Hello Everyone. Christmas week is upon us! It snuck up on me pretty quickly this year, but I’m very grateful to have been able to spend the holiday season with friends and family at home. It’s always nice to be home in Washington this time of year as I truly think it’s the best time of the year to be in our nation’s capital. I’m writing to you this week from my brother’s house here in New Hampshire where I’ve only just arrived this evening. I figured it would be good to spend a few days in New England before heading off to old England for the New Year.
It’s been a fun and festive week here and I hope you are all enjoying the season however and wherever you celebrate it. We’ve certainly been busy and I’d love to tell you what we’ve gotten into this week. Last Tuesday my folks and I took a wonderful candlelit tour of the Tudor House, one of Washington’s oldest homes, the oldest parts of which date back to the late 18th century. We drank cocoa, ate mince pies and pound cake and heard the story of the family which called Tudor House home for 6 generations. Many of the furnishings are original to the house and the whole house was decorated for Christmas which was really special. After our tour we had a great dinner at Farmers, Fishers and Bakers on the Georgetown Waterfront while watching ice skaters cruise around the rink.
Wednesday we got up early and headed up to Columbia, Maryland to check out an afternoon matinee at Toby’s Dinner Theatre. We started with a really delicious buffet brunch and then enjoyed a fabulous production of the Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life performed in the round. The actors were great and the adaptation was incredibly well done. This was definitely a highlight of the season and I will absolutely be returning to Toby’s in the future. After the show we took a spin around Historic Ellicott City, a town I’ve really enjoyed visiting over the last couple of years. The town was decorated for the season and it was fun to wind around the hills and rivers for an hour or so. We wound up the day with a few craft beers at the nearby Sapwood Cellars Brewery.
On Thursday I spent the day cleaning and packing and then headed over to my friend Sandy’s house for dinner. Sandy was my date to my senior prom and has become one of my very good friends over the last thirty years.
Hello Everyone! It’s been another amazing week out here in New Mexico and I can’t wait to tell you about it, but I’m going to start out this week with my most exciting news. As most of you know, I will be going back to my regular gig as an overland tour guide this summer. I’ll be working for a company called Incredible Adventures which is currently being run by my last two managers from my old company. I got a call from one of them yesterday with some thoughts on my start-up tour and I will be heading to Hawaii next month. Of all the places I thought I might go this summer, Hawaii was not on my list and I am so excited for this opportunity. It will be in the midst of my time in Arizona, but I will fly out and then back and be able to finish up my time there before heading on to San Francisco to begin my season in earnest. I am definitely looking forward to walking barefoot on a white sand beach and swimming in beautiful turquoise water. So with mai tais and sea turtles dancing in my head, let me tell you about my exciting week here in New Mexico.
When I left you last week, I was planning on heading to a place called Meow Wolf the following morning. Meow Wolf was an incredible experience which is really hard to explain. It’s essentially a big funhouse, full of fascinating and beautiful art installations. You enter it through the front door of a Victorian house and then you choose your own adventure from there. You can go through the fireplace into an ice cave with a mammoth skeleton which you can play like a xylophone. You can go through the refrigerator which takes you to a strange vacationland. You can go through the bookcase and come out in a circus-like room. You end up in treehouses and lighthouses and flying buses. It really is quite a place to experience and I was there for probably three hours and continued finding new rooms and passages right up until the end, and I’m sure I missed some along the way. It was weird and wonderful and I would definitely recommend it if you are ever in Santa Fe (or Denver or Las Vegas).
My Thursday afternoon was definitely one of ups and downs. I got a call from my dad telling me he had fallen and broken his ankle. He’ll be okay and is in a recovery facility, but I worry about some of these places and what floats around in them with Covid only being one such worry. On the flip-side, I got a nice email telling me one of my photos has been accepted to be published in a book of hiking trails from National Geographic called 100 Trails, 5000 Ideas. As a photographer, National Geographic is obviously one of the biggest names in the industry and while it will be a small photo in a big book, I’m still very happy to be included. In the afternoon I headed over to visit the Montezuma Masonic Lodge, where the gentleman I met in Taos told me I could find Kit Carson’s rifle. I met several of the Masons who were a part of the Lodge when I walked in, and they were incredibly warm and welcoming. The Secretary, Don, told me the whole story of the rifle and how Kit himself had instructed that it be hand delivered to the Lodge upon his death. It was, and they’ve been caring for it ever since. I had to put on a pair of gloves to hold it, but it was amazing to have this piece of history in my hands. I’m very grateful to the gentlemen of the Montezuma Lodge for their hospitality and all of the fascinating stories they shared with me while I was there. I decided to celebrate the day with a few beers at La Fonda, a wonderful must-see hotel right off the central Plaza in downtown Santa Fe. Mark has been bartending at La Fonda for years and it’s always a pleasure to stop in and say hello and have a drink in historic surroundings. From there, I said goodbye to Santa Fe and headed up the highway to the Buffalo Thunder casino for the night.
I started my day on Friday at Bandelier National Monument, not far up the road. Due to its proximity to Santa Fe it’s a busy park and it was fairly crowded when I was there, but there were some great old ruins to poke around at the base of some beautiful cliffs. When I had had my fill of the ruins, I had some lunch and then set off up the other side of the canyon on the Frijoles Rim Trail. It was a wonderful and beautiful trail and, in contrast to the valley, I didn’t see a single person along the whole hike. The trail took me up to the top of the canyon and along its rim for a mile or so and there were wonderful views down the canyon and off to the mountains in the distance. When I made it back to my van, we were off and running to Los Alamos to have a short look around Manhattan Project National Historical Park before it closed. I had been to another section of this park several years ago in Oak Ridge, Tennessee where they had enriched the uranium which was then transported to Los Alamos and built into the atomic bombs. They tested their first bomb at the Trinity Site down near what is now White Sands National Park…
Hello Everyone! It’s December! That means 2020 is almost over and it’s Christmas season which are both things that make me happy. It’s definitely getting dark early these days which is not my favorite thing in the world. While I love the nighttime and the dark, I really prefer my daylight to stretch until at least 6. Thankfully it’s only three weeks until the Winter Solstice and then we can start looking towards springtime. The good thing about it getting dark earlier this time of year is that it means more time to see the beautiful Christmas lights and displays in people’s yards. I do love Christmas lights and I know from how many decorations were up for Halloween that this year will be bigger than usual. If you’re still looking for some holiday gifts for friends and family, don’t forget about my beautiful Cloudland Canyon wooden jigsaw puzzle available here from Wentworth Puzzle Company. And if you have any photos of mine that you like, I’d be happy to sell you a print or a beautiful aluminum art piece. You can check out prices at my store here, and know that I can do any photo you want, not just the ones featured there – don’t hesitate to reach out and we can make it happen.
I had a big little win this week which definitely made me smile. At the very beginning of this adventure when I was trying to build a blog from the tiny fishing village I lived in in Japan, I started to look for web addresses which would suit the project. I have always loved the Robert Frost poem which inspired the name for this blog, and was trying to figure out how to make it all work. When I looked up milestogobeforeisleep.com, it was available, but for a cost of like $1500. No page would be worth that to me, so I settled on its catchy but somewhat more complicated twin, miles2gobeforeisleep.com. I’m still happy with that decision, but the “2” can make it harder for people to remember etc. I’ve kept my eye on that page for ten years now and last week whoever owned it finally gave up the ghost and I snatched it up the very next day. It’s kind of silly at this point, but like I said it was a very small victory and it made me happy.
I also had a really nice offer come in this week from my friend Kim who owns and operated Up The Keys tours in Key West. She is planning on doing some sailing for a few months this winter and wanted to know if I would come and run her business for her while she was gone. It was a wonderful offer and I was very touched and humbled that she would ask, and who wouldn’t want to spend the winter in Key West? Any other time and I would jump at this, but I’m just not comfortable with guiding tours right now, not until I get a vaccine which is hopefully just months away at this point. I think I’m here in D.C. until that happens, which I’m not unhappy about, but I will be dreaming of the Keys for the next few weeks. I know when the time is right that something great will come along. It always does for me.
We had a wonderful Thanksgiving last Thursday with my brother and his family in New Hampshire. He cooked up a real feast and I was definitely impressed with his cooking ability. It was a day of food and festivity and a very relaxed one at that…
I had a wonderful Thanksgiving in New Hampshire last week and got out to do a little bit of exploring and to take these photos. It was lovely to drive around the small towns in the south of the state and I enjoyed seeing what they had to offer. Beautiful New England spires were ubiquitous, but I also found some stoic old industrial buildings and some incredibly still water to get some reflections shots. I hope you enjoy these photos from southern New Hampshire as much as I enjoyed taking them.
Hello Everyone! November is coming to a close and I doubt that I’m the only one looking forward to putting 2020 in my rear view mirror. Not that anything will magically change on January 1st, but I definitely believe that next year will be better than this one. Personally I’m looking forward to getting back on the road, seeing some new and beautiful places, catching up with some old friends and making some new ones. I feel like this year I just kicked it up into neutral in April and I’ve been coasting along since them. I remain incredibly grateful for so much that’s happened this year, but I won’t be sad to wave goodbye come New Year’s Day.
One of the biggest joys of this year has been hanging out with my 2 year-old buddy, Mason, who has kept me smiling for a lot of months now. I realized that I’ve now spent over 10% of his life with him. 10% of my life ago, Barrack Obama was still president, so it’s no small amount of time. This week we spent a little more time at the playground than usual. We don’t spend much time there because all the nannies in the neighborhood go there, mingle and let the kids they watch do the same. I don’t want any kids breathing and snotting all over Mason, especially now that cold and flu season is in full swing as I don’t want him or me to get sick. But with colder temperatures fewer people are there, so we’ve at least been able to get the kindergarten playground to ourselves a few times which he really enjoys. He was disappointed when I wouldn’t go down the slide with him, and I tried to explain that I was too big to go or I definitely would. Now when he sees a small playground in someone’s yard he says “Uncle Mike, too big” which I just think is really funny. One of the slides we use I have to pick him up and put him on, which was a nice bicep curl motion to it. I started doing “Mason curls” and counting to ten and he seems to really enjoy it too, so that’s been good for both of us. Beyond that, we’ve been seeing the forest leaves thin and disappear and the change of season has been interesting to watch for both of us. He’s learned some evergreens like cedar, holly and ivy and continues to pull whatever berries he can reach. It was another good stretch hanging out with him.
Last Friday we had a pretty quiet night at home. We had originally planned on heading up to New Hampshire to my brother’s place first thing Saturday morning, so we didn’t want to overdo it on Friday. We had some turkey sandwiches, some pumpkin eggnog and then watched Planes, Trains and Automobiles, one of the only really good Thanksgiving movies out there. It wasn’t as raucous as usual, but it was a fun Friday night with the family just the same…
A few weeks ago I had the wonderful opportunity to go and spend a week with my brother in southern New Hampshire. We went out to explore some of the most beautiful parts of the area by car, by boat and on foot. The fall colors were just starting to kick into high gear, and some of the scenes we saw were truly spectacular. We saw covered bridges over the Ashuelot River, beautiful rural countryside and charming small towns like Hancock and Harrisville. I took a lot of photos, and this is the second post I’ve published with them to allow you to see the area through my lens. I hope you enjoy these photos from fabulous southern New Hampshire.
A few weeks ago I had the wonderful opportunity to go and spend a week with my brother in southern New Hampshire. We went out to explore some of the most beautiful parts of the area by car, by boat and on foot. The fall colors were just starting to kick into high gear, and some of the scenes we saw were truly spectacular. We saw covered bridges over the Ashuelot River, lakefront vistas at Lake Winnipesaukee, and charming small towns like Peterborough and Amherst. I took a lot of photos, and this is the first of at least two posts which will allow you to see the area through my lens. I hope you enjoy these photos from fabulous southern New Hampshire.
Last week I had the distinct pleasure of traveling around southwestern New Hampshire to photograph these wonderful covered bridges. I’ve always had a thing for covered bridges, and these were no exception. Much like the lighthouses and Mail Pouch Barns I’ve featured in the past on this blog, covered bridges are such a beloved and photogenic part of the American landscape. Autumn had just begun when I was out taking these pictures, and was in varying stages depending on which bridge I was looking at, but it certainly was a beautiful day to be out there. I hope you enjoy these beautiful and historic covered bridges from southwestern New Hampshire.
