Outdoor Travel Geek

Tag: travel

  • reno, rest, relaxation & return

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    The drive from Seattle to Glacier National Park took almost ten hours. Originally our plan was to hit up Yellowstone after Glacier, and then Arches and Zion, and then hit Las Vegas before heading home. But looking at the map, we saw that each of those drives would be at least a good eight hours.…

  • glacier national park

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    Often when car camping for multiple days in a row there’s a bunch of leftovers. Those leftovers are great when thrown into a pot with some ramen noodles. In this case we had some leftover seafood soup from the Korean restaurant we ate at outside of Seattle. It made for a really tasty breakfast. It…

  • seattle

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    Most people know this about me: I like to bike, I like to eat, and I like photography. Apparently Portland exists at the intersection of all three of those. Seriously I liked Portland so much, it was hard to leave. The distance between Portland and Seattle is not very long. In fact, I biked it…

  • portland gluttony

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    I ate so much in Portland that I decided to dedicate a post to all the food I had… Spanish anchovies with lemon aioli. This food cart was named Euro Trash– they had all sorts of stuff including escargot and foie gras. Kalua pork slider. Very tasty, but kinda pricey at $3 for such a…

  • portland

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    Please excuse the crappiness of the photos in this post. They’re all cellphone shots, I didn’t use my SLR a whole lot in Portland… We arrived in Portland pretty late in the evening. We found a cheap motel in the outskirts of town. Our motel is next door to a Chinese dive bar (never knew…

  • crater lake

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    I think part of the reason why I like road trips is because my family used to go on them when I was a kid. I have good memories of road trips in our family minivan. My dad would be driving, my mom would be riding shotgun and my bro and I would each have…

  • lava beds

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    Tonight we’re staying at a campsite at Lava Beds National Monument. The drive from Burney Falls to Lava Beds was pretty ridiculous. The GPS kept wanting to take us on dirt roads, and for a long time I kept trying to force it to recalculate by continuing on paved roads. Finally I just gave up…

  • burney falls

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    A long journey began today. Gid and I went to the Sacramento airport to pick up a rental car for a long road trip. We had reserved a compact car, but we ended up upgrading to a Prius V. My first impressions of the car are that it accelerates really slowly and the handling is…

  • socal sojourn

    I’m not really a huge fan of socal. I think I’ve mentioned that before. I mean, there are some great things going for socal. There’s an abundance of awesome food down there, some stuff which is not really available up here. The beaches down there are great, not like the cold water beaches we have…

  • the capital

    One of the great things about my job is that it’s relatively flexible. It’s because of this flexibility that I can take advantage of great deals on flights. Back in June Southwest had an amazing sale on airfares throughout the country, so I ended up booking a trip to Washington D.C. I actually visited DC…

  • all aboard for seattle

    all aboard for seattle

    I’d love to ride the trains across Europe or Asia someday but I’ve never understood the appeal of trains in the United States. The difference in the US is that less people ride the trains, so the schedules are terrible and the trains are always late. And on top of that, trains in the US are…

  • the launch

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    T-Minus 17 hours. Approximately 10:30pm EST. My buddy Tim and I arrive at Spaceview Park. We thought we were going to be among the first ones there. Oh how wrong we were. The entire front row along the water is already lined with camp chairs. Luckily we find an elevated planter box, from there I…

  • boyhood dreams

    boyhood dreams

    When I was a kid, I dreamed of being an astronaut. I would spend hours playing with Legos building elaborate spaceships, then I would crash those spaceships into the walls. So perhaps it’s good that I didn’t actually become an astronaut. This week I’m in Florida to watch a space shuttle launch. It’s the second…

  • inflection point

    inflection point

    If you remember from your early calculus classes, an inflection point is a point on a curve where the curvature changes sign. On an S-curve, the inflection point occurs at the transition point between the increasing-slope segment and the decreasing-slope segment. I like Wikipedia’s illustration of an inflection point- “If one imagines driving a vehicle…

  • stone soup

    stone soup

    One of my favorite restaurants when I was a kid was a place called Stone Soup. I remember going to Tanforan mall one day with my mom and being really sad because it went out of business. It was a small cafeteria style place like Pluto’s or Jack’s Urban Eats. I think part of the…