Category: Nature
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Costa Rica, Part 6 (Beyond the Beach)
My flirtation with idleness ended. I simply couldn’t sit around Tamarindo another day doing nothing or I’d grow increasingly frustrated. So the relaxation was fine for awhile but now I needed to find something else to do. Surfing lessons didn’t seem like a thing for me but plenty of other activities sounded interesting. Tamarindo Estuary…
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Costa Rica, Part 3 (Exploring La Fortuna)
The second full day in La Fortuna promised abundant showers although not continuously. It was the rainy season after all and it rains, and people deal with it. Frankly, the bright sunshine of the previous day was a fluke. So we understood all of this ahead of time and we devised a plan. We’d stick…
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Costa Rica, Part 2 (In the Shadow of the Volcano)
We landed at Juan Santamaría airport in San José on a Friday afternoon, clearing Immigration and Customs nearly effortlessly. Then we got a taste of rush hour traffic riding on the shuttle to retrieve our rental car. Driving conditions became a lot more difficult later in the trip although I didn’t know it at the…
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Mitten Accomplished
I got a unique opportunity to visit counties in a corner of the Midwest I hadn’t touched much when my older kid decided to go to college in Michigan. But it didn’t offer a lot of time for my quest, just a four year window before graduation. Even so, I set what I thought was…
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Mackinac’s Orbit, Part 10 (Into the Highlands)
A typical tourist on Mackinac Island sticks pretty close to town. Maybe they’ll take a carriage tour inland or head over to the golf course. Still others may venture around the perimeter on a bicycle along Lake Shore Road. But there are other spots that get less attention. I wouldn’t call any of them “obscure”…
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Mackinac’s Orbit, Part 9 (Lake Shore Road)
Bicycles are the most popular form of transportation on Michigan’s Mackinac Island, other than foot. They’re perfect for an area of less than four square miles where motorized vehicles are essentially prohibited. There are plenty of places to rent bicycles within an easy walk of the ferry docks. However, I had an inside track. My…
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Mackinac’s Orbit, Part 5 (Eastern U.P.)
Staying in St. Ignace for a week was a whole lot cheaper than staying on Mackinac Island. It was also a lot easier to use as a base for exploring the eastern end of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Once, many years ago, I drove along the southern edge of the U.P. and stayed overnight. Other than…
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Mackinac’s Orbit, Part 4 (Petoskey)
One day we decided to explore Emmet County, at the northwestern tip of Michigan’s lower peninsula. Prior to that, my only exposure to this place happened along a brief segment of I-75 barely clipping the county line before crossing the Straights of Mackinac. My entire elapsed time in Emmet lasted mere seconds. However I’d completely…
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Southern Hills, Day 2 (Roadside Attractions)
We built a buffer into our schedule. That way, we figured, if plans went awry we’d still have an extra day to get down to the first race. As it happened everything unfolded beautifully on Day 2 so it was all about seeing as many roadside attractions as we could squeeze into daylight hours. An…
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Bogue Banks Bound, Part 5 (Critters)
I’ve covered some pretty comprehensive topics in the last several installments. So let’s get a little more lighthearted with the content and shift gears. Everybody loves animals, right? I sure do, and we saw a bunch of them on Bogue Banks. Whether captive or in the wild there was something here for everyone. North Carolina…