After several days of truly miserable rain, wind and generally awful weather, we lucked out into a truly incredible last day on the island. We packed up all of our stuff, started reloading our suitcases for the return journey, and hit the road. And what a road it was. Our last full day on Iceland was also our best weather day. One of my primary rules about road trips is to never backtrack unless absolutely necessary. After all, why see…
Believe it or not, 4 days into our trip to Iceland… we hadn’t really seen any ice! We tried to see some glaciers, but with all the rain and clouds, our visibility was less than a mile at best, and sometimes even less. Really miserable stuff. But finally the rain was over, and we were headed for the Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon. We had reservations on a boat but had some stops to make beforehand, so we had to be extremely…
So day 3 started with… more rain. Turns out the beautiful valley we roamed around in the last post wasn’t quite ready to give up on the rain after all. Rain which didn’t let up all day. Like a constant downpour from the minute we left our cabin, through 8+ hours in the car – our longest driving day of the entire trip. But we had no choice but to keep moving forward. Our destination for this day was Vik,…
After recovering from one of the more miserable travel experiences I’ve had, Ariel, Jacob and I wasted little time hitting the road on days 2 and 3 of our Iceland adventure. For the first time since our trip to Alaska (which perhaps not-so-coincidentally was the last time we were going away in advance of a baby), Ariel and I have been immersing ourselves in just totally epic landscapes all day every day. Sure Hawaii was beautiful and incredible, but this…
You’ll notice the title does not include the exclamation point I would normally include… Let’s just get right to it – we’re really excited and happy to be here, but man getting here was a classic “not a pony ride in May-sunshine” experience. Our saga started sitting in above-average Belt Parkway traffic on the way to JFK. After getting through security, which for some reason closed the TSA Pre check-in line at 7:30 pm (is this a thing at JFK???),…
When traveling, especially on a long journey, finding an inviting, comfortable, and safe place to get some rest is critical. During the pandemic, when we weren’t traveling as much, it was still important to search for places of refuge from the mundanity and quiet but omnipresent low level anxiety of virus-driven daily life. Regardless of the circumstance, finding an oasis of peace and rest amongst the chaos can go a long way towards restoring both mental and physical stamina. In…
Sitting here now over a month after being home from our epic Hawaii trip, I can’t help but feel a bit of the same melancholy I felt five years ago at the end of our New Zealand trip, as there were quite a few parallels between coming home from that trip and this one. Both involved really rather epic travel itineraries that included long, overnight layovers in California. Both involved a lot of moving around, in a way Ariel and…
Well it’s been just about a month since we got home from our epic family adventure to Hawaii. Even though it’s been a while since I stood on the side of the Piilani Highway, feeling like we had reached a new pinnacle in our adventuring career, I’m sitting here at my office staring out at the steady thrum of cars and trucks motoring along the New Jersey Turnpike, with a strange feeling of unreality. In a lot of ways, it…
So after a week of exploring Maui with our son and my dad, I thought I would summarize what we did, because a lot of it isn’t really what families with young children do when they go to Hawaii. In fact, few families even go to Maui, as it’s generally seen as a honeymoon/romantic type of destination. But we actually found there was a ton of stuff to do, even with a 4 year old! We stayed Lahaina, near the…
One of the things I was most looking forward to during our Hawaii trip was taking a drive up to the top of Haleakala National Park. I was excited to visit one of the most remote national parks in the entire system, and the pictures I had seen made it look like a far easier version of our somewhat ill-fated attempt to “simply walk into Mordor” aka the Tongariro Alpine crossing. The Red Crater really does look a lot like…