2001: An Odyssey of Sorts

Earlier I highlighted a trip I took with my father, and with my mother's birthday having just passed, I thought it would be a good time to revisit the summer before high school.  That summer, my mother and I took the train to Toronto and visited New York with a group of her friends and their kids.

Keeping it classy on the train to Toronto

I recognize I was afforded a lot of incredible trips in my younger years, but the summer of 2001 was one that definitely left an impression.

8 Years Later

When Matt mentioned it had been 8 years since our last update, it was both hard to believe and yet made perfect sense. I was 27 when we published our first entry and had been married for 3 months. Life looks a lot different on the other side of 30. I’ve changed jobs twice, as has Katie. We have a house now as well as a dog and occasional travel companion. Dingman’s, the hole in the wall bar I wrote about in one of my last posts has since burned to the ground. Baby Yoda is a thing now. We might be living through the apocalypse. Lots of big stuff!

Still, I think the purpose of this blog was to highlight small ways in which travel was possible some of the time. Life certainly intervened, but I think we’ve still continued our love of travel. In the past 8 years I’ve been to Florida, California, and Nevada for the first time. I was finally able to return to Toronto. I’ve been on so many different camping trips and have explored new parts of Michigan. We might look at traveling differently than we did 8 years ago (Future Blog Idea: Why I Fucking Hate Road Trips Now - Always Fly) but it’s still very much a part of our life.

I figured a good way to jump back into things would be for Matt and I to have a conversation about what the hell we’ve been up to for the last 8 years, so here’s that!

Louvul, Leweyville, Looaville, Louisville!

As Paul and I begin to dust off our blog's figurative cobwebs, we can't help but look back and reflect on the places that we traveled to during, and since, Part Time's initial launch.   Logging back in was reminiscent of how I imagine store-owners felt coming back after their forced leave brought on by the current pandemic; returning to a place full of promise and unfinished projects, uprooted by life.  One such unfinished project for me is the entry below aimed to recap the trip Paul, Katie, Tom Butler and I took for my birthday back in 2013.

I don't usually care about my birthday, but with our relatively new-found passion for travel and the fact that my birthday happened to fall on a Friday this year, it seemed like a perfect time to take a quick break from the gloomy Michigan winter.

Picking a place was easy.  Paul and Katie had been talking up Louisville ever since they had stopped there back in October and it was a reasonable drive that would still afford us plenty of time to enjoy the city itself.