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Category: Adventure

Day 3: An Anti-Climactic Conclusion, A Detainment, And An Amazing Sunset

Day 3: An Anti-Climactic Conclusion, A Detainment, And An Amazing Sunset

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Keeping with the Paul Bunyan theme of the last post, the morning of Day 3 started with a trip to his….grave? I don’t know. This was pretty amusing considering there’s about a 99.9999999% chance this guy never existed. But it was somehow a little moving. Paul Bunyan is awesome. Is this really where he’s buried? No. It isn’t. But still. Anyway. So I finally made it to the northernmost point of the contiguous United States – Northwest Angle, Minnesota. This…

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Re-adjusting to normalcy: Finding adventure in the everyday

Re-adjusting to normalcy: Finding adventure in the everyday

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As I sit here at the Delta Lounge in Atlanta (which is AWESOME by the way), it dawns on me that it’s been four months almost to the day since we returned from our epic New Zealand/Middle Earth adventure. While our trip was only two weeks long, being away from home and seeing new things (not to mention the intense breaks from reality that were our travel days there and back again), where every day’s goal was to simply live…

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On being home…

On being home…

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So we got home late last night after an extraordinarily exhausting 53 hours of travel, including some borderline time travel that I’m still trying to wrap my head around. Consider this, our flight left Auckland, NZ on Saturday at about 11:30 pm New Zealand time, crossing the international dateline shortly afterwards. We landed in California (after a 12 hour flight of nonstop turbulence) at 2:30 pm. On SATURDAY. That’s about nine hours BEFORE we departed. We went to sleep in…

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They’re taking the Kapoanos to Isengard… AKA back home to New Jersey

They’re taking the Kapoanos to Isengard… AKA back home to New Jersey

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Well, I’m sitting here now at the lovely Emperor Club at the Auckland Airport. We had a three hour drive today followed by a 90 minute flight from Queenstown to here. Now we begin the real journey home, via California. Since our last update, we’ve continued having some really wild experiences. As I alluded to in the last post, on Wednesday morning we had our tour of “Rohan” AKA the Poolburn Reservoir area in the Otago region. This place was…

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One does NOT simply walk into Mordor… Or traverse the Tongariro Alpine Crossing

One does NOT simply walk into Mordor… Or traverse the Tongariro Alpine Crossing

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On Wednesday, Ariel and I traversed the Tongariro Alpine Crossing. Or in other words, we attempted to simply walk into Mordor. We had known this day was coming for months and even made some half-hearted attempts to “train” for it by doing a few hour-long hikes around New Jersey. We were unprepared. Our bus picked us up from the Park Hotel where we were staying at 7:30 am and dropped us off at the start of the trail around 8…

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Adventures are not all pony rides in May sunshine

Adventures are not all pony rides in May sunshine

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Bilbo was sadly reflecting that adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine… –The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien So this isn’t a vacation. We knew this. You knew this. It’s an adventure. What’s the difference, you ask? Well, it’s simple really. Vacations are relaxing. Adventures are awesome. But occasionally adventures also suck. And like the word “awesome” sometimes it means amazing, sometimes it means intimidating. When you’re trying to cram an entire country into 13 days, you’re going to experience a lot…

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