Blogs from Costa Mesa, California, United States, North America

Still in LA, anxious to get this traveling part over with! I cannot wait to get there! I am hoping the weather is nice and warm. I will send an update within the first couple days of arrival. xoxo... read more

Couchsurfing. I totally never heard of that concept until just this year when a friend I met through one of my stays in the Chicago Hostels had told me about it. He's from Europe and was going to rent a car and drive down through the USA and couchsurf. It made me curious and I had recently joined the website: www.couchsurfing.org I haven't hosted or surfed yet, but I think it's a brilliant idea. Sure, it may be a very risky commitment to a lot of people especially the Americans who are very closed minded compared to such countries like Canada and very much of Europe. These countries find it as a norm... and I love it! Anyhow, I got invited by a group that is local to me (Orange County) for $1 tacos on Taco ... read more

Ari and I are venturing back out into the world again! We will be gone for the first two weeks of October this year. Our layovers include Tokyo (Wooohoo cant wait to be back in the arms of Narita airport) and a new one for us, Singapore! We fly into Delhi on the last day of September, our tentative itinerary will be something along the lines of this: Delhi---Agra (for Taj Mahal)----- Varanasi -----Dehli--- Rishikesh ---- Amritsar ---- Rajasthan (Jodhpur, Jaipur, Jaisalmer, etc.) ----- Mumbai -----Delhi---- Home! With every trip we take, this itinerary will change 100 times im sure... We will try to be better about keeping in touch on this excursion and uploading photos more frequently. Subscribe to our blog and get updates whenever we post! Countdown: 67 DAYS TILL LIFT OFF! Wooohoo!... read more

After months of planning, the Road Crew - Gabriel, Rece, Samantha and I - loaded up our rented Town and Country van with all of our travel stuff and hit the road. A brief and incomplete inventory: - 5 digital cameras - 1 radar detector - 2 laptop computers - 3 cell phones - 3 mp3 / iPod players - 12 complete MRE meals - 4 sleeping bags - 2 tents - 4 lawn chairs - 4 duffel bags / suitcases - snacks, drinks and breakfast stuff for 3 days - 2 atlases, 3 US maps, 8 AAA tour guide books, 1 set Route 66 maps, 2 self-prepared guide books - 1 box of teen-appropriate car activities - 14 books - 1 DVD player and 13 DVDs - and miscellaneous other stuff Our goal that first ... read more

The first part was pretty fun. We were still up in the mountains/hills west of Flagstaff and started to come down. That made for some fun driving, aka truck dodging. Now, I understand that they’re trying to save on gas by getting everything out of a downhill they can. It’s still damn scary when you’re driving along and a semi comes racing up on your rear and you can’t get over because of the traffic! I was wishing for flatter ground every time that happened. Be careful what you wish for. We dropped out of the hills right into desert, with mountains off in the distance. It got really boring, really fast. I think the 7 mile long construction zone, where we were going 45mph through very repetitive terrain, was the height of boredom on this ... read more

After 3 relatively uneventful flights, we're home at last. :-) I say relatively uneventful because I did learn some things - never transfer flights in Vietnam. Its really an odd experience. They had us sit in a corner and wait until the staff could come to us rather than go to them. Nobody would tell us what was going on and no one smiled other than one of the China Airlines officials. I also learned that flying with Athena requires medication - both for her (she gets so horribly anxious its amazing) and for me to deal with it! :-) I've posted some pictures with the former blogs that I copied from Athena. After I have my camera fixed, I'll see if I can get mine posted too. :-) Its wonderful to be home back with ... read more