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.

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.