Welcome to our blog! We hope you will find it helpful as well as inspirational while dreaming about and planning your future travels. We do not travel for a living or aspire to. We have day jobs and try to squeeze as much as we can into a few precious weeks per year we are able to take off to travel. Our goal is to share our adventures, misadventures, travel itineraries and budget information to help you to plan your own perfect adventures.

Here I sit, like everyone else, in the middle of a pandemic that feels like it will go on forever. Oh so you’re not sitting outside in a tent/gazebo in Alaska on a 34 degree October afternoon with both a patio heater and a gas fire-pit to stay warm while remembering a trip to Paris? Well maybe that’s just me then? Anyway…the outdoor cafes with overhead heaters that keep you toasty even in the fall was one of my favorite things in Paris, and the inspiration for this outdoor space. I digress. I know this pandemic will not last forever and we will be able to travel again someday. While I dream about past and future travels though, why not start a travel blog? I have always wanted to, and now seems like the perfect time.

I have always loved the idea of travel, but before college I had never been anywhere outside of the west coast, and had never set foot on a plane. My first trip was a college travel abroad to Malaysia and Singapore. It opened up a whole new world to me, literally, and I couldn’t wait to travel again. There was a trip to Canada, a Caribbean cruise, a weekend in Mexico, but it would be many years before we were free to do more travel.

When our kids were young, any trip we took revolved around visiting family. We would visit as many friends and relatives we could manage in the allotted break from school, and maybe squeeze in a trip to Disneyland. Don’t get me wrong, visiting family and friends is great and I have to admit, I do love me some Disney, but it wasn’t the kind of travel I had longed for all my life. Now being empty nesters, we no longer have to plan all of our vacations around kids soccer championships, spring breaks, or summer vacations. A whole new world of travel has opened up for us.

We will share practical information about destinations we’ve been to, activities both touristy and off the beaten path, as well as budget and lodging options. While we do stay in hotels at times, we prefer to live like locals and prefer to use VRBO, Airbnb and new favorite home exchange. With home exchange is not only the ultimate live like a local, but also making lifelong friendships and exchanging in places that we would never have found outside of home exchange. We will also share travel we have done around our own state of Alaska which . For right now we are not planning any exchanges or travel so in the meantime I will share previous trips we have taken.