The food! The art! The wine! The pretty views! We were not expecting to love New Mexico as much as we did. We stayed in 5 different places in New Mexico and found that the food (local Mexican food in particular) was very good, the local wines were the best we’ve tasted outside of California, the art scene was very impressive and so were the natural views. New Mexico is also an interesting state by the numbers. Some fun facts: It’s the fifth largest state by area, but only ha

Just as we serendipitously found ourselves on Route 66 in the spring, we magically (unintentionally?) found ourselves following the old Santa Fe Trail this fall - all the way from Kansas City to Santa Fe. We learned that between 1821 and 1880, the Santa Fe Trail was an important commercial highway connecting Missouri and Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was primarily important because ranchers could herd their cows from the southern ranches to much higher paying customers further n

We really could not have driven through the southern part of New Mexico without stopping in Roswell. As Craig said, we had to get to the bottom of the Alien Landing thing. Yeah, we did ALL the touristy stuff. Why wouldn’t we? It all started with the Roswell Welcome sign and the official mural (above): Everything in Roswell is alien themed, and I do mean everything - did you see the Dunkin’ and McDonald’s photos in the We ♥️ New Mexico post? How about the street lamps? Here

Some random stuff from in-between. I debated whether or not to even post about these, because there was no theme or geographical relationship between them, but some are too much fun to leave out. First, we spent a long weekend in Oshkosh, Wisconsin on our way south from the UP and had a lot of fun there! They had a several cute local events for us to enjoy, the downtown area we stayed in was right on the river, and there was even an aviation museum! After Oshkosh, we backtrac

View of the Menominee River from our dock. Who are the Yoopers, you might ask? According to the guidebooks, that’s how the folks who live in Michigan’s Upper Penninsula refer to themselves (it’s the “U. P.”). When we decided to start our retirement travels with the Great American Road Trip (GART), we wanted to be sure we went to lots of places (1) we had never been, (2) didn’t know anything about, and (3) were different from our pre-retirement vacations. Well, we had heard

Our path from New Hampshire to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, our next month-long destination, took us through the Great Lakes area, giving us lots of options for enjoying the journey. The best part was that it gave us the opportunity to go through Niagara Falls - we spent a couple of days on the Canadian side, which was the perfect amount of time. The falls were spectacular - we did not make it to the maid of the mist boat trip that goes right up to the falls (see photo above f

View from the Escarpment Trail in Catskill Park. Pronounced cook-SOCK-ee, Coxsackie is a lovely little town on the western bank of the ...

OR - Only Mad Dogs and Englishmen*. We knew when we made our plans to visit DC that the weather was likely to be hot and humid, but we...

View from Pisgah Inn viewing platform, Pisgah National Forrest And we felt like we climbed them all! After our month in Charleston, SC,...

Next stop - Charleston, South Carolina. In case you are curious, our summer plans were roughly determined by our plans to be in New...

Welcome to Miami Beach! I feel like this whole post is going to be a series of obvious statements, but that doesn’t mean they should not...

But definitely none I would drink. More about that below! One of the aspects of living a month in each place in our retirement that I...

New Orleans (aka NOLA) is one of our favorite cities - the music! The food! The laid back attitude! I mean, their slogan is literally...

For our first “roadtrip” as homeless nomads we spent about a week traveling to New Orleans, where we planned to spend a month at an...

When we picked out the new SUV that would be our main transportation for the foreseeable future, the salesman sent us this photo when it...

A recent article from Wine Enthusiast about the area: “ Carmel-by-the-Sea was named by a Spanish explorer after the Carmelite friars on...

The other post started getting long, so here’s a handful of other fun things we did in the area…. 17 Mile Drive 17 Mile Drive  is a long...

We had just over a week left in our Northeast adventure, and it seemed like a great time to check out The Hamptons, since (1) we were...

We decided to go to Vermont after New York City for two reasons, (1) we needed somewhere simple to hang out and recover from our crazy...

When you stop worrying about work, suddenly you sleep a lot better. I mean like almost immediately. This shocked me. I really didn’t...