Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog and one of the things I most enjoy in life. My travel for 2024 ran right up to within a few hours of the New Year... when I returned from a great both fun and frustrating trip to ( Read more... )

It's time to go back to Alaska. Topically, that is. It feels like my trip there was two months ago even though it was literally just two weeks ago. (The last day of my trip was Wednesday, June 17.)  One thing I've been meaning to write about since even before I embarked on the trip is a retrospective on how I planned it: How I finally got to Alaska ( Read more... )

Alaska Travelog #2
Anchorage - Sat, 15 Jun 2024, 1:30am

Flying to Alaska this evening was kind of eerie. When we left SFO at around 8:45pm the sun had already set. But it wasn't yet dark. The waning light of dusk cast a blue pall over everything. But then as we flew north the sky got... slowly brighter for the next few hours. By the time we were ( Read more... )

For years now I've had a bucket list goal of visiting all the states in the US. After notching Alabama, number 49 out of 51 in 2016, I remained stuck at 49/51 for several years. (I'm using 51 because I'm counting Washington, D.C. in addition to the well-known count of 50 states in the US.) Last year I reached 50/51 by visiting Louisiana. That left ( Read more... )

North Carolina Travelog #21
South Carolina border - Fri, 22 Sep 2023. 2:50pm

The falls we're headed to next, Whitewater Falls, are near the South Carolina border, about 10 miles away. "I wonder if it's worth taking a dip into South Carolina on the way there or back," I mused.

The worth I was thinking of was my bucket list. One of my bucket list ( Read more... )

West Virginia Travelog #3
New River Gorge National Park - Sat, 16 Sep 2023. 3:30pm

Well, we did it. We got to the the US's newest national park only... *checks watch*... 33 months after it was designated. One of our bucket lists is to visit every one of the (now) 63 national parks. As of today at New River Gorge National Park in West Virginia we ( Read more... )

West Virginia Travelog #1
SFO Airport - Fri, 15 Sep 2023. 10pmTonight Hawk and I are at SFO airport, embarking on a week long trip to the east coast. Our flight leaves a few minutes before midnight and will arrive about 5 hours later in Charlotte, North Carolina. Once at CLT we'll rent a car and drive north across the foothills of North Carolina, ( Read more... )

Mississippi Travelog #1 / New Orleans travelog #10
Pinckneyville, MS - Tuesday, 25 Apr 2023, 12pmThis morning we left New Orleans. We slept in a bit after both of us had rough nights, packed our bags after breakfast and showers, walked over to the car rental depot on Canal Street at 9:30, and hit the road a bit past 10am. Our destination: ( Read more... )

Earlier today I wrote about canceling one beach trip in favor of another. It seems an easy call, right? Two trips now on the books, they seem redundant, so let's keep the better one and take back the time and money from the other. Unfortunately it's not as simple as that.

The difficulty is that I'm struggling to justify the whole rest of the trip ( Read more... )

Every year around the new year I do a variety of retrospectives about the year just finished. Several of those are about travel, as that's the main theme of this blog. My travel is complete for the year- I returned from Five Days in the Desert Wednesday night even though I still have a few more blogs to push out from the trip- so I can tally up my ( Read more... )