After our 3 month South American trip last fall, we settled into our Florida home for the winter. Florida had a mild winter, so I played a lot of golf, fished a lot and enjoyed boating. Now that the winter is coming to a close, we are about to hit the road again.
Something that dawned on us was that it would be great to rent our condo during the peak Summer season so that we could use that income to further fuel our travels. We hired a property manager to manage the listing so that we don’t have to hassle with it, you can see the listing on VRBO here: http://www.vrbo.com/456233.
Yesterday, we went fishing and caught a nice mess of fish. We cleaned them and gave them to the staff at Runaway Bay to cook. They were excellent, we had them fry some and blacken the others. Enough to feed 4 of us and as fresh as you can get!
Fish to feed four
Fishing from our ski boat!
Other than fishing, the past month has been consumed with readying our place for the summer rental season. We’ve been packing up personal items, spring cleaning, and getting rid of items we have accumulated but no longer need. Goodwill loves us. We’ve been visiting them every week for the past month. It is very empowering to get rid of stuff. Stuff we don’t use or need. Goodwill is great because we know it will go to someone who needs it more than us.
Next Friday we hit the road for a month. We plan to spend a week in Colorado with our boys. We hope to do some fun things — visit some museums, do some site seeing and maybe even head up to the mountains. From there we head to California. We have always wanted to go to Napa Valley, so we plan to do that and more. I love photography, so we plan to go to Yosemite National Park and take the Ansel Adam photography tour, seeing many of the great shots he took there. We also plan to hike up to the awesome waterfalls in Yosemite.
Then we plan to head to Napa Valley for a few days of wine tasting. We visited the Colorado wine country last year and had a blast, so I am sure this will be even more impressive. We will then head up to the Redwood Forest National Park to see the huge redwoods. Then we plan to drive down the Pacific Coast highway to San Francisco for a few days. We really want to visit Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf.
We will then head south to San Diego, stopping off in Carmel for a while. I’ve always wanted to see the San Diego zoo, so I am very excited to see it. On the way back, we plan to stop into Las Vegas to see a show and then visit the boys in Colorado for a few days before heading back home. On the way home, we hope to visit our friends in Dallas.
When we return mid April, we will only have a few weeks before we hit the road again. We plan to spend the summer in Seattle, Victoria Island (Canada) and Vancouver Canada. We may even do an Alaskan cruise. We still have some planning to do for the summer, let us know if you have some cool places you’ve visited on the west coast.
Finally, in January, I started thinking about a cool smart phone app I would like to create. We were doing some travel earlier this year and I stopped at a hotel and forgot my Hilton’s rewards card. I thought it would be cool to have an app that I could use to retrieve that information at the touch of a button. In fact, it could hold website passwords and any other personal information that is useful to have at your fingertips. To be very cool, it would need to work on your desktop, web browser, tablet and smart phone — and the data would have to be encrypted to be secure.
So I built a business plan, figured out it was viable and started working a few hours a day to create it. Here is the prototype for the web interface. The cool thing about software product development is that you can work as little as you want, it does not interfere with travel, and it allows you to keep your mind sharp. Let me know what you think!
aMemoryJog – the web version (smart phone and tablet coming soon)
Like this:
Like Loading...
WeBeTripping Blog 