Category: United States

  • Seattle WA

    November 4th – November 17th, 2007

    Getting to know Seattle

    Sleepless in Seattle pretty much sums up our last two weeks in Seattle. Talk about Shrek and Donkey on a whirlwind big city adventure – that was us! During the days, we continued hiking everywhere, from short jaunts up the hill a few blocks to the Victrola Coffee Shop for some business sessions, to the Broadway Grille for brunch, to the Seattle Art Museum (known as SAM in these regions) for an extensive tour, to the waterfront where we saw Pike Place market again and browsed the shops along the waterfront.

    We made several trips to REI where we got a chance to scope out some of the equipment we have looked at online. It was a wonderful opportunity to see in person how things work, and what we definitely want to add to our list – like the MSR Dragonfly stove, bear canisters, and the GCI Outdoor Everywhere chairs. We also got a chance to return our sleeping pads – both of which had faulty air valves – and we scored some Chaco sandals for when we hit warmer weather. I also scored on some North Face Espial pants on sale – they are so comfortable that I take them off long enough to wash and then I wear them again!
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  • Seattle WA

    Father Mark, AB, Pat and assorted friends

    It’s dark outside, we’ve just finished a bowl of soup and toast for dinner, and we’re settling in for more work after dinner. We’ve had an awesome day, in fact, an awesome week! We just love being here in Seattle. There’s never a dull moment, and there’s always something or someone to see. Pat’s got a long, long time friend named Father Mark, who very often comes out to Seattle from New Jersey for Halloween. I first met him last year after our 2006 cycling adventure, and we were lucky enough to overlap with him again this year. FM, as he’s known to friends, is great fun.

    He took us to dinner at Julia’s in Capitol Hill on Friday night, where we met Alex Jackson and Rod, followed up by a visit to Purr, a happening nightclub, where AB joined us, and where we met Jay Sandel. Check out the photos in the photo gallery. Then we had another treat on Sunday – we got to have dinner with Pat, Carlos, and FM in Chinatown. The food was great and the leftovers were still great! We laughed our way through both nights. Father Mark gets our Hero of the Day for both of those wonderful evenings!
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  • Seattle WA

    We made it! We’re here in Seattle and we are starting the next major leg of our trip. At this point we aren’t quite sure what that will look like, as we are now nearly into winter, and the temperatures at night are dropping down into the 30’s. Luckily, we have a few days to think over what our strategy will be – we are staying with longtime friend Pat Celi and his roommate AB live right on Capitol Hill in downtown Seattle. We’ve arrived just in time for all the Halloween festivities, and we are having an incredible amount of fun with the guys, going to second hand stores and costume stores looking for the perfect costumes for them. Chelsea’s got a great start on hers – we’ll post photos on Halloween.
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  • Dover NH

    Still here – but not for long

    Yep. We’re still here. Even though we are so happy staying here – it’s very comfortable – we still are getting increasingly itchy feet, and the open road is calling us more every day. We have had incredibly much to do now that our funding has disappeared, and we have to raise funds to continue, as well. We spend a lot of time at the computer, and we’ve done lots of work on the bikes.

    Website improvements, website lockdown, and organizational issues

    We’ve continued our work on updating our site to reflect the new company, Traveling Roses. We are still catching up on blogs and on the photo galleries, and we are writing additional pages on things like choosing clothing and equipment, the top questions we are always asked, text for our gift registry text, and more. We are also collecting our “hundreds” of bits of paper that have accumulated (or that we threw in our bags in a panic when we left) and we are inputting all those into a Word document so we can access the information easily and without being weighed down by all that paper weight.
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  • Bar Harbor ME

    We ended up spending most of Mark’s week off by taking an impromptu trip up to Bar Harbor. We left on Wednesday morning about 7 a.m. and got back late Friday, and we had a wonderful time. It was great fun to see the Maine countryside, and the campground in Acadia was gorgeous. Mark really knows how to do car camping in style. We had kebabs roasted over an open fire, fresh tossed salad, and Absolut martinis complete with olives for the first night’s dinner.

    We had eggs and potatoes and veggies for breakfast, quesadillas, freshly brewed coffee from ground coffee beans, and lots of other goodies for our meals. And the best part is that Mark spent 22 years in the restaurant industry, most of those as a professional chef, so we had taste and style and presentation, and he cooked it all! We are now totally spoiled for camping with our little camp stove!
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  • Dover NH

    We’re here in Dover still, and still catching up on all our tasks. Before we left on our trip, we opened a new company called Traveling Roses, to reflect the changes in our lives. We are really happy because we have now managed to get our domain name changed and all the hosting issues solved with our website. It’s been an incredible learning curve. As I am writing this, Chelsea is busy updating our graphics files and all the related references on our site. She’s even hoping to have finished the updates on our Google map by the end of today.
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  • Dover NH

    We’re back online at long last. It has felt like forever since we have connected with the outside world, but our lives and adventures have meanwhile been rolling along steadily.

    Where have we been?

    Since we last wrote we have progressed from Satellite Beach through the rest of FL – Port Orange, Beverly Beach, and St Augustine FL. Attempting to escape the heat, we took a bus through Georgia, stopping in Savannah; and South Carolina, stopping in Charleston; and then finished the ride in Wilmington, North Carolina. We rode (in triple digit heat) from Wrightsville Beach in Wilmington to Surf City/North Topsail Beach, NC; from there to Goose Creek Campground on Bogue Sound, then off to Otway NC. From Otway we had a hot and difficult day (serious heat exhaustion) getting to Ocracoke on the Outer Banks.
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  • Boston MA/ Dover NH

    Our bus ride was really uneventful until New York. The traffic getting into New York was appalling, and we were late by at least an hour. We were half panicked, as we needed to make a connection in New York for Boston, and we weren’t sure what our other choices were. As it was, we weren’t arriving in Boston until 11:30 at night, and we had someone meeting us there, driving at least an hour to get there.

    Typical of a huge city, the New York bus terminal was immense. We had our small carry-on luggage, two big snorkel bags, stuffed to the gills, and at least three good-sized cardboard boxes. Needless to say, there was no way we could carry all that ourselves, and Murphy’s Law kicked in – our next bus was clear across the huge terminal. It was worse than many airports! Luck smiled on us in the shape of a baggage guy who agreed to take our boxes and snorkel bags over to the next bus while we ran for the departure gate.
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  • Salisbury MD

    The day was pretty much a repeat of the day before. We did crane our necks going over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, and watched everything we could see. We reached Salisbury by dinnertime. We’d agreed to part ways from Brian here, with us shipping our bikes off to New Hampshire and taking a bus up to Boston. We’d found a bike shop in Salisbury, so we talked to them about boxes and moved all our gear outside in back of the shop in order to pack our bikes.

    We have one distinct memory of Salisbury – and that was the owner of the shop, Buzz. He had been hit by a car some months before, suffering a brain injury. He was still in a relatively acute stage of recovery, but was back at work. We told him about Chelsea’s brain injury, and that she had recovered, and we talked about some of the things we’d done to achieve the recovery. It was very emotional, as Buzz was still in the throes of the immediate damage, and we could still so vividly recall our own tough times over many years.
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  • Kitty Hawk NC

    What fun it was cruising along the road in an RV. Mandy was a complete sweetheart. She took the front seat often, which she did when she and Brian were alone, and it was very funny to see the dog riding along as a passenger. Chelsea and I loved staring out the window at the scenery, and having time to read during the day. We chatted desultorily with Brian, and just generally had a great time. We opted for stopping in Kitty Hawk for the night, since Brian was interested in seeing the Wright Brother’s Museum there.

    We found a great RV camping spot right on the ocean. We got signed in and set up, then we took off for lunch and to see the museum. I wasn’t too thrilled about seeing the museum, but I must admit to having quite a bit of fun there. It was extremely interesting to see how people lived on the island back in the Wright Brother’s day…what a far cry from the present day. Even though Brian was the one most interested originally in seeing the museum and grounds, I nearly outdid his patience with being there. 🙂
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