This is my friend Andrea

I think I really offended her the first time we met. I can never remember what I said to her, but she’s always jogging my memory. She laughs with lingering amazement and reminds me, “All us first years were sitting in a van about to head to Cherry Creek and you and the other senior leaders were all headed to Abbo's. Your stuff was in our van and you walked over, threw open the door and looking at us with an intense stare, said "Any of you touch my stuff and I will kill you." I remember thinking, "who the hell is this guy?"

I swear, I don’t know what goes through my head when I first meet people. Things just come out without even thinking about it. But Andrea is a good sport, and I quickly realized that I would be a fool to let her pass along her way with out becoming her friend first. Andrea is so funny and it is so easy to feed off of her energy. She’s always talking with a different accent and down for an epic adventure. She circumnavigated Santa Cruz Island with me on my boat for a week. She taught me a lot about a lot of things on that trip. Right now she is riding bicycles around New Zealand with her husband Brian. It’s the first leg in their “around the world honey moon.”

When we first met, we were in Colorado for a week or so training for our summer trips to come. There are always so many amazing people in Colorado and we were all having a blast staying at my co-leader Nicole’s house in boulder. This house was anything but ordinary; nobody knew who lived there and who was just passing through. The door was always open and every time you walked in, there would be five new people nobody had ever seen before watching sex in the city on the tube. This was always on because there was no cable and the sex in the city series were the only DVDs in the house.

Six of us ventured out one night and we began to paint the town red. We were all separated amidst the chaos and shenanigans that ensued and that was pretty standard. I will never forget stumbling back through neighborhood after neighborhood at five in the morning with Andrea trying to find our temporary home. A Volkswagen van was stopped at a stop sign and we asked for a lift to the other side of town. It was a young couple and they obliged. We hopped in and sat in the back next to their three year old daughter. What they were doing driving around at five in the morning picking up hitchhikers with their daughter in the back would remain a mystery to us. The only thing we knew was that as weird as it was, it would save us about a forty-five minute walk. They dropped us off a block away. We thanked them again, and walked towards the dawn. As we approached the house, we saw four figures walking in the middle of the street towards us, dressed in bed sheets transformed in to togas! Our band was reunited again! We didn’t even ask how they ended up in togas, for anything can happen in Colorado.