Pack your essentials

When our friend Martina messaged me about what to get Chris for his birthday, I didn't really have any great ideas to share. All my good ideas I'd already bought to give him myself, or they were outrageously expensive and thus not gonna happen. Luckily she eventually asked what I thought of concert tickets. That sounded like an excellent idea. And I just remembered that Red Hot Chili Peppers were going to be in Oakland soon! Slam dunk. Or so we thought. All concerts nearby were sold out! Alright, well, we'd always wanted to see Portland, so why not? Fast forward a few months, and we realized this concert was  on a Wednesday . I guess Wednesday-Thursday is the new weekend, then ಠ_ఠ This was not a very well planned trip. All we knew about Portland was coffee craft beer donuts hipsters vegan something about a TV show called Portlandia, but neither of us have ever seen an episode, which was not really a whole lot to go on to start touristing. Well...

Top of Arapahoe Basin on March 5th 2017 For our first trip of this year, and our fifth anniversary, we decided to go skiing in Colorado. We had the Epic Tahoe local pass , which includes five days of skiing at Vail, Breckenridge, Keystone, Arapahoe Basin or Beaver Creek. Since we were not booking this very far in advance, we took a private room in Frisco through Airbnb. We flew into Denver and rented a car for the two hour drive up. Our flight was delayed, so we only got in at 3am Wednesday night / Thursday morning.  Thursday The next morning we were up predictably late, so we decided to have a big breakfast in Frisco so we could skip lunch and spend as much time on the slopes as we could. We strolled over to the Butterhorn Cafe  for frittatas and coffee in friendly yellow mugs. Frisco Frisco was a pleasant surprise. It is a former mining town, and they have done their best to preserve this spirit, while still clearly catering to tourists that will wa...