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Travel, Interrupted
Lesson learned in 2018: Perhaps avoid planning travel excursions during the holiday season when people are getting sick and germs are running rampant. Last week, the day after Christmas, for the second year in a row, we had planned a trip to Asheville, North Carolina, with two days in Williamsburg to follow at Christmas. We’ve been trying to do a little more travel and less material gifts with our kids now that they are older teenagers. And so, last year, the trip was put off because my son, as a then senior in high school, had a ton of homework and presentations to put together for both school and…
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Travel Blog: Day 2-4 | San Fran, Carmel & Pebble Beach
Days 2-4: San Francisco, Carmel, Pebble Beach On the second day in San Francisco, I clocked in over 16,000 steps on my tracker. We walked everywhere. We began by having breakfast at Farmer Brown, a nice homestyle-meets-jazzy-blues place, where we all devoured some eggs, pancakes, and waffles. Afterwards, we lined up at the trolley, and the line was pretty long. We waited over an hour to take the trolley, but we were standing next to a family from Los Angeles who was also celebrating their daughter’s graduation from high school, and we became fast friends. One of the things I love most about travel is talking to people and meeting…
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Beautiful Beaufort, South Carolina
* It was one of those places I’d seen highlighted over and over again in magazines: Beaufort, South Carolina. As we’ve recently made Hilton Head, South Carolina, our new vacation spot, we’ve been visiting some of the towns nearby each time we go. This past year, after we left Charleston where we spent three days, we mapped our drive to Beaufort and decided it was the perfect place to spend a few hours before checking into our condo on Hilton Head Island. I’m so glad we took the time to visit. The town was everything I imagined it would be: small, quaint, full of Southern charm, hospitable and friendly, and…
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The (Obnoxious) Kid on the Plane
*** It’s a prayer all of us have sent up at some point in our lives: Please, God, don’t let the small, rambunctious kid sit near me on the plane. Sometimes prayers get answered. Sometimes, they don’t. Don’t get me wrong, I love children, especially my own more than others, but when I’m packed in like a sardine on my way to a pleasant vacation—or even worse, on my way home from a pleasant vacation—the last thing I want is a fussy, crying, obnoxious kid sitting next to me on my journey from which there is no escape until we land. I already come to the journey on an airplane…
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When Are You The Happiest? Part One
* I think that we can all confirm the obvious—we work a lot. Here, in the United States, we work many, many hours, whether those hours are at work, outside work, in the classroom, outside the classroom, attending meetings and conferences, or attending other notable business-related practices as needed, when needed. I never realized how much we worked—truly—until I sat on the edge of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, on the River Arno with my husband. We had purchased fresh Prosciutto, mozzarella, olives, roasted red peppers, and bread, and made ourselves a little picnic as we watched people close up shops for the afternoon siesta. I believe the words…
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“You think life is like living in a magazine.”
I’m not sure if it was last year or the year before during our family vacation when my father offered one of his astute and memorable (and humorous) observations. We were sitting on the beach and I was romanticizing about the late afternoon time of day; we were some of the only folks on the beach and the sun was lowering in the sky. It was picture perfect. “This makes me want to have a clam bake on the beach, you know, like Martha Stewart would do,” I said. My dad snickered. “You think life is like living in a magazine. You think life is like ‘Sex and The City.”…
