Dave & Meredith's Travel Blog

Dave and I have been talking about whether or not to take one more trip together before getting back to reality (read: finally stop procrastinating on updating that resume and get a job!).  The decision hinged on this very scientific analysis:

Pros of going on a month-long trip:

1. We love to travel
2. We can see some friends we haven’t seen in a while
3. We’re tired of being hyper up-to-date on news stories (doesn’t everyone check the news 10 times a day?)
4. Election season makes me talk to the TV in anger
5. Watching the value of our investments decrease on a minute-by-minute basis is a drag
6. We aren’t ready to go back to work yet
7. We get to post regularly on the blog again

Cons of going on a month-long trip:

1. We’re starting to run out of money
2. We love the quality time we’ve spent with our friends in Boston since we got back from the last trip
3. We would probably miss most of Soxtober
4. That resume isn’t writing itself!

Guess what we decided!  We’re heading out West with our camping gear.

We don’t have a detailed itinerary at this point, but I’ve posted a new itinerary page with a very loose list, which we will update as we go.  We know we’re flying into Denver on Tuesday October 7 (tomorrow!), and flying out of Oakland on November 5 (don’t worry about us missing election day; we’re going to do absentee ballots.  Make sure you’re registered by the deadline and vote on Nov. 4!).  We’re renting a car for the month and we hope to hit some national parks in Utah, Arizona and California, as well as spend some time with friends in Boulder, Southern California, Lake Tahoe and the SF Bay area.

We have trip preparation down to a near science by now.  We’re not stressed, even though we’ve only given ourselves a few days to get ready.  I did buy a few new items, including trekking poles, so that I can hike confidently while my ankle is in its last stages of recovery.  We also got a broadband access card, so we can update the blog regularly.  I also bought a snake bite kit and bear whistles.  According to Dave, this just reaffirms my crazy.  Personally, I don’t understand what the big deal is; these things hardly take up any space in our luggage, weigh next to nothing, and could save our butts in the (admittedly very remote) chance that something bad happens.  And Dave used to be a boy scout!  Some preparedness…

Talk to you from the road!

– Meredith

Our apartment community is built around a wetlands conservation area. There are several ponds in the community, where we often see geese and ducks. This summer, a new resident moved in:

Do we live on Sesame Street? This bird is huge!

We call him Buddy. We see him almost every day, usually in the same spot. Thanks to my marine biologist friend Sara who knows a lot about animals and can ID them just by looking at a picture, we now know Buddy is a juvenile Great Blue Heron.

Our apartment community must be doing something right for Buddy to live peacefully here. Rock on, Arborpoint at Seven Springs!

– Meredith

Today we completed a long-distance mission that we accepted while in the Galapagos in March. There was a place on the island of Floreana called “Post Office Bay” that has a barrel that holds postcards written by people visiting the Galapagos, addressed to others all around the world. The idea is that other visitors rifle through the postcards, take any that are near their homes, and then deliver them when they return. No postage required. There’s a lot of history in that barrel – it dates back to the 18th century when whalers used it to send messages home.

Dave and I are not quite as fast as the postal service, since we picked up the postcards on March 11 and delivered them on August 23. Also, there was no snow, rain, sleet or even a cloud in the sky today as we delivered our mail (unlike the rest of August here!), so we’re not as hardy as the postal service. But, you get what you pay for. We have only been home a few weeks since March, so not too bad.

We delivered four postcards to people who live in Boston and in one of the suburbs that’s not too far from us. We rang the doorbells hoping that the recipients would come out to chat, but unfortunately no one was home at any of the places we visited. We just left the postcards in the mailboxes or under the door with a sticky note saying that Dave and Meredith delivered them (of course we also left our blog address!).

Mission accomplished.

– Meredith

Dave finally shaved his beard off!! For those who haven’t had the pleasure of seeing Dave for a while, he had gotten a little too…Yeti…for me. He had decided not to shave during the trip to Mongolia, partly for fun, but partly because we were in the middle of nowhere and he would have had to shave with icy water from glacial streams.

At first, I thought he looked quite handsome with his rugged not-yet-beard:

And even when he got to the point when it really was a beard, I didn’t mind it too much. But that was when I thought he would shave it once we got to Hawaii. But the experiment continued. I thought, “No problem, he’ll shave it as soon as we get home.” But Dave wanted to show it to our friends to see their reaction.

Almost three weeks after we got home, he finally shaved it (he wanted to wait until we saw our friends Andy and Darcie in Maine, which we did this past weekend).

Here are the before and after shots:

Dave the Rough (Before)

Dave the Smooth (After)

HOORAY! Dave’s face is back!

– Meredith

*Too obscure a musical theatre reference? How about, “Ding Dong the Beard is Dead”? The problem with that one is that while more people know The Wizard of Oz than they do Bye Bye Birdie, it’s just not as clever a word play. Thus, I chose to title this post “Bye Bye Beardie!”

A quick post to say that I’ve posted a gallery of pictures from Hawaii. Click here to see them. Enjoy!

– Dave

It’s taken longer than I would have liked but I have just uploaded picture galleries from our trip to Mongolia. You can click here to see pictures from Ulaan Baatar, here to see pictures from western Mongolia (Ulgii and Tavan Bogd), and here for pictures from the Gobi Desert. As usual, the Photo Galleries page has also been updated with these links.

The pictures posted are a larger size than previous galleries which I think looks much better but download times may be longer. Please let me know if there are any issues.

I’m now working on some of the panoramas that I took on the trip and will post again when they’re ready. As always, feedback is welcome. Enjoy!

– Dave

My friend Maura posted a comment to the blog this morning saying she assumed we made it to Buffalo, but did we make it back to Boston? It’s uncanny how pertinent that question actually is.

The short story is that we are back in Boston, with my car, and we got to take Buffalo Grandma to lunch yesterday. Here’s proof:

Grandma wearing the muumuu we got her in Hawaii

The longer story is that we had a heck of a time getting back. I don’t know *what* my parents did to my car while they had it, but about two hours into the trip home, the check engine light went on and the whole car started shaking. We had a three-hour diversion in Syracuse to get it towed and fixed (the service guys at Burdick Audi stayed past closing time – they really went above and beyond). We were back on the road with a new ignition coil at about 8:00 pm, but by 11:00 pm, the light went back on and the engine started running really rough again. So, we stopped for an hour at the Lee rest stop on the Mass Pike to give the car a break, and then when we turned it back on, the engine wasn’t shaking. So, we took a chance and drove to the next rest stop. Basically, we stopped at every rest stop on the Mass Pike and rested the car for 10 minutes and we got home okay. At 3:00 am.

I think I’ll borrow Dave’s car some more until I get this little issue fixed. I have an appointment on Monday. Of course, my Massachusetts inspection expired in June while the car was in NY, so I had to take it to get inspected this morning. It passed. Good to know the test has such high standards that a failed ignition coil/misfiring cylinder won’t keep someone off the road.

– Meredith

We’re just trying to get to Buffalo so I can get my car from my parents’ house and drive it back to Boston.  We already attempted this on Wednesday, but thunderstorms crippled the whole airport, and our severely delayed flight led to a flat-out canceled flight (after already having boarded!), and then we ended up back home around 3:00 am (the original flight was at 4:45 pm).  Anyhoo, it’s Sunday and we’re back at Logan.  Our flight was supposed to leave at 9:05 pm.  It’s now 12:15 am (wait a minute, it’s actually *Monday*, not Sunday, now) and JetBlue is suggesting we may be able to leave for Buffalo by 1:15 am.

I’m sure Dave and I will be in tip-top shape to drive 8 hours from Buffalo to Boston tomorrow.  If we actually get to Buffalo.

Thank goodness Terminal C has recently been renovated, complete with a Johnny Rockets and a Wolfgang Pucks.  “Sweet!” I hear you say.  But it turns out that a) Johnny Rockets was out of ice cream (REALLY???  They might as well be out of ground beef!) so no milk shakes.  And, just as the Red Sox-Yankees game was getting good (as in the Red Sox were really taking the lead), the bar we sat in that was showing the game called, “Last call!” at 9:25 pm and shut off the TVs, so we couldn’t finish watching the game.  Now I know Boston is pretty conservative when it comes to bar closings, and it *has* been a while since I’ve been out downtown, but a 10:00 pm closing seems a bit early, don’t you think?

So…still killing time in the airport.  I’ll let you know if we actually get to Buffalo or not.  I really hope so, because we are taking Buffalo Grandma to lunch tomorrow if we do.  🙂

– Meredith

We’re back in Boston again and looking forward to catching up with friends and family!

– Meredith and Dave

We spent two nights on Oahu so that we could see some of the local sights before flying out of Honolulu. At the top of our list was Pearl Harbor.

It’s hard for me to write about my experience at Pearl Harbor. I could write a factual account of what we saw, but that would fail to capture the meaning and emotion of the visit. I’m sure each visitor experiences something different at a place like this. I will try to tell you some of my thoughts without sounding overly sappy or sentimental.

One of the first things that struck me was the sheer multitude of visitors of every age, race and nationality. The National Park Service says that the USS Arizona Memorial gets about 4,500 visitors per day. I was very happy to see lots of families there, and though the youngest kids may not have fully understood what they were seeing, I generally got the sense that they knew they were someplace where they needed to be respectful, and needed to pay attention. The older kids certainly seemed to be interested in the exhibits in the visitor center, which I was pleasantly surprised at.

The visitor center and the USS Arizona Memorial visit was very well done, so perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that the kids were so engaged – I was too. One of the things that really made this a special visit was that they conveyed a significant amount of information through personal stories (not unlike Ken Burns’ “The War”, which was an amazing TV series on WWII and if you haven’t put the time investment into seeing it, I highly recommend it).

We heard stories from Pearl Harbor survivors on the audio tour (which was nicely done), and we read some other stories of both survivors as well as others who died during the attack. The park also has five Pearl Harbor survivor volunteers who work there at various times during the week. We met and chatted with one of the survivors named Everett Hyland. He has a fascinating story, and he was a delightful man to talk to as well. I am so glad to have met him and learned about his story. Click here to see a picture and read a short article about him – I thought it captured his story and personality well.

I am happy we spent extra time on Oahu to see the memorial. I expected that the visit would be moving, but I did not expect to be as engaged by the exhibits as I was. While we were there, we learned that there are plans to expand the visitor center and museum to include more personal stories and artifacts from the many families that have reached out to the park service after having been to visit the memorial themselves. It’s great to see people interested in preserving and sharing family memories so that others may learn about — and learn from — the past.

– Meredith

A family looks at the list of names of the nearly 1200 people who died on the USS Arizona during the attack on Pearl Harbor.