Fitzdog Radio - Solo Episode - Episode 1081

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Fires are closing in on my house! Solo podcast where I catch you up on my 3-week trip to South Africa. Follow Greg on Instagram @GregFitzsimmonsExclusive $35-off Carver Mat at AuraFrames.com. Use code FITZDOG at checkout to save!My Bookie: https://mybookie.website/FITZWatch my special "You Know Me" on YouTube! http://bit.ly/FitzYouKnowMeAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

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sportsbook worth a celly, and an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager, Ontario only. Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connects Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. Bet MGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Happy New Year and welcome to Fitts Dogg Radio 2025. Coming up on our 15th year of doing this podcast. Week in, week out. I don't give a shit if I'm in Turkey, South Africa, Chile.

I do it. I get it done. Except I've missed a couple in the last six weeks because of my extensive travel and my burnout. I was a little burnt out. I needed three weeks and I got it. I just got back from South Africa yesterday and I went with my family.

We'll get into that in a minute, but the pressing issue right now is we're on fire! Fire on the mountain, baby. I'm in Venice Beach and the fires are about seven miles away right now, blowing kind of in this direction but we got a lot of concrete. We're not... this is more the city here in Venice. The Palisades has some woods, has some trees, and then we've got Santa Monica in between us and us and the Palisades so I think we're fine. I'm 95% sure we're fine. But the air is fucked. I can't breathe. My eyes are burning my car. I just washed it. And it's already covered in ashes. And yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy.

It's very sad that so many people have lost their homes. I know what it's like to own a home. My whole savings, my whole retirement, everything is in this house. And I don't know if you know this, but a lot of the insurance companies canceled fire insurance for Californians, like literally six months ago. And so a lot of these people who thought they had a life

after retirement are now gonna be fucking Walmart greeters. If you see somebody stand out front of Walmart and they've got, their hair is singed, yeah, they're from the Palisades. And it's kind of a wealthy area for the most part. So maybe people are less sad. It's not like when a hurricane hits a trailer park in Mississippi and those people,

man, they really got nowhere to go. But I'm not minimizing it. It's very sad. It's scary because it's 0% controlled right now as as I'm recording this which is on the 8th. This podcast should come out on January 9th. And it's definitely getting into my chest. I had, you know, and I was in South Africa and I had a chest infection all I could think is okay good going back to LA you know we live a mile from the beach so there's

and the wind blows in from the ocean so it's like very nice air here I was like good I'm gonna clear out my lungs and then we're flying we're flying into LAX and I look up and I was like, what's that orange spot and that smoke like next to my fucking house? I could see it from the plane. I had no idea there was a fire. Like no, we were in the air for, I flew for 24 hours straight, there was no newsfeed.

I didn't know we were on fire. And then you come down and you're like, Jesus Christ. Immediately, like we're driving from the airport, you could see the flames from Lincoln Boulevard coming from the airport. And we got home and the wind is like, it's been windy over the years. I've never felt wind like I felt last night.

You could barely stand up, it was so strong. over the years, I've never felt wind like I felt last night. You could barely stand up, it was so strong. It blew my metal gates open on my fence. I had to put cinder blocks up to keep the gates from being thrown open by the wind. It's a hellstorm, people. And maybe we'll catch on. Venice. You know, maybe it's gonna hit those homeless tents

are a little oily and dry. They may go up like a fuckin' tinderbox and just a straight line down Lincoln Boulevard, one after the other, straight to my house. Oh my God, my niece is very sweet Julia she invited us to stay in her house in San Diego if things get bad she's going away for the weekend so maybe we'll go to San Diego for the weekend why not the fuck The car is gassed up. I fully gassed the car.

I got all my vintage porn magazines in the trunk, hidden under the wheel well. Don't tell the family. That's all I need to save. fucking Valerie, Valerie Bertinelli from the 80s. Adrian Barbeau, remember her? Yeah. In the in the wheel well of the Subaru. That's it. The only people that are gonna survive this are the lesbians. You can see a line of Subarus heading out of LA. Softball equipment in the back, indigo girls blaring from the windows, and me.

Could be a good script idea. Anyway. So I'm back from South Africa. We had an unbelievable time. It was an adventure. It was a lot of traveling with a lot of people. There's a perfect amount of people to travel with on a three-week trip and 19 is not that amount. That would be a large amount of people to be traveling with. I did my final night which was two nights ago. I can't even keep track how many days have gone by when you fly. But I did a show at the final night after three

weeks. I did a show in Cape Town at this place called the Arm Chair Theater and my sister-in-law got me on stage she's a television executive and she knew some comedians they got me on stage you know I headlined this this club and it was such an amazing experience I was so fucking nervous I had all my family coming in first of all, they made me nervous my family. It's there's there was 1917 or 19 people traveling and I would say 16 of them have severe ADHD So it was hurting kittens the entire time Everybody got distracted. Everybody, you know, my sister-in-law, the one that got me on stage, Pat, who I

**** love. She's one of my favorite people in the world, but I mean, can't go from A to B without stopping and going, she's South African and going like, oh, well, Greg, there's a lovely cappuccino place. There's always a shop we got to get a croissant from or there's a view. But it's always something that's in the moment that you enjoy and is worth it. But it's always a detour. And she's always, always late. So we show up to the house and we're everybody's coming to the show.

And that breaks my rule. My rule is don't bring people to my shows. Period. It's always a hassle. It's always a distraction. And I'm nervous because I've never worked in the this hemisphere of the earth before. And I don't know how my jokes are going to go over. And I'm trying to think about what I can say. And then they all make me late. They all make me late. And then we get to the show and my nephew, who's 11, is now in the showroom. I'm like, what the fuck is going on here?

I can't let, the other comedians don't wanna perform in front of 11 year olds. It's not fair to them. Anyway, so that got handled, but then there weren't enough tickets and now everybody's sitting in the front row. And it was just it all made me very stressed out. And so I went up. And the other comedians could not have been more welcoming. They it was just it

was so weird. It was like being in New York or LA or San Francisco anywhere there's a comedy scene it felt exactly the same. It was just a bunch of funny smart people who were a little bit fucked up just kind of taking me into their little scene. It was amazing and a couple really funny dudes. This guy Keenan Cerf was I gave him him my number I go dude if you ever make it to the States hit me up I'll try to set you up with some shows or whatever really funny dude and then the Ambrose Ambrose urine or something urine or urine I told him to hit me up as well.

I think I gave them both my number. I think I gave them both my number. But they just were, it was just so much fun. And first of all, it's intimidating to go up. It's intimidating to be in, you know, Biloxi, Mississippi, and have to go on stage after a local comedian who's doing references about the town and about Mississippi and you've never been there and you're like, fuck, how

do I follow this? How about being in a different nation, a different continent where the comics are going up and doing jokes about fucking, you know, language, you know, Afrikan and all this. And so I'm back there going, I didn't know what was gonna work. So it went well. It went really well, I have to say. I was really happy with it.

Family loved it, crowd loved it. They called me back up to do an encore, which I didn't do because I didn't understand why that's why they were calling me up. They brought me back up on stage and I just kind of like I shit on a guy in the front row and I talked to the host and then I fucking left. I'm not not doing an encore. I was lucky to get away with the time I did. If it was America, I could have done an encore but I was

like all my references I kept like just throwing jokes out, you know. But anyway, now that I did the show, I can write off the entire trip on my taxes. Actually, I don't know. I think I can write off some of it. I got to call my call my Jews, find out what I can do. There was some Americans in the crowd which was annoying they came up to me that I'm from Dallas I go I don't I don't want to talk to you I want to talk to these these black people from South Not the white guy from Dallas, you know? Anyway, tried to drive a lot. I got into an accident.

I ran into a pillar in an underground parking garage and crushed in the side of the van that we'd been driving. And here's the great part is it was a Hertz rent-a-car and I took full insurance I got the total insurance maximum insurance and then I turned the car in I said well I guess it's covered they go well no well there's a $1,700 deductible I go what I got the maximum insurance. They're like, yeah, but there's a, you gotta read the fine print.

And I go, oh, so this is a ripoff. And they goes, yeah, pretty much. So now I'm on the hook for like 1,700 bucks on this fucking rental car. Plus my phone, I've no, my phone is probably gonna cost me another 1,700 bucks because we got a different SIM card, but it seems that my phone wasn't flipped over into the right I think I've

been using Verizon American domestic minutes the entire time and it's gonna be a lot of money I think and now my phone won't even work in this state in the States I can't text everything's fucked up. I just I got off the plane in South Africa I was jet-lagged and I just went up to a guy It was like a booth with a guy selling SIM cards and I just had him do it and then I'd even saved the receipt I didn't even know what company I was with. It's chaos. I'm back and it's chaos. I have some shit I gotta clean up from the trip. Every time I, and I'm driving, South Africa's on the wrong side of the road.

And so it's a van, it's a long van, it's a 12 passenger van, it's a stick shift, and I'm driving on the wrong side of the road. And so, and then the directional, at least put the directional on the left side. You don't have to switch that to the right side as well. So every time I would be in an intersection about to make a turn, I would turn on the windshield wipers, which created more chaos for me as I'm trying to figure out which

direction I'm supposed to be going in. So yeah, having an accident was just a matter of time. So, we had fun, I was with my, it was all my wife's side of the family. Her brother John is like the biggest alpha male you've ever met. He's not aggressive. Here's the thing about him, he's just very capable. He's just very like like like he drives an old Land Rover Discovery that's like 25 years old. It's like a mashed 407 Jeep, flat windshield, boxy, stick

shift, no air conditioning, fucking clutch that it's like doing a leg squat every time you got to push the clutch in and and feel every bounce every bump on the road and so you know it was just it it was amazing having him on the trip because we went well I guess I just walked through the trip and everybody was great my my brother-in-law Shaheen was there he he was pitching in left and right. Anna, who's my wife's cousin who works for Martha Stewart as a chef, was cooking some of the meals which was incredible. My nephew Rowan, who was in the Navy SEALS program, didn't become a SEAL, got close. He was super manly. There was a lot of manly

guys on the trip. His friend Wes, Wes and Tess, who got mugged. There was a mug. South Africa is a dangerous fucking place. They got mugged on a hike. They were on a hiking trail and this gang pulled knives on them and took their shit. Took their wallet, took their phones, and then took one shoe from each of them and threw it over the side of the hill so that they couldn't chase them. How about that move? That's a pro move. And then they charged $5,000 on their PayPal account on their phone because

they they made them give the code the passcode for the phone and you have to lock everything like you can't leave a sock in the car or it's gonna get robbed John's camping equipment got stolen at one point he had it behind a locked gate in a driveway and that got robbed. Every house has like gates on the windows and you triple deadlock everything. It's fucking scary. And then there's guards who are, you know, private security.

If you live somewhere, you hire, there's the police and then you hire private security on top of that. It's kind of fucked up. It's a great country, I really love it. It's beautiful, physically the most, maybe the most beautiful place I've ever been in my life, physically.

And the people are amazing, but it's a very black and white, obviously there was apartheid just ended in 94 and there's a lot of division and then there's also a lot of other African immigrants that come to South Africa particularly Cape Town where we spent a lot of time and we were in the white segment of South Africa for the most part and especially in we were in a place called Sedgwick because it's said Sej field we're in Sej field which is just a just gorgeous unbelievable we were staying in this house this giant house overlooking a lagoon and the ocean water would come in at high

tide and then when it receded at low tide a giant sandbar would would come up about the size of a football field and you could swim to it from the house it was like a pretty good swim it wasn't a short swim but then you'd get out there and we would play rugby on the sandbar and there'd be tidal pools where you could find Hershey crabs, horseshoe crabs, whatever they're called, lay in these like little whirlpools and it was amazing. It was like I can't tell you. And then you can ride the lagoon out into the ocean. There's a channel that has a current

that takes you into the ocean, which has big fucking waves. And the lifeguards, let's just say they're a little laid back in South Africa. They're not really right on the water. They're kinda near the water roughly. And so you're on your own. If you get fucked in that ocean, good luck.

It's, and it's cold. South African water is cold. It's a cold plunge. Every time you go in the water, it's a cold plunge. And I spent a lot of time in the water. Some areas were warmer. There's the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic on the

two coasts of South Africa and the Indian Ocean side is a lot warmer but it's still cold. Anyway, so we started out. I got in. I did not have jet lag. I took a 12 hour flight to London and a 12 hour flight to South Africa. Took a sleeping pill at the beginning of each flight. Slept the whole fucking way. Got to South Africa, head clear. Did not experience jet lag at all the entire trip.

Cannot recommend that system enough. Fly, if you're flying somewhere, try to get your first leg long so you can sleep the entire time. Got in, yeah I was groggy, groggy enough that I fucked up my SIM card but I was I was fucked up because I went to Cleveland the week before and I caught a vicious chest cold in Cleveland. It was like 14 degrees in Cleveland. So I came home and I had about four days before we left for South Africa and I spent almost that whole time in bed wheezing, hacking, brutal. I won't call it a flu but it was a very

bad cold and then I went in that condition onto the plane and just drug myself. And then when I got to South Africa, I had the first, I would say the entire trip, I had chest issues. But I got some, I went to the pharmacy and I said, hey, can I get some cough syrup? I said, give me the strongest stuff you got got and the pharmacist walks to the back he comes back and he hands me a giant bottle that just says codeine on it and

then he winks at me I was like dude so I was like fucking Jay-Z I was just sizerping and just chillin everybody else is drinking booze. I'm doing a pound and a couple shots of codeine. It was nice. So that got me through most of it and that was in Sedgefield and then we went to then we went camping and we drive into it's called the Addo elephant park and you have to drive like two hours into the park where there's nothing just wilderness for two hours and then we get to a campsite and we're not glamping there's no cabin we got fucking tents we've got three cars know, with the 12 passenger van plus two land rovers and we've got a long ass

trailer filled with equipment. So everybody's setting up the tents. I proceed to have a major asthma attack. I've had asthma since I was a little kid. Hospitalized many times, really bad. I just have bad lungs. My uncle died of emphysema. My mom's got bad asthma. The Irish, it's a big Irish thing, having asthma. And so I get into the park and the chest cold mixed with some, some kind of allergens. And then there was all the wood fires at the campsite and I had a major asthma attack I could not move I was laying on my back fighting for breath and They started making plans after about six hours of this

They were gonna drive me to the emergency room. We're gonna drive out of the park and take him to the emergency room I had an inhaler I had Steroid inhaler all this stuff that I had gotten from a doctor. Nothing was working and I'm said the worst part is I'm sitting at the campsite and 17 other people are Sweating grunting putting up tent poles sweating, grunting, putting up tent poles, lighting fires, lugging, and I'm just sitting there like a puss. I felt like such a fucking beta. Like I'm surrounded by a lot of alpha people, very capable, very strong, and I'm just sitting there

wheezing like a little puss. And then I look over and there's another campsite that's next to ours that has another, they call them Afrikaans. They're the white Dutch related South Africans, the white people. And they're also building a structure. And then I look over and there's a woman sitting over there and she's got intellectual disabilities. And she's looking at me and I'm looking at her and we just kind of go like yeah I know. Yep I guess we got it good right sister? So anyway we go off into the bush and we are in the cars and there's elephants.

Big African elephants everywhere. And there's a couple watering holes and we pull up to the watering holes. At one of them there were, we counted, 70 African elephants. Babies. Big ones. Butting heads and wrestling and rolling around in the mud and making that elephant noise. I can't do it. But you know the elephant sound. It was incredible. There were zebra all over the place. We saw wildebeests and jackals. Did we see giraffe? No, we did not see giraffe. I wanted to see some giraffe. We did not see any cats. There were lions in the park. We did not see any of them. We saw a lot of what do they call the spring bucks and different types of deer and buck type things we saw there's no crocodiles saw a ton of shit it was it

was pretty amazing and so it was just weird seeing these animals like an elephant. I've seen elephants up close because I've been to the zoo, but it's very different when you see them in the wild. It's an experience that is... it's hard to describe. It's like you're seeing them the way they're supposed to be. You're in their land. It's not like at the Bronx Zoo where they're in your land. You're in their land. It's not like at the Bronx Zoo where they're in your land. You're in their land. And at one point they walked next to the cars, a single file line of elephants walked,

literally brushed up against the cars. And it's like, there's something about seeing them in the wild. It's almost like, yeah, it's great seeing a stripper in a strip club on the pole on stage, but there's also something really exciting about seeing that same girl standing out front smoking a cigarette there in a shift break they're taking her 10 and you go wow there she is in

the wild I'm it she's in my territory now or however the analogy goes um so what else uh we saw a lot of people on the side of the road there was a lot of native people who were and i remember george carlin talking about native americans how they not Native. There are no Native people. They came over the Bering Strait back when they were Asians that came over here and they they're not Native and it's insulting to call them Native Americans. He said the only Native people are Africans because I guess that's where life started. I don't know. But these but these people were the you know I think they're called the Cosa Cosa people or Coci and I think that's what Nelson Mandela was he was

from that tribe and they were out like we're driving and you just see how displaced they were there was they were having a circumcision ceremony, but their TP had plastic bags around it instead of fucking animal skin, and they were rubbing white chalk on themselves, and they were right off the side of the highway. It was very weird. There was like 30 men having a ceremony,

and my brother-in-law was like, yeah, that's like the circumcision ceremony. And African people walking along the side of the highway with nothing in their hands, and you're on a stretch of the highway where it's 10 miles to the next exit and it's 100 degrees out. They have no water bottle and they're walking along the side of the highway but they're not destitute they're not homeless they're just that's how they get around and it's

just it's so disorienting it's like it's like seeing a fucking Martian it's so disorienting. It's like seeing a fucking Martian. It's like how does this exist? How does this person exist in this modern world? There's a juxtaposition of wealth and poverty that is jarring in South Africa. And it felt weird about it. I was constantly aware of feeling privileged and feeling like, I don't know, you talk about colonialism and all that, but you go, yeah, but the Dutch and the Portuguese have been here for you know 500 years like at what point is it just they're part of this society but the societies have not merged they're still uh they're still uh a dissonance and there there's a um a bridge like there's neighborhoods that are very clearly demarcated. And I don't know, it was it was very weird. I never really could wrap my head around it. And then it's like, and then you see some of these Afrikan, these white Afrikan people,

and they're driving like a beat up Kia. And just looking at them like, you fucking, you've had 500 years of subjugating half the population, and that's the best you can do, a fucking Kia? Do you know the advantage you've had? And you couldn't get a, you're living in an apartment? You should be in a fucking house with Lamborghini

living off the backs of people. I mean, it's kind of like this country too. I guess I don't know. But when does it become normal? When is it when is it all? I don't know what I'm talking about anyway. So we're in Port Elizabeth and we saw all of that and we saw a scorpion and my nephew, my nephew was getting dressed and he's about 14 and he found a scorpion. It was about three inches long in his underwear. Right before he put them on, a fucking scorpion.

And he was a champ about it. He wasn't a pussy at all. He just was like, he still stayed, he was down in the basement. This was at the house in Cape Town. And he was a champ, you know? He kept sleeping in the basement. He saw a few more scorpions outside the window.

And I would have fucking moved upstairs and then everywhere you would go there were these car guards which is just and I said do they work for the city and there are people that wear like green vests and when you pull up to park on the street which is free parking they come up and they and you give them money. And I said, Are you paying like for your spot? Is this like the meter fee? And my sister-in-law is like, No, no, no, they're just regular people. They put on green vests, and then you give them money. And I said, Well,

what are you giving them the money for and she said will they look after your car I said well who were they protecting your car from and she's like well from them I go so it's like a mafia thing she's like well no but you know they're they're poor people and you want to help them out I go well are you helping them out are you being coerced? What is it exactly? And she said, well, it's kind of white guilt. There's like some white guilt involved. And so you always got to throw them a 50 Rand or 10 Rand. I don't know.

I never could get the Rand thing straight. It's like 19 Rand to the dollar. Give them like 10 Rand, give them like 50 cents. And then they leave your car alone. I't know it's fucking weird it's like the slowest most ineffective reparations that have ever been paid to a group of people all right let's get down to this oh Oh, so when we were camping, my brother-in-law made a poiky? It's called poiky.

It's like a stew. And he brought these giant steel pots and he cooked up this giant, fucking, enough for 17 people. And we made it over like three nights in a row. We slept there for three nights at these poiky stews. It was amazing. And he just kept throwing shit in

and pouring in handfuls of salt. I'm like, this is gonna suck. And it was like one of the best, there were two or three of the best meals I've ever had in my life. It was incredible. And we just ate meat, every fucking meal. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner was meat in South Africa. That's all you eat and it made me feel good. We were like exercising a lot.

I was getting 20,000 steps a day. We were hiking. We were swimming. We were canoeing. We canoed with the penguins in Cape Town. They have these these penguins they call them jackass penguins because that's what they sound like and they're endangered but you can go do sea kayaks around them and it was pretty it was pretty intense and we swam in the water near them. Last time we were it is my third time in South Africa. And the last time we came was probably 15 years ago and we swam with the penguins. And now they're so endangered

that you can't swim with them anymore. It's very sad. We actually, we did this kayak literally in the spot where did you see the octopus teacher? Is that what it was called, the octopus teacher? Literally in the rocks where that guy used to scuba dive or used to snorkel that's where we were and beautiful water great coastline and we went out to the Cape of Good Hope which

is the southwestern tip of Africa and it is where ships used to make the turn from India around Africa to get up to Europe. It's where the Dutch West Indian company set up shop. They have a fort there that you can visit and the currents off that tip are so treacherous because it's where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic meet and there's a lot of rocks out there and there's been thousands of shipwrecks over the years. It's freezing cold water and it's shark-infested. And then there's orca whales out there too. I think that's the area where the orca whales have been bumping boats. It's crazy! And we took a big hike out to that tip.

It's one of the most beautiful spots in the world. It's incredible. And I got out there and I made a funny video. I made a bunch of videos if you want to go to my Instagram account. I posted a bunch of videos from South Africa if you want to go to my Instagram account. I posted a bunch of videos from South Africa if you want to check them out. What else? Saw birds, a lot of birds. We stopped for a night in a place called in a place called Kersh... I can't remember it's a it's wine country Stellenbach, Stellenbach and I guess there had been a settlement of the French it was the Huguenots way back when and so there's a wine area that also has olive oil they have a lot of olive trees and this world-famous olive oil and we stopped there for the night

we stayed in this beautiful house with a pool and we went on a tour of a oil olive oil place and then the wineries and here's the thing I don't drink so go no fucking wineries I'd rather roll around in my own feces. I gotta watch everybody that I'm with getting little shots of wine and they swish it around and they sniff it and they sip it and they spit it and then they get drunk and then they it's like, and they're, oh, well this bouquet is oaky and you can taste the fruity high end. Shut the fuck up you just all

here to get drunk cut the shit you would drink you drink prison wine if you want if if that's all you could get that's it's just that it's just a expensive way of getting drunk they don't know the difference I even asked my son I go he took a class in wine in college He couldn't tell the difference between the wines. He didn't give a shit So we did that I had to drive of course because everybody's drunk and And we came back When we when we went from the wine country to Cape Town when we went from the wine country to Cape Town, we had this insane ride because we had the 12 passenger van

and then we had the two Land Rovers. So, and then, oh, and then we had a fourth car actually because then my nephew's fiance met up with us. And then we had to drive to Cape Town, which was like a five hour drive but the coolant was leaking out of one of the Land Rovers and so we had to... all the cars are loaded to the fucking teeth. We get so much shit and people in the cars. So now we can't drive the Land Rover to Cape Town. We have to unload everything

out of it, smush it into the other cars on the roof. We get stuff strapped to the roof and we leave the car behind and she's gonna come back and get it another time and it becomes this rugged journey. Now all of a sudden we got three cars. We're driving through mountain passes. We got a trailer on the back of time and it becomes this rugged journey. Now all of a sudden we got three cars, we're driving through mountain passes, we got a trailer on the back of the car, it's pouring rain, the suitcase is on the roof of the car getting soaked, the trailer is fucking fish tailing behind us through mountain roads for five hours. It's by the time we get there we got such a late start, it's 2 30 in the

morning we pull into Cape Town and now we're exhausted and we got to drop one we got three different houses. No four and I'm the last stop so every time we drop somebody off we got to open up the trucks, pull out their baggage, repack the entire fucking truck, drive to the next place, and then we finally get to the last house and we gotta go up a 45 degree road where the wheels are spinning, the clutch is burning, and then I'm picturing that we're gonna get to a place

that has a gate, and there's no gate, it's a street, and we have to get the trailer into a garage so my brother-in-law the alpha male he undoes the hitch for the trailer but we're on a we're on a fucking hill and so he goes just put your ankle under the wheel so me and my brother-in-law Shaheen have our ankles under the wheels holding it in place while he opens the garage he opens the garage we're fucking exhausted opens the garage and there's lumber stacked in the garage he's like oh I forgot about that I forgot there was lumber stacked in the

garage we need to put the trailer in because you can't leave the trailer on the street Or it'll get stolen. So now it's 2 30 and we're outside stacking fucking restacking wood and Trying to push this trailer in We finally get that in we We have to stop for groceries We get to our place and then we get out of place, and then we get out of the car, and we realize to get to the condo we're staying at,

we have to go about a half a mile downstairs. We're up on the top of a hill. We gotta go all the way down these stairs. We've got like seven pieces of luggage, and then we gotta go down, cut across, and then up five flights of stairs to get to the place, we get in. It was fucking nuts, and it's like everything I could

to just go, all right, I quit, I'm taking an Uber to a hotel, I'm abandoning my family, fuck this. But you don't quit, and that was the thing about South Africans are rugged people. And you know, my brother-in-law and everyone, they're just rugged. And I think I pushed myself further than I have in a long time on this trip.

Some hikes, some kayaking, some shit that I'm not used to doing. And I feel good right now. I feel very capable. I feel strong. I feel like I want to take on more challenges now that I'm back. I fell into a rut of just watching too much TV and football and just taking the easy way. I need to I need to do more shit. I'm gonna take up knitting. Yeah,

you'll see. Anyway, all right, so we should wrap this up soon, but we, I got in the accident, I talked about that. I might be going back next year. My nephew Liam is getting married to Alice and I'm thinking about going back. Maybe? Who knows? It was fucking expensive. Flights were crazy expensive, but we did it. It was all worth it and now I'm coughing, coughing and yawning. Maybe the jet lag

is kicking in, but I'm coughing from this fire. Say a prayer. Thoughts and prayers everybody to everybody in the Palisades. Also don't forget you can still get the Sunday Papers t-shirts. There's a Take it Ease shirt. There's a regular Sunday Papers shirt. All different colors and sizes. Go to FitzDog.com. Check them out. Holiday season is over but not too late to get a t-shirt also the special you know me is on YouTube go to my website you can connect to that watch it watch it again tell a friend also got some live dates coming up Janesville Wisconsin next week January 17th and 18 at the Comedy Cab. NYAC New York at Levity Live January 23rd and 24th. Raleigh Improv January 25th

and 26th. Milwaukee Improv January 31st through February 2nd. Then I'm coming to Vegas, Fontana, California, Atlanta. We got the St. Patrick's Day show at the Hollywood Improv March 15th. Ontario, Toronto La Jolla go to FitzDogg comm get some tickets come hang out say hello love to see you and I think that'll do it. Thanks for hanging in I know I missed a couple shows in the last couple months, but I'm back. We got some great guests coming up. I got Who do we have well you'll see you'll see we got some big names coming up and and we'll see you then thank you to Midcoast Media for producing and editing the show and thank

you guys for listening and have a great new year. Happy 2025. God bless America. Bet MGM is an official sports betting partner of the National Hockey League and has your back all season long. From puck drop to the final shot, you're always taken care of with the sportsbook Born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with Bet MGM. And no matter your team, your favorite skater, or your style, there's something every NHL fan is going to love about BetMGM.

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