• Dog-ish Days

    We are in weird times. I’m talking about our family and the point in the calendar we’re at, not more globally. Summer’s end is coming up quick and we’re beginning to squeeze in as much as we can. But we also just came out of the hottest stretch of weather in nearly seven years here in Indy, which made it…

  • KC Trip Notes

    A belated and brief wrap up of my weekend in Kansas City. Thanks to Southwest’s always morphing flight schedule, I believe for the first time ever on one of these trips I flew over late in the afternoon, landing at 4:00. That certainly shortened the weekend up a bit. But, to be honest, often when I came over in the…

  • San Diego Notebook

    Our summer trip is already in the books. After C and L wrapped up their school year last Tuesday, we set early alarms and headed off to the airport at 5:30 Wednesday morning to get our flight to San Diego. It was the girls’ first trip to California, and the first visit to San Diego for S and I. Other…

  • Spring Break Biggie

    It’s a Nephew Duty day so getting this out a little later than I planned. OK, now for the trip itself. First off, I must say, I can not recommend enough traveling on off-days during spring break. I believe we saved a little on the airfare by doing a Thur-Thur trip. More importantly, the airports were breezes to get through.…

  • Spring Break 2019, Part 1: Prologue

    As expected, my Cancún summary is rather long. So I shall divide it into a couple posts for you. Part one goes back to the pre-trip drama I mentioned before we left. Two Sundays ago we were deep into the trip prep process. Packing, printing itineraries, making our 30th Target run, etc. As a part of this I pulled out…

  • Breakin’ It

    As I said Monday, this is a very busy week. It’s already noon on Wednesday and it feels like the first half of the week has raced by as we get closer to our spring break departure tomorrow morning. Last night M and C and I went to St. P’s first every big theater production. A few years back there…

  • So About That Golf You Mentioned…

    Ty! What’d you shoot today? Oh, I don’t keep score, Judge. Oh well, how do you measure yourself with other golfers? By height. Yep, first round of golf in something like 11 years, and only second round in 15 years. It went about as you would expect. I picked my ball up on three holes, so I did not finish…

  • On Tony and Travel

    I haven’t posted anything about Anthony Bourdain. Although he didn’t impact my life as much as Scott Hutchison did, Bourdain’s suicide still struck me deeply. I watched his shows for years, read several of his books, and was a fan of his overall approach to life. I’ve written before about the irony of my love of travel books given the general…

  • Una Semana en Mexico

    We left cold, snowy Indiana for a week in the warmth and sun of Mexico. It was, almost completely, an excellent trip. Our home for the week was the Paradisus La Esmerelda resort in Playa del Carmen, about 45 minutes south of Cancun. Our flight down was without incident, we navigated the hour-long line that was Mexican immigration, gathered our…

  • Belated Holiday Wrap Up

    Glory be! After roughly 36 hours without either cable or internet access, our house (and neighborhood it turns out) has been reconnected! So I can finally start unloading some of the accumulated content from the past week-plus. First, Happy New Year! I hope your celebrations, large and small, were fun and safe. Let’s go back to 2017 and review how…