Last (lifted) leg

On Wednesday Special Ed and I took a jaunt up North to Newport Bay where the Orange County Hump Hash was holding their weekly rendezvous of hashing goodness.
Much like the Porter's Pub hash, they use each of their checks as holds for the pack to come together. Surprisingly enough though, without the Q&A sections, the pack was still able to keep moving at a fairly reasonable pace. Only near the end, when a late arriving EO was playing catch up, did we have a couple longer holds.
Coming to the On-In itself was a load of fun as well as there are some serious runners in the O.C. hash and I took the opportunity to expend a fair amount of built up energy from the plane flights in all out drags with Howdy Do Me, Prick and another chap whose name I cannae recall at the moment (which is funny because he was the most competitive of the lot!).
We circled at a harriette's place with loads of top quality beer and some of the standard snack mish-mash. For the $5 fee, it was an impressive spread of drinks, reminiscent of Special Ed's beer-meistering in the mid-00's back in Las Vegas.
I was talking with Afterbirth about the beer and the run fee and she said that they have been working extremely hard at keeping the fee at $5, with a pack in the mid-20's. Hoarding coupons for the local big liquor store Bev' Mo (think Lee's Discount Liquor), buying seasonals that are being clearanced and being creative with their selection has really paid off.
It was a nice change from the standard piss-beer (Bud, Miller, Coors, etc.) that I had seen at most U.S. hashes (reference Tiger for most S.E. Asian hashes). I wonder if we can pull together that kind of resourcefullness back at home. Have a couple cases of PBR/ML for the down-downs and lighter beer drinkers, then buy some true good stuff at cut-rate prices (already did some looking, you can get bottled beer for less than $1 a bottle if you are crafty) and beef up the Las Vegas stock.
Over this past weekend, SpEd and I drove through Death Valley to Ely, NV to help out a friend of his who was running the Concessons stand at Cave Lake for their Fire & Ice event. Snow/Ice carving competition with a hell of a fireworks display at the end of the last night. We even got put onto a 100 year old train with the governor and one of our senators for a night of over-drinking and watching them shoot fireworks from the moving train.
It was special, not only for being able to ride in an old coal-powered locomotive, but this is (at the event coordinator's best guess) the first time fireworks were ever fired from a moving locomotive. Well hey, that's pretty damn cool.
On Monday I drove into Las Vegas, roughly at 4:30 a.m.
After dropping Special Ed off at his house, I drove downtown to Fremont St. and walked around for a couple hours, ending up on top of the El Cortez parking garage watching the sun rise over the valley.
I guess that means I am officially home, but I may not do my return hash just yet. I was talking with my brother about driving out to California again this weekend to visit some family and I might throw in a couple hashes while I'm there. Who knows...
The world is wide open.