Our departure date is approaching fast! That means I only have a few days to tell you, Reader, what our plans and goals are so that you can hold us to them!

After we had our main stay locked and loaded, the next step was to chart a course to Arizona. We knew right away that we would be driving since we had Dog, and a ton of stuff, and would need a car once we were down there. If we were to drive straight through, it would take us 25hrs to get to our destination. Did you just cringe? Because I reflexively cringed typing that out. A deadhead 25hr drive was out of the question. We could break it up into two roughly equal driving days, but then we would have to waste an entire weekend just…driving. Not ideal. A better solution seemed to be to make a trip out of getting to our trip. We realized that by breaking our drive into four roughly equal legs of ~8hrs and veering slightly off the straightest route, we could hit some cities and parks that are near and dear to our hearts: Omaha, Denver, and Salt Lake City among others.

As I mentioned, we’ll be working through this entire trip, so we’ll need reliable access to the internet Monday-Friday. That was our first consideration when mapping out our stops, and our few “vacation days.” Omaha is a lovely city (it’s totally underrated!) that we got to know because I went to school there. We have had one super fun trip to Omaha together as a couple, but think that for this trip it will be used mostly as a stopping point half way to Denver. Unlike the other cities on our list, we don’t have a ton of things that we want to do in Omaha, and there will be limited options for Dog to join us. So a hotel room with a comfy bed and a strong wifi connection will be our priority with this stop. With most of our travel, we plan to work a full day, hit the road around 4PM, and buckle in for 8hrs of travel. Omaha will be one of our shorter stays. We plan to arrive late late late on a Tuesday, and leave right after work on the following Thursday.

Next stop will be Denver, where we are lucky enough to have several friends and family members willing to host us. We will arrive to the apartment of some friends around midnight (they are saints) on Thursday, and work from their home that Friday. That weekend we have an Airbnb rented near Rocky Mountain National Park with one of M’s cousins. We plan on spending the weekend hiking and exploring RMNP, and will actually take our first day off that Monday to extend the adventure. Tuesday through close of business Thursday we will work from that same cousin’s house and explore Denver in the evenings. Then it’s on to Salt Lake City!

M has a friend from college who lives in Salt Lake City who we will crash with the night we arrive. We are taking our second day off to explore Salt Lake the following morning (and to sleep in!) before meandering down to southern Utah that evening where we have a weekend Airbnb rented near Zion National Park and Bryce Canyon. We will spend the weekend hiking the area, and then take the following Monday to drop down into Arizona and check into our long term Airbnb.

It will be two weeks of travel that are absolutely jam packed with driving, and exploring, and working. Hopefully we make it! I’ll have a better grasp on the Studs and Duds after we actually arrive at our destination, but my predictive list is below:

Our departure date is approaching fast! That means I only have a few days to tell you, Reader, what our plans and goals are so that you can hold us to them!

As I mentioned in my inaugural post, we have some pretty serious travel planned for the spring. Just before the holidays last year, we were taking stock of the world and our place in it and wondering if there was anything else we could be doing to capitalize on the unique situation the pandemic has forced upon us. We had attempted to sew our own masks, participated in drive-by baby showers and birthday parades, tried at-home hair cuts, did a home renovation, and started fostering puppies – besides getting weirdly into baking bread (which is still on our to-do list, don’t worry), we were feeling pretty good about our pandemic bingo cards. The only thing we could think of that was left to do was to physically be somewhere else. 

We had both been working from home nearly 100% of the time, and figured from that point we had maybe 5 months until vaccines were widely available and we might get called back to our offices. That gave us a 5 month window to do something fun and have our big COVID adventure. Wisconsin is actually awesome in the summer and even some days in later spring, so we knew we wanted to be back in time for that turn in the seasons. So we tentatively landed on the month of March for our digital nomad residency in another state. 

After we had that sketched in, the next item on the list was to pick a destination. Our criteria for  a location were: 

• Warmer climes – One of the things that has made the pandemic such a buzzkill this winter is that it is freezing cold where we live. During the summer we could at least make do with outdoor dining, activities, and hang outs with a few friends. During the winter though, that is very rarely an option. We don’t plan on eating out every night, or throwing parties or anything, but having the option to safely gather outdoors would lend a sense of normalcy to the whole arrangement, and normalcy is something we are desperately craving.
• Proximity to outdoor adventures – We were originally thinking that it would be super nice to just go somewhere warm with access to a beach and relax there for a month or two. But after noodling on it for a bit, we decided that a beach retreat wouldn’t actually add too much to our daily routine. We would be doing everything we’re doing now, but be able to walk on a beach after work. We decided the location must be a good jumping off point for things we’ve never done or seen before, and we’ve actually spent a fair bit of time at the beach.
• Access to wifi – Tragically, this trip will not be a vacation in the traditional sense. We are going to continue to work our day jobs and for that we will need continuous access to reliable wifi. This means no camping or van living. 
• Dog must be welcome – Listen, Dog is objectively the best dog in the entire world, so there was no shortage of people who volunteered to take him while we trekked, but honestly, the thought of spending that much time away from him totally wrecked us. Plus, we’re thinking that most adventures are going to be parks-based and Dog loves parks. So he’s coming with!
• Can’t break the bank – We’re not millionaires. We’ve got a mortgage and bills back home for a house that will be sitting empty and accounts that we won’t be using for at least one month, maybe longer. That said, we have been saving more money than expected due to the pandemic. Thousands of dollars in would-be season tickets, restaurant bills, concerts, league fees, and flights that were cancelled and refunded are now sitting in the bank. We did allocate a fair chunk of that extra savings to our home renovation project over the summer, but figured we could swing this whole live-from-one-place-work-from-another situation for a few months at the right price. 

With all of those considerations in mind, we landed on a month-long Airbnb rental in northern Arizona. It worked out pretty perfectly actually. We had been looking forward to a week-long AZ adventure in the spring of 2020 to celebrate a friend’s wedding and do some hiking, but that was one of the first personal casualties for us when the lockdowns went into place. So we had already scoped out a couple of awesome days there that were pretty easy to pick back up and fit into a month-long trip. Add in a quick google search for “fun things to do in AZ” and it seems like we could probably fill up a whole year with experiences in Sedona, Flagstaff, Prescott, and the surrounding parks. The town where we’ll be staying does experience snow with some regularity, but average high temps for March tend to be around 50-65 – positively balmy compared to where we’re coming from. So that takes care of the first two items on our list which were more location-based. The next three items had more to do with the dwelling and booking service we selected. We were in a bit of a pickle with this one. We knew we couldn’t afford to stay in a hotel for a month – they have high base rates and usually charge by the night for a dog, plus they don’t have full kitchens so we would be eating out for almost every meal. We do have some friends and relatives that live in and around Phoenix, but imposing on someone like that for a week, let alone a month didn’t sound great either. I opened up Airbnb to see what was out there but wasn’t optimistic. In our experience, Airbnbs are cooler stays than hotels, but can be just as pricey, if not pricier, on a per night basis. The first thing the Airbnb app asked me when I opened it up was something like, “Are you looking for an extended stay (month or longer)?” which seemed pretty serendipitous. It turns out LOADS of places on Airbnb offer discounts (like between 40-60%) for month-long stays! We only had a rough idea of the location we wanted and could set the date range to be flexible, so we had tons of awesome options in a few different cities. The only thing we were strict on was the dog policy (a lot of Airbnbs list as pet-friendly, but then outline distinctly unfriendly policies in their house rules). We ended up finding a place, chatting with the hosts, and booking the full month of March on the day after Christmas. All in, the price for the month was just over $2,100. 

Up next we’ll do a post on how we’re getting to northern AZ (spoiler: we’re driving) and all the stops we plan to make on the way.

Get a Hobby

The holidays can be stressful for everyone, but in our coupledom, it is especially so. Between December 20th and February 20th, we experience the following gift-giving holidays: Christmas, anniversary, birthdays for both myself and M (and Dog!), and Valentine’s Day. On the one hand, it’s kind of convenient to knock out all of the gift-giving for the year right away, but on the other hand, I have to think it would be nice to have something to look forward to after February. So in our household the challenge is to find a gift that keeps on giving and giving to get you back around to December, and boy did I win Christmas 2019 (Christmas is a competition, right?) with the gift I got for M. In my quest to find an experience-based gift that we could use together throughout the year, I landed on the 2020 WI State Parks Pass. We had been to enough Wisconsin state parks in 2019 to have warranted a pass, but never actually took the plunge. 2020 would be different. Not only was this a hobby we could do together, we could also bring Dog with to the parks, and there was no shortage of parks within easy driving distance of our house. This also fit well into our plans to become ultra fit in 2020 (ha!), since by Christmas 2019 we were both sitting rather uncomfortably at our lifetime peak chubbiness. Because I am personally motivated by gamification, I printed up a bingo card with 24 randomly selected parks (big mistake – didn’t factor in proximity to other parks or drive time) and a sticker set for us to keep in the car, and just like that, we had a new hobby!

The Cheat Code to Life

If you’ve been around M or me for any significant period of time, you’ve probably heard us mention that we think walking is the cheat code to life. It’s one of our mantras and, we’re pretty sure, a universal truth. Walking is free, you can do it almost anywhere, it’s good for your mental and physical health, you can bring the pup, and ideally you get outside which has all kinds of other benefits. But one of the cooler things about walking is that its an actual mode of transportation! You get all of those benefits AND you actually arrive somewhere. Using our house as a base, we walk all over – to city and county parks, through fancy neighborhoods, to our friends’ houses, to beer gardens, to the dog park, to the river walk, to coffee shops and breakfast cafes, to the grocery store and other shops. We absolutely cannot get enough. And hiking (or at least the version of hiking we are familiar with) is just a cooler version of walking. So we were pretty excited to tie on the old hiking boots and hit the trails with our new parks pass – so many cool new places to walk around and explore!

Park People

We are officially Park People^TM now. We started using our parks pass on January 4, 2020 and we haven’t stopped yet. We hiked in every season and in all four corners of the state. We were splashed by the angry waters of Lake Michigan in a winter storm, and jumped from truck-sized boulders into Devil’s Lake to cool down in the summer. We kayaked through the sea caves on the shore of Lake Superior and scaled the bluffs of the Mississippi River at Wyalusing. We have never once visited a state park and regretted the trip. Even when trails are flooded, or it’s so cold that your hair freezes into a brick, or you almost get run over by a mountain biker, we all three agree that it’s still better than sitting at home rewatching the mock-umentary du jour on Netflix.

How to State Park

We knocked out the nearby parks pretty quickly, and then had to start factoring longer drives into our hiking days. One of our favorite ways to hit a state park is to think to ourselves on any given Wednesday “Hey, we don’t have anything on the calendar for the weekend!” Then pick a random cluster of parks in some remote pocket of the state, and book a night at a dog-friendly hotel. We’ll leave at the crack of dawn on Saturday and spend the day bouncing from park to park to get to our destination, and then do the same thing Sunday on the way home. We also like to break up longer drives (like the 5hr drive back to my hometown which we make several times a year) with a few hours at a state park, which has dramatically improved our attitudes on travel days. When we started out, we didn’t have much in the way of equipment, but over the course of the year, we did start to accumulate some tools to make our hiking excursions a little smoother. For day trips though, we can usually get by with just our boots, weather-appropriate clothing, a leash for Dog and water that we leave in the car. We aren’t camping people just yet, but I really want to try camping at some of the cooler parks we’ve seen, just to spend more time there and see what else they have to offer. Maybe in 2021!

Below you can see a (very) rough map of all of the parks that we hit in 2020:

Perfect Timing

Wowza. We could not have picked a more perfect year to pilot the state parks pass. By the time the pandemic well and truly hit in our neck of the woods, we had used the pass 4 times already, but it quickly became the crown jewel in our hobby closet. There are only so many rounds of gin you can play (before you ask, yes, we are 80 years old) with your significant other before you start longing for the great outdoors, and our parks pass was our ticket out. Just like everyone, in 2020 we had to cancel vacations and travel plans, quit our rec sports leagues, and ditch our in-person gatherings for clubs and hobbies. But we still had the parks. The state parks gave us something to do and somewhere to go that wasn’t our house. We could be “alone together” outside and never come within 6ft of another person. We could get exercise while our gym was closed, and explore new places while there were travel restrictions. In trying to make the best of a bad situation, we even planned an entire road trip around the state parks last summer to give us the feeling of a “real” vacation again, and it was one of the best vacations we’ve ever taken. In the understatement of the century, 2020 was a real bummer of a year, but I feel very confident in saying that the parks pass and the fact that the parks largely remained open at limited capacity through the majority of the pandemic were the things that kept us from spiraling into full-on pits of despair. 

Bang For Your Buck

Wisconsin maintains more than 80 different parks and natural areas. Most of those have several unique trails and attractions, and even the parks that we’ve been to 7 or 8 times (looking at you, Devil’s Lake) still seem like they have something new to offer every time we visit. We are continually shocked at how little it takes to see an old park from a new perspective. Even doing an old tried and true trail in reverse can be a wildly different experience, and that’s not even touching on the fact that you basically get a whole new set of parks every time the seasons change. 

Why the Lists?

For starters, I love lists. I, J, am one of those terrible Type A people who think that packing for the vacation rivals the vacation itself. My dopamine levels are never higher than when I am making a list. And record keeping is right behind list making as far as banal tasks that I love to perform goes. Documenting our reviews of things that we’ve tried or places that we’ve gone forces an intentional and thoughtful reflection, and gives us the opportunity to relive these things again and again – a win-win!

Why Make it Public?

A little bit of narcissism, maybe, a little bit of convenience, a little bit of accountability. All I know is that I love to write, and I don’t do it nearly enough. If I tell my friends and family that I have a blog and that they can expect regular posts about our adventures, then I have someone – possibly many someones, but at the very least just my dad; shoutout to my dad – that I am accountable to. It will force me to put pen to paper (or rather fingers to keyboard) and actually hammer out a narrative in a way that keeping a private journal would not. And if I do amass a following larger than one father, then having a single place to direct people for updates will keep me from repeating the same information across multiple text threads and phone calls. As for the narcissism, well, this is the Internet and I am a millennial, so we’re pretty much all narcissists here. But I’m not my own therapist, so that’s where that analysis ends.

What Will You Post About?

Well normally, I would post about just the big stuff – big trips or vacation, life events, etc. But the experience of 2020 has taught us that you can still have a very full life even when those big things are put on hold or happening with less frequency. And as someone who lives far away from their family and a fair chunk of their friends, I can personally attest that sometimes hearing about the small stuff does big work to connect you to the people that you are missing. So in this blog, I plan to post about all stuff – the big stuff and the small stuff – that M and I review in our daily life. We’ve got some big travel plans coming up, which is why this blog came to life when it did, but we’ve also got thoughts on other parts of our life together that will probably get their own posts as well. What you can expect from every post after this one, though, is a summary at the end sorting our experience into studs and duds. Enjoy!