Category Archives: Blog Information

A history of changes to the Blog: formatting, themes, and so forth.

Who are these gypsies?

We are a retired couple who enjoy travel.  We love meeting new people, new cultures, and exploring unique experiences.  We will share our discoveries on our blog and photo album as we wander about our wonderful world.

Check out our (almost) daily blog that follows below.

When we’re traveling we blog nearly daily.  When we’re home and not planning a trip, this blog may go quiet for weeks or months.  Check out or DailyBlog for a sense of our day to day life when we’re not travelling

Categories

Use the categories filter on the right side to select the blog entries that interest you. Alternately you can scroll back “in time” through our blog.

International Travel

We love to visit Europe, Italy in particular.  Spring 2015 we took our inaugural “Retirement Celebration”  trip to Europe.  We visited the Galapagos Islands on the National Geographic Islander with Safari Experts & Tim Lapage in the spring of 2016. In 2017 we visited Vietnam with Gate1 Travel and took two months out to travel Italy with six weeks living in Florence. 2018 has been a quiet year with trips to visit friends and family.  We have an extended motor home trip to Yellowstone NP visiting Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Washington, and some of BC. Departing in 2018 we will visit Scandinavia for two weeks to see the northern lights and the Ice Hotel. In 2019 we will visit Central Europe. We have a long “wish list”.

Our International Trips:

  1. Seabourn Cruise of the Greek Islands, Rome, Istanbul, Venice, and Florence, 2015
  2. The Galapagos, 2016
  3. Vietnam, February 2017
  4. Italy for two months, spring 2017
  5. Pacific North West, Montana, Yellowstone RV trip Fall 2018
  6. Northern Lights trip to Norway & Sweden spring  2018-2019
  7. Eastern & Central Europe trip spring 2019
  8. Around the World Cruise, 4 months 2020.
  9. Machu Picchu, the Sacred Valley, and the Amazon, future
  10. Alaska, future
  11. Antarctica, future
  12. Africa: Zambia, South Africa, Tanzania, Namibia, future
  13. Ireland, Scotland, England, France, Spain, Portugal, Morocco, future

Road Trips

We purchased a 2015 Winnebago View in February of that year in Connecticut and drove it back to California in some of the coldest weather that winter.  We have since taken a number of trips in “The Beast”, as we call “him”.  We’ve taken to calling him “Li’l Beast”.  As large as our 24′ RV is, it is dwarfed by some of the 44 footer’s.

  1. return trip from Connecticut, 17 days
  2. San Diego, 1 week
  3. Napa Valley, 2 days
  4. Whidbey Island, Washington state, 2 weeks
  5. New England, 9 weeks
  6. Thanksgiving, San Diego, 2 weeks
  7. Springdale, Utah 1 week (Tesla S)
  8. Next: Nevada,Wyoming,Yellowstone NP, Montana, Idaho, Washington, Oregon (8 weeks)

Notes from each of these trips can be found on our blog.  We are now enjoying a week in San Diego during a heat wave summer 2018.  We’ll take our RV to Washington State, Canada, Idaho, and Montana this fall.  Over thanksgiving we’ll visit Joshua Tree.

The photos that rotate through in the top banner capture memorable events in our travels.  They are not necessarily related to the day’s blog.

“Track our Travels” (on the top menu) will show you where we have been today.  You can also access our photo albums or other nooks in this website. If we’re not traveling, TrackOurTravels will not be operable.

Enjoy!

<last updated, 9/8/18>

Past Post Categories

I’ve significantly changed the categories widgets and applied them in a regular way to my posts.
This makes access to all posts associated one click away. For example clicking on “Past Posts/Past Travel/Italy/Venezia” will bring up all our posts about Venice. Sometime in the future I’ll be adding tags for more granularity to access specific sites mentioned in our posts.

We will make it a point to add more photos to our posts.

We’re now researching the best way to get from Guayaquil, Ecuador to Cusco, Peru; the stepping off point for excursions to Machu Picchu and Manu.
Flights typically take multiple hops: Guayaquil-Quito-Lima-Cusco, can take more than 24 hours, and cost upwards of $500 per person. An Ormeno bus from Guayaquil to Lima stopping at the border at Tumbes costs $33 per person and takes about the same amount of time as a flight. I’ve read not so glowing reviews of Ormeno bus lines. Another option is a direct bus, Cruz Del Sur which has better reviews. A direct bus runs $99/111 (std/vip) and takes 26 hours. There is a bus that stops in Mancora for half that price, but it has no arrival time nor estimated travel time.

Now here’s an option! Take a bus from Guayaquil to Tumbes, Peru than fly from Tumbes direct to Lima. A direct flight takes about two hours. The bus from Guayaquil to Tumbes takes six hours. Now I’m looking into a side trip from Guayaquil to Banos to visit Banos and Pailon del Diablo

Enjoy
Ron

ReOrganized Photo Album

I’ve broken the Europe2015 photo album into a series of location based sub-albums and added a number of photos to the Venice and Florence folders. It will take a while for the change to propagate to the website.

For the 4th of July we will be with family in Sacramento CA for a BBQ.

Here’s to a fabulous 4th celebration for all, though any fireworks display will not come close to Firenze’s on the 24th of June. We were told that a local businessman donated $60,000 Euros toward the fireworks display.

Enjoy!

Ron

Testing uploading some photos

These are taken while driving “The Beast”, our 2015 Winnebago View 24J, back from Connecticut this past February.  The weather was brutal and forced us south along the eastern seaboard then west on Rt 10.  This was way south and added at least another 1000 miles to our journey.

This is our first RV.  It has a bevy of buttons and switches, knobs and dials and luckily most are pretty intuitive.  The few that are not are easily mastered after the first few oopsies.

What surprised me (but makes sense) is the slide out will not function if the e-brake is not set. Our first night headed back I was freaking out that the slide out was broken.  I tried all the breaker switches I could find and some that I couldn’t find.  It was a web search that turned up the comment made to another fellow who made the same mistake, “I’ll bet you did not set the emergency brake!”.  Yup, “problem” solved.  I must admit I did that two more times over the two weeks driving back.

Here are a very few photos from that trip.  The one by the lake is Oak Hollow North Carolina.  We also loved Roosevelt State Park in Mississippi (I think it was Ms, I’ll have to double check).

 

IMG_2629 IMG_2596 IMG_2528 IMG_2541 IMG_2588

WebBots, Spam, and Captcha

Surprisingly, I’ve been seeing a relatively large amount of spam originating from advertising bots, some of which I may have unwittingly accepted as valid comments.

I just finished installing WorldPress’ captcha plugin. Captcha provides that annoying numeric field that pops up during data entry to prove that you are not a robot. Apologies ahead of time, but you will now have to verify that you are not a webBot by entering that annoying alpha-numeric field if you want to post on the blog or contact me.

At some point webBots will be able to recognize and enter the captcha field and “spam wars” will escalate with an “even better” captcha, but until then ….

 

Ron