So I’ve decided that I think I’m going to resurrect this blog.  I stopped using it because it felt like no one really wanted to follow a separate blog to read about my travels - if they wanted to know about them, they’d just follow my regular blog at sherylhugill.com.  But, well, I kind of like the idea of blogging about traveling, just because I love it so much.  So maybe this is really just for me.  Call it therapy.

I hope to be updating soon about trips I’ve taken recently, especially the one to Russia.  I guess I should blog about Aruba as well.  We’ll just see what transpires.  Until then, enjoy some pictures from my recent travels.  Adios!

Ok, so the very next trip I am going on is to Aruba in… a week from today!  As cold as it is getting here in Indiana, I am definitely looking forward to the 80 degree temps and beaches of Aruba.

Ricky and I planned this trip a few months ago.  He had gotten a free round trip ticket from Airtran for taking a later flight home on a business trip to Orlando a while back, and this is where he decided he wanted to go.  Originally, I was skeptical, since we had just been to an island (Oahu) earlier this year.  But checking out all the stuff to do in Aruba and seeing pictures of how beautiful the water looks changed my mind, and now I’m pretty excited about going.  I started looking a bit more into some of the activities and things I wanted to see in Aruba, and just today we finally reserved and planned some of the things we are going to do while we are there.

We get there on Saturday, and I figured we’d just relax and enjoy the island over the weekend.  Monday morning we are taking a half-day jeep tour to see some sites on the island, including the Natural Bridge, Natural Pool (which you can only get to with a jeep), and Donkey Farm (maybe I will get to meet Eeyore!).  Then on Monday evening, we are going on a sunset sail on the Jolly Pirate.

The only other thing we have planned specifically so far is a trip to De Palm Island on Thursday.  Ricky has taken a scuba diving course (he just finished) and become very interested in diving.  He is planning on diving at least once while we are there.  I can’t swim, so I don’t feel comfortable getting into diving just yet, not until I take some swimming classes and get comfortable with that first.  But one thing we did find is that on De Palm Island you can do something called the Sea Trek, where you can go 20 feet underwater (to the ocean floor) using a helmet and breathing surface air from a tube.  There is actually a walkway that lets you walk straight down there.  You don’t have to know how to dive or even swim to do it.  So we are going to go check it out while we are there, so we can experience the deep sea a bit together.

We’re both starting to get pretty stoked about the trip and can’t wait to leave next Saturday.  I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the next week, I’m so excited!

I thought I would write a post about how I got into traveling.  When I was a kid, my family really didn’t do much traveling at all.  Most of our trips were to visit family in Kentucky.  Occasionally we made a trip to Oklahoma to visit family that lived there, and we also took several trips to Kings Island in Cincinnati, Ohio.  The farthest I can ever remember being from home growing up was when my parents decided to take a trip to Niagara Falls with my aunt, uncle, and cousins.  That was my first time out of the U.S.

My parents have never flown.  My first time flying (which I had to beg to do) was to my cousin’s wedding in Oklahoma.  I flew with another cousin from here in Indiana (who now lives in Arizona).  This was when I was about 13, I think.  The next time I flew, my brother went with me.  It was after my cousin and aunt and uncle had moved to the Phoenix area and we went to visit them.  It was my brother’s first (and only so far) time to fly.  So, as you can see, we really were not much of a traveling family.

Since then, I’ve flown quite a few times.  I’ve gradually starting traveling more and more.  I flew to Austin, Texas on a work trip when I was working at IUPUI.  I took a trip with a friend of mine to Phoenix (my second trip there) where we also took a couple of days and drove out to Los Angeles.  That was my first time seeing the ocean, at Manhattan Beach.  I also took a mission trip to Monterrey, Mexico.  And when I got brave enough to fly alone, I decided to visit both Orlando, Florida and Washington, D.C. to visit the friends I have living in both of those places.

And then I started dating Ricky, who also loves to travel and has been to even more places than I have.  Since getting together we’ve flown to Nicaragua, Las Vegas, Hawaii, New York, and Phoenix - not including all of the countless road trips we have been on together.  We both get comments often from people about how often we travel.  Which, yeah, we do.  Intentionally.  We love to do it and try to as often as possible.  Sometimes we get insinuations (or outright comments) that we must have a lot of money to travel this often.  Well… yes and no.  We both do okay, but honestly I think that we just have the money to travel because that is what we choose to spend our money on.  We both have pretty low car payments (and neither of us even had one up until last year), no kids to pay for, no cable bill every month, and we split the cost of a modest two-bedroom apartment.  So we choose to spend a lot of our disposable income on traveling.  That’s really our only secret.  And we like it that way.

So given my background and lack of ability to travel as a kid (I didn’t even make it Disney World until I was in my twenties), that’s really why I get so excited about the trips I get to take now.  I was literally ecstatic about our trip to Hawaii this past March.  It had been a dream of mine to go there since I was a kid - I wrote a report on it (that my mom still had) when I was in elementary school.  And I absolutely love planning trips.  I love researching and booking flights and hotels to try to find the best deal.  I love learning about new places to find out what there is there to see and do.  I even go so far as to check out Google street view to see what the place looks like.  I’m a little obsessive about it, honestly - but that usually means we end up having really great trips because I’m so prepared.

So that’s my passion and why I get so excited about it.  Let me know if you are planning a trip somewhere anytime soon.  I would love to help you find a great deal or find the best things to do when you are seeing somewhere new!

Welcome to my travel blog.  I decided that since I seem to be traveling quite a bit over the last few months, that I should start a separate blog to document these travels.  And, since tumblr makes it easy to post various kinds of content including photos, it might make an easy-to-use medium.  Sure, I could just use my normal blog, but I kind of like having my travels separate.

The name of this blog is inspired a bit by my normal blog.  You’ve seen the coffee cup, right?  And the name of my regular tumblr is “Small Bites”.  Well, coffee, small bites, travelatté… you get the point, right?  It’s also a play on words of “travel a lot”.

Do I really travel enough to warrant a separate travel blog?  Well, I keep getting comments from people about how often I travel, and in the last two years I have been to Nicaragua, Las Vegas, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Chicago, Hawaii, San Francisco, New York, and Arizona (and yes, I know I mixed cities in with states and countries there) and I’m soon visiting Aruba and Russia as well.  I’m pretty bad about documenting my visits to these places, usually only posting photos.  So maybe having a special blog for it will encourage me to post more.  Maybe not.  I guess we’ll find out.

Thanks for joining me on my adventures.  I look forward to having you along!