Days not Homeless: 5 Years, 106 Days ...and loving every second of this alpine adventure!
Hawaii and the Asheville Six
Having more time than anticipated after hammering through the last batch of six highpoints we realised that the next six were still en route to Florida and all surrounding the city of Asheville, North Carolina. There was no excuse that during our week with a good...
Six in the East plus Utah
Our love, (wait, did I say love!) for driving is once again taking us on a repeat route up towards Massachusetts, this time to bag more of those ridiculous state highpoints. Last time we were out this way we skipped six on the east coast as we were over driving,...
Fall on the San Juan Skyway
We are both feeling very fortunate to have gone from hiking the amazingly scenic John Muir Trail in California's Sierras straight to Durango and the San Juan Mountains of Southwest Colorado. Even better was lucking out on some typical Colorado weather for possibly the...
JMT: Beyond Muir Trail Ranch
With the likes of Forester, Glen and Pinchot passes behind us we assumed that the second half of the John Muir Trail would be plain sailing - wrongly assumed that is! The entire 220 plus miles are continuously up and down. In fact, for us the most difficult and...
JMT: 111 Miles until Resupply
Typically time flew by and before we knew it we were sitting having Chinese, excellent Chinese at that, in Lone Pine, California the evening before our big departure. Going Broke, our SUV, was patiently waiting for us at Mammoth Airport and all we had with us was what...
John Muir Trail Preparation
It wasn't until our short time spent in Yosemite National Park a couple of years ago, then hearing from a friend how amazing a hike the 220 mile John Muir Trail actually is that we started thinking that this sounded right up our alley. The seed was set, the biggest...
West of the Badlands
Continuing on from an out-of-the-way Iowa our route took a very direct west towards the Dakotas. We had driven this same road 3 years earlier and had been close to the places we were now revisiting for our state highpoint goal - just wish this had been on the agenda...
En route to Lake Superior
An early exit from the Tour Divide bike race allowed us to take a non-direct route from Kentucky to our month long housesitting job in Bozeman, Montana. It would also enable Andrea to complete her quest to visit all fifty states, an achievement that took almost 44...
55,000 Feet of Up
Sitting here writing this I'm still kicking myself for not currently being part of the Tour Divide 2017 mountain bike ride! Then I look down at the swelling and feel the tingling in the fingers on my right hand. Then I stand up and feel the grating along the achilles...
Highpoints; the Next Batch
Continuing on from a successful Spring hike to the summit of Colorado's Mt Elbert we went back and forth between either Utah or Arizona as the next highpoint. Utah's Kings Peak, it turned out had a much better approach from the north and would have ended up being a 5...
The Inside Passage
We have now driven over 10,000 miles since starting our US road trip in Morehead, KY on May 24th. Our return journey from Alaska back to Canada and the lower 48 could be completed a few different ways, either by more driving or utilizing the Inside Passage ferry...
The Dalton Highway, AKA Haul Road
What could be more fun than a thousand mile round trip from Fairbanks, across the Arctic Circle, over the Brooks mountain range, through 200 miles of North Slope tundra, and up into the industrial town of Deadhorse, gateway to the Prudhoe Bay oilfields. Again, not...
Bears, bears, bears
I had two nature encounters I didn’t want Andrea and I to miss out on whilst in the northern hemisphere, watching brown bears feasting on salmon as they migrate back into fresh water to spawn, and experiencing polar bears in their natural habitat. The first became...
The Alaska Highway
Beginning at mile 0 in Dawson Creek, British Columbia and ending in Delta Junction, Alaska at historical mile 1422, this amazing road trip through British Columbia, Yukon Territories and into the mining heart of Alaska took us six days to complete. We detoured onto...
The Canadian Rockies
The Canadian Rockies are a continuation of the American Rocky Mountains, stretching up to the Liard river in northern British Columbia. We planned on spending time in the various national parks en route, utilizing the scenic Bow Valley Parkway and Icefields Parkway to...
Glacier National Park
After a brief one night stay in Victor, Idaho we made it to another new state for both of us. Our goal was Glacier National Park, before crossing over the border into Alberta, Canada. Not sure Andrea was looking forward to Glacier too much after scaring herself stupid...
Yogi’s Yellowstone
Continuing on our westerly heading through the Black Hills towards Wyoming, our first stop was Devil's Tower NM, not far over the state line and only a minor detour from I-90. We weren’t planning on visiting National Monuments on this trip, but this one was so close...
Badlands and Mt Rushmore
Not somewhere either of us had really thought about visiting but whilst planning our route it became apparent that we would pass through the southern part of the two Dakotas en route to Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park. Outside magazine ran an article on the...
The Day our Luck ran out
We assumed that we would have a few weeks to explore the north of Peru so we booked a flight from Lima to Fort Lauderdale a few months ago on the cheap and nasty Spirit Airlines – we actually exhausted all of our time in Ecuador to spend time with my family so getting...
Volcano Bagging
With an abundance of relatively easily accessible peaks situated down Avenida de los Volcanes, Ecuador is a mountaineering heaven. The likes of Tungurahua, Sangay and Reventador are off-limits due to volcanic activity but it still left a variety of different...
Tip Top III
Months before our departure, I researched as many boats as possible that spend between three and fifteen days island hopping through the archipelago. The costs were ranging from the high hundreds of Dollars to the high thousands. We both agreed out budget was around...
Galápagos, Las Islas Encantadas
I’d always dreamed of visiting the Galápagos Islands since my first visit to Ecuador in 1980, at the ripe old age of twelve. More than twenty years ago my grandparents had spent a week on a cruise and talked about how amazing the islands were, but during both of my...
Quito, feels like home!
Andrea and I finally arrived in Quito some five hours after crossing the border at Tulcan. We had reserved a single night at Boutiquito, a new and trendy hostel, if not a little on the expensive side, before heading over to Cumbaya in the east of Quito to see my aunt,...
The Road to Ecuador
We’ve fallen behind with the blog, or at least I have since we left Popayan almost three weeks ago with a hop, skip and jump to Ecuador. In between we stopped at San Agustin for a few days to see the stone statues of its UNESCO World Heritage Site, Mocoa for the...
Cali, the City of Salsa
Personally one of my favorite places in Colombia, being a little rough around the edges but having great people and a relaxing old town. Cali is best known as the home of Salsa, and previously with the ruthless Cali drug cartel – nowadays the police presence is huge...
Zona Cafetera
We were really looking forward to visiting this part of Colombia because we had heard so many wonderful stories from various travellers – we found that the cities were not overwhelming, the weather perfect, and the scenery stunning. And for me, loving coffee, I was...
Bogota in Brief
Not too much to talk about on this blog as neither of us were enthralled with the mass of Bogota, located on a high plateau at 2625m above sea level, making it the third highest capital city in South America after Quito and La Paz. With over eight million people...
Big Ass Ants
San Gil, the adventure capital of Colombia, and Barichara, the home to Hormigas Culonas roughly translated to Big Ass ants, were to be the next destinations on our journey through Colombia. San Gil offers a slew of activities like white water rafting, downhill...
Chiclets and Cocaine
Medellin, the city of eternal spring, and once the world's deadliest city with 381 homicides per 100,000 people, equivalent to 32,000 murders per year in New York City, is so far one of our favorite places to visit in Colombia. Safety has improved vastly since the...
Nabusimake
Valledupar and on to Pueblo Bello and finally Nabusimake was very much an unplanned part of our tour through Colombia. It wasn't until we heard from Barbara, our new travel planner, about not missing out on the indigenous area in the south of Sierra Nevada de Santa...
