Travel Stories

Recorded in the beautiful home office, Chateau/ Relaxo, FL. If you’re a first-time listener, welcome. If you're a returning listener, welcome back. Tonight I am drinking local with a Castillo Coconut Porter from Ancient City Brewing of St. Augustine, FL. This comes in at 6.8% ABV It’s a porter mixed with dark chocolate and black malts. It's brewed with raw organic coconut and finished with Norther...

Recorded in the beautiful home office, Chateau/ Relaxo, FL. If you’re a first-time listener, welcome. If you're a returning listener welcome back. We skipped the mid-month episode, just too much going on trying to keep that home life work-life balanced to get an episode recorded. Here’s what’s in store for the April craziness -  * Remember the childhood game “Chutes & Ladders” in modern times we p...

Recorded in the beautiful home office, Chateau/ Relaxo, FL. If you’re a first-time listener, welcome. If you're a returning listener welcome back. One road trip since our last episode, three nights in three different hotels. Hampton Inn Lawrenceville, GA, Hilton Garden Inn, Atlanta, GA, and another Hilton Garden Inn, Valdosta, GA. All three were serving breakfast and in both the Hilton Garden Inn...

Recorded in the beautiful home office at Chateau’ Relaxo Florida. Hello, if you’re a new listener welcome, if you are a returning listener, welcome back. It’s time for yet another random show, which equates to right around 20 minutes of content across several topics. Opening with making the most of a three-day weekend. An update from episode 183, my 2023 travel resolutions where I talked about the...

Recorded in the beautiful home office, Chateau/ Relaxo, FL. If you’re a first-time listener, welcome. If you're a returning listener welcome back. Tonight's show notes were written while enjoying Lagunitas IPA coming in at 6.2% ABV but since I’m recording this on Sunday morning and I’m not that much of a monster I’m partaking in a cool crisp Diet Coke 0.0% ABV. Let’s open with some international s...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau/ Relaxo. Following up on the Southwest Airlines 2022/2023 travel debacle CNBC posted these key points. * Southwest Airlines said on Friday it expects to post a loss in the fourth quarter after it canceled over 16,700 flights between Christmas and New Year’s Eve due to a tech meltdown. * The mass cancellations during the peak season for U.S. airlines...

Recorded in the beautiful home office Chateau’ Relaxo. If you traveled by plane over the past few weeks, hopefully, you have been reunited with your luggage and you finally have made it home. In case you didn’t hear 2022 Christmas air travel was a dumpster fire and a winter storm ignited the fire on Friday, December 23rd, and the havoc from that continued for almost the entire next week. Because I...

Recorded in the beautiful home office Chateau’Relaxo, FL. Around this time each year I add up the year's travel numbers, thank you free version of TripIt . 2022 - 20 Trips, 69 Days & 26,357 Miles 2021 - 11 Trips, 28 Days & 12.173 Miles. 2016 - 51 Trips, 248 Days & 75,280 Miles.  I’ve been using TripIt since 2010. It’s excellent at organizing and managing my trips but another nice feature is that i...

Recorded in the beautiful home office Chateau’ Relaxo. FL. No trips since our last episode. This isn’t that odd when you take in the time of year. Many clients and customers tend to enter “Holiday Mode” this time of year as project deadlines get extended to compensate for team members taking some well-deserved PTO time. Opening up with some sad news - Airline Weekly recently asked this question -...

Recorded in the beautiful home office, Chateau' Relaxo, FL. One trip since our last episode, and it came in the form of a road trip which is the topic for this episode. This trip was four days on the road with three nights in three different hotels, which is never desirable, and to add to the madness Hurricane Nicole made landfall halfway through the trip. It’s safe to say that none of the hotels...

Recorded in the home office of Chateau’ Relaxo. Sorry, no episodes since the September crazy travel roundup it’s been really busy the last 30 days. Hears a few updates to open the episode with -  In episode 177 I mentioned that during a recent road trip I noticed that two of the three Hilton hotels that I bunked at had Peleton bikes in their fitness centers. Drum roll please - Hilton and Peloton T...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau Relaxo, FL. One trip since the last episode. From O-Town to John Wayne airport for a three-day visit to Irvine, CA. The trip out was uneventful as was the Hampton Inn Irvine East. Three things of note…  First, 78 degrees with zero humidity is amazing.  Second, the landscape is beautiful. Irvine is nestled inside these beautiful mountains, none of wh...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo. One trip since the last episode, and it came in the form of a 1500-mile road trip. Chateau’ Relaxo to Ft Oglethorpe, GA to Nashville, TN to Helen, GA, and back to Chateau’ Relaxo. The Hampton in Ft Oglethorpe, GA gave me a surprise. They offered me an upgrade at check-in and since it was a single-night turn-and-burn I declined. The surprise...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau Relaxo One trip in the last few weeks a quick two-night stay in Jacksonville, FL, the birthplace of the CEO in case you were keeping track. The hotel was the Homewood Suites Hilton Garden Inn location. Hilton has embraced a strategy that combines two of its brands into one single structure. Shared pool, shared fitness centers, and shared parking lot...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo Florida. Tonight it’s time for my thoughts on elder care. This topic is a launch off from Episode 172, Remembering My Father . I make jokes all the time about how Florida is God’s waiting room, but in reality, the whole country is God’s waiting room as modern medicine is keeping us alive longer than ever before. My dad had been struggling wi...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo Florida. Tonight it’s time for that July crazy travel roundup. Often I talk about the island of me, a place inhabited by residents who strive to make everything about them. Our first story contains at least one resident from the island of me. From One Mile At A Time we have “ Delta Diamond Medallion Gets Engaged On Tarmac In Atlanta. ” Delta...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo Florida. Tonight is not about my travel stories it’s just me remembering my dad. On July 4th, 2022 my dad passed away, he was 86. He likely planned to go out with a bang and what better day to do that than July 4th? The year was 1994 and that was when my dad introduced me to craft beer. My dad was not a “beer guy” but he was an early adopter...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo After spending most of the month of June away from Chateau’ Relaxo it’s time for a COVID update from the road warriors' or at least my point of view. Most COVID signs, COVID stickers, and COVID warnings have disappeared from hotels, restaurants, and gas stations. Here’s a spoiler alert this will be the second month in a row with no mention o...

Recorded in the beautiful Northwest Georgia mountains. Since May 22nd I’ve spent less than 5 days in my own bed, yes it’s been this much travel. The opening audio quality is sub-par since the only microphone I had was built into my iPhone. If you get through the first few minutes, the audio gets better. Our first two interweb round-up stories are a bit of a throwback to episodes past. Railroad wor...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo This episode is being posted a solid week after June 1st, and the reason was that I was attending a conference in San Antonio, Texas the first week in June and due to the time change and commitments, I barely had a free hour to record much less a free hour to edit the audio. During May I spent 5 nights in the beautiful Demorest, GA Hampton I...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo, FL. In the words of the immortal Frank Sinatra, “Regrets, I've had a few” and when it comes to travel there have been more than a few regrets. Before we head into regrets, how about a few travel non-regrets, if that’s even a word. I have no travel regrets when it comes to food experiences -  * Gator tail in McComb, Mississippi.  * Homemade...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo, FL. Believe it or not, I’ve spent a fair amount of nights away from Chateau’ Relaxo over the past 30 days. Looking to combine that with some CEO travel that we’ve done over the past 6 or 7 months and turn that all into some sort of an episode in the coming months. Onto the April crazy travel roundup. Starting off with a recap of episode 166...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo. In case you’ve been on a deserted island, the Airline Mask Mandate has been Extended Until May 3, 2022. If you haven’t followed the mask mandate here’s the Cliff Notes -  The original ban was through September 14, 2021,  * Next, it was extended through January 18, 2022,  * Next, it was extended through March 18, 2022,  * Next, it was extend...

Being recorded in the beautiful Hampton Inn & Suites, Lenoir, NC. This is another part of North Carolina that plays a big part in my family history. My grandmother’s brother  Dr. Voigt R. Cromer was the college's president from (1949 to 1967). There’s even a Cromer Center building that houses the bookstore as well as the campus food facility…. Makes sense since I come from a line of foodies. Onto...

Recorded in the beautiful home office of Chateau’ Relaxo. The intro to this episode was to have been recorded in the Hampton Inn & Suites Lake Park, Ga. However, try as I might without a legitimate microphone there was no way with my limited editing skillset to get 3 minutes of decent-sounding audio. Over the past 7 days, I’ve been traveling, and that travel included stops at four different hotels...