Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had a joyous holiday season and that 2018 started with a bang.
Welcome back to Peter & Lynn’s travel adventures. We’ve put the site back up because we have some exciting travel adventures planned in 2018. The bad news is that the hosting site tech who helped me back up the site before taking it down last April, only saved half the necessary folders so I lost everything that was on the site before. But the good news is that I had copied all of the posts into a Word document so I’m pasting it all into a post called 2016 Revisited. If you have no interest in looking at that again, we’re not offended. We do, though, have some new followers who may be interested in taking a look at that trip. The pictures didn’t paste though so over the next couple of weeks I’ll reinsert the pictures. If you are looking at the old posts, please be patient.
Being very experienced Airbnb users, I get a lot of questions about how to select great places to stay with Airbnb. If you’re interested in learning more about that, check out the post from November 1, 2016, called Traveling Through Europe on Airbnb. There’s a lot of great info in there about finding great places to stay. You’ll find that entry near the end of the post.
Travel in 2017
Actually our 2017 travel adventures began on Christmas Day 2016 when we headed down to Florida. After stopping to visit friends in Asheville, NC and Greenville, SC we arrived in Jacksonville FL on 12/29. We spent a few days in JAX so Peter could work one of the college bowl games on New Year’s Eve. After the game we headed to Clearwater where Peter has cousins. We hadn’t seen them since the wedding, so it was fun to catch up with them. After a week in the Tampa area, we headed to Orlando for a few days. While there we discovered that if you don’t visit the theme parks and it’s not warm/dry enough for golf, there really isn’t much to do in Orlando. Since it was cool and rainy the entire time we were there, we didn’t do all that much. One of the highlights, though, was a visit to the Kennedy Space Center. They have some great exhibits, and we thoroughly enjoyed our time there. We celebrated Lynn’s birthday on the 8th with a new set of golf clubs and a nice quiet dinner at home.
After Orlando we stopped in Pensacola for a few days. The weather was a little nicer, so we played golf in between day trips to a few more National Parks. We also checked out the Pensacola Aviation Museum. It’s a great museum with hundreds of different aircraft.
Our trip home took us through Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Missouri where we stopped to visit Peter’s sister. We were gone for about 3 weeks and in addition to visiting family and friends we visited over 15 National Parks throughout the southeast and Midwest. Lynn has a National Park Passport book and is having a great time getting her stamps and stickers. She filled in quite a few pages on this trip.
Summer 2017
Other than a few days in Las Vegas when Peter worked an auto race and a weekend trip to Iowa where the highlight was walking the bases on the Field of Dreams, things stayed pretty quiet on the travel front until the end of July when we took a short 5-day trip to Washington DC. We spent a couple of days in Annapolis, visiting Gettysburg, Ft. McHenry, Eisenhower’s Home and, of course, the Naval Academy before heading to DC for several days. We had a great time walking around the National Mall and Lynn was thrilled to get about a dozen more stamps in her passport book. The best part of that trip, though, happened while we were at BWI waiting for our flight home. That’s when we got the call about the offer for our house. All in all, it was a very nice mini vacation.
September 2017
This year for our anniversary we spent a very nice week in San Diego. It wasn’t quite as exciting as our first anniversary in Venice, Italy, but it was lovely just the same. We visited with Greg and Kathi, Peter’s brother and sister-in-law, played golf, and visited a few more National Parks….gotta get those stamps. We went on a terrific dinner cruise for our anniversary, which happened to be Labor Day. The weather was beautiful, the food delicious and we even got to dance as they had a disc jockey on the boat. We stayed in San Diego a week before heading home to finish packing up the house for our September 18 closing. It was certainly the calm before the storm.
October 2017
After closing on the house and spending 3 weeks in an Airbnb house in Chicago, we headed to the Bay area in northern California. We spent a week in Pacific Grove at the beach house of our dear friends Barb and Max. We had a great time walking on the beach, eating amazing seafood in Monterey, walking around Carmel and, of course, playing a little golf. We also managed a few more National Parks along the way.
After a week in Pacific Grove, we headed to San Francisco where we spent another 3 days. Peter had never been there, so we spent several days on the hop on hop off bus seeing as many sights as possible in just a few days.
During our short stay we visited Golden Gate Park, the Presido, Sausalito, Chinatown, Pier 39 plus we road through some very interesting neighborhoods on the bus. We had great food and even managed to get a few more stamps in our passport book. It was cool and rainy during our stay, but we had a ton of fun anyway.
October – December 2017
Once we sold the house, we decided that if we were going to be homeless (we’re not moving into the house in Minooka until June 1st) we might as well be someplace warm. So, we packed up the car and headed southwest. Our first stop was Henderson NV, just outside of Las Vegas. Neither one of us is crazy about Las Vegas but it was an area we wanted to check out as a possible “snowbird” destinations. On our way to NV we managed to hit 4 National Parks in 3 days….Arches, Canyonland, Bryce Canyon and Zion. One was more beautiful than the next.
Once we got to Vegas, we stayed in 2 short-term places until we settled into a gorgeous 2BR 2BA condo in Lake Las Vegas. While there Lynn was working full-time on an instructional design contract, but we still managed to get out and about quite a bit. We visited Red Rock Canyon State Park, Fire Valley State Park, played golf a couple of times a week, and went to see the Donny and Marie Show. It’s important that you understand that seeing their show was Peter’s idea, not Lynn’s. Actually, they were wonderful. Of course, there was no one in the room younger than 50, but it was a very entertaining show. Considering that Donny is now 60 (yikes…. how did that happen) and Marie is just a couple of years younger, they held their own with the 20-year-old dancers.
Of course, Lynn got another stamp in her National Park Passport when we took a long day trip to Death Valley. It was just over 2 1/2 hours from Lake Las Vegas, but it was well worth the trip. We didn’t really expect it to be so beautiful. Of course, being November, the temp was only in the upper 60s, but it was still pretty cool to stand at the lowest elevation in the U.S.
Lowest point in U.S.
Since we are looking for someplace to winter over in the future, we wanted to check out some of the neighborhoods. So, we spent quite a bit of time driving around Henderson and Summerlin. Many of the communities looked like compounds with the gates and high walls surrounding the complex. It bothered Peter more than Lynn, but they didn’t look particularly homey. It was nice, though, to get a feel for the area.
One highlight was taking dance lessons from the current U.S. Argentine Tango champions. Michael and his sister Ana live in Henderson and Peter stumbled into their website while searching for places to dance. In addition to a couple of group lessons, we also took a private lesson. The best part was that Lynn got to dance a set with Michael at a Milonga (tango dance party) right before we left Nevada. Talk about a smooth dancer. It was a lot of fun, and we learned a great deal from them.
On to Arizona
After 6 weeks in Nevada, we packed up the car and headed to Arizona for a month in Green Valley, which is about 20 miles SW of Tucson. We spent a few days sightseeing along the way, driving historic Route 66 from Kingman AZ to Williams. Then we headed north to visit the south rim of the Grand Canyon. We had been to the west rim in March and Lynn has been to the south rim several times, but Peter had never seen it. If you’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, think about putting it on your bucket list. Lynn has seen some spectacular places all over the world but has never seen anything as awe inspiring as the Grand Canyon. Pictures don’t do it justice; you have to see it to really appreciate the amazing beauty.
We splurged on a canyon view cabin at the Angel Bright Lodge in Grand Canyon Village. Even though it was dark most of the time it was very cool to wake up in the morning to that spectacular view. We spent a few more hours exploring the Canyon before heading south towards Green Valley. We stopped at 3 more National Parks/Monuments (Lynn’s Passport book is filling up rapidly) along the way. There were actually 3 more between Flagstaff and Phoenix but we ran out of time. We’ll have to catch them next year.
Since it was almost 6pm by the time we got to Phoenix and we still had 2 more hours to go, we decided to cash in some Hilton Honors points to stay in Chandler AZ for the night. We were just too tired to go any further.
We checked into our Airbnb townhouse on December 13th and have thoroughly enjoyed our stay in Green Valley over the last month. The townhouse is very small and not nearly as nice as the condo in Lake Las Vegas but it’s clean and close to everything. We’ve found several nice golf courses (which are much less expensive than in Henderson) and have taken several day trips. Over the last month we’ve visited Case Grande Ruins National Monument, Old Tucson movie studios, Seguaro National Park (both East and West), Tubac (very cute little artist colony about 20 miles south of us), Tumacacori National Historical Park, Sonora Desert Museum, Tombstone and the Buffalo Soldier Museum at Fort Huachuca. We also spent a few hours in Nogales Mexico, but we weren’t very impressed. We expected a lot of shops with cool stuff, but we didn’t find much of anything. If there was a “tourist” area, we didn’t stumble into it. We only stayed about an hour before walking back across the border. Of course, we played as much golf as we could give Lynn is still working on the instructional design contract.
Tombstone AZ
We celebrated Christmas in Green Valley with a round of golf (it was in the low 70s) and a delicious rib roast for dinner. Our Christmas decorations were a poinsettia plant and a couple of stockings we picked up at Walmart. We missed being around our family, but it was a wonderful day anyway.
Then on New Year’s Eve we went to a local tango dance party. In Chicago a Milonga starts at 10pm and lasts around 2am. This one started at 8pm and ended at 12:05am. By the time we celebrated midnight with champagne, there were only about 20 people left. But they had a live band who were very good, and we had a great time.
Just like in Nevada, we spent time checking out neighborhoods and some active adult (55+) communities. Lynn likes Henderson a little better as it’s more cosmopolitan, but Peter really likes Green Valley. They have a network of recreation centers (the Green Valley Recreation centers) that have fitness centers, pools and over 100 different clubs to join. Even though this is a little more rural, the weather is about 10 degrees warmer than Henderson and we think there is a lot more opportunity for us to make friends our own age. We met a couple playing golf and we’ve seen them a couple of times already. Everyone here is very friendly and we’re seriously thinking about coming back again next winter. We’ll find a nicer, larger place to stay but
Green Valley is certainly worth a second look.
Well….you are now caught up with our 2017 travel. Lest you think all we did was play, Lynn continued to work part time traveling to Omaha, Boston, Denver and New Jersey several times and she is currently working on a very large instructional design project. And Peter worked over 80 ball games and concerts at Wrigley Field.
We leave Green Valley on Thursday 1/11/18 for a 10-day trip across the south heading to Florida. Of course, we have a list of National Parks to see along the way. We’ll be in Florida about 10 days before we head to Costa Rica. Then we’ll be back in Chicago about a week before we head to Europe for three months. We’ll keep you posted on these adventures as they happen.
Bye for now; we’ll be in touch soon.