it focus on me focus focus focus? anyway Anywho She's got a little pot in the hot springs in the side of the snow That's our Idaho Probably one of our better pictures from Idaho that we actually had a really good time with So we have to take notes of these So put in Alex putting you but it's gonna be difficult. How am I gonna get Your emails to reach out and such Oh, you just answered right here, right? I don't know right now. You don't have to add it to the line Not right now. I'll just take note. You know what? I'll just take note of the correct answer By that i'm telling you none of them are Warmer Oh, I don't know how to say like warmer or not to a car Anyway, we'll we'll leave you with that little So what else how about how about we just say by next thursday, we'll tell people what the car is Sure. Yeah on here at least even if we don't make a video if you show up here next week We'll tell you what our new car is And maybe we'll show you a little bit if it maybe we'll we'll drive it over here and we can finish up in the car Sounds good. All right, mike Have a good night Yep. Ah, yeah, we gotta do stuff anyway. All right. I'm gonna say bye to everybody and I'm gonna like lean this way Very nice hanging out. You're leaving? No, I'm not going anywhere Okay It's crazy. I keep trying to think of boxcar since you have made references Hey, he's the one saying but I'm not going anywhere. I'm gonna wait for the sun to go down Oh, I gotta give you the hi-ho silver away Come here crazy If you guys have seen ace ventura when nature calls me is that hi-ho silver He just rode past Yes, he does that all the time. Okay, so Look at the kiddos. There you go. Hey, we have three more minutes of content to burn up So look at look at others. Oh boy Okay Okay, any any other comments questions What no, I just want to see there's still a couple of people watching so Okay Well, then if not Why Africa this weekend could be fun north carolina has a burn Ben in place That's the worst when you go camping and you can burn stuff Yeah, it's a bummer why africa we wanted to do the seven summits a long time ago Not that that's died really but just Hey, like you see all the stories about the top of evers being so popular We're like some places that were otherwise awesome to go now Sometimes I've lost some of their appeal because like everybody like by the way there Or for that matter just go there anyway, even if they totally deserve it There's just a lot of people kill them in jarro with the glacier Perhaps disappearing off the top in the next generation or two which obviously there'll still be ice But it just won't be classified as a glacier But they use that to get a lot of fresh water up there when you're hiking they get water from the glacier up there Some of those things will become less and less available over the years That seemed like a good one to get out of the way because it might not be the same in a generation or two Um, and it might change over the course of our generation Uh Other ones I think elbrus you had on there It was a good elevation the people that were going to take us up elbrus for a good price We're going to give us some training. Yeah, elbrus was good too Elbrus is the highest peak in in europe which happens to be in russia A lot of people think that's a high speak in europe is Mont Blanc in france But it's actually russia and it's pretty cheap compared to it's cheaper than kill him in jarro Getting to russia is not the most expensive flight and then Doing the climb right there is not that expensive, but that was the first one I want I don't know how we switched from wanting to do elbrus to kill him in jarro He's climbing and versus and not as well, but um, like I said with the north of glacier stuff, obviously, uh What am I trying to say australia would be an easy one We're told people could drive to the highest peak of australia So that wouldn't be that bad Yeah, it's just scratch on the edge But also seemed like a good novel way to get out and do something Big right and I think that's big. I'm excited to do it. I really am excited to do it My moroccan friend dreams dreams. Where are you from in morocco? I'm actually glad you're going to africa. You don't see that on youtube as much. I can't wait for those videos Thank you. I'm really, you know, uh, I'm excited for tanzania It's gonna be great It's gonna be a lot of videos a lot of work too to get those videos in place, but uh I'm really looking forward to go to morocco at some point and you know, just make videos up there in morocco Just even though about to call forever and talk about how good the rock climbing is there as well so that would certainly be A straight winner. Yeah, and even I would love to go rock climbing in morocco Tarja Tarja is a good area for rock climbing. Who knows maybe we could ship the mystery machine over there too Mystery machine our mystery machine Which is also the name of the scooby-doo That's why So, okay. Well, awesome Habiba's procrastinating because she doesn't want to go. I don't want to go work out I'm trying to I'm trying to be tolerant In the clever way, you're not really being procrastinating. I know that we're looking forward to this, but yeah Casa Blanca My parents moved to vie when I was 10 years old Rocking at heart and virginian as well. Oh That's fantastic That's nice. I'm actually almost curious. Where did you move to first when you came to the states?  That's it was straight to virginia wasn't that's like where you're settling Yeah, okay. It must have been a different experience to to move here You know when you were younger Must be fun Okay. All right. I'm ready. We're gonna go It was very nice chatting with you We dragged this a little bit longer, but it's always fun and nice and So happy to to to be able to chat with all of you And we will see you guys next Thursday again 6 p.m. Arizona time take care of yourself Enjoy this long weekend. Most importantly and We love you so very much Stay classy in San Diego. All right. Bye. Bye dreams. Bye fomats. I don't know who else is still here But you guys take care and we'll see you very soon. Bye Bye


process, at least to me, is usually pretty scary. There's lots of issues getting access to the right production data. And usually, when this is happening, you're under lots of pressure to fix the thing causing the outage.  And you're under immense pressure without access to a lot of data. And it's just very, very challenging as a developer. So let's take a look at some of those challenges and how we might be able to mitigate those with better tooling. So to start off with that, let's first take a look at a monolithic application. In a monolithic application, you're trying to deploy primarily one large service, which may be talking to some databases and some other back end systems. And generally, you're trying to look at things like, oh, I forgot to add some particular logging or metric. Your program just crashed, and you don't really know why and what's going on. And the famous line for everybody, it works on my computer. I don't understand why it's not working in production. Or actually, I don't even understand why it's not working on someone else's machine. So this is a pretty, pretty classic set of problems. Now, you add in the fact that you start moving to microservices, and you start having the problem for monoliths on every service. But you also start having a new set of problems. Why can't my services talk to each other? It was a lot louder. And did an upstream API change, caused some blocks to happen, and which services are making this transaction slow? And this isn't meant to be a comprehensive list, but it's just supposed to show you the breadth of the types of problems you're going to run into. One of the cool and interesting things is that Kubernetes is making the deployment of microservices a lot easier. We actually see the number of services is exploding. Right in this diagram, you're seeing how this problem works for two services. In reality, what we actually see is something like this. This is actually an actual service diagram we pulled from an actual cluster running a workload. And if you go take a look at popular other services like Netflix, and others, you'll see there are hundreds of services that are talking to each other. So if you're trying to debug this, it can be a pretty big challenge. So I went through a lot of information over there, but let's summarize them with some of the key problems and kind of bucket them loosely so we can understand what those look like. So one of the problems is collecting the right data. And an example of this is getting the right log lines and metrics, and figuring out why two pods can't talk to each other. Then there is the flexibility or rather the inflexibility of analysis, which is your program just died, and you'd really want to understand why and you wanted to be able to analyze that. And then obviously the classic problem doesn't happen in my dev environment. And then there's also just contextualizing the information and understanding why this problem is happening and the context of where it's happening. And this is like, oh, I deployed my service and something broke. Did it actually break because it would change in the different service? So contextualizing it with other updates in your API. And also figuring out which of these services is making a particular transaction slow is another part of contextualizing information. And with that, let's quickly summarize some potential solutions. And this is by no means a comprehensive list. And there are many different ways to solve these problems. So one of the things around collecting the right data that we'll talk about today is doing auto telemetry with EVPF, which is something we do in the project we work on, Pixi. And then to deal with the analysis, it's trying to create scriptable and API-driven interfaces to give that level of flexibility that's necessary. And the third thing is to try to build a more Kubernetes-native system that can understand actual entities and Kubernetes so that we can actually build an entire experience for debugging. With that, I will move forward to quickly talk about Pixi, which is a project that Natalie and I work on. It was contributed by New Rolec to the Cloud Native Sandbox earlier this year. And Pixi is an observability platform for developers. And we kind of have three key things that we work on. The first one is doing this auto telemetry with EVPF. And we'll see some of this in a demo. But basically, we can go and automatically instrument an app without a priori adding code. The second is building a fully scriptable and API-driven interface. And the third one's being Kubernetes-native. And with that, I'll hand it over to Natalie to quickly go over a demo. Thanks, Zane. Yeah, so we're going to do a lightning demo here. And if anyone's interested in learning more about Pixi's capabilities, you should also come to our talk on Friday at 11. And right now, we're just getting the display set up so that I can actually see what I'm doing when I'm demoing. No, we're good, yeah. But yeah, as Zane said, I'm also an engineer working on Pixi and really excited to be here today. OK, so first, we're going to show you a slightly sped up video of how to deploy Pixi. We're showing this because we think that part of the challenge with collecting the right data is that it's just so hard to instrument our systems. And EVPF provides this amazing opportunity where we can automatically collect data without the need for manual instrumentation. So while we sped up this video a little bit, it usually takes about two or three minutes to deploy Pixi onto your cluster. I think that the key thing here is that in just one command, we're automatically deploying all these EVPF probes to your cluster to collect a rich set of telemetry data, which will then show in the UI demo next. And kind of an interesting fact about this is that the Pixi team was at KubeCon in 2018. And LinkerD, which is another really awesome project, gave a demo that heavily inspired this deployment flow. And we hope that deployments of observability and other types of infrastructure in Kubernetes can get a lot simpler. So deploying. Oh, it finished. OK, great. All right. Now let's switch over to the UI. So OK, I deployed Pixi to my cluster. What can I do now? So that was a video of deploying Pixi to this exact cluster. We can see right off the bat that we're seeing traffic between various Kubernetes services. We can list out the various nodes in my cluster.  And this is where the Kubernetes native part of these systems that we want to build come in, where if you know the system you're running on, like Kubernetes, you can attach much more helpful context to debugging Kubernetes-specific problems. So that's why we want a reason about entities like Pod or service. And so Kubernetes helps us do that. So when we cluster our service graph here, we can see that there's two main apps running on here. And I heard in a bug report that customers are finding my online boutique to be slow. So let's dig into why that might be. We're going to go into our services and just widening this serviceability. These are some of the services that are running in my cluster. And we want to actually sort this by latency and see which ones are the slow ones. So we can see that this checkout service right here is taking almost a second in some of its requests. And that is heavily unexpected to me as a developer. So I'm going to click into this and try to figure out more about what's going on. I can see these HTTP requests and errors in latency. And all of these things, I didn't have to instrument my system manually. It's just being collected through the EBPF probes that were deployed via that simple PX deploy command. I can see the inbound traffic. I can see that the traffic coming from this IP is actually a lot slower on average than the traffic coming from the other IP. There's only one pod here. So let's drill down into this pod and see if we can figure out more about what's going on. And this is a lightning demo. So we're not actually going to solve this, just trying to show off what I might do in a true incident. So we can see lots of both infrastructure level metrics as well as application level metrics in this view. And one of the things that we're most excited about is that we recently added continuous profiling to Pixi. So you can actually see performance flame graphs of not just the fact that something's slow, but which function is slow, which function is the problem. In this particular case, we don't really have one function that stands out a super large amount. But actually, we have used this in our own production cases when we were like, wow, that function is like really slow and we didn't even know it. One point that Zane was talking about is the idea that we want things to be API driven. We want things to be scriptable. We want to be able to compose data pipelines together of different pieces. And we don't want it to be in some walled garden that's like very hard to access. So one thing that we did when we built Pixi was we made sure that everything that you see in all the views that I showed is generated by a script. And we have client APIs for this. So you can build Slack bots with Pixi data and things like that. So just to kind of demonstrate, we can see that these are some of my HTTP requests running in the cluster. And we can see headers and request body and things like that. And let's say I just want to do a simple filter and only get a particular request path. Oops, I pressed the wrong button. Okay, well, I'm probably running a little long anyway, but what would have happened is I would have added a filter to filter all of these requests down to a particular endpoint and then I could drill down into those particular requests. I don't think the technical gods are blessing us today with the system. Okay, great. So back to this presentation. The thing is we are so excited to be part of the CNCF because of the quality of projects that the CNCF has. We're thrilled that these projects, like Prometheus and Open Tracing, like now we get to be part of the CNCF with them. And they are also solving these problems in really important ways. We have Open Tracing, which is making a standard for data that people can use to query and analyze all of their data together. That's huge, huge for flexibility of analysis. We have systems like Prometheus, which are, it's a world-class time series database and it's so easy to use and it's incredibly scriptable with PromQL and so you can make highly composable data pipelines with Prometheus. Fluent D for logging, huge for default observability on Kubernetes, it's so much easier to get in all this information today when you have an incident than it used to be. Linker D, as I mentioned, they directly inspired a large part of our architecture. They in Envoy, with the service mesh approach, it has huge impact for observability. We would love to invite you all to come to our happy hour tonight. It's sponsored by New Relic where both Dan and I work. It's gonna be at the Intercontinental and the whole Pixie team will be there and a large part of our community and we would love to see you there. Also, here are some talks that we are gonna be attending. We're gonna be attending way more than just this but here are some of them that we're really excited about. As mentioned before, we're actually giving a different talk on Friday at 11 so we would love to see you there. And finally, if you wanna check out the source code, Pixie's fully open source, please check out our GitHub and we would love to see your issues or feature requests. Thanks everyone.