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.

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.

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.

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 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.