The Road to Atlanta

Weddings are a lot like vacations. They both require a ridiculous amount of planning and when successful, the end result is something beautiful. But anyone that has ever planned something relatively complicated knows that plans are like college students; they like to get fucked up.

I was fortunate enough to get to stand in my friend, Kyle's, wedding this past weekend. I've known Kyle longer than I've known almost all of my friends. We met through a semi-Nintendo related message board while we were both still in middle school. I don't really know how it was that we managed to remain so close over the years but I'm sure it didn't hurt that we have nearly identical taste in movies, music, and literature.

Ali, Paul, Kyle circa 2004

We met for the first time in 2004. One of the most interesting parts of our friendship is that we also gradually began to become friends with each others friends as well. A quick glance at Facebook shows me that we have 16 mutual friends which I find kind of impressive for two people that have only met in real life a handful of times. Kyle's friend, Ali, thought it would be a great idea to fly me down as a surprise for Kyle's birthday. It was actually a great idea, though Kyle managed to figure it out ahead of time due to his super sleuthing skills.

Day Tripper: Ohio

Panoramic view from my seat

Now, spending an entire day or two in Ohio, isn't exactly what I'd consider the ideal get-away, but it was still an opportunity to experience something new.  The original plan, was to drive to Cincinnati and go to the Bengals tackle football game and then jump over to Columbus to see my cousin, stay at a hotel for the night and go to the highly touted Columbus Zoo and Aquarium.

I originally came up with the idea to travel to different stadiums when I was writing my entry about my trip with my father to Toronto.  I decided to start with Cincinnati because of it's relatively short drive and had decided against Indianapolis because I wanted to experience an outdoor football game.  I wanted to experience the elements, not be pampered and sheltered like I am when I visit Ford Field.  But I still had to find tickets.  I found one a few rows back in the corner of the endzone and when my order processed, I had no choice but to go to the game.

I knew that in order to make it on time (Google Maps told me that it would be about a 4.5 hour drive), I would have to leave very early.  Now, I'm not the smartest man alive and decided to hang out with other family members the night before to watch the Tigers game, which, by the end of it, allowed me a little more than 4 hours of sleep.  So I set my alarm and miraculously woke up on time at 4:30 a.m. to begin my journey.

Flying Solo

I just got back from a trip to Cincinnati, which was supposed to branch off to Columbus as well, but I ended up having to postpone that segment.  And this trip was a complete solo mission.

I'd gotten used to doing things independently growing up, being an only-child and all, and must say, I enjoy the certain freedoms that come along with flying solo.  But in the same breath, you get the feeling that something's missing when you realize that altogether you've been driving for about 12 hours by yourself.

Being Travel Minded

It's been about a month since we decided to start this blog. When we first came up with the idea, neither of us really had much of a plan in mind. It was mostly intended to be an outlet for all our crazy ideas about travel, though as I mentioned way back in the intro, we all have real jobs and it hardly seemed practical to write about something new all the time. Hell, we were even hesitant to share this with anyone partially because we didn't think we'd really have that much to write about. Even though Matt, Katie, and I all have a decent amount of experience when it comes to travel, a lot of what we had were memories of past trips that we wanted to share. For me, this was largely because I knew that I needed to have some sort of creative outlet in my life, a desire I had been suppressing for far too long. But it didn't really seem feasible to have a consistently updated travel blog when we were just mining past experiences for amusing anecdotes. Again, as much as I love writing about travel, I don't think I really intended it to be something that I spent any significant portion of my time actively pursuing. If anything, it was intended as a spark for future projects.

Puppies and Pumpkins

This past weekend Paul and I had an opportunity to head up north and spend some time with my family and enjoy the fall colors. Going up north in the summer is nice because it's great to enjoy swimming in the lake and spending time at the beach. Going up in the winter, well, is also nice sometimes because its hard to beat seeing huge snow flakes piling up on a forest full of pine trees and viewing this all from your couch being cozy under a warm blanket with a hot ovaltine (I am obsessed with ovaltine!). But lets face it, there is nothing better than being up north when you can enjoy the peak of the fall colors. Because I have limited time to go see my family, sometimes the visits are touch-and-go because the weather is not dependable. However, this past visit was perfect. The weather was gorgeous and the colors were stunning. Oh, and did I mention my parents got a puppy?

Weekend Trip: Northern Michigan

One of the benefits of being married to Katie is a free place to stay in Northern Michigan and a reason to head up there whenever the mood strikes. As I've touched on before, all of my early vacation memories center around the area and I love getting to go back. One of highlights of visiting in the fall is the beautiful colors you get to see and even if it was a bit early in the season, we were not to be disappointed.

No trip up north can begin without a stop at Dingman's. Dingman's has been our go to bar for a few years now for many reasons. 1) It's generally pretty late by the time we get up there and 2) It's really the only place to stop on the way.  It's exactly the kind of hole in the wall spot you'd expect to find in the middle of nowhere. Immediately upon entering on a Friday evening, you're greeted with terrible karaoke renditions of country songs made better/worse depending on your level of intoxication. The bartenders/wait staff are generally as drunk as the patrons to the point that it can sometimes be difficult to actually tell who works there as everyone seems to freely roam in and out of the kitchen area.

OBX: The Director's Cut (Starring Bill Murray)

While all of our entries have been recounts of actual trip events, Paul and I do enjoy being creative once in a while.  One day at work, we decided to come up with a "Travel Log" of a potential alternative chain of events for an OBX trip.  Hopefully, one day, this will actually happen.

    day 1: awesome

    day 242: still awesome
    day 313: still awesome, kinda drunk.

    day 452: still awesome, really drunk, saw dolphin.

The Bumpy Road to Vacation

As we have alluded to before,  sometimes, when it comes to getting ready for vacation, things don't go as planned.  Or sometimes, you may run into a few road blocks that might threaten some vactioners from joining the trip.


First example, is for the first year of OBX, Colin was almost unable to join us because he doesn't know how to swim properly and reinjured his knee while swimming with his then-girlfriend-now-wife.  He originally injured his knee by beating up some little kid*.

Hilton Head: The Journey (Or More Accurately A Long Tangent on the Narrator's Fear of Cars)

After the countless hours spent planning the trip, you eventually reach a point where you have nothing left to do but leave. The anticipation leading up to this moment becomes almost unbearable in the weeks proceeding the trip. One thing I've learned over the course of the last few vacations is that taking the day off prior to the start date is always a good idea. For me, there is no feeling worse than being stuck at work hours before you're set to leave.

Being on the road is one of the best parts of the trip. Being trapped in a car with a group of other people for an extended period of time is a great way to build up some camaraderie. It's also a great way to drive yourself completely fucking crazy. Honestly, I don't care how much you like the people you're with, being confined to close quarters for long stretches of time is not the way we're meant to live. Sure, you'll probably listen to some good tunes, tell some great stories, and see some amazing scenery. Even if you follow all of your rules for a successful road trip, after 12+ hours on the road, you'll be glad to get to your vacation home simply because it means you no longer have to be in the car.

Variations On A Theme: The Impromptu Vacation

Hey audience! Glad to see you've dwindled down to nothing after our brief stint of Facebook popularity! I know I promised that when we next met I would entertain you with more from our recent trip to Hilton Head, but my dear friend Matt has inspired me to write about something which is also dear to my heart, the impromptu vacation.

Matt did a great job covering what it is that makes pointing at a map and saying "Fuck it, let's go" such a memorable way to vacation and I just wanted to touch on a few of the memories I have with such trips.

Before I grew old, these kinds of trips were a lot easier. There were no full time jobs, the idea of marriage was about as non-existent as the idea of even talking to girls, and no one would even think about having kids for years to come. At the time, my best random travel experiences were with my good friends Jason and Justin. Like Matt, we too took a random trip to Toronto. I want to save that for a later entry, though, as I have since been back and have much more to say about the most wonderful city in North America.

Instead, I'd like to touch on a random day trip we made to Northern Michigan, specifically Traverse City and the Sleeping Bear Sand Dunes. I don't really remember what the exact circumstances were behind the trip. Probably, we all had a day to kill an spent some time staring at a map and figuring out what we could possibly get up to in a day. As I mentioned earlier, my family had spent almost all of our summers in this area and no trip was complete without spending a day at Sleeping Bear. We loved the exhausting work which climbing the dunes entailed which would all culminate with a race back down.

This picture is actually from a later trip but I don't care because it's beautiful.

Let's Eat.

Aside from all the obvious benefits of vacation (not being at work) one of my favorite parts is the food. My plan is always to eat as much good food as I can by both eating out and cooking. There is a fine balance between cooking and eating out when on vacation. For example, I have a very low tolerance for 'road food' and pretty much cant wait to cook a nice meal once we reach our destination. Cooking is something I love to do but don't do as often as I should. Or at least as creatively as I should.

Wherever the Wind Takes Us

While a good deal of our entries have focused on the planning of trips, it can also be very fulfilling to just get up one day and take a long weekend trip with no planning whatsoever. 

On one of my dad's designated weekends with me when I was about 10, he decided that we were going to just take a random trip to Toronto.  We had taken a couple trips to Niagara Falls before, but nothing was ever this spontaneous. 

Hilton Head: Anticipating The Trip

Now that I've refrained from talking about our most recent trip in as many ways as I could, it's time for Hilton Head 2012!

OBX: The First Love

As you could probably tell by our earlier entries, we have an abnormal obsession with the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and just thinking about it gives me the same butterflies that a very pretty girl does. 

It was my first real road trip and didn't really know what to expect.  I volunteered to drive the midnight shift because I am always staying up late, so I drove from 11pm to around 5 am because I was getting tired, and sticking to the rules of the road, I used my communication skills to let people know I wanted to switch. 

It took us 21 hours to get to our house (partially because of a two and a half hour stop in the Pennsylvania mountains due to a accident and partially because of cranky people and Nathan having to come back to pick Tom and I up because for some reason we thought we could walk faster than the "beach traffic") but we quickly realized that it was worth the wait.  However the first night was spent eating Dominoes Pizza and trying to get some rest for the week ahead.

Interlochen or Why You Should Never Go Back

As I've mentioned before, my family wasn't much for traveling great distances when I was younger. Almost all of my childhood vacations were spent in Northern Michigan, specifically Interlochen State Park. Interlochen is probably most known for the Center for the Arts/music camp which has hosted several notable alumni like Josh Groban, Norah Jones, and Sufjan Stevens. Our summers were mostly spent tenting it up within the campground.

Looking back, I wish my travel experience had been more robust, but in my younger years, I loved getting to sleep in a tent, ride my bike throughout the campground, making friendships on the playground that would last an entire week, and swimming in waters that were very much lacking in any sort of creature with the capability to kill you. 

A big logging wheel. I used to climb the shit out of this thing.

Vacation 2013: The Early Stages

Now that we've laid out the process we go through to actually plan a vacation, it's time for you to witness said process first hand. Over the course of the next several months, we hope to show you everything that we go through while planning one of our trips.

As Matt mentioned earlier, we generally start to plan our next excursion as soon as the current one winds down. This year, the seeds of Vacation '13 were planted while we were still in Hilton Head. Right now, our tentative destination is Bethany Beach, Delaware. We came to this decision in a very scientific manner.

The Ocean and Why We Can't Stay Away

I've been wondering lately why most of the trips we plan seem to involve the ocean. On one hand, the ocean is totally awesome. There's simply no way to describe the feeling I get when staring out at the vastness of it. To stand on the cusp of the Atlantic and realize that on the other side of it lies Mexico (I have a very American sense of geography) is enough to make one realize just how small they really are.

On the other hand, the ocean is fucking creepy as shit. There are so many ways in which one can die in the ocean, it's enough to keep me out of the water entirely. Sharks? Sting Rays? Jellyfish? Sticks that feel like they might be jellyfish when they rub up against your leg? Rogue waves? Manatee? Who wants to take that kind of risk just for a really big, overly salty body of water? And don't get me started on the sand. Walking is already hard enough. Do I really have to spend my time watching my steps so that I don't step on a vicious crab? Fuck that. There are plenty of lakes in Michigan where the most dangerous thing you have to worry about is Asian carp.

Still, since I got my first taste of it, I haven't been able to resist the allure of the ocean. My family wasn't much for traveling when I was younger. We'd take yearly trips, but they were almost always confined to Michigan. In fact, the furthest outside of Michigan we ever traveled was Ohio and some would say that that is almost worse than not taking a vacation at all. (They would be right. Ohio is a piece of shit.) When I hit my early twenties, I knew that the ocean was something I had to see, if only as a rite of passage as a traveler. Here's a picture of me standing in the ocean for the first time.

Rules of the Road: Part Deux

Paul, everything you’ve said is correct.  However, there are a couple more rules you need to observe during a road-trip in order to make sure things run smoothly.

5.  It’s a Team effort

While Paul has an eternal doctor’s note relieving him of any driving duties on the expressway, he makes up for it by being the full-time navigator.  That means that everyone else should take their turn driving, so that others may rest.  Just as others have paid their share of the house, the same goes for driving duties.  Occasionally you’ll have a wanker that will refuse to do any driving, saying they're too tired, but how much sleep do you need on a bloody 21 hour car ride?

Rules of the Road (Trip)

Thanks, Match.

Given our budgetary restrictions, our preferred method of travel has always been road trip. Even with Obama driving up gas prices by selling all of our oil to the Socialist Kingdoms, splitting multiple tanks of gas between a car full of people still tends to be cheaper than a single plane ticket. Plus, given our previous destinations, air travel would be over in a matter of hours. Who would want to do that when they could spend 15+ hours in close quarters with some of their best friends?

Here are some tips for a successful road trip so that you can avoid turning your best friends into your worst enemies.

Location, Location, Location.........and price

Thanks Paul!   Indeed, after you pick a location and you sift through your friends and find some good ones to go with you, you have to find a place to lay your head.  And it can be the most exciting, yet nerve-wracking part of the planning process.

The first step to finding a place to stay, which is true for just about anything you want to know, is to google it.   A lot of times in vacation hot-spots, there are a handful of real estate companies that  rent out properties and each one has their own website, so you have to be patient in this leg of the race. 

Next comes the most exciting part.

Vacation Planning: Assembling the Crew

Choosing a destination is only the first step. After that comes the more difficult step of assembling a vacation crew. Over the past few years, we've done a pretty good job of badgering almost every single person we know to come on vacation with us. At times, I feel we're one PowerPoint presentation away from being like those creepy people you're vaguely aware of that are always trying to get you to join their pyramid scheme. Heck, sometimes I think we'd have more luck if we just went the extra mile. Nothing says "Awesome Vacation" like a great slideshow.

It's Only the Beginning

A wise person once said that you can't end one vacation without beginning to plan the next one.

Now, I didn't have the honor of attending the Virginia Beach trips, but I could see the substantial impact vacationing had on my friends, and I wanted to be a part of it. After going through the rigors of organizing the first trip to OBX and seeing our plans come to fruition, I was immediately hooked.

Since then, vacationing has become a kind of drug. Its high lasting a week and then plummeting into 51 weeks of withdrawal (though we might take some shorter trips to tide us over). The planning and scoping out of new places to stay only teases us, but in the same breath gives us hope for what the future may bring.

We're still working out the kinks in our trip planning system and trying to find ways to resolve the problems we seem to face each year(i.e. reliable people to join us and Hurricane Season) but we're still going to try new things and broaden our locations target because there is just so much to see. At the current point in our lives we can only afford to take one really nice vacation a year (maybe throw in a long weekend trip or two), but we're working on fixing that (come on Power Ball). Nonetheless, we're still going to try to see as much as we can, as often as we can because sometimes the short trips can be just as rewarding as the longer ones.

So, as we continue to look towards the future and new places to go, and reminisce of trips past, hopefully you will be inspired to begin your own travels, or, if you're cool enough, join us in ours.

Destination: Hilton Head

Choosing a vacation destination is arguably the must important part when it comes to travel. It's also one of the hardest things to do.

Almost instantly after Vacation 2011 ended, we entered into the discussion about what we would do for Vacation '12. There were some very serious things that needed to be discussed. First, we had to look at the things we had done before. This was done in the most scientific manner possible. Matt, Katie, and I printed a blank map of the United States. We took three different markers. One color was used for states we had visited on our own, another was used for states that two of us had visited, a third was used for states that all three of us had occasion to pass through.

Intro

Hello Internet.

I would like to welcome you to my newest project, a collaborative effort with my long time chum, Matthew Alfred Turner.

The idea for this blog sprung from a shared love of traveling. Much of our free time is spent discussing places to travel, planning trips, and reading about places others have traveled. Seeing what the world has to offer is a passion for us and we decided it would be a good idea to have a place to collect the memories that we've created and hopefully an outlet to share them with others.

Neither of us plan to quit our jobs to become full time travel writers (yet). The two of us both spend the majority of our week at full time jobs and as much as we'd like to, a weekend trip to Vegas or a sojourn to the Outer Banks isn't always possible. But what we decided is that travel doesn't necessarily have to be limited to one really cool trip a year. There are millions of new things around is that we can experience on a day to day basis if only we're willing to travel a bit outside of routines we've built for ourselves. Whether it's a 5 miles or 500 miles, we want to make the most of the lives we've been given and experience whatever part of the world we have a chance to experience.

We've both logged a significant amount of travel time in the past and we intend to highlight those memories as well.

And that, simply enough, is the mission statement of this blog. I hope you'll join us for the ride.