Hawk and I have spent many hours today poring over booking options for our two-week trip to New Zealand next month. This is what we aimed to do today. But it has a) taken longer than expected and b) been a case of Three steps forwards, two steps back ( Read more... )

We're going to New Zealand! That's so exciting. We booked our flights to/from Auckland, NZ three weeks ago. And then we... did nothing... for two weeks. 😨

The obvious problem here (I hope it's obvious) is that a two-week trip to a foreign country takes more planning- way more planning- than just booking the flights in & out two weeks apart. It ( Read more... )

I got word on Friday that "Club" this year, aka President's Club, aka the annual resort trip for top performers in my company's sales organization that I won in February, will be in San Jose del Cabo, Mexico this year. We'll be at a fairly swank resort hotel on the beach for 4 days in May. If I go.

Wait, what do I mean "if"? Well, over the past ( Read more... )

Hawk and I have been discussing where to go on an April trip for months. Originally it was going to be a February trip, but by early January we hadn't planned anything and our work schedules were looking like they'd be too busy, so we vaguely pushed it out from February to April. When Hawk found out in late January that her position at work is ( Read more... )

It's been a while since I've checked in on stats about my blogging. I track metrics mostly out of curiosity but also because long ago I set goals and I like to see how I'm doing compared to my own predictions/expectations.

One thing about setting goals is that I rarely set just a goal. I set a multiplicity of goals. Sometimes that based on ( Read more... )

Over the past several years I've made a habit of using New Year's as a time to reflect on, and take stock of, the year just finished. Ideally I would've shared my reflections on 2023 three weeks ago, at the turn of the new year. I've left this idling because it's been a challenge figuring out how to frame it. The challenge has been that my gut ( 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 for 2023 ran right up to within 12 hours of the New Year... when I returned from a phenomenal trip to Australia on midday December 31 ( Read more... )

For literally months now Hawk and I have been kicking around the discussion of where to go for a year-end holiday. I say "kicking around" but most of the kicking we've done has been kicking the can down the road. We've put off the hard work of planning it time and again ( Read more... )

First off, yes, I'm still writing about our trip to West Virginia and North Carolina from last month. Yes, it's over 3 weeks since we returned home and I still haven't cleared the backlog of journal entries from it. But now I'm almost done. One of these last few I'm going to switch into the present tense instead of tying it to a particular day or ( Read more... )

After we visited Bassi Falls, below the falls and above the falls, and drove back out the road with the challenging short hill climb at the end- people walking up the dirt 4x4 path expressed amazement at us so easily driving down it- the question was where to go next ( Read more... )