We started our day traveling to Prairie Creek State Park, with the goal of driving the Newton B. Drury Scenic Parkway and doing a hike along Prairie Creek. The parkway was beautiful and there was a lot of trailheads off of this road. One of the trails was the Prairie Creek-Foothill Trail (now called the […]
Read more "Redwoods Day Four"We started the day in the Redwood National Park with a very peaceful walk through the Lady Bird Johnson Grove. We went early and had almost the whole trail to ourselves – I think we saw two or three other people the whole time. Richard Nixon dedicated this grove to the former First Lady, Lady […]
Read more "Redwoods Day Three"Earlier this year, Mike and I drove 12 (!!!!) hours to Northern California to see the redwoods. We drove from LA to San Francisco and spent the night there, then drove the rest of the 6 hours the next day. On our way out of San Francisco, we stopped at the San Rafael Mission (we […]
Read more "Redwoods Days One and Two"In November 2019, Mike and I took a trip to Paso Robles to see Sensorio, which is a light exhibit by internationally acclaimed artist Bruce Munro. It had opened in May 2019 and was originally supposed to be a temporary exhibit – only available for a few months. However, it became so popular that it’s […]
Read more "Paso Robles"For our last full day in Vietnam, we went back to Hanoi. We left Sapa in the morning and got into Hanoi around mid-afternoon. We had a bit of a break before our evening activity – a cooking class! Our chef, Hoai, met our group at the hotel and we walked to the local market […]
Read more "Vietnam Day Nine – Hanoi"After Mai Chau, we headed north towards the Chinese border. The end of our trip was spent in Sapa, which is in the Hoang Lien Son mountains. This is the area of Vietnam where there are terraced rice fields. We had seen pictures of these before, but we were super excited to see them in […]
Read more "VIETNAM DAYS SEVEN & EIGHT – SAPA"We started our day with a trip to a market in Mai Chau that’s only open on Sundays. As we pulled up to the market entrance, the first thing I saw was two people putting chickens in a funnel head first and chopping off their heads. It was…a lot. One thing that this trip brought […]
Read more "Vietnam Day Six – Mai Chau"We left Ninh Binh in the morning and began our journey to Mai Chau. We stopped before descending into the town and had a great view of where we were going! Once we got into town, we had lunch at a homestay. Mrs. Xuan made the best food and we were lucky enough to eat […]
Read more "Vietnam Day Five – Mai Chau"Our fourth day began with a relaxing boat ride down the Tam Coc River in Ninh Binh. This area of Vietnam is referred to as Ha Long Bay on land – we were going in the middle of a tourist season, so our guides picked this area so we could see the landscape without millions […]
Read more "Vietnam Day Four – Ninh Binh"We left Hanoi to head to Ninh Binh on our third day. After a couple hours on the road, we ate lunch and had some downtime before our afternoon adventure. We were all well rested when we got to the Bai Dinh Temple, which was good, because there was a LOT of walking to be […]
Read more "Vietnam Day Three – Bai Dinh Temple"
Life in Pictures 