Our Weekend Wanderings

Place: Providence Canyon State Park Lumpkin, Georgia Destination: First available camp site along a 7 mile loop (we walk until we find one)  Length: 3 days, 2 nights Mission: Get the gear through the canyon floor, up the silty river, and up the foothills... with enough water for sustainable life (no reliable water sources) Status: Successful completion minus car troubles Ranking: 7/10 Here's the story about our  Memorial Day Weekend 2017 I feel like there's a growing interest in camping, hiking, and backpacking in an attempt to get away from society and technology and get lost in your own little escape from the norm with an opportunity to discover something in you that you didn't quite know existed. So being the ever-aging somewhat crazy woman I am, I got to planning a backpacking/camping trip to a canyon area in Georgia (which is beautiful and unique by the way). I haven't camped in years and years and neither has my husband and most o...

California.  How do you begin to express how happy you are when you book a flight to somewhere you've always dreamed of going? California was our place. Forget Tahiti, Forget Paris. Forget Iceland or Alaska or Hawaii... (though we'll go to all those places soon enough). For us, we just NEEDED to go to Cali first get it off our mind.  How did we find a RT flight from Florida to San Diego for $160/person? When we told people that we booked the flight for that crazy cheap they literally didn't believe us.  Here's how we did it:  Download flight apps on your phone and TURN ON notifications. There's a few that you can download that will allow you to search for a particular destination within a time frame and let you customize completely what you want... and it will NOTIFY you when it's found a match or even something close! This means if you can't scour the internet for countless hours, you still have a good chance at finding a well priced fl...

Lately we've gotten into the habit of stalking cheap flights. When I saw a 70$ RT flight to Niagara Falls (somewhere new for us) I couldn't pass it up. It just so happened to be around our 10 year anniversary together too, so what better way to celebrate? Truth be told... it was a ghost town. Again, we do literally the bare minimum amount of planning so we were unaware that it was a highly seasonal town and since you are literally looking at Canada you can bet its freakin cold. Actually, the winter gear we bought for our earlier in the year Chicago trip came in handy for sure because it was 2 degrees in NY. That was without the extreme windchill factored in that left us minimally frostbitten because we refused to go inside since we only had one day to see everything. In hindsight, it would have probably been a much more exciting trip if we stayed on the Canadian side, but we didn't think that far ahead. We still enjoyed our day looking at the falls and practicing our ...

Hogg Mine This trip had all of a few days of planning from the time we were invited to the night we left. My dad actually asked us randomly early in the week if we wanted to go to Georgia with him to mine for rose quartz. I'm going to be honest and admit I had never thought of mining and/or rose quartz but I am not the kind of person to say no to a trip! So we tagged along.  The drive was about seven hours from Tampa FL and we left sunny and 75 to go to overcast and 30. We were unaware of the temperature change due to our zero planning so we had to buy some warm clothes to keep from freezing in the mine all day. We slept in the car for the night and was off to the dig site! We mined for rose quartz, smokey quartz, tourmaline, and aquamarine from 9am-5pm for only $35 a person and a 5 gallon bucket limit! We found our fill in gems and crystals and were on our way back home with sore body parts and a few minor injuries due to a pick-axe to the hand. But if you're ever...

As you can surly tell from the title of this post, we went to Chicago in the middle of January and lived to tell the tale. Okay so I'm well aware that the question going through your mind is "Why the heck would any sane individual CHOOSE to go to Chicago in the middle of winter?" well, long story short, some of our fellow travelers found some incredibly cheap plane tickets that they couldn't pass up so we joined along. Sky Deck on the Sears Building Honestly, it wasn't that bad. It's amazing how hard it is to find REAL winter gear in FL, even in winter!! We have like two cold days a year and that's about it. Luckily, a friend of mine suggested the Columbia store and we went! Apparently Columbia doesn't believe that Floridians only wear shorts and tank tops and had a fully stocked wintery selection of everything warm and cozy for our near-Canada journey. When we got to Chi Town we were of course greeted by an Uber driver that literally had ice...

For our last day in Tennessee, we decided to check out the city of Gatlinburg. With a morning temperature of 19 deg. and a high for the day in the low 40's again, we were sure to bundle up and make our first stop for a local little shop in the Villages area of Gatlinburg for some delicious coffee. The main strip in Gatlinbug is impossible to miss and is adorned buy more shops than you can count that have everything from interesting varieties of Jerky to indoor mini-golf, a skylift up a mountain, and soooo many whisky distilleries. Don't worry, there are more places to shop than I knew what to do with! The perks of travelling to these cities near the holiday seasons is that they really get into the spirit of the seasons and once night set in there were beautiful little lights adorning the walk-ways. Beware of the pigeons though, they are a little bold when it comes to funnel cakes (yes I am speaking from experience). Some of the things we did while walking around in the ...