Foodies in Chicago

January 6, 2023.Reading time 27 minutes.

One of our favorite hobbies to do while traveling is to eat at great restaurants. Derek loves combing through reviews and vetting menus to uncover gems in the city. I put together the logistics of a day trip in Chicago after Derek picked out our new places to eat. It was a foodie tour planned […]

Wicked

November 24, 2022.Reading time 14 minutes.

“Okay, let’s get this over with, No, I’m not seasick, Yes, I’ve always been green, and No, I didn’t eat grass as a child.” -Elphaba, The Wicked Witch of the West, from Gregory Maguire’s Wicked. Everyone knows the tale of the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy, the farm girl from Kansas, is displaced by a tornado […]

A Rookie’s Recap from Gen Con

August 11, 2022.Reading time 19 minutes.

The Gen Con magic was winding down and we had one last day to delight in. If Saturday had been the busiest day of the weekend, then Sunday was the slowest one. We slept in a little later before checking out of our hotel and stopping for our favorite bagels from Einstein Brothers before arriving […]

BIG Game Night

August 10, 2022.Reading time 15 minutes.

It was the event we had all been waiting for…Big Game Night had finally arrived. On Friday night of Gen Con weekend, hundreds of board gamers would unite for a sold-out evening from 8:00 pm to midnight of group tabletop gaming by Alderac Entertainment Group (AEG). A couple days in, we could start to feel […]

A Library of Board Games

August 10, 2022.Reading time 23 minutes.

The Games Library Pass was the best value of play at Gen Con. More than 4,700 games were available to check out over an 8 hour period for only $8.00. Housed in the Indianapolis Colts’ Lucas Oil Stadium, we checked in bright and early on Day 2 at 8:00 am for our pre-registered day passes […]

Gen Con Indy 2022

August 9, 2022.Reading time 21 minutes.

Welcome to Gen Con: the largest tabletop game convention in North America by both attendance and the number of events. At Gen Con 2019, over 70,000 people attended with a similarly impressive crowd of 50,000 in 2022. Derek and I are still relatively new to the scene as we met fellow board gamers who have […]

Copper Harbor Road Trip 2019

July 29, 2022.Reading time 1 minute.

This is a throwback to the late summer of 2019 when we took a road trip to the UP in Copper Harbor, Michigan. I realized that I had never written a blog story about this experience since it was made into a home video at the time. We had a wonderful trip with our friend […]

Where the World Gets a Little Smaller

July 15, 2022.Reading time 8 minutes.

A rainy day on vacation is typically seen as a wasted day, but this wasn’t a typical vacation. On the morning that we had planned to hike, we sat on the back porch before breakfast contemplating the weather forecast. In Hartfield, VA, there is a chance of rain and thunderstorms almost every day this time […]

Hiking Beaverdam Park

July 14, 2022.Reading time 10 minutes.

At the top of our wish list for the River House trip was hiking with the family. Dale and Ginny are avid “nature people” and we wanted to trek a trail with them since we had never before explored the natural environment of Eastern Virginia. With much consideration for the hiking possibilities in the coastal […]

Paddling the Piankatank

July 13, 2022.Reading time 12 minutes.

The Chesapeake Bay is an estuary: a body of water where fresh and saltwater mix. It is the largest of more than 100 estuaries in the United States and the third largest in the world. The Piankatank is one of the many rivers that empties into the Chesapeake from Maryland to Virginia. It is a […]