Chi/LA/New Zealand xmas

I left off August 2018

SO

End of November / early December

Chicago and Los Angeles for Peru film screenings
The highlight was a free upgrade to my rental car in LA to a convertible. My "making it" in life arbitrary requirement has been checked off. 

December - Christmas in New Zealand

2 nights camping along the beach on the Abel Tasman costal track before family time. Who knew NZ was so tropical and paradise like?! I think NZ may have it all.

It certainly had the amazing fresh plumbs at our hiking exit and wine.

April 2017 - end of August 2018 - 3 countries, 14 states?

I left off in April 2017 (at Australia / NZ). It's now end of August 2018
(this excludes CT, other Philly trips, NYC, upstate NY, VT and probably that place I'm forgetting)

end of April 2017 - Belgium!
Beer road trip.
MAP

June 2017 - Philly & Maine weekends

August 2017 - Ashland, OR again

October 2017 - Los Angeles
K&R Wedding party #3 Indian style

December 2017 - Boston
Directing job!

January 2018 - STL
High school friend hangout

end January 2018 - Minneapolis, MN
Job - coinciding with the Super Bowl there

February 2018 - Bahamas!
Random last minute job

April 2018 - buy house
Indiana (job)
Outer Banks OBX (vacay)
Toronto! (job)

June 2018 - Rochester, MN
with road trip back to VT

August 2018 - San Jose & Ashland, OR (#4!)

Jan, March, April - Iceland, Australia, New Zealand

End of January 
Went to Iceland for a long weekend. Flights were cheap. Why not :)

Map of Adventures
Day 1 
Day 2 









No northern lights, but saw an Arctic fox! 3 days is totally worth it there, as long as you're willing to not sleep. Winter may be dark, but it just means 3hrs of sunrise and sunsets for a weird glow-y light. Lots of driving and water falls, plus music, snowy hike, hot springs, and tomato greenhouse feast.

End of March / April 
New Zealand for 2 1/2 weeks with 1 day layover in Sydney on each way.

• Queenstown beauty lake. 
• Wanaka wedding wine spectacular. Plus day hike to glacier. 
• 2 day overnight hike in Fiordlands National Park Routeburn Track. Lots of ups and downs, glaciers views, beach trees, blue drinkable water, boulder fields, and then mossy green magical wonderland. 
• Wine tours 
• Mystery boulders and coastal seals & yellow eyed penguins 
• Weird "Steampunk capitol of the world" Oamaru with blue pengiun colony. 

Aug - Scotland / Oregon then into Sept VT etc

Since those two locations make sense together, I took what felt like my first real adult vacation. 2 1/2 weeks. 1 1/2 weeks in Scotland - land of whiskey, castles, and amazing cloud mountains.

With an overnight in Boston, then 1 week in Oregon for endless amazing food and brain stimulating varieties of spectacular plays.

A quick weekend in Philly happened in Sept for a fancy wedding. 

I won't try to keep track of my Vermont travels, although they seem worthy as some little camping adventures have taken place all over the state during Aug / Sept.  

May / June - STL, Jersey, Idaho, West Cost, Seattle x2

Trying to keep up. NYC / Vermont in between these.

St. Louis for high school wedding. 3 down, 3 to go. At the magical City Museum!

Then work -  Seattle, West Coast. Got 2 days off and saw a college friend and an LA friend. Two very different times in my life, but they've carried through seamlessly. LA friend I also call my snail mail friend,  as we seem to communicate via snail mail than any other way. Gotta hold on to a good old postcard and penned letter!









Then Jersey for an epic Indian wedding. Stepped into a Bollywood movie!





Then back to Seattle...but via Idaho. Road trip with the crew from Idaho to Seattle was STUNNING! Puffy cloud skies for days and then dramatic mountains and mist.

Now staying NYC / Vermont put until early August.

end April / begin May - Philly / Montreal

For some reason I've never thought of Philly as a city that I should pay attention to. But it sure is a city! Quite the variety. And history is cool. Thought of the Benjamin Franklin biography I read a lot.

Montreal for a quick circus weekend and then a stop on the Vermont water for some mead on the way back.

Feb / March Dominica - Island Jungle

A weird "adventure" for sure. 6 weeks. No sleep.

We started in the South in Roseau and then spent 2 weeks in the North in Portsmouth. That hotel happened to not have water every other night. Really great when you've completely filled every hotel in the area with crew and we all come "home" at the same time after running around in the jungle for 12 hours. Moving back South for the last 2 weeks felt like coming home. Better Sunsets there anyway.

Beautiful island regardless, and some pretty awesome trees.
 

Real adventure was a hike to boiling lake. Literally boiling. Hike was a jungle stair master to rocky mars landscape to bubbling, hot, stinking, lake.

4 States Left

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure, I only have 4 states left to visit! Idaho, Minnesota, Delaware, & North Dakota. And I'm not including layovers in airports. I am including driving through on road trips - sure did see a lot of a state by driving through, and I'm sure I stopped to pee.



Create Your Own Visited States Map

Oct / Nov "Beaches" AL, SC, & TX too many times

Getting to work on a beach show?! Awesome! Oh wait...I keep getting sent to Texas. Still a good gig.

4 episodes in Oct / Nov

October was tiny Sargent, TX. Then Hilton Head, SC over Halloween.

November was one day prep / wrap from SC and off to Gulf Shores, AL.

A week off and then back to Texas - Rockport, TX - for the vegetable option being fried pickles.

Back to no "home" living with a sublet apartment since end of October. We'll see. Pretty good deal though.

9th Year in Peru & Costa Rica - September

Trip #8 for me #11 for Josh to Peru! 9 years of filming the changes of Yantalo. As always, overwhelming and nonstop, but inspiring and worth it.

THEN COSTA RICA - for the first time we went outside of Peru! Filming the amazingness of science and future cancer treatments.

Plus just fun exploring on what I call turtle Island. Tortugero National Park. Where we witnessed HUGE prehistoric looking turtles laying 120 eggs on the beach in the dark, 3 kinds of monkeys, sloths going to the bathroom (they only do that every 7 days!), iguanas, otters, alligators, and birds.

Oregon in August

Southern Oregon for an awesome week of theater, wine, food, smokey wildfire air.

Got to hike in Crater National Park and then went swimming...so basically I can say I went swimming in a collapsed volcano.

Indianapolis - St. Louis (aka tiny Illinois) - Vermont

Oct / Nov - Month shoot outside Indianapolis and outside St. Louis. Office was a mini van and there were 19 hour days. But there was singing on walkies and crew yoga.





Nov / Dec - Snowy Vermont and some stays in NYC.

Pennsylvania - New Jersey - New Orleans

Pennsylvania for more barns in June.

4th of July - New Jersey. Specifically in a pool. In a pool for 4 days straight.

End of July - New Orleans for an amazing unique wedding involving a downpour of rain, shutting down streets for 2nd line dance party, music, and old friends.

Realized upon returning from New Orleans, my brain functions differently when traveling. There's no dwelling. There's less purpose / need for constant productivity. I feel constantly in motion but don't have to think about that. I live in the moment while traveling, without even having to remind myself to do so.

1st Barnwood Shoot - Indiana, West Virginia

First note: March - Went to VT and sugared and made a HUGE snow fort. 3 hours of non-stop digging. As adults, we made the childhood versions of ourselves extremely impressed.


April into May - Winter into Spring - 10 days on the road

Ohio for a night, Indiana for 4 days, Upper West Virginia for 3 days, lower West Virginia for 3 days. Or something like that.

Didn't realize there were such secluded places in the middle of the U.S. 45 minutes to get to anything. Some spectacular spots!

Traveler, Nomad, Vagabond, Gypsy, Homeless

6 months & 2 weeks on the road / living out of a backpack / not having a place of my own / not paying rent. It’s been over half a year since I gave up my apartment.

Explaining what I’ve been doing is really hard. People ask where I moved from. Easiest answer? Nowhere. Most confusing answer? Nowhere. Maybe “everywhere” is more appropriate, but I doubt solves the confusion.

My insurance company for my camera / other equipment called every month asking for my new address. Yes, keep my mailing address my parents, yes please still insure my storage unit, no I do not have a physical address. Month 6 another call came in, they had heard back from some higher ups and needed my physical address where I was living. After 6 months they still couldn’t figure out that I was living nowhere! Did they want me to call every week or every day with an updated address? There are other things too that require living at a physical location. Like voting. So then, where do you belong if you travel all the time?

I was so excited about getting all of my belongings out of storage, but as I unpacked box after box (actually, I had packed in garbage bags due to the last minute rush of my moving in July), I just felt a feeling of panic. How did I have so much, so much that I didn’t need for half a year. What’s the point? And now all of sudden I can no longer pack all of my possessions in less than an hour and be on a plane to somewhere else with no trace left behind.

CHI-LA-SAN FRAN-PORTLAND-SEATTLE

November. 1 month by plane-car-bus-plane-train-boat!-plane

Two of the most common questions, ones I don't have easy answers to:

1. Where are you from? (aka Where do you live?)
2. Why are you in town? 

Simplest, most honest answers, but apparently the most confusing:

1. No where. (everywhere) 
2. Not sure, biding my time, made up a few excuses to do some things and see some people.

This is my record for living out of a backpack (well, except for when I was 2 and my parents backpacked for a year). It looks like I'll get an apartment again in February, making it 6 months, which is half the year!

A few notes:

1. Regardless of what time of year, ALWAYS bring flip flops to LA.
2. Stop buying white shirts, on the road you only do one load of laundry - colors.

COLORADO - NYC - NEBRASKA / S. DAKOTA - NYC - ILLINOIS - STL - NYC - VT

Squeezing a lot of states into one post - but that's fitting, since I squeezed in a lot of states into a few weeks. 6 in 3 weeks. About 8 nights of not consecutively sleeping in the same place.

Wedding #4 was middle step brother's in Colorado. Maybe the biggest most organized one (wedding planner for the day) I've been to thus far. What do weddings =? A lot of hard work and details.

Back to NYC for 3 days in time for screening World Circus at the Coney Island Film Festival.

Then, off to Nebraska - or what I surprisingly learned - South Dakota! I knew I was on a job for a week in Nebraska, but what I didn't know was the hotel was just over the border in another state.
A week in the middle of no where, land of vegetarian options being "tomatoes" and a town of 1,000. 10,000 visitors descended on the corn fields for the History Channel show. Golf carts, some outdoor work, and production = happy me, even though days started at 5am and 12 hours were spent with another bout of food poisoning.

After a 17 hour day of shooting the live show, which started airing literally before we were done editing, I realized I was headed back to NYC and hadn't reserved a couch to sleep.

3 days in NYC and then off to the last wedding of the year - #5!
(With a quick stop in Springfield, IL for a family hello)

This one was for a friend who I have known for 20 years. Insane. We used to play spy games and she was my first movie making buddy, when at eight, I bought my first video camera. This wedding was full of friends I've known forever and their parents. It was a wedding of visual doubles - so strange who we all become and getting a glimpse of it a little in advance.

So, after 5 weddings I think the only thing I was surprised to learn is I didn't hate them, they weren't as stupid as I thought they'd be - among other nice thoughts.

2nd half of Peru Trip

Hiked El Morro from the "easy" side. Kenya came with us again, last time she was MUCH smaller and ran up the whole way in flip flops. 

Packed our evenings with meetings and dinners and drinks with friends. Even in the middle of the jungle it's a busy social life :) Love it. 

Got sick for the first time since visiting Peru - I sure had been lucky all those other times, because it wasn't a fun day. 

I came back to fall time in NYC and the cab driver yelling at me. Oh right, welcome home. Without a place of my own I hung out on a Brooklyn stoop with my bags in the fall weather until a friend got home with keys to another friend's place to stay. Sure am lucky. 

Three days and I'm off again. NYC has become my go-to layover city. 

Peru Trip #7

I skipped a year visiting Peru, but I’m back. Before I leave it always seems like such a hassle, and then the second we land in the jungle and take off in the car from Tarapoto, I feel home. The heat makes sense. The colors and crazy moto taxis - they just feel calm.  Everything is the same…but this time not. Little things, like the Lima airport doesn’t have their game show red light / green light random security system for searching bags. Peurto Mirador Hotel no longer has a switch for hot water you have to turn on 30min before you want to shower. There’s a new beer, Tres Cruces, but it’s still just as cold – colder than anywhere I’ve ever had beer. But the rest is the same, we arrive at the hotel with the group of 8 doctors and are greeted by Luis - hugs and then “Okay, 7min and then we leave for Yantaló .” And we’re off, pack well, because filming starts 10min before you’re ready. Straight to Yantaló for the usual tour of the clinic, and the shock of pulling up and seeing the progress was even more than usual. It’s SO BIG!

I always forget how grateful and impressed and inspired I am by the people who congregate to Yantaló,  instigated by Luis. There are always late night dinners, a table full of over 20 from around the world. It’s 10pm and we’re eating and drinking pisco sours. The doctors wake up at 6am and perform 6-8 surgeries in a day. I think josh and my days are hard, carrying around cameras, they’re cutting people open and saving babies! To us filming is fun, to them surgery is fun. Everyone at the table is brilliant, whether a 25 year old student from Lima, President of a hospital from the US, or top surgeon from France, everyone is laughing, and drinking, and completely happy. 

I’m not 100% sure why we're all here, but pretty much all of us will be back, or have been returning- again and again. 

THE Hamptons - LA - Mammoth - Bahamas - LA

Fourth of July weekend in THEEEE HAAAmptons, Darling. Avoided most of humanity in the pool. Plus fire on the beach - dug and created by me - after stumbling upon such glowing beach fires after July 4th fireworks.

I feel like I missed some locations. But it might just be that I gave up my apartment to NYC apartment hell and two weeks before departure moved some of my belongings into a storage unit and gave up the rest. Backpack, purse, and camera, and I'm off to LA, I learned my pack light lesson years ago and am thankful I remembered it - it may have taken a few heavy loads.

LA - wonderful friends, unique job, and sun. I find myself putting in "____'s couch" into my calendar. I'm coordinating my "home".

Quick 1 night Mammoth trip for a Peru Volunteer House meeting

BAHAMAS - Josh & Annah wed-cation. (wedding #3) So much love for these two. The whole thing made me feel so adult. A VACATION, what is that word you ask? It's where you feel like your brain and body is in slow motion. Where the sun beats down and you drink straight from a machet-ed off coconut at 9am on a Monday for breakfast and follow breakfast 10min later by adding rum to the next coconut. I let my brain stop.

 I also checked a fear of flying step off my list. Propellers. Done. Survived.