I’ve been in a bit of a travel dry-spell, so I’ve been spending my weekends exploring my own backyard. Living in the New York area gives me plenty of opportunities to check out cool spots and locales. Check out my first backyard tourism extravaganza to Chelsea Market.
When Richard suggested we hit up a Mets game a couple of weekends ago, I was game (pun intended). While a little chilly, it was the perfect spring day to hit up a baseball game.
Welcome to a new feature on Living in Flux: Photo Friday!
I’ve been lamenting at the fact that I haven’t been able to adequately satisfy my wanderlust as of late. For various reasons, I haven’t been able to get much travel in. To help quell my yearning to travel, I’ve been working on being a backyard tourist and I’ve been sorting through my travel photo archive. Each week, I plan to share a sweet snap from my travels pre-Living in Flux.
This photo is from my trip to Europe in June 2009. While exploring the streets of Brussels, Belgium, I found that there were many streets that has strings of flags strung across them. The colors and the tattered, weathered quality of the flags spoke to me, so I snapped this picture.
I haven’t had any travel planned since the beginning of the year and there is nothing currently on the docket for the coming months. To make up for this lack of travel, I’ve decided to start to explore some of the more touristy sides of my own backyard. Enter: Chelsea Market. The great thing about backyard tourism is that one person’s backyard can be another person’s travel destination, so hopefully you will find this useful regardless if you are local to New York or planning to travel here soon. Chelsea Market is located in, you guessed it, the heart of Chelsea in New York City.
Just about every week around here, I share some good reads from around the Internets. You might have noticed that while I aim for variety, there are a few blogs or resources that I pull from often. These standbys are what I go to for my fix of life, career, money and travel. I figured I would share the wealth and give you the skinny on what I’m reading day after day.
I’m not sure about you, but I couldn’t possibly take nearly two weeks off of work without doing something. Yes, during the holidays, there is food to eat, family to entertain and merriment to be had. But for those of us who get stir crazy with too much “free time,” there are also places to go.
And places to go over the holiday, I went. I went to Charleston, SC to be exact. My first time, too.
So what did I think? Here are the deets on my 2 days in Charleston.
As you are well aware, Superstorm Sandy delayed my departure from San Diego. Knowing that we would be in California for a few extra days, we decided to rent a car and drive up to San Francisco. During the ride (I didn’t drive – lucky me!), I had a lot of time to soak in the scenery and contemplate what I thought of California and my stay there until that point.
Maybe I haven’t been as observant when looking at pictures of buildings in California as I could have been, but I was pretty excited to find non-boring architecture in San Diego. Things are newer, yes, but it also has this cool vibe that you just don’t get on the East Coast.
The great thing about San Diego is that the airport is fairly close to the city. And by close, I mean, I was able to get a shot of a plane’s underbelly!
Since we stayed in downtown San Diego, it was easy to walk to the hot spots we wanted to check out. We walked about 7 miles the day we went to Balboa Park, we didn’t taxi while we were in town and we took a bus over to Coronado Island. We decided it might take too much time to swim over there, you see.
Driving up to San Francisco was a fairly easy ride as well. It took us nearly 8 hours, but it was 8 hours well worth it. We were able to see some of the California countryside while driving with the Pacific at our side.
We saw nothing but blue skies on our way up to San Francisco from San Diego along the Pacific Coast.
I already knew this. But now I’m finally able to say that I’ve seen it myself. I couldn’t help but be in awe as we drove up the 101 and had the Pacific Ocean right beside us. It was really cool to drive through so many different terrains in just one day. The East Coast is beautiful in its own way, but there is definitely not as much variety.
San Diego is awesome! I’d go again (and again) in a heartbeat. When I go next time, I hope to check out some of the things surrounding San Diego. We really only explored downtown because it was close and there was plenty to do, but there is so much more to do in the surrounding area – especially if you have a car.
Have you ever been to San Diego? What was your verdict?
Last week, I wrote about all of the fabulous food that I ate while in San Diego. Now this week, you get to hear what we actually did during the hours that we weren’t eating.
In researching the city prior to my trip, I just wasn’t finding many things that I was interested in doing or seeing that were plan-able. It turns out that you can’t really approach a trip to San Diego with that mentality. I found that the best approach was to just going with the flow, spending a lot of time outside enjoying the beautiful weather and exploring parks and beaches that sprinkle the city.
After I successfully conferenced myself out for the foreseeable future (Kidding! I love conferences!), I headed from Las Vegas to San Diego to meet up with my boyfriend, who had been partaking in the conference scene that week himself.
One exciting thing about going to San Diego is that it was my first time in California. Traveling to California means I’m one step closer to reaching my goal of visiting all 50 states, per my flux list. California and Arizona are the first new states that I’ve visited since starting Living in Flux, so I still have quite a way to go. My rough estimate is that I’m about half way there. Want to know what states I’ve been to? Well, there will be a post for that in the coming weeks!
However, I digress.
We spent about 4 days in the San Diego area, and I must say it: I’m in love with San Diego! The weather was gorgeous, the food was to die for, and I was definitely digging the Spanish-influenced architecture.
Today, I’ll talk about the eats in San Diego. Stay tuned for a follow-up post about what we did during the hours that we weren’t eating (spoiler alert: most of our exploring simply got us from one food venue to the next, so there weren’t all that many non-eating hours).
… you are definitely living in flux.
First, I hope everyone reading this is safe, happy and warm in the wake of Hurricane Sandy.
Luckily, I’ve been able to stay out of harm’s way. After seeing that Hurricane Sandy was headed right for New York / Hoboken the day I was supposed to arrive back in town and not wanting to risk not being able to get to Hoboken (since that was right around the time they were planning to start shutting down the subways), I decided to extend my trip a bit.
I’m currently flying from San Francisco to Washington, DC. Yup, I’m not quite heading home, yet.
I had quite the challenge the other night. For my Tour de West Coast (which I’m currently on), I’m hitting 4 airports in 7 days. Since I’m traveling, attending two conferences, and taking a couple of days off, I’m going to need a range of clothing options to choose from.
Checking a bag wasn’t really an option for this trip. There isn’t a lot of turnaround time between my flights, as I’m quickly jumping from JFK to PHX to LAS to SAN.
If something were to happen to my bags, I would be screwed.