All Aboard

If you’ve ever returned from vacation to face the endless security lines at the airport and the herding of passengers onto the plane, where you struggle to find space in the overhead bin for your carry-on bag and wait for the drinks and snack carts to roll past your seat at the rear of the plane, hoping that they have anything left to snack on besides pretzels, then consider a luxury train trip for your next vacation. Imagine the anticipation of stepping from the station onto the platform, hearing the whistle in the distance, feeling the rumble of the approaching train, and…

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Let’s Go Glamping

I love the idea of camping – the whole great outdoors, unplugging from technology, getting back to basics, communing with nature, cooking on a camp stove, sleeping in a tent, telling ghost stories around the campfire, eating s’mores, cuddling up with your favorite person to stay warm thing – it seems so romantic. In reality I have issues with the sleeping part. It doesn’t bother me to sleep in a tent but the thought of sleeping on the ground, in a sleeping bag – that is nylon on the inside – that I have to zip myself into, on a thin little…

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Out Of Town

I hope you had a relaxing 3-day weekend. We spent the weekend in my happy place – Port Townsend. It’s a fun, laid-back, town on the northeastern most tip of the Olympic Peninsula. It boasts the largest collection of Victorian era homes north of San Francisco. It’s the perfect place to hangout and do nothing or do everything.   I discovered a new shop in downtown Port Townsend called Bubble N Squeak (love the name).  And the proprietress, Dawn Mohrbacher, is as nice as she is passionate about what she is doing. It’s a great shop full of odd, interesting, and fabulous finds…

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Road Trip: California

The last few weeks have been busy around here. In addition to the trip to New Orleans and High Point Market we also squeezed in a road trip to the Bay Area to visit family. On our way to Carmel-By-The-Sea we stopped in Los Altos to pick-up our hosts and were treated to a wine tasting/dinner party. It was 4 couples and the table looked like this. Wine glasses as far as the eye could see. The tasting was fun and a little crazy toward the end when we had to rate each of the bottles we’d sipped on. My sister-in-law’s husband kindly provided…

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The Big Easy

Last month our good friends invited us to join them in NOLA for a few days. They hosted us at their fabulous pied-a-terre; an historic building in the French Quarter. Their unit is one of four in what used to be a shotgun house. The building was damaged during Katrina and their unit was picked-up by a contractor and repaired in the aftermath. Fortunately much of the original millwork remained as well as the wide-plank heart pine flooring. The original exterior doors, window and shutters are beautiful and the ceilings are a fantastic 14′ high and a little more than that in…

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