In April 2012 my friend Jason and I took a trip to Scandinavia (see "The Great Scandinavian Adventure"). Amazingly enough we found a flight to Stockholm for $578 on Iceland Air. We just had to change planes in Reykjavik. Not a big deal for a flight that cheap to Europe. While we were on the flights we watched Borat like three times each. But we also watched some videos about Iceland tourism that the airline had made. And you know what? Those videos worked. Iceland looked frikin' awesome. By the time we were back from Scandinavia we had already decided that we had to go to Iceland. And being so close to the US, we could manage to just go for a weekend and not have to make a huge trip out of it. From DC ... read more

It's been about 7 hours since we got back to our hostel in Cuzco from trekking the Inca Trail (see "Inca Trial to Machu Picchu"). It would be glorious to get to sleep in. To rest. But we don't have that luxury. We've booked a 4 day expedition in Manu National Park with Manu Explorers (http://www.manuexplorers.com/). We probably should have put aside a day of rest between the two tours, but we have limited vacation days and need to get as much done as possible. It's Sunday November 19th, 2012. This will be our second week in Peru. Richie is not coming with us to Manu though, as he has to fly back home to spend Thanksgiving with his family. Mason, Cory, Sarah, and I are "thankful" for the US having two holidays this week so ... read more

It's February of 2012. Not even 6 months out from our trip to Oktoberfest in Munich, my friend Mason and I are eager to plan our next adventure. Ideas are thrown around and turned down like 19 year old me trying to get a date. Then I mention Machu Picchu. It's near the top of both of our lists of places to see. We could go to Peru and hike the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu. It's settled. That's what we're gonna do. After a few weeks of solid research we choose to go to Peru in November, giving us about 8 months to prepare (and wait). We decide we'll make it a two week trip and go over the Thanksgiving holiday to save 2 days of Paid Time Off from work, as we both get ... read more

As a structural engineer, I'm usually either super busy or not busy at all. Working on Federal Government jobs leads to intense periods, followed immediately by waiting periods. After a horrid February and March of 12 hour days working to get the 90% construction documents done for my embassy project, I decided I would definitely need a week off during the down time in April. I guess working on a building in the UK got to me, and I decided it was time to finally go across the pond to the land of our former overlords. Planning the trip was a bit more difficult than usual, due to the fact that I was using my American Airlines reward miles and in order to avoid the hefty taxes that European airlines charge to go overseas I had ... read more