By January 2021, I allowed myself to start dreaming about what a vacation could look like. One that wasn’t confined to a few hours’ drive to a remote place where we could hunker in a cabin. We had a family wedding in Chicago in October, so I used that as our jumping-off point. I wanted to go someplace that felt truly foreign (read: speaking another language), but I also didn’t want to book plane tickets just yet. So, Montreal rose to the top of the list.
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Big Sur
First Post-Vaccinated Trip: Big Sur + LA!
Big Sur has been high on my list, and it turned out to be the perfect cradle for my force re-entry after getting vaccinated. Los Angeles was also a dream; it was great to take advantage of working from wherever while that’s still an option. Yeah, it was weird to be around people, but it was also so truly wonderful to be outside of my home and to wander the streets of a new city on my own.
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Our Airbnb tiny house
A Driftless Halloween
Before election week, we took a little road trip down to Viroqua, Wisconsin. We stayed in a cozy tiny house, ate incredible food from The Driftless Cafe, watched almost all of The Queen’s Gambit, and hiked around the bluffs of the Mississippi.
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The view from Madeline Island.
Apostle Islands National Lakeshore
We spent a perfect Labor Day weekend biking and hiking around Madeline Island, poking through used bookshops, and seeing what the much-lauded Bayfield, Wisconsin had to offer.
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A Socially Distanced Camping Trip: Theodore Roosevelt National Park
After not really leaving our house for a couple of months, when the governor okayed “dispersed camping,” we packed our backpacks and spent a couple of days exploring Theodore Roosevelt National Park in western North Dakota. From bison to wild horses, badlands to prairies, we still left feeling socially distanced but with an itch to return.
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“Four Spirits” statue in Kelly Ingram Park memorializing the victims of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing. Birmingham, Alabama
A Mother & Daughter Alabama Road Trip
In early 2020, before the world shut down, I invited my mom on an Atlanta/Alabama trip. I’ve not spent much time in the American South, and I was very curious what the mood and general landscape were of Alabama in 2020. The trip was both sobering and encouraging. As we continue to come to terms with the way racism lives on in this country, I urge others to visit Alabama, and especially check out the work of EJI in Montgomery.
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How the Swedes do Summer
You can’t visit Torekov, Sweden without plunging yourself into freezing seawater, riding a ferry called Nanny to an island to see lighthouses and orange slug and roaming sheep, and leave with the feeling that Swedes really know how to do summer right.
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Overlooking Jordan Pond from North Bubble
Maine // Penobscot Bay
In the fall of 2019, we took what felt like a very grown-up vacation to Maine. It was rainy, moody, and quiet. It was also so beautiful and filled with vivid pops of reds and golds, subtle pinks and faded blues, and deep, seaside greens.
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The view north from Palisade Head
The North Shore: Grand Marais + Cascade River State Park
As an evangelist for the southeastern, driftless region of Minnesota, along with the western prairies, I have a confession: I'd never been past Two Harbors. I've seen the plunging shoreline photos, had friends rave about Grand Marais, but just nodded politely, assuming THEY were the ones missing out. So, to back-up my claims that SE is where it's really at, I knew I had to give the other regions a fair shake. About a year in advance, we booked the best pack-in site at Cascade River State Park and spent a long weekend literally camped on the shore of Lake Superior and poking around Grand Marais.
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Linnahall in Tallinn, Estonia. An event venue built for the 1980 Olympics hosted by the Soviet Union. Abandoned in 2010, it’s currently undergoing renovations and should be completed in 2019.
Tallinn, Estonia: A Quick Glimpse of Post-Soviet Reality, 2017
When trip planning for Scandinavia, I had no real plan of going to Estonia. The guidebooks all mentioned that Tallinn could be an interesting stop, but only if you had time. Perhaps that underdog/under-explored factor is what tipped my decision to convince J we should go.
More than a year later, it’s still the city I think about most, even though it was the only place we visited where we didn’t also spend the night. We took the 2-hour ferry ride from Helsinki through the Baltic Sea to Estonia’s capital city. We had done little research and were not sure what to expect. Our blank slates probably contributed to our continual state of surprise and delight.
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