Arches

The plan for our summer 2020 vacation was to spend a lot of time outdoors exploring three of America's greatest National Parks in California: Sequoia, Kings Canyon and Yosemite. All three of these places had been on my list for years; Yosemite for I don't know how long and Sequoia and Kings Canyon ever since I visited Redwood National Park in 2008 and found out I was thinking redwoods were actually sequoias. That day was pretty disappointing from a massive trees perspective, I can tell you that.

We never made it to California this year when we originally planned and we have no plans to do so in the near future. The virus messed us up. To keep our trip where we initially booked it (the week of June 22-26) would put us perilously close to the reopening date for some of the Parks and some of the parts of California we were traveling to and we didn't want to chance a park re-closing when it was flooded with more tourists than the State anticipated. Plus, wine-tasting (which we intended to do after the Parks) is not a good socially distanced activity. 

Because we didn't want to move the date of a trip, we pivoted...and decided instead to spend a lot of time outdoors exploring three of America's greatest National Parks in Colorado and Utah: Arches, Canyonlands and Rocky Mountain. All three of those places had been on my list for years too, although maybe not so long as the three in California. But a shorter flight, a lot more remoteness and a lot more certainty about the Parks' open status sold us. Yosemite and the rest will have to wait. Again.

Each of the three Parks we visited this past June was memorable and definitely worth the trip, although circumstances conspired against us taking full advantage of one of the three. Each Park is getting its own post on this blog because we got something way different out of each one. I'm starting with the first of the three we visited: Arches National Park right outside of Moab, Utah.

Sunrise in the desert at Arches National Park.

Every once in a while I want to go see someplace beautiful and amazing and I wanted that out of Arches. Nothing more than that. Laying eyes on towering stone figures carved by mother nature standing straight upright in the middle of a desert landscape in the American southwest. Exploring tunnels widened by wind and sand into the solid rock clear-span arches that give the park its name. Cliff after cliff of red-orange-amber-brown sandstone fashioned over centuries into something both amazing and breathtaking and straight out of the Road Runner cartoons at the same time. Maybe a walk or two along the way to get an up-close perspective on what I'd only previously seen in pictures.

We landed in Colorado on a Friday afternoon and got to southeastern Utah and to Moab by driving west from Denver on I-70 across some of the most gorgeous mountain and canyon scenery I've seen in just one five-or-so hour drive the very next day. I found the 12-1/2 mile long Glenwood Canyon, where the interstate splits into two separate elevations so both east and westbound sections can fit between the rocky walls of the canyon alongside the widening Colorado River, to be especially striking. I'd love to drive that again someday.

But when you cross the state line into Utah, the landscape gets...well...blander. A lot blander. Actually, pretty boring. It's all yellowish green grass on rolling hills as far as you can see. It's some of the most banal land I can remember driving through and it continues that way once you turn off the interstate and head south along US-191 towards the town of Moab. But eventually, about 10 miles or so north of the town, the scenery changes into enormous cliffs of red-orange-amber-brown rock. This is what we were waiting to see. This is why we came to Arches.

As a spot to explore Arches, Moab being a mere five miles south of the main entrance to the Park is perfect. We stayed in town for four of the eight nights on this trip last month and took advantage of the closeness to visit Arches on three separate days, including twice in a single day. There were a couple of reasons we did this other than the proximity: (1) we wanted to experience the park at different times of the day, including at sunrise, sunset and after dark; and (2) the temperatures the week we were in town were in the high 90s or maybe even cracking three digits by noon. And hiking out on the exposed, shade-less slickrock in Arches with the sun high in the sky in the middle of the day was not something we were interested in doing. Hence the multiple visits.

Before we got to Arches, I sort of saw the Park as an introductory drive which led you to three distinct and separate parts of the property: the Windows Section closest to the entrance (although not really that close at all); the Devils Garden deep into the Park featuring the largest arch in the place; and Delicate Arch, so famous and iconic that just that arch alone can stand on its own as equal to the other two spots that have many, many arches to see. 

I think my preconceived notion of the Park's geography is both close enough to reality and way, way off base at the same time. As an organizing structure as a way to visit the Park multiple times in a bit more than half a week, it worked well enough to give us something to shoot for. But considering those three spots as the only ones worth focusing on completely sold the rest of the Park short. What I saw as an introductory drive on a park map to get to the good stuff was just plain wrong. The good stuff is all around in this place. 

One of my favorite spots which we stopped at a couple of times for a good 20-30 minutes at a time was the Three Gossips, a carved grouping of three massive human-like figures in the Courthouse Towers part of the Park. Windows Section. Devils Garden. Delicate Arch. All cool. But so are the Gossips and a lot more of the other sights along the way. Drive slowly. It pays off. We all like different stuff.

The Three Gossips.

Balanced Rock. Yeah, I know...not many actual arches so far in this post.

So about that walk or two. 

One of the biggest dilemmas we faced in Arches was Delicate Arch and what to do about seeing it. We were legitimately concerned about the heat in the desert and the Park brochures listed the hike to Delicate Arch in the "Difficult Trails" section. Difficult...heat...high elevation. Do we do it or do we not? Surely there must be ways to feel fulfilled in the Park without making that trek, yes? After all, there's a viewpoint to that particular arch so we could still say we saw it without actually walking there in person, right? In the heat. At elevation. Difficult. Right? We planned on skipping the hike, checking out the viewpoint and taking it from there.

We decided we'd go check out Delicate Arch on our first visit into the Park. This was our sunset visit. We'd heard Delicate Arch is amazing at sunset.

Among my misguided, preconceived notions of Arches (like there are pretty much three good areas in the place) was my impression that we probably had to drive into a valley to see all those amazing natural sculptures. You don't. Quite the opposite. One of the most remarkable features of this place to me was that the entirety of the Park is actually on something of a giant plinth. That red-orange-amber-brown rock is the top layer of sediment deposited in this spot about 170 or so million years ago. Driving into the Park involves driving up. So on our first visit, we drove up. Past the Gossips. Past Balanced Rock. To Lower Delicate Arch Viewpoint. Just about in time for sunset.

We were underwhelmed. Significantly. It looked so small. And to be honest, not super picturesque. Validated our decision to skip the difficult hike. In the heat. At elevation.

Delicate Arch at around about sunset from Lower Delicate Arch Viewpoint. What's the fuss?

Two days later we'd make our second Arches visit to really explore, this time driving all the way to Devils Garden for a walk before making a stop at the Windows Section and taking an off-road adventure all the way out to Tower Arch and Marching Men. Lots to see on day two in Arches. And that's not even counting our second visit of the day to see the stars.

Any time we get to see hundreds and hundreds of stars in the night sky, it's a special day. We will never forget our night on top of Mauna Kea in Hawai'i in 2016 on a ranger-led night program spotting constellations and looking through a telescope at the moon close up. I guess living in the city makes the stars in the sky that much more special because we just cannot see them at home. There are a ton visible in Arches when the moon is new or close to it like it was just one day removed when we were there last month. If there's a skill in life I wish I had it would be the ability to identify constellations. I just can't figure those things out; they just don't make any sense to me. But that many stars, including some that were either shooting (or maybe actually moving satellites), is impressive. Quantity counts for me there.

Landscape Arch.

Our morning walks on day two got us deeper into the Park, including a relatively level hike to Landscape Arch near Devils Garden followed by a detour on the way back to the car to see Tunnel Arch (not worth it) and Pine Tree Arch, which is the cover picture of this post and had the most amazing light coming through the arch highlighting the range of colors in the rock with the deep blue sky beyond.

Landscape Arch is the longest spanning arch in the Park, and likely the thinnest too. Its current state of lightness was caused by a massive chunk breaking loose in the 1990s. Eventually, it will collapse entirely, as will all of the arches in the area given enough time. I guess they'll be replaced with new carvings by that time. We turned back at Landscape Arch. It was impressive enough to be worth the time we put into our walk that morning and to keep going to Double O Arch would be taking us down a "Difficult" trail and we wanted no part of that. In case that wasn't obvious by now.

We compensated for our lack of adventurousness first thing in the morning with a very short hike along a paved trail to Double Arch in the Windows Section and a very long drive on an unpaved road (if you can call it that) to Klondike Bluffs in the very northwest part of the Park. Double Arch is worth the quick walk; it's an impressive piece of work by mother nature and there's some shade at the end where you can stand and admire the wind's handiwork. Klondike Bluffs is farther than it seems and there's a long and exposed hike over rough terrain to see anything interesting out there. The heat made us turn back after coming up empty there.

I couldn't help thinking that we might be missing out on Delicate Arch. It gnawed at me.

Double Arch. Windows Section.

The plan for our last morning in Moab was to wake up when we woke up, grab some breakfast somewhere (heck, maybe even skip the free grab and go breakfast at the Best Western and spring for something heartier) and then head north with a couple of stops along the way. But Delicate Arch got the better of me. We had to give it a shot, right? There had to be more to this thing than the pretty boring picture we took from the Viewpoint I was thinking. Damn the "Difficult" rating. It couldn't be worse than hiking to Machu Picchu last May could it?

We found a description of the trail to Delicate Arch that broke the mile and a half each way hike and climb into three sections: a relatively flat first third over paved and gravel paths; a steep middle third involving walking and maybe a little hands and feet action over some of the Park's signature slickrock landscape; and a pretty flat final third before reaching the ultimate destination.

Slickrock. Sounds scary. Rock that's slick? Sloped? What if we fall? How far do we slide and fall and what's at the bottom of that trip? A hard landing I'm guessing. 

Slickrock is everywhere in southeastern Utah but we saw more of it at Arches than anywhere else. People come from all over to mountain bike over this sort of terrain. It's rock that's been worn smooth but very definitely not flat by centuries upon centuries of erosion. It's challenging terrain to walk or ride over. It's rock but it's not rocky, if that makes sense.

The trail description we read was right about the first third of the walk. It was pretty easy. And relatively flat. Straight into the blazing early morning sun but relatively flat. The guide didn't say anything about the sun but believe me when I say "straight into the blazing early morning sun" means like it's directly ahead of you right where you need to look to walk. A big hot ball of gas blinding and cooking you every step of the way. There's no way to look where you are going and not stare right into the sun. It makes this "Difficult" trail significantly more difficult.

Looking back down over the slickrock. Don't believe me about the sun? Check out the length of our shadows.

So here's the thing about slickrock. When it's dry, it's not slick. In fact, the coefficient of friction between slickrock and a Timberland boot is pretty darned high. Did that make the climb easy? No. But honestly the sun made the walk way more difficult than the path itself. I started to think we could do this thing. This walk is no Inca Trail. We got this.

There is something incredibly satisfying about working hard to get somewhere beautiful. I believe if we hadn't done this walk, we wouldn't have left Arches with anywhere near the satisfaction level I have as I write this post today. This walk and this work made our Arches experience. It was hot and it was blinding and the last third of the walk was no less difficult for me than the middle third, but it was worth it.

The last mile or so of the walk to Delicate Arch was entirely over rock. One foot in front of the other again and again until you get to a maybe five or six foot wide ledge running for about 200 feet or so with a view out over the desert that represents the final push, not that you necessarily know that on the way up. Turn the corner and you are there. One of the most iconic sights in all of our National Parks.

The last approach to Delicate Arch. This is me on the way down. Sun too bright for a pic on the way up.

I'll say one thing about the look at Delicate Arch you get from the Viewpoint where we first laid eyes on this formation and took the picture earlier in this post: it sucks! No way does a long distance look convey the majesty, siting and size of this arch.

It's sat on one end of a horseshoe type shaped rock that forms a kind of very steeply sloped natural amphitheater with all views pointed towards the star attraction which is Delicate Arch. This is a seriously steep piece of rock and walking around on the other leg of the horseshoe from the Arch is a delicate (pun intended) business. I walked carefully. No way did I want to slip or fall or roll or have to run downhill to regain my balance. That whole coefficient of friction between rock and Timbas I mentioned earlier? Not enough. I stepped deliberately.

It's also massive. I mean really, really huge. There are actually two people standing below the Arch in the picture below. They are like ants. This is a big, freestanding, rock sculpture made by the action of wind and sand on rock. It's just awesome, especially considering the view behind and through the Arch itself. There's a gorgeous rock wall forming the perfect backdrop to the view. Difficult? I guess. Heat? You bet! Elevation? Sure. Worth it? Definitely. So definitely worth the hour and 45 minutes we spent walking the three miles to Delicate Arch and back. This was debatably the best thing we did on this trip. There's such a sense of accomplishment. This morning walk on our fourth visit to the Park made it all worthwhile.

And downhill with the sun at our back was easy. Definitely worth the walk both ways.

Delicate Arch. The money shot.

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How We Did It

According to their website, Arches National Park is open 24 hours per day, seven days a week, 365 (or 366) days per year. And yes, I know that's redundant. That schedule is essentially true. But if the Park gets too full, which it seems to do routinely on weekends according to the official Arches Twitter feed, access is restricted until some people leave. 

We solved this issue by avoiding Arches on weekends during the day and getting into the Park early on weekdays. We entered the Park before 6 a.m. some days and exited after 11 p.m. on the day we went stargazing. There were cars in front of us and behind us every day we visited no matter the time. This is a busy Park. I've always been a fan of getting somewhere early. That strategy served us well at Arches.

The Park's website also has a parking page, which shows how busy each of the three main parking areas at Devils Garden, Windows and Wolfe Ranch (Delicate Arch) is for the prior day. I found this page showing Devils Garden and Wolfe Ranch being busy to very busy by about 8 am. We didn't necessarily find this to be true for our one visit to Devils Garden; there were a ton of spots when we left this area at 8 am. But it was for sure true at Wolfe Ranch. We got one of the last available parking spots at about 7 am when we hiked to Delicate Arch. Early bird. Worm. That's all I have to say there.

Finally and if it wasn't obvious from the post above, I highly recommend a walk to Delicate Arch. This will be difficult for some. Use your judgement and take plenty of water. I can highly recommend the breakfast burritos at the Moab Diner as a reward if you do. 

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So We Traveled...

Yes, we got on a plane and went somewhere. 

We just got back from a bit more than a week in Colorado and Utah. We couldn't take being at home anymore so we traveled. Having already cancelled two trips this spring, we elected to trade in our already planned week in California for about the same amount of time a little further east. Now we are back home. And it appears we are healthy and safe.

Considering we are still living in the midst of a global pandemic (hence the healthy and safe comment in the previous paragraph), you could make the case that this trip was reckless. You might say we didn't NEED to get on a plane, stay at a bunch of hotels and mingle with a bunch of strangers out west for eight days. We did it simply because we wanted to, because after being cooped up at home working remotely for about three months we had enough. You could also make the case that such a trip might put us and others at risk of contracting a virus that is out there and still not under control.

I'll accept all of that. Life is full of risks. And this is one we took but I do feel we did do a lot to distance ourselves from danger. In case there's someone else out there wrestling with this same dilemma, here are some strategies we used that we feel made our trip safer.

Yeah not taking a cab or Uber to the airport these days.

Ground Transportation

Unless we are flying out of town for five days or fewer, we typically take a Red Top Cab to either National or Dulles airport. But there was no way we were chancing close quarters in a cab with someone, even though I'm sure it would have been a fairly low risk activity. Instead, we drove and paid for parking, which can add up over eight plus days out of town. By switching our destination and using some frequent flyer miles, we ended up saving over $1,200 in cash. Why not use some of that to be a little safer and park within walking distance to the terminal? 

Totally worth it. A quick 25 or so minute ride out to Chantilly had us in Parking Garage 1 within walking distance of the terminal with pretty much nobody around us coming or going. The entire airport for that matter was pretty empty which made us feel way better about our decision to travel. It wouldn't be the same out west.

As luck would have it, we caught an additional break here. Dulles Airport dropped the price of parking right near the terminal to just $10 per day to allow people to park safely, which at $90 for a little more than eight days of parking ended up being cheaper than a $60+ cab ride each way anyway.

Flying

It may seem counterintuitive, but sitting on a plane for about four hours isn't actually that risky. I mean, after all, you are in a closed space with a bunch of strangers which might seem like an airborne petri dish. But the risks can be minimized. There are also a few ifs, most of which are out of your control. IF the airline provides masks to passengers. IF the passengers wear the masks. IF the airline intentionally caps capacity so only 2/3 of the seats are full. IF you don't get up and touch all sorts of surfaces and then touch your face. And IF someone who has the virus doesn't sit right next to you. If you can get all those ifs in place, you are in space with highly filtered air with more air changes per hour than most hospital wards.

There's one thing we did to maximize the chances of all those ifs coming true: flew Southwest. Early on in this pandemic, United Airlines made a big deal of blocking out middle seats to allow some distancing between customers, only to be later revealed they would only do that if there were few enough passengers booked to allow that to happen. But Southwest is deliberately capping capacity so nobody has to sit in a middle seat, in addition to providing masks to all flyers. Southwest is the best!

We did three other things to minimize risk: picked Denver deliberately because we could fly non-stop each way, used the overhead ventilator on full for the entirety of both legs of our journey and sat in the very last row. We figured we would only have to deal with bathroom traffic during the flight, there would be nobody behind us breathing our way and we'd avoid the inevitable crush and rush to get off the plane once the fasten seatbelt sign was turned off. And believe me, that crush did happen. So much for social distancing...

Emptiness. No issue social distancing here. 

The Itinerary

The plan for our trip to California was to spend some time exploring some of our National Parks before heading up to the Napa Valley for three days. When we moved away from that idea, we also moved completely to outdoor attractions. Colorado and Utah seemed like an ideal choice since we could basically spend every day outdoors seeing something new each day.

But we did a couple of other things to lower risk here. We stayed away from parks with historically high numbers of visitors on weekends in favor of long drives between places and parks with historically low numbers of visitors. This meant we hit Rocky Mountain National Park (4.7 million visitors last year), Arches National Park (1.6 million visitors in 2019) and Canyonlands National Park (733K visitors in 2019) on weekdays. We spent an entire Saturday driving between Denver and Moab, UT in our rental car by ourselves and spent the next day on Sunday at Hovenweep National Monument, which drew just 35,000 visitors last year, about what Rocky Mountain averages in three days, although attendance in the summer is way higher than that.

We also shifted our travel dates to allow this itinerary to work better, flying out on a Friday afternoon and coming back the following Saturday rather than Sunday. That meant instead of mingling with folks enjoying the weekend, we were traveling home. We could have stayed a day longer but why risk it?

Hotel room eats. OK at first but gets old. The sweet potato tots from Denver's Highland Tap & Burger were amazing.

Eating

One of our great loves when we travel is exploring the local food scene. We do our research ahead of time and find some great spaces with even better food and spend an hour plus eating and drinking after a full day of sightseeing. The ability to hang out and unwind before and during an excellent meal with a beer or two (or three...) is one of the joys of traveling. We skipped it entirely on this trip. Even in Utah, where from our perspective restaurants were fully open for business.

One of the highest risk activities we could identify during a weeklong National Parks-focused trip was spending time indoors with a bunch of people opening their mouths over and over to eat a meal while talking and expelling virus particles into the air. No way were we going to do that. We took almost (there were two exceptions) every meal we ate to go, whether it was grab and go breakfast from the hotel or a sandwich taken with us for lunch (we invested in a Yeti Daytrip Lunch Bag for this trip) or dinner to go from a restaurant.

Did that mean our culinary experience suffered? Honestly, yes. But we tried to find well-regarded places that were offering take out service of their regular menu or had shifted to provide a focused and excellent reduced menu. I think we ate some good food on this trip but the eating experience was not the same and some meals didn't stand up to the out of restaurant experience as well as others.

Mask off. Mask on.

Protection

After electing to drive ourselves to the airport; carefully selecting our airline; creating an agenda that was likely virus free; and then eating every meal away from other people we had to take some additional protection, right? Wipes to clean everything close to us on the plane and inside our rental car? Sure. Of course. And masks to wear everywhere? Yep, took those too.

We also took a few neck gaiters (or snoods, for those of you in England) so we could breathe a little easier through the thinner material in the middle of the desert during the day and still protect ourselves from random outdoor encounters with strangers, of which there were many each day. These things are also generally UPF 50+ rated to block at least 98% of the sun's UV rays which is smart in late June in southeast Utah.

Did all that make our trip 100% safe? Absolutely not. No way. Impossible to do. Life is really full of risks, even without a global pandemic. We figured after more than two months working at home, not seeing friends or family at all and going everywhere that we had to go on off hours with face coverings, a trip with layers of well-planned risk mitigation strategies would be safe enough. I think we were right.

Will we do this regularly? Nope. Not even close. But if we do it again anytime soon, you better believe we are doing everything we did on this trip to protect ourselves as much as we possibly can.

Blog posts to follow.

Flight to Denver. Not full at all.

52

Today is my 52nd birthday. If this isn't the most bizarre year I've spent on this planet, I'm not sure I want to know what's coming in the future. Although let's face it, this next year may be even stranger. I'm buckled in pretty tight for the next seven months or so at least.

The plan for year seven of this blog was pretty modest. Sometimes it happens that way. Our travel whims generally have about the same amount of travel in each calendar year but the distribution isn't necessarily spread out evenly between birthdays for me. That means some years between name days have more travel than other years. Year seven happened to be a light year by design. But not as light as it turned out to be.

We planned to complete four trips over the past year. I know. I know. That sounds like a lot. But only one of those four was planned to be a week in length. The other three were long weekends, either four days or five days away from home. A week plus in Ireland? Done. Lots of rain, but done. Long weekend in The Bahamas? Also done. Pirates and Goombay Smashes and beach time and rum cakes! Awesome! But the other two trips, to Costa Rica's Tortuguero National Park in March and northwest New Mexico in May, never happened. Cancelled! Victims of this global pandemic that is still very much out of control.

So understandably, this is not the birthday post I thought I'd be writing. If everything went according to plan (and we've already established that is very definitely not the case at all this year), not only would I have had time in Costa Rica and New Mexico under my belt, but I'd also be hoisting a beer in the cover photo of this post somewhere in central California after hiking among enormous trees in Kings Canyon National Park this very day. But that trip (planned for this entire week) didn't happen either.

But I am on the road. I'm out in Utah (of all places) on a plan B scenario that's worked out about as well as I could have hoped. It's incredible country out here and I'm excited to explore this place for the next few days before heading home. Given all that's happened over the past four months, I'm pretty excited about getting away for a week to some place this amazing.

Does all that mean year seven was a waste? Absolutely not!! Sure we lost a couple of long weekends in Costa Rica and New Mexico (we'll get there or back there one day) but we snorkeled and explored strange rock formations and played with swords and dug up some skeletons from the past that my native country tried to bury. Along the way we walked a lot and learned and found good food and great drinks, sometimes with music. We also got to travel with friends (or friend) which I love to do. I appreciate the fact that our friend Bryan came with us to Ireland. He definitely made that trip better for me. I love the perspective that other people bring to traveling. Hope we can do it again soon.

All that's not too shabby I'm thinking.

At Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland. Cold, wet, windy but amazing just the same.

I've traditionally used my birthday post to write about how I'm doing on the goals I've committed to achieving and what my plans for the next year are. Let's not let a global pandemic affect that reckoning, shall we?

Year six of this blog saw me knocking off three of my five goals for my second five year period of exploring the world. Three of five! In one year!! Pretty darned good if I do say so myself. Continent number six? Check! Cologne? Check! Machu Picchu? Check!

How did I follow that success up this past year? Well...by accomplishing absolutely nothing on my list. Seriously. And it was deliberate. Really. Why rush things? I have three more years after this one and the only two outstanding promises I've made to myself is to visit the balance of the 50 states that I haven't set foot in (just four left, if you must know) and to make it to Angkor Wat in Cambodia. Although honestly...this virus out there makes me want to rush a bit more. It's amazing how quickly something that you love so much can be taken from you. I mean that on many different levels.

So what's next? What does year eight hold? Honestly...I have no clue whatsoever. Yes, we have two trips planned already but there are absolutely no guarantees we are going on those or anywhere for the rest of this year and maybe beyond that. I think for the foreseeable future we are going to just remain flexible in our travel plans and open to any possibilities that present themselves. Particularly with the number of destinations that appear to be off limits to Americans considering we lead the entire planet in deaths from this pandemic. So proud!

I've read a lot about the future of travel in the last four months or so. Most of what I have read has suggested more planning is the way to go. Reservations for flights, restaurants and attractions are going to be more important than ever. We can't plan more. We regularly commit to travel plans a year or sometimes more ahead of time. I think for us the answer may actually be to commit later than we usually do and keep all our options open. Sounds counterintuitive but for us over-planners that might be the way to go. I will commit to providing a progress report a year from now.

No matter how it happens, it won't matter at all if we don't take care of ourselves. Throughout this duration of this pandemic, we are fortunate to have not known anyone to be seriously ill with this virus that's out there and I hope we can continue to be so lucky. I know there are so many who are not in the situation we are in. We'll keep pushing the envelope in a very very safe way to travel and explore where we can. Stay safe everyone. Happy birthday to me!

Our first view of New Providence island in The Bahamas. Pretty much paradise. 

The Archives

Any post on this blog that starts with a closeup of a glass of beer has to be a good post. This is certainly not the first and likely won't be the last post that's started that way. Shocker, I know! This delicious pint of Fuller's Black Cab Stout in the matching glass (the way it's supposed to come) was captured on film (or maybe not film, exactly)  and then downed lovingly at The Hydrant pub in London right near The Monument in 2016. Yummy! Give me English beer over any other nation's beer any day!

It's now been more than nine weeks since my cancelled trip to Costa Rica was due to depart but didn't, a casualty of the global pandemic we now still find ourselves in more than two months after I was supposed to board a southbound flight at Dulles Airport. Last week, I cancelled my second trip of 2020, a long weekend in New Mexico visiting a site that I should have visited 19 years ago but which I missed because I just didn't get how big the Land of Enchantment is. Go figure! I guess now it's going to be 20 years at least.

Since I've been grounded, I've been combing through my picture archives from the last almost seven years that I've been traveling in a deliberate way and writing about it in this blog. I thought it might give me some hope for the day I can go somewhere new on this rock of ours if I posted some pictures of a great past memory. I've been doing that on Twitter every day since March 26, the day I was supposed to go to Costa Rica. As of today, I'm up to day 65. I'm going to keep going until I take my next trip, whenever and wherever that might be.

Some of the pictures I've posted over the last couple of months have appeared on this blog. Others have not. For whatever reason, they ended up on the cutting room floor, likely because I either elected not to write about that day or moment in time that I took the picture or just couldn't find a way to work them into a post. I miss writing about traveling, so for this post (and since I'm not going anywhere right now), I thought I'd write a few words about some of the photographs I've unearthed this spring. They are presented in the order I tweeted them. And, no, I'm not covering all 65 days.

Hawaii (2016)

One of the most disappointing experiences we've had over the last seven years was in Hawaii. I know, right? Who'd have thought? I sound completely spoiled. But it's true. 

We decided to spend the better part of one of our days on the island of Maui in February of 2016 by driving from Kahului to Hana on a road appropriately named the Road to Hana. It's a twisty, turny highway right along the ocean front with tons of pullouts and scenic views and secluded hikes to waterfalls along the way. It sounded cool as hell, especially when we had rented a Jeep Wrangler to get there.

It sucked. Honestly for us it was almost a complete waste of time. Sure we enjoyed a hike into the woods but other than that it was literally just a drive to a hardware store. A long, long drive to a hardware store. And I really do mean a hardware store. That's what's at the end of the road. Seriously. And nothing else. We got there, were supremely disappointed and headed back, without stops on the return journey.

So why am I reminiscing about a day that was almost a complete waste of time? Because "almost" is the key word. Along the way we stopped at Aunty Sandy's, a roadside stand selling hot, fresh banana bread, for breakfast. We walked down to the ocean and sat while we ate our loaf of banana bread and looked out at the view above. If there's ever been a breakfast I've eaten with a better view, I can't remember it. We were literally in paradise. We got nothing out of that drive except that view. And ultimately, that was enough because I'm remembering it four years later.

Venice (2015)

If there's something every first time tourist has to do in Venice, it's take a gondola ride along the Grand Canal. Sure it's overpriced, too short and a little cheesy. A complete tourist trap in other words. We did it anyway. How could we not? The Grand Canal is one of the great boulevards in Europe, albeit the only one made out of water. We have a picture in our house of us in the gondola with our gondolier smiling giving us two thumbs up after our ride. It was completely awesome, despite the fact that it's a total tourist trap.

When I was paging through my old directories of past trips, I found the picture above, which shows a series of gondolas in the foreground and Andrea Palladio's San Giorgio Maggiore church in the background across the water. For me, that church and those boats bring me back to Venice instantly. They are enduring symbols of that city. To find a picture with both in them at once brought back the three days we spent there in vivid detail. This photograph must have been taken late in the day because the gondolas are closed up for the day and the sun is hitting the west side of the church as it is setting.

I loved Venice. I thought it would be flooded and overcrowded with both tourists and pigeons. It was none of those things. I could have spent a week or more just wandering around the canals and streets of this place. It's definitely on the would love to go back list. But then again, so are a lot of places.

Brú na Bóinne, Ireland (2019)

Every so often I write almost an entire blog post about a place and then discard it. My post about Brú na Bóinne from the end of last year is the latest one of these posts to be started and never see the light of day. Sometimes I lose inspiration about a post or can't find enough to say or am just forcing things and decide to give up rather than completing something that's not worth the time and effort. With Brú na Bóinne, it just came down to not many interesting photographs. 

I've been to some pretty ancient places over the last seven years or so. Prehistoric petroglyphs in the American southwest. All sorts of Roman ruins. Stonehenge. Machu Picchu. I never would have thought the most ancient site with construction at the hand of man would be in Ireland but Brú na Bóinne beats all those other places handily in the age department. 

What we saw that day in the Irish countryside was a passage tomb, a stone structure beneath a mound of earth that's stood in place for 3,200 years. Stepping inside this place and hearing our guide talk about the history of the place and its relationship to the solstices was just amazing. The amount of labor that must have gone into putting this place together so precisely must have been staggering.

I love this picture as a reminder of what we experienced that day but I also love it because it's about the most green photograph I've ever taken in my life. It's perfect as a memento of Ireland which shone so brightly on some days and disappointed us so badly on others. A day at Brú na Bóinne was not one of the disappointing days.

Mount Fuji, Japan (2017)

When I first made my list of must sees for my one and only (so far) trip to Japan, it needed some serious editing. There's often a dilemma with me between getting into one spot in a country super deep vs. moving around and seeing a lot at the risk of spreading myself too thin. In the end, I think I sort of split the baby on Japan. Mount Fuji made the initial list and survived the cut down.

There's not much to a visit to Mount Fuji unless you are intending to take a hike right to the summit, which in mid-May we weren't planning doing. We hopped on a bus for an hour or two and got dropped off about halfway up the slope on the north side. There's a store and some food vendors and (of course) a Shinto shrine but not much else. You just sort of do what you can until the next bus shows up to take you home or wherever the next stop is that you have a ticket for.

But there's something about Fuji. It's a picture perfect single volcanic peak and its shape couldn't be a more idealized cone shape. It's like a cartoon image but its presence and meaning in the lives of the Japanese is huge. It was important to me to stand on the mountain on my first visit to Japan. So we did. 

The day we were there it was about impossible to photograph the mountain either because of the cloud cover or we weren't standing in the right spot or there was some object or human in the way. This picture is my favorite of the day, taken from the front steps of the Komitake Shrine where I purchased what is now my niece's goshuin-cho and then half filled it with goshuin, the calligraphy and temple seal artworks that you can collect from each temple or shrine you visit in the country. To me, this picture reminds me of how cold and isolated and spiritual it was on Fuji and it also shows off the peak of the mountain which I love.

I can almost guarantee the reason why this picture hasn't appeared on this blog before this post is that it has a portrait orientation and plain and simple I usually use landscape orientation or square photographs in this blog. Today, that doesn't matter.

Roosevelt Island, New York City (2019)

I am pretty sure without really checking too closely that I've visited New York City more than any other destination in the past seven years. I don't think there's really any need to check. I just know it's true. Despite all the time I've spent in the Big Apple, I've only written one post about my experiences there, a 2015 visit to the Statue of Liberty's crown.

The reason for this is simple: we are usually in New York to do the same things we love doing over and over again and by that I mean Broadway shows, trips to Kalustyan's to stock up on spices and chutney and our new tradition of dinners of chicken skewers at the excellent, excellent Tori Shin restaurant in Hell's Kitchen. Simply put...New York is where we would live if we could afford to live in the manner we want to live there. We can't. So we don't.

Every so often I do something in New York that approaches post-worthy status. My trip to Roosevelt Island in the middle of the East River last year almost made it. As many times as I've been to New York, I'd never been there before last summer to see the ruins of the old smallpox hospital and Louis Kahn's Four Freedoms State Park, which was executed posthumously (and therefore in my opinion not the way Kahn would have done it; the great architects always tweak during construction). It's totally worth a trip.

One of the best parts of this day was getting to the island, which can be visited by bus, Subway or ferry. Or you can take the tram, which takes you above the city from 2nd Avenue to the middle of the East River. You'll get some killer views of the City as you ride alongside the Queensboro Bridge for the low, low price of a Subway ride. The picture above shows the tram approaching the Roosevelt Island terminal. Do this if you are in New York, even if you turn right back around and go back to Manhattan.

Ollantaytambo, Peru (2019)

Last year we spent about a week deep in the heart of the Andes exploring the cities and towns and citadels of the Incan Empire. Our trip took us from Lima on the coast of Peru up to the Incan capital of Cusco and then over to a spot where we hiked for a day to the royal retreat called Machu Picchu.

When the Spanish conquistadors "discovered" the Incan Empire in 1526, they took what they wanted almost from day one. The Incas proved no match for the Spanish from the very first engagement although it was really the horses that they couldn't compete with. A man who has never seen a horse before in his life is no match for a trained and heavily armed soldier on the back of a 2,000 pound animal. Almost every engagement the Spanish had with the native Peruvians resulted in a victory for the Europeans except one: Manco Inca's stand at Ollantaytambo, a fortified hilltop between Cusco and Machu Picchu.

Today Ollantaytambo is one of many sites with ruined but mostly intact Incan masonry structures, a testament to the timeless quality of Incan construction. And like some of those other sites, the remains of building at Ollantayambo are in what seem like the most remote and most inaccessible locations you can possibly imagine. 

This photograph of some abandoned grain warehouses is my favorite of our partial day stop in town. I appreciate the way these old buildings are just clinging to the most precarious of slopes and blend in perfectly with the mountainside. We didn't have time that day to explore these ruins but I got as far as I reasonably thought I could from our tour group to get a picture I thought I'd be happy with. And I am.

Kyoto, Japan (2017)

I know, I know, I already put a picture of Japan on this post. What can I say? Japan was simply one of the most amazing places I've ever been. I can't wait to go back. And yes, it's ahead of Venice. Way ahead.

It's difficult to describe all the ways I love Japan from my week and a half or so there in 2017. It's a place with so many details. Tradition. Respect. Humility. Incredible food. Gorgeous nature. Spiritualism. Cutting edge modern anything. Boozy late nights of karaoke. The markets. The temples. The bars. Cleanliness. Order. Speed. Crowds. There are so many sights and smells and tastes and sounds to take in.

As we walked around Kyoto, which is the traditional capital of shogun-era Japan, I couldn't help but notice these red paper lanterns with birds on them. They seemed to be everywhere in that city as we roamed the streets and alleys in search of geishas or gyoza or street markets or temples. I took this picture because I wanted to find one of these lanterns in a store and bring it back and hang it in our home. We never found a paper lantern store. But this is still one of my favorite details of Kyoto.

Serengeti National Park, Tanzania (2018)

We've been fortunate in the last five years to have taken two safari trips to sub-Saharan Africa. We spent less than a week in primarily Zimbabwe and Botswana in 2015 to get our feet wet and then really did it right a couple of years ago by spending a week each in Kenya and Tanzania. The diversity of wildlife and the almost completely untouched environment is like no other place on Earth I've been.

In 2015 we didn't know what to expect. We were happy to see anything that we'd only ever previously seen in a zoo somewhere. Fortunately, elephants, hippos and lions featured heavily. In 2018, I went with a top 10 list of species that we hadn't been able to find on our first trip. I think we got seven of the ten. Maybe eight.

Never in my wildest imaginings would I have expected to find the birds in Kenya and Tanzania to be one of the more fascinating aspects of that trip. I've never been much of a birds guy (ostriches and storks and things like that don't really count here) but those two weeks in eastern Africa, particularly at Lake Manyara and Serengeti National Park, really opened my eyes and I fell in love. Who knew lilac-breasted rollers and carmine bee-eaters could be so interesting? The picture above shows four superb starlings. I love how the colors pop against the thorny gray tree (always with the thorns in Africa...) they are roosting in and I love that I got a group of four all in one shot. I have no idea how this didn't make my Serengeti post. Too focused on the wildebeest and zebras in that location I guess.

One day soon, I'm hoping that I'll be writing again about some new places I've visited. I have to find a way to do some low risk traveling sometime in the next three months and hopefully I won't be cancelling any more flights or hotels. I'll leave this post with a black-backed jackal at Lake Nakuru in Kenya. Haven't posted this one to Twitter yet but I'm sure it's going to be there if this thing goes on long enough. Stay safe out there.

United In The Time Of Coronavirus

You might read the title of this post to be an homage to how together we all are in the face of a spreading pandemic. You'd be wrong.

This week I was supposed to embark on my next adventure, a long weekend in Tortuguero National Park on the Caribbean Sea side of Costa Rica. Jungle. Beach. Canals. Central American food and beer. Monkeys. Sloths. Hopefully no snakes. And tons and tons of toucans. Or at least that's what I was hoping for. One more country in the books. One or more stamps in the old passport.

I'm not going. I've been hunkered down telecommuting to work over the last two weeks social distancing myself from everyone but my wife and hoping someone somehow someway finds a way out of this current coronavirus crisis. I'm not complaining here really (although I might be in a little bit). We are both healthy, employed, have tons of food and toilet paper and plenty of unread books and the electricity is on and the water's running. All things considered, it could be plenty worse. I know there are way too many people who are not this comfortable.

I believe this is the first trip in my life I've ever cancelled. I could be wrong. My memory sometimes isn't so great about these things. But I don't think I am. I cut one short once to beat a snowstorm home (I lost that race and spent two nights in the Detroit airport) but I can't remember cancelling one before. If I'd known this would happen, I would have spent a couple more days in The Bahamas. Maybe I could have gone down to Inagua and made another attempt to see those flamingos that keep eluding me on these trips.

The process of cancelling this trip varied from routine dealings with forgiving and apologetic companies to an exercise in extreme frustration. This post is either an effort to share that experience or a carthasis or both. It involved interface with four different companies: a tour operator, a worldwide hotel chain and two United States based airlines. Here's how it went.

Kenya. February 2018. Our transport for the week, courtesy of G Adventures.

The Tour Company

We were scheduled to take our long weekend at Tortuguero through G Adventures, a Canadian-based travel company that takes people all over the world to all seven continents. Our relationship started with this company in 2016 when we visited the Galápagos Islands. Since then we've been to Kenya, Tanzania and Peru with this company. They have always taken good care of us, they have amazing people working for them and they are socially responsible.

G Adventures was proactive in cancelling our trip, sending an email about a week and a half ago that all trips through April 30 would be cancelled. No refunds, but credit in our account equal to 110% of the purchase price good for use on trips with G through April of 2022. I get that some people might be upset about no refunds but the 110% credit is unnecessarily generous. We already have our next trip booked with these guys in October of this year so the credit is useful. Hoping this crisis is over by then. If not, I have a huge list of trips I want to take with G Adventures.

The Hotel

When we travel, we typically make our hotel and airfare reservations months and months ahead of time. One risk we take in booking early is taking advantage of non-refundable but slightly cheaper rates on our hotel bookings. Our G Adventures trip was all inclusive but would have required a red eye flight home so we elected to spend an extra night at a DoubleTree hotel before leaving San Jose. And yes, we booked the non-refundable rate. We figured we were sunk here. Risk is risk and we wouldn't be checking in for this reservation.

Fortunately, Hilton (which owns the DoubleTree brand) decided a crisis was a crisis and non-refundable would in fact in this case be refundable. No charge whatsoever! We appreciated this gesture of goodwill. They didn't have to do this and we could have easily have cut back in other areas of life to save the $150 or so we would have lost here but Hilton decided to take this one for us. Hooray for them. This is the second time in the last six months or so Hilton has done something good for us. This chain is definitely trending up on our loyalty scale. This sort of treatment will generate more business from us for Hilton properties.

Free snacks courtesy of Southwest at ATL. Free! For no reason. January 2017. The BEST airline!

Southwest Airlines

A little while ago I was talking with someone who travels frequently but maybe not quite as much as me. I had just come back from somewhere and mentioned we flew United to wherever it was we went. He asked how I like United. My response was something to the effect of all these airlines are the same; they just treat us like cattle and try to pack more and more of us into smaller and smaller spaces while charging for more and more. All airlines that is except Southwest. Seriously. That was a real conversation.

Our trip back from Costa Rica was on Southwest. We booked with points. It took maybe five minutes on their website to cancel and get our points and cash back. Maybe five minutes. Might have been shorter. It seems like every interaction I have with Southwest is amazing. They continue to be my favorite airline in the world. 

Umm...app not working. Hello? Hello!!

United Airlines

Remember that story two paragraphs ago about United? Come on...sure you do. It was just two paragraphs ago. We booked our trip down to Costa Rica through United using points. 

Like most travel companies addressing customers during the coronavirus crisis, United decided to make some alterations to their standard change and cancellation policies. This meant changes to flights and cancellations to flights would be permitted with no change fees (Southwest ALWAYS has no change fees for what that's worth). No refunds but credit could be used for alternate flights within one year of the original booking date.

A couple of things here. First, United didn't have to change their policy at all so I guess they should get a little credit for doing so. Second, credit is great but one year from the original booking date is not that great sometimes. We booked this trip in September, which means the credit would expire about six months from now. Given the fact that we booked with points and not wanting to commit ourselves to another destination in the next six months, we figured we'd cancel, get our points back and eat the $46.80 worth of fees and taxes we paid.

Not so fast! No cancellation and change fees means just that but United has a $125 charge per ticket to redeposit points back in your MileagePlus account. Come again? Moving points around, which I would do on the app or website myself, costs $125??? How does that make any sense? The most loyal customers, the frequent flyers, are made to spend $125 per ticket for something that costs United nothing? Apparently, yes. And there is no flexibility. You should see the comments on Twitter from frequent flyers on this one.

Not wishing to pay $250 to get 35,000 of our own miles redeposited in our account, we opted to try to find a different itinerary. United recommended their website or app for this transaction. Didn't work. We could book a new flight (why we want to do that right now?), cancel a flight and pay for our own miles back but not change the flight. Errored out every time. How does the website not even work right? What kind of a company has a website where the one transaction that would benefit their most loyal customers is the only one that doesn't work?

We called, waited 90 minutes on hold and ultimately changed our flight to a roundtrip to Maine in July. We added 5,000 more miles into the effort and are hoping that this whole thing is over by that point. If not, I expect we'll go through this whole exercise again, only if the one year from original date of booking rule is still in effect, we'll have about two months and a very quick end to the crisis to reschedule. For what it's worth, Ryan who answered the phone for United was awesome.

Considering the flexibility we got from the other three companies involved in this situation, United's conduct sticks out as selfish and unhelpful. There are some past interactions that have forever affected our willingness to travel with certain companies (Frontier, Eurowings and Icelandair come to mind here). We are not likely to leave United based on this experience, but we are likely to go another direction if other options (probably from Delta or American) are equally priced or maybe a couple of bucks more.

My next trips are in May and June. Right now I'm not convinced I'm going on those trips either but at least they are both domestic trips, which shouldn't matter but somehow to me it does. If this crisis is still going on, I'm hoping United has come around in their attitude towards their customers by June because our flights at that time are with them. 

I hate writing complaint posts, especially about a few hundred bucks or a few thousand frequent flyer miles at risk during a pandemic that might kill millions. Compared to the concerns of the people suffering and the families who have lost loved ones, my frustration with United is so unimportant. Stay as safe as you can be.