Nipyata! Vision Quest:  Our Annual Corporate Retreat

Nipyata! Vision Quest: Our Annual Corporate Retreat

With another Cinco De Mayo in the books, this is the time of year we like to reflect on our efforts, and any resulting progress, made in the last 12 months as we hightail it to Mexico for our annual corporate review.
 
“What’s Next for Nipyata!?” we ask ourselves as the intern strings up the next Nipyata in the back of our rental van and we finish another round of nips.
Things are looking good now that we're in Mexico, but this isn't a vacation.  
Sure, we'll take in the traditional Mexican experiences – pyramids, beaches, donkey shows, hot peppers, etc.   but this is a business trip.  
We have a full schedule, packed with piñata making courses, tequila tastings, strategy sessions, and frequent mescaline trips. 

Because of the mescaline, we like to schedule all of our meetings and high-level corporate activities for early in the trip when we’re still fairly lucid.  

We've had a productive first week.  We've paid off our debts to the piñata elders in Monterrey, we've done some tequila tastings in Jalisco, and we've held some meaningful discussions about the current state of affairs of the piñata industry.

We've covered pretty much everything there is to cover for a nip piñata company.

By the end of the week though, things are getting ugly.  

We're steadily battling gastrointestinal illnesses, our hallucinations are getting stronger, we've been robbed a few times, and we’ve lost our intern.  

We haven’t seen him since a particularly gnarly night in Puerto Vallarta, where, incidentally, we made a wrong turn.  

We ended up in Zamora about 400+ miles southeast of Mazatlan where we were scheduled to meet with Juan "El Casco" Del Rio, the head of the Mexican Piñata Maker's Guild, the next morning.  

We eventually made it to Mazatlan, but El Casco was a no-show.  

We were supposed to meet him on a Monday, but we found out it was Thursday when we got there.  

We had no clue.  Our intern was our time keeper and he had our laptop, so without him it was impossible to know what day it even was or when we were supposed to do anything business-related.  

We should've known we were fucked the night we saw him running down the beach, tripping his balls off, with that laptop in his backpack.  

That was the last time we saw him.  

NIPYATA! Tripping on Peyote

Things were looking bleak for us, and this corporate retreat was unraveling quickly.  

After a wild night, we woke up late Friday(?) afternoon.  

We estimated we had been in Mexico for about three weeks at this point, but that was just a guess. 

We were running out of pesos, we were down to our last Nipyata, and someone had taken the wheels off our van while we slept in it.  It was time to make a move.

While we gathered our thoughts, we strung up our last Nipyata on a nearby tree and took some whacks at it until the nips fell out.  

In between nips of tequila and massive doses of mescaline, we talked about how we really wanted to meet with El Casco, but at this point we were pretty sure he wouldn't  see us.  

Everyone in the piñata industry knows you get one shot with El Casco, and you don't blow it.  

We decided instead that we should retrace our steps to see if we could find this missing intern.  

We also agreed that, "next year, no drugs from strangers until we're done with all of our meetings."

Finally we sobered up and realized our predicament wasn't so bad.  

We don't even have an intern. That was a guy we picked up on the way out of Monterrey; evidently he managed to hang with us for a few days until he robbed us blind that night in Puerto Vallarta.  

That was him running from us with our backpack and laptop.  

In our state, we were convinced he was our intern looking for better wireless reception so he could call El Casco's people to confirm our meeting.

A wave of relief washed over us as we realized we could close this soon-to-be-filed missing person case.

NIPYATA! Relief

As we hopped on a bus headed back to the US, holding our heads high with a sense of accomplishment from another productive retreat, we polished off the last of the mescaline and got excited about getting back to work and continuing to spread Nipyata! joy and happiness to people all across the country.

It feels good to be back.  Now, let's kick off a sweet summer - best wishes for a happy, healthy, and nip-filled Memorial Day weekend!

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