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Colorado was our third summer trip in just two months (after Chicago and Vegas) and my 17th State. It promised to be a great trip with mountains and beer featuring prominently on the itinerary. To boot, we had Danielle’s best friend Melissa and her husband, Stephen, as our excellent local tour guides.
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Back in June, we found ourselves somewhere neither of us really wanted to be. Las Vegas. So we hired a car and took a mini road trip from Vegas, west to the Grand Canyon.
I had flown into Las Vegas to join Danielle who had already been there for a few days with work. Her team were representing a new hotel/casino, Resorts World, which was opening on the strip. I’ve never had much interest in visiting Vegas, nowhere close to the top of the list of places to visit, but when opportunity strikes…
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The beating Mediterranean sun, golden beaches, rugged hiking trails, French wine, and fresh seafood. That was the idea. We’d celebrate a friend’s wedding in Toulouse then travel onto Corsica to enjoy a summer holiday…and our engagement. Unfortunately, all plans got postponed.
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We’ve been back three of weeks now, a weird few weeks. When we left the city as still firmly in lockdown, the streets were deserted, and we were getting groceries delivered and left outside our door. A lot of things changed while we were upstate: cases went down a lot, the state started reopening in certain areas, summer arrived and George Floyd was killed. I’ve already reflected a bit on that first week back with the protests, riots and curfew. My next post will be a chance to reflect more on what the city is like now we’re back but I’ll look back at our couple of weeks upstate here.
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This is something I wrote late on Monday, was going to post on Tuesday but #blackouttuesday needed a voice of silence. Now I’m posting on Thursday evening. Protests continue, the curfew has been moved up to 8pm, some looting and rioting continues across New York and the country. Several shops near us were broken into and now boarded up, but unlike earlier this week I don’t hear any sirens or people outside right now (11.30pm).
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It was a chilly 40 degrees (just above freezing) in New York, winter coat, woolly hat and gloves weather. The good news: it was Presidents Day, a public holiday. More good news, we weren’t wearing coats either. In-fact, with iced coffee in hand, we were meandering our way to the start of a walking food tour. It was the last day of our three day long weekend escape to Nashville and it was beautiful and sunny.
Continue readingI got my first taste of the ‘south’ with my trip to Austin last fall, with Australia, England and Dublin coming after that, President’s Day in February presented the next great ‘excuse’ to explore more of it. While New York was freezing its ass off, South Carolina should be a good few degrees warmer even in the winter and perfect for a three day weekend in Charleston.
Having left it a little late to book, direct flights to Charleston SC were a tad on the extortionate side (ranking just below brokers who try to charge a fee on non-fee apartments). So..we had to get a bit creative with our travel.
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174 days. The number of days that have passed since I last posted a blog update. During that time, a lot has happened including turning twenty-nine. As I contemplate retirement and with it hearing aids, Zimmer frames and taking 10 minutes to usher food from my fork to my mouth, I felt it was the right time to prove I’m not completely gone by updating this blog.
I mentioned in my last post how I saw 43 bands last year, obviously a record I want to beat this year. While so far I’m not off to the best of starts – we’re now at the end of February and I have yet to get my gig on, I have just acquired Bruce Springsteen tickets for his last New York date on his current River tour (note I have a spare if you’re interested!). A couple of weeks ago I also stumbled on another impressive busking performance, a group called ‘Cover Story’. So, with gigs top of mind at the moment it seems like a good time to do a post on my top gigs in New York so far.
With 2015 well wrapped up and my unsuccessful attempts to keep this blog upto date, I am changing tact to come back to course. So, here is a wrap up of the last year in one blogpost, in numbers. Therefore in appropriate analytics esque fashion, click through for 2015 by numbers…
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