Tag Archives: road trip

Our 2022 Road Trip #17: Bernie and the Bears

October 20, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne with mittens!

What has two thumbs and buys winter wear in summertime? This gal!

Bears. Memes. Bernie-Starred Mitten-ica.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #16: Obligatory Vermont Maple Syrup Intermission

October 14, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne doing jazz hands at Dakin Farm.

Hurray for sugar and sugary products!

“Did you buy any maple syrup while you were there?” asked far too many people whenever we mentioned our trip to Vermont. So…yes. Yes, we did. WE HOPE YOU’RE ALL HAPPY.

I mean, we do hope you are. Sorry if it sounded sarcastic.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #15: Behind the Boathouse

October 13, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Boats on Lake Champlain!

Lake Champlain once again, but up close this time.,

Our next stop appealed to us on two levels: we thought it would offer easy access to something we wanted to see; and admission was free. Fans of boats and boat accessories might’ve gotten more out of it than we did, but when it’s free, we’re willing to live and learn a little.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #14: A Night at the Old “Newhart” Place

October 9, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 3 Comments
Waybury Inn west side!

Some ’80s kids saw the front of this place on TV, though the owners have had new windows installed since then.

Vermont! At last! Naturally our first stop was a pop culture reference from our childhoods.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #13: The Peak of Defiance

October 3, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Lake Champlain and Vermont!

As elevated views go, it isn’t Pike’s Peak, but it’s not nothing.

Fun travel rule of thumb: if someone asks if you’d like to go up a really tall structure or geological feature so you can look down upon all the other tourist attractions you actually came to see, you say yes.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #12: The Armies Sacked at Fort Ticonderoga

October 2, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Fort Ticonderoga!

Welcome to Fort Ticonderoga, which rhymes with hardly anything except “yoga” and “Conestoga”.

Some of the roadside attractions that catch our attention are all about indulging our geek sides. Some are highlights that speak to Anne the history aficionado. For such a tiny town, Ticonderoga pulled off the neat trick of catering to both facets in her. It was a little jarring transitioning from a tour of the 23rd century to a time capsule of the 18th, but we managed. We are large; we contain multitudes.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #11: A Trek Tech Trove

September 27, 2022 By in Travel, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments
Anne in captain's chair!

Captain Anne has the bridge.

Sure, Vermont was our target destination, but the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour might’ve been the stop on our itinerary that we were most excited to see. The town of Ticonderoga seemed an odd location choice, as opposed to a large city or squarely in California, land of ten thousand entertainment tourist attractions. But inside those doors and on those resurrected sets, all questions about the outside become irrelevant while you’re exploring this full-scale, familiar TV world.

Of course we couldn’t contain all that space goodness to a single chapter.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #10: The Enterprise Docked at Starbase Ticonderoga

September 25, 2022 By in Travel, TV/DVD Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
transporter jazz hands!

Scotty, two to beam down!

MCC’s amazing colossal Star Trek year continues! So far in 2022 we’ve attended Star Trek: Mission Chicago (where we met cast members from multiple series) as well as two other conventions with Trek stars (another Chicago show, plus one here in Indy); we’ve shared and overshared our impressions of Picard; loved both Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds without writing about them; read a few Trek-related books, some of which I’ve discussed as well as others I’ll eventually cover when I get back to writing about my reading; and checked out the Captain Janeway birthplace statue in Bloomington, IN. After taking several years off from the universe Gene Roddenberry built, we’ve fallen back into it hard.

We even worked a heaping helping of Trek into this year’s vacation. It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve detoured for Trek’s sake (cf. that one time in 2014 when a traveling Trek exhibition stopped at the Mall of America), but some extra mileage was necessary to reach this one. One does not merely swerve off-road on an impulse for this particular spectacle.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #9: Von Steuben in the Woods

September 24, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Anne and von Steuben monument!

Another day, another grave.

Upstate New York is populated by the remains of so many famous dead people that it’s tough for any serious history aficionado like Anne to pass all of them without at least a cursory courtesy visit. Hardcore fans of the Revolutionary War who want to complete their gravesite set will have to detour far into the sticks west of the Adirondacks to pay respects to one particular Prussian whose assistance was instrumental to securing America’s freedom from the British monarchy, at least in a bureaucratic sense if not necessarily in a head-space sense.

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Our 2022 Road Trip #8: Stylin’ Syracuse Sustenance

September 17, 2022 By in Travel Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment
Korean Breakfast Corn Dog!

These treats were billed as Korean Breakfast Corn Dogs — dipped in Cinnamon Toast Crunch pancake batter, drizzled with a hot honey ‘n’ sweet cream sauce,

Not all the food we had on this trip need to be raised on their own commemorative pedestals, but Syracuse, NY, earned bonus points for providing us with not one, but two of the best meals of the week. That’s worth a single-entry shout-out.

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