I spent 8 days in Vevey, Switzerland which is an affluent town on the other side of the Lake from Geneva and about an hour away by train. During this time I also visited Gstaad (sort of like a Swiss Aspen), Geneva (but just for a day) and took a train to Chamonix, France. The trains to both Gstaad and Chamonix were both scenic trains with big windows and beautiful views.
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After Venice it was a quick few days bouncing around Florence and Tuscany. I had visited Florence once as a child, but this time I found Tuscan food some of my favorite. I also came to understand that Florentine people are very fashionable and interested in fashion! I did see the original statue of David previously (which is impressive of course) — there are other copies of it to which are neat as well. Continuing Tuscany adventures, next in line was Follonica, on the western coast of Tuscany, but just for four days while working. Still managed to do some exploring around the seaside towns and beaches in the area. This would be a great place to spend a summer.
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After finishing the European bike trip through Austria, Italy and Slovenia, we all took a shuttle van to Venice Italy where we spent three days and two nights exploring fun and interesting things around town. I have only been to Venice once before, when I was fifteen years old, on a school trip and this time around I got a better sense of what Venice is really like thanks to Costanza who patiently explained, guided and accommodated me across the various islands. She made an appointment for us to visit the island of Murano, where famous glass art is crafted, to have a business meeting to investigate sourcing materials to her Los Angeles design company. She let me tag along and accompany her as I stood wide eyed with my hands in my pocket making a concerted effort not to break anything. Murano glass is apparently world famous — they produce chandeliers for retail locations of major Italian fashion designers and prices there I saw were over $50,000. One of the head salesmen of the company greeted us when we landed on the island from the free boat he was kind enough to send for us (well really for Costanza). […]
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When someone invites me to do something somewhere in the world, my default is yes. Well I’ve had to re-evaluate that position since meeting Costanza – a woman whose sense of adventure and desire to travel and explore new places vastly outshines my own. She was doing a bike trip through Europe (Austria, Italy and Slovenia) for 7 days that her friend had organized and invited me to join alongside five others. So I reorganized my itinerary (sorry Vancouver, some other time). A cool thing about the bike trip was since I was in the central European time zone (which was about 7 hours behind in the USA timezone I work within) I didn’t have to take any time off work. Each morning we started biking with an early start to avoid midday European summer head and then arrived at the next destination in the afternoon which allotted plenty of time to attend my remote work meetings and grind on client work. The best part though was that the project I was currently working on during the trip got canceled half way through it, so I didn’t end up working at all during the entire six days, which was great. […]
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I stopped in Denver for the first time in a long time — sometime in 2022 I think? Anyway it was time to repack my bag again after so long on the road and I wanted to visit my friends and family. I crashed in the basement of my friend Eric’s house for a few nights and then I headed north to southern Wyoming to visit my dad and his wife on our family’s property in Carbon County. Since my days in the USA are limited for tax purposes (< 35 a year) I always jam pack a lot of obligatory ToDos into a short period of time (re-registering the license plate of my car, Amazon.com orders, catching up with friends etc). This time in Denver I was really fun. I celebrated the University of Colorado’s big first-week win at a watch party in downtown Denver with a big group of alumni, and met up with four different former coworkers. By the time I arrived in Wyoming I was ready to spend time with my dad and go to sleep early. I worked from the kitchen table and had coffee with him and then we rode ATVs around the property […]
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Sayulita has been a Mexican vacation spot for Americans and tourists for a long time, and during the past ten years its popularity seems to have grown. I’ve wanted to visit ever since I saw beach and tacos photos popping up on my Instagram years ago and always had the idea that it could be a stop-over destination on the way to somewhere else or as a short vacation spot to accommodate a beach side work-style. And it did – I ended up staying in two other places as well, San Pancho, a smaller town about fifteen minutes outside of Sayulita which is a little less developed than Sayulita but still retains the same taco and beach vibes. The beach at San Pancho is better than in Sayulita and it seems a better place to stay and visit if you are in the market for a short Mexican getaway, though I also enjoyed Sayulita (and the gym that I used for a couple of days — no air conditioning, no water, 40 degrees and super sweaty). I also spent four days at the W resort in Punta Mita, Mexico which was a special splurge that was a lot of fun […]
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Banff is the sort of scenic mountain town that you might find in Colorado, USA. Big mountains, trees, rivers, lots of tourist appeal, hiking and activities to attract visitors in every season of the year. The real appeal of Banff is not the town of Banff – it’s everything outside of it. For some reason all of us tourists flock there because it gets a lot of the attention for the beauty of Alberta that surrounds it. Banff is just another hyped up touristy mountain town. Skip it if you can and enjoy all the cool stuff outside of it. There are so many hikes to do all over the place offering different views and panoramic landscapes. Morraine Lake and Mirror Lake are both famous places to see but there are some logistical stress that comes with visiting them. The national park service disallows parking or vehicle traffic to manage load, so you need to purchase ticketed reservations. The time slots sell out immediately (as within 10 seconds of them becoming available online during high season). But what you can do is rent a bike or ebike (electrical bike) and ride 9 kilometers from the rental shop to the lakes […]
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Calgary has been on my Canadian hit list for the past couple years as Canada has increasingly become a place of interest to me; it’s like the United States, but it isn’t the United States,. For a travel hipster like me, that’s a cool reason to visit. So far I have visited Montreal, Toronto and Newfoundland and Calgary has been next in queue. Part of my interest in Calgary has come from the annual Calgary Stampede which is a huge, ten day rodeo in the middle of July with many other events and activities, and always seemed similar to Cheyenne Frontier Days, a comparable event in Cheyenne, Wyoming each July for ten days. I couldn’t visit the Stampeded this year owing to my friends’ wedding in Prague at the same time, but I was able to visit in August. The people I talked to while I was in Newfoundland told me how the province of Alberta (within which Calgary is situated) is different from the other places I had visited in Canada. Alberta is more western, mountainous, scenic and rural. It’s always really fun to “discover” a new sort of mico-culture in a country, it makes you feel like an […]
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My friend David is from and lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland and I visited him for the second year in a row to stay at his house and attend the annual George Street Festival. Each year dozens of bars on George Street open their doors and people stream between them as live music bands play in the street during each of the seven nights. David was again a gracious host and we had fun exploring the streets of George Street again, though I think we only made it out about three or four times. When David goes out he likes to stay out until 4 AM which isn’t something I’m so good at handling anymore, though I am proud to say I’m pretty good at drinking David’s drink of choice, Whisky diet gingers. My favorite part about staying at David’s are the afternoon happy hours that happen outside in his back yard around his fire pit, listening to a portable speaker playing tunes while we talk about work and women. I’d fly to St. John’s just for that. The next time I see David there’s a good chance he’ll be married – he met a woman from Jersey (the island) […]
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In 2004, I took my first solo, international trip to Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, to fish for sea-run brown and rainbow trout on the Rio Grande River. At the time, I was a financially constrained, post-collegiate individual. I quickly learned that fishing access in Argentina was only possible if you paid thousands of dollars to stay at large, private estancias (similar to Brush Creek Ranch in Wyoming or A-A), catering to wealthy foreigners who wanted to fish. I thought that couldn’t be right. Surely, there would be local public access for ordinary people to fish, just like in every other country in the world (presumably). However, I couldn’t find any information online, and even inquiries on the TripAdvisor web forums (lol TripAdvisor) yielded no results. Nonetheless, I ventured forth to figure it out upon arrival, and what an adventure it turned out to be! It involved, among other things, an abandoned, post-apocalyptic hostel, a ghost ship named DESDEMONA, a run-in with authorities, and help from local children. Eventually, I did locate local public fishing access and caught some truly enormous trout on salmon flies. I updated my TripAdvisor question with the fact that I figured it all out: there was […]
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