I started this blog back in 2011, optimistically hoping that I'd have some adventurous travels to report on. Unfortunately, this was an extremely low-budget period in my life, and by the time I abandoned the blog in 2013 and promptly forgot about it, I hadn't done much traveling beyond my adopted city of Chicago and my hometown of Philadelphia.
It's too bad that the blog slipped from my memory at that point, since it wasn't much later that I actually got the resources and opportunity to travel more extensively. In the five and a half years since my last post, I have been to Colorado, Seattle, Cuba, Ecuador, and Ireland, among other places. Maybe at some point I'll get ambitious and post some of those pics and memories here; but for now, I'm going to focus on the present: my upcoming journey by trains and planes and maybe boats to the Pacific Northwest and maybe Alaska. I'm in a holding pattern regarding the Alaska leg of the trip (hence all the maybe's), since the Inland Boatman's Union of the Pacific, whose members crew the Alaska state ferries, is currently on strike. I'm a proud union member and support them in their struggle, so I don't want to make this all about me and my vacation; but still, I really hope they are able to settle quickly. My inner optimist and my inner pessimist are currently engaged in mortal combat over whether or not the strike will be settled before my boat is scheduled to sail; but in the meantime, I'm making some contingency plans and anticipating a wonderful trip wherever I end up. In the next episode, I'll be talking about riding Amtrak's Empire Builder, a journey I've made once before in the opposite direction. It's a beaut! Stay tuned.
It's too bad that the blog slipped from my memory at that point, since it wasn't much later that I actually got the resources and opportunity to travel more extensively. In the five and a half years since my last post, I have been to Colorado, Seattle, Cuba, Ecuador, and Ireland, among other places. Maybe at some point I'll get ambitious and post some of those pics and memories here; but for now, I'm going to focus on the present: my upcoming journey by trains and planes and maybe boats to the Pacific Northwest and maybe Alaska. I'm in a holding pattern regarding the Alaska leg of the trip (hence all the maybe's), since the Inland Boatman's Union of the Pacific, whose members crew the Alaska state ferries, is currently on strike. I'm a proud union member and support them in their struggle, so I don't want to make this all about me and my vacation; but still, I really hope they are able to settle quickly. My inner optimist and my inner pessimist are currently engaged in mortal combat over whether or not the strike will be settled before my boat is scheduled to sail; but in the meantime, I'm making some contingency plans and anticipating a wonderful trip wherever I end up. In the next episode, I'll be talking about riding Amtrak's Empire Builder, a journey I've made once before in the opposite direction. It's a beaut! Stay tuned.
