Utterly Irrelevant Vacation Travelogues

My idea of a good time is to go on a vacation to some faraway place and see fun things and get tanked a time or two. I’m not particularly choosy. In the last three years we’ve been to Costa Rica, New York City (multiple times), Greece, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Italy , Lake George (NY), Turks and Caicos, Montreal (also multiple times), Key West (for Christmas), Dayton, Niagara Falls, Bermuda, Spain, Portugal, Gibraltar, France, Italy (again), Vatican City, and Puerto Rico. On top of that, Carole visited Grand Rapids, Hershey, and Louisville, and I did a solo road trip through New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ontario, Quebec, and back home again to Vermont. Two of our joint trips were cruises (Spain to Rome, Athens to Trieste). We also had a couple of sad trips to Dayton, Ohio due to the passing of Carole’s dad.

Carole and I never had kids so we never had to worry about child care, whether they were old enough to be left home without having wild parties and/or burning the house down, or whether the Reptilians from Zeta Reticuli would kidnap them while we were away. Vacation planning for us was mostly a matter of checking Carole’s banked time off, picking a spot on the globe, and just up and going there. I’m pretty darn good at doing all the logistics of travel — hotels, air, transfers from airport to hotel and such, planning our excursions, and so on, so we never had to pay a travel agent.

“Wanna go to Duluth, Minnesota?”

“Sure! When are you thinking?”

“Midwinter, of course!”

“Sounds terrific! Let’s go!”

(To be honest, I would absolutely love to go to Duluth in midwinter. Preferably to stay in a hotel down near the waterfront. Looking at the maps, there’s a perfectly nice Motel 6 just a stone’s throw from a big tank farm. If I’m trying to have an absolutely depressing winter vacation, I think most of my needs could be met within a mile or so radius.)

The one thing all these trips have in common is that I took a zillion photos and came back each time planning to write an exciting travelogue so the entire world could read about and see the cool things we got to do. I say this knowing perfectly well that in the universe of popular bloggers and media creators and influencers, I am a brown dwarf and they’re supernovas. I might get five people to read my witty banter. On the other hand, if I write my stuff with even a modicum of attention paid to SEO and social media sharing, it’s just barely conceivable that I’d get a few more hits than that. After all, a video I took of the 2018 SD Ireland St Patrick’s Day Cement Mixer Parade down Church Street in Burlington, Vermont received … let’s see, 5.4 million views. And I have no idea why.

So this is fair warning to everyone that unless I lose steam and give up before I’ve really gotten started, I absolutely do intend to share some of the gems from our travels. The emphasis will not be on “hey, look how spendthrift we are” and more on “so we were really really lucky they believed us” and “I never knew that was against the law.”

Stay tuned.