A reluctant visitor

December 29, 2025December 29, 2025 / Greg / Leave a comment

Like many fellow Canadians these days, the thought of a trip south of our border into the United States brings a lot of feelings. Back when I was heading down to Washington, DC for work, I was apprehensive. Aside from being excited for an interesting work-related opportunity, I didn’t have a lot of desire for the travel and exploring aspect of a trip like this that I normally would have had in the past. Maybe some of that was because I had been to Washington previously, maybe some of it was the feeling like I was heading directly into the belly of the beast… but work was calling so I packed my bags and decided to try to make the best of it.

How did that get started? A February day with the temperatures hitting close to 20C made for perfect unexpected patio beer weather and I took advantage one afternoon at Aslin Beer Company. They had a wonderful array of beers across some favourite styles and I luxuriated in the opportunity to do some tastings while feeling the heat of the sun on my skin for the first time in a couple of months.

Beer tasting at Aslin Beer Company in Washington, DC

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Atlanta with my favourite person

October 18, 2025October 18, 2025 / Greg / Leave a comment

My second trip to Atlanta was, for me, a mostly work trip. Luckily, my wife was able to join me on this visit and we squeezed a few experiences around my conference activities. While I was off doing conference things, she visited the aquarium and the zoo, and was nice enough to indulge me on our first (and only) free day in the city touring some craft breweries. I made sure to pre-scout these so they had ample gluten free offerings for her. We had a grand time touring a few neighbourhoods we wouldn’t have otherwise visited. There was lots of laughter, some great Mexican food (the barbacoa tacos at Wild Heaven were tremendous!), a lot of tasty patio beers, and a few games of Yahtzee to get our trip kicked off well.

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Non-stop fun in Cincinnati

June 6, 2025June 6, 2025 / Greg / Leave a comment

I love my annual baseball trip. Last summer, with eleven stadiums and cities left for me to visit to have seen a major league game everywhere baseball is played, I decided to head to Cincinnati. It was to have been my baseball trip in 2020 on account of a ridiculously cheap plane ticket I had found. I had done just enough looking at the city before the world shut down to know that there would be plenty to keep me interested for a few days there. Cincinnati may not strike you as a “must go” destination, but as a baseball fan, there was plenty to like. A downtown stadium I could walk to, six games in five days on account of one double-header, and some fan apathy due to a number of down years for their team that made my tickets pretty inexpensive.

Cincinnati Reds game at Great American Ballpark

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Seattle two ways

March 9, 2025March 9, 2025 / Greg / Leave a comment

They were simpler times in so many ways. Crossing the border into the USA wasn’t something that made my stomach churn like it did for a trip I just took to Washington. And while I’m debating with myself how frequently I’ll be back down to the USA for pleasure over the next little while, there was no such hesitation on my last two visits to Seattle. Seattle feels a lot like Vancouver and I’ve been there enough that I have a good sense of the city and a few favourite haunts by now.

The first trip, my wife made the journey there with me while I was attending a conference, and it was fun to both see the city through her eyes and to also experience some new things with her. A tradition we have on all of our trips is some form of Yahtzee championship. We spent a couple of hours at TeKu Tavern + Cafe and while I enjoyed a couple of delicious pints of Washington state beer, I demolished my wife in our Yahtzee matches. She was terribly disappointed at how the games went.

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Cleveland really does rock!

August 5, 2024August 5, 2024 / Greg / Leave a comment

In my pursuit of seeing a baseball game in every major league stadium, I had paired Cleveland with Detroit on the same trip last summer. A couple of hours after picking up a rental car on the outskirts of Detroit I was in Cleveland, a city I’d otherwise never get to visit. It is a really great city with a picturesque downtown and beautiful architecture. I very quickly got a warm feeling about Cleveland and enjoyed the couple of days I spent there. Some of that had to do with Progressive Field, their beautiful ballpark. On my journeys so far, this stadium is up there with those in San Francisco, San Diego, Minneapolis and Baltimore as one of my favourites.

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Finding the charm in Detroit

July 26, 2024July 26, 2024 / Greg / 1 Comment

Somewhere along the way of being a baseball fan and someone who loves to travel I had visited enough ballparks that it seemed like an interesting quest to watch a game in each major league city’s stadium. While I’ve knocked off most of the sexy places (Seattle, Chicago, San Francisco, New York….) I’m left with some locations that I otherwise may not actively choose to visit. Last summer, the intersection of my work schedule, the ballparks remaining and the baseball schedule pushed me toward a trip to Detroit and then onto Cleveland.

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California road trip

July 31, 2021July 26, 2021 / Greg / Leave a comment

While waiting for the opportunity to reengage with travel over the past year, I have been looking through pictures of past trips to take some of the sting out of losing the ability to explore freely like during the pre-pandemic days. In all of those pictures are great memories. Some are grand experiences like seeing the Eiffel Tower for the first time… some are more subtle memories of the smell or sense of a place from sitting on a park bench somewhere far away from home. While I was looking back through photos from a trip in 2008 to San Francisco and Northern California, there were lots of memories in both camps, including what I still to this day think is one of the best travel days I have ever had.

We tried to do this trip on a relative shoestring budget using points for hotels and our flights (that resulted in a very restless night trying to sleep in Pearson airport before the onward flight to San Francisco… booking with Aeroplan almost always guarantees you something like this) but we were torn as to which of two more extravagant experiences we wanted to include… a hot air balloon ride over the Sonoma valley or dinner at the French Laundry. We settled on the hot air balloon ride, and turned it into an amazing day trip from Sonoma that we still talk about to this day.

We got a confirmation phone call that the weather looked good at the crisp hour of 3:30am, loaded into our car for the drive to Santa Rosa, and as the sun came up, we waited for our balloon to inflate.

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Murals of Roosevelt Row

July 26, 2020July 19, 2020 / Greg / Leave a comment

While I was in Phoenix late in 2019, the Roosevelt Row area became a bit of a repeated destination for me. Initially, much of that had to do with my attraction to the amazing outdoor beer garden at Arizona Wilderness. On my walks to and from my downtown hotel to the bar, I took meandering routes as I discovered the neighbourhood was home to a plethora of vibrant murals. Here are some of my favourites from my time spent wandering around the Roosevelt Row area just to the north of Phoenix’s downtown.

On the side of Angels Trumpet Ale House (where I enjoyed a delicious outdoor pint one evening):

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Patio beers in November

July 19, 2020July 19, 2020 / Greg / 2 Comments

I was sitting on the tarmac in Saskatoon shortly after boarding when I started to hear a constant patter of freezing rain striking the body of my plane. Looking out the window into the dark of a November morning, hoping that we’d get loaded and de-iced before the weather got too bad to take off, my mind drifted to where I’d be landing later that day and my plans for my first night in Phoenix. As the freezing rain intensified, all I could think about was escaping winter and having a beer on a patio.

Leaving behind a few days of -15C weather and then a just in time escape from a freezing rain storm, I landed in Phoenix in 30C weather. It took remarkably little time for me to drop my bags at my hotel, change into shorts, and make my way to the Arizona Wilderness outdoor beer garden just on the north edge of downtown.

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Into the desert

July 6, 2020July 5, 2020 / Greg / 1 Comment

When I was planning my trip to Phoenix, I added an extra day to my itinerary for the sole purpose of getting outside the city to explore a bit of the desert. I wanted to see large cacti up close and I really wanted an experience different that the previous days spent exploring the urban environment of downtown Phoenix. Every local I met during my visit stressed to me that I had to visit the Desert Botanical Garden, located about 30 minutes outside the city. I’d get to see all the cacti I wanted in a well-planned garden that blended a rugged terrain with interpretive signs to help me learn more about the vegetation that is indigenous to Arizona.