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Petrified Forest National Park

by Brian on July 6, 2012 in Arizona, Travel, United States

Go for the Fossils. Stay for the Scenery.

Of all the places we’ve visited in our more than two years of continuous travel, Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park has to be the most under-sold. We arrived there expecting to see 225 million year old wood. What we found were some of the most magnificent badland vistas of our trip.

That’s not to say Petrified Forest doesn’t live up to its namesake, too. It does. The place is lousy with fossilized trees. And unlike other fossils, these aren’t impressions of once living creatures in stone. These once living organisms are stone.

Photo of the Day: Sunrise Over Theodore Roosevelt NP

by Brian on July 4, 2012 in North Dakota, Photo of the Day, United States

Sunrise Over Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota

Mission San Xavier del Bac

by Brian on July 2, 2012 in Arizona, Travel, United States

We rounded a corner and, at first, the gleaming white building looked to us like the Taj Mahal. An instant later we recognized the Moorish-inspired structure looming over a sea of green as Mission San Xavier del Bac.

A short drive from downtown Tucson, Arizona, San Xavier stands as one of the most impressive missions we’ve visited in our tour of the Southwest. Its seemingly spotless white façade is a distinct contrast to the more ancient look of the San Antonio Missions. And its ornate architecture sets it apart from the simpler structures we found on El Paso’s Mission Trail.

What the ObamaCare Decision Means for Perpetual Travelers Like Us

by Brian on June 29, 2012 in Money & Finance

Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

EverywhereOnce isn’t a political blog, and this isn’t a political post. Health insurance, for us, isn’t a political matter but a practical one.

Of all the things we had to consider when preparing to hit the road full-time, how to manage health care costs was not only the most significant but also the most unpredictable.

In 2010, when we left behind our Mega Corp provided health insurance coverage and surrendered ourselves to the tender mercies of the individual insurance market, we couldn’t guarantee we’d even be sold an individual policy. Now that we have one, we can’t be sure it will actually be honored if ever we get expensively sick—despite paying hefty premiums each and every month.

We’ve written before about the special challenges we faced in trying to obtain health insurance without a physical address. We worried, and still worry, about our insurance company’s ability to declare our application fraudulent because we don’t actually live in our state of declared residency – or any state for that matter. Being citizens of the U.S. should be sufficient to buy a U.S. health insurance policy, but alas, it is not.

Another Grand Canyon First

by Brian on June 27, 2012 in Arizona, Travel, United States

How do we celebrate the four-year anniversary of our favorite trip ever; one that had us locked in to seven days of tent-camping and whitewater rafting when we’d never done either before? We revisit that destination with a new first-time experience.

And how do we follow up rafting through the entire 280 miles of the glorious Grand Canyon and rectify never seeing any of it from the rim? We view it from the air, of course.

That is how we found ourselves aboard a three-million dollar EC-130 helicopter, flying a mile over the Canyon floor on our very first helicopter ride.