The news of Huell Howser’s passing this week came as a sad shock, an unexpected and abrupt end to a life that had given us so much over the last few years. From the moment we moved here, I began recording every one of his many PBS travel and history shows and watching them religiously, […]

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As I finished up my U.S. map puzzle, I got started on my second project, a drop-leaf Lego table. I’d seen tables before with baseplates as the surface, but I wanted something bigger than this IKEA hack and smaller than this dining room table extravaganza. I wanted it to have some Lego storage underneath, and […]

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The steady stream of UK trips slowed down after the bustle of the early aughts, and more than four years passed before Aimee and I returned, during the banner travel year of 2008. Friends were celebrating a 40th birthday in the Cotswolds at a big country house, and even though we’d already been to Hawaii […]

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My first trip to the UK with Aimee was a surprise, at least to her. We spent a few fun-packed days in London over New Year’s 2003/2004. The trip was the first in the Doubleperf Era, so you can read all about it here. It was a short trip, between December 31st and January 4th, […]

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2002 was a peak year for UK travel: for the first (and only) time in my life, I visited twice in one year. First, another spring break trip, this time as part of a trip with my buddy Josh to Iceland. We spent time in London and Edinburgh only, maximizing our time exploring these two […]

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Having had such a great time the year before, I decided to head back to the UK in 2000, taking advantage of cheap Virgin Airways tickets and another two-week spring break. Brent joined me from Seattle, and we rented a car (a Skoda, this time), and headed up to Scotland. The trip was a little […]

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After the intense and in-depth six months I spent in the UK in 1995, I was ready to return at the next opportunity. My chance arose when I went to Poland in the Spring of 1997 to do research for my thesis, on the films of Krzysztof Kieslowski. My flight took me through London, and […]

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When the opportunity to study abroad during my junior year at Amherst came up, I knew where I wanted to go. I was enjoying Amherst enough that I didn’t want to spend an entire year away, which was how the exchanges with Cambridge University proper worked, but I could study for a semester through a […]

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July is upon us, and Olympics fever is starting to build. I’ve been planning a trip to the UK for more than a year, and it’s hard to believe I leave two weeks from today. The seed for the trip was planted sometime last year when we met Neil and Melanie in Paris, and after […]

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We took Grace to my fifteenth college reunion in Amherst this weekend, and we all had a great time. We arrived in Boston early Thursday morning, and after spending some time with Aimee’s family in Wellesley, we headed west to the Pioneer Valley. I stayed in the dorms while attending the fifth and tenth reunions, […]

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We took Grace on her second trip to Alaska, and her first during the summer, over Labor Day Weekend. She had a good time seeing both my family and Aimee’s (visiting on vacation), and also discovered the world of stairs, since our house has none and my parents’ place has many. She took right to […]

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We took ownership of a new car this week, a 2012 Golf TDI. It’s the first new car I’ve ever owned and the first car Aimee and I have bought together, but it’s not the first Volkswagen our family has owned. In fact, if I did the math right, it’s actually the tenth VW owned […]

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One last report from our European trip: the night I spent playing arcade games and taking photobooth photos in a house packed full of mid-century American amusement machines in superb condition in a suburb of Amsterdam. It sounds a little unlikely, but it’s true. I’d been in touch with Peter and Ina about their beautiful […]

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When it seemed like spending time in Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam would be a little too ambitious for the time we had, we cut out Brussels as an overnight stay. Instead, I made plans for a day trip from Paris in order to visit my holy grail, the Musée Hergé in Louvain-la-Neuve, about an hour […]

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Back in 2003, when we lived in Boston, we enjoyed a snowstorm or two, and today, we’re enjoying another good old-fashioned Stormageddon™. And by enjoying, I mean marveling at the ST7RM CENTER Doppler radar coverage and hyperbole and driving school closures and poor meteorologists stuck out in grocery store parking lots reporting live. We had […]

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