Tag ArchiveEverywhere Once |

The Indispensible Man

by Brian on September 3, 2012 in How To, Lifestyle, Travel

These empty chairs were meant for you.

“I feel like I’d be less of a person, a bad employee, if I didn’t work on vacation,” says Jermaine Turner, director of current series for Walt Disney Pictures Animation in a recent BusinessWeek.com article.

Mr. Turner is not alone. A Harris Interactive study “found that 57 percent of working Americans will have unused vacation time at the end of [2011], and most of them will leave an average of 11 days on the table – or nearly 70 percent of their allotted time off.”

That is a remarkable finding: the majority of us take less than one third of our vacation time. And on those rare occasions when we do break away, we bring work along with us. Why?

Home Sweet Hoboken

by Brian on August 27, 2012 in New York, Travel, United States

You really can go home again.

I first learned that lesson when we returned to New York City after a year-long absence. During that trip I gained a greater appreciation for the Big Apple, around which I had lived and worked for so many years. This time back, we used AirBnb to rent an apartment in our former hometown of Hoboken, NJ.

While we often consider ourselves New Yorkers, we spent most of our adult life living just across the river in New Jersey. For anyone who’s ever been to Hoboken, the confusion is understandable. The city feels more like a borough of Manhattan than a sister of Trenton.

Hoboken is connected to New York’s great metropolis by a system of subways, ferries, and tunnels that make flitting back and forth between the two as easy as getting anywhere in Manhattan. And while the Staten Island Ferry draws tourists eager to take in beautiful skyline views, a trip on Hoboken’s Hudson River ferry is every bit as breathtaking. A summer evening trip across the river, sailing – wind in your face – away from the sunlit jewel of a city twinkling into nighttime magnificence is nothing short of magical. Although not free, the Hoboken ferry easily challenges Telluride’s claim to “the best commute in America.”

Break the Rules. Go Home with Strangers

by Brian on July 20, 2012 in Colorado, Lifestyle, Travel

Nelly’s handmade saddle

As often happens in life, good things start with a beer. That is, after all, how Shannon and I found ourselves on the back of Nelly, the very first horse either of us had ever ridden.

In retrospect, we didn’t really stand a chance. The Main Street Brewery in Cortez, Colorado, was walking distance from our campground. We find so few things in this country we can walk to that we always take notice of those we can. Boozy establishments that we don’t have to drive home from are especially rare and prized finds. So there never was a question of whether we’d pull up a bar stool at the brewery a few blocks from our door. It was really just a question of when.

Our timing couldn’t have been better.