This year we joined the Cygnet Theater for their Transatlantic Theater Tour. We spent four days in London, crossed the Atlantic in style aboard the Queen Mary 2, and two days in New York City. The focus of the trip was to see a number of productions in two cities well known for their theater. Inasmuch as I had never been to London, I was far more interested in exploring all the weird and wonderful things for which the two-thousand year old city is known.
Labor Day Vegan
Karalee was out of town, so I decided to challenge myself and live the vegan lifestyle for the Labor Day weekend.
Being vegan is quite a bit different than being vegetarian. Vegetarian is a diet, you eat plant-based foods and avoid meat. There’s no ethical restriction to keep you from eating butter and eggs, or even the occasional hot dog. Vegan, on the other hand, is a lifestyle.
Vegans choose to eliminate all animal-based products from their lives, including products that aren’t made of animals, but might exploit animals in their production. No meat, no leather, no gelatin-capsule medicines and no Elmer’s Glue.
It’s a strict lifestyle, stricter than I care to live, but for three day I gave it a try. Eating vegan wasn’t difficult for me, we prefer a plant-forward diet anyway, but there are certain elements of the diet that would have tasted better with butter instead of oil. The bigger problem was eliminating animal-based products from my life. I stopped carrying my wallet, but I wasn’t about to sit on the floor to avoid my leather couch. There are medicines I take in gelatin capsules, so I couldn’t avoid animal products, but I did my best.
Dry July is over! let’s have a Hot Toddy
Hot Toddy
- 16 oz hot tea
- 4 oz cheap whisky
- 1 teaspoon honey
- Lemon wedge
Reserve half the tea in a separate vessel.
Stir in the honey and squeeze the lemon directly into the mug. Pour in the whisky and top with as much of the reserved tea as will fit.
Grab a good book. Drink and enjoy.
Making Maps for Your Travel Journal
A travel journal is on of the best artifacts you can bring home from a journey. A good travel journal captures all the pictures, drawings, scraps of paper, thoughts and memories of your experience.
I like the idea of writing everyday, but at the end of a long day at work, it’s one of the last things I want to do. A trip away from the office frees me the burnout of the daily grind and gives me the energy to write daily.
just looking forward to an upcoming expedition gets me excited about journaling and I want to start laying down pages. A great place to start is with the map.
Our channel in 2023 and the future
We started Wonder About Us in 2023 as a way to document our lives and lifestyle. I’ like to think we’re unusual people and others would like to know what we’re up to and hopefully learn from, or be entertained by, us.
I’m not sure that’s happening, but we’re just getting started. A lot of 2023 was finding our feet and trying to learn how to create content and set ourselves up with skills for the future.
One thing I’d like to change is that we seem to be a little heavy on the cooking content, and, that makes sense. We’re not always out on some great adventure, but we do cook every day.
Now that I know how to make content, and have established a nice format, our plan is to spend 2024 getting into the swing of producing content on a regular basis. The idea being to do one video per week and fill in with shorts and posts on other platforms throughout the week. I would like those videos to follow a weekly release schedule.
- Cooking
- Travel/adventures in the field
- Home projects
- Art projects or other creative works
- Vlogs
I’d like to thank everyone for supporting us as we grow. Here’s our final video of 2023:
Accessibility at the Skyways Hotel
On the way home from our cruise we returned to the Skyways Hotel. Because of our late arrival, we were assigned the accessible room, and it impressed us a great deal.
Don’t regret a missed opportunity, but learn from it
We were in Berlin last week. Most of the time, when I’m traveling somewhere, I study as much as a I can and I come away with a list of things I want to see and do. I did t do this with Berlin. We decided to take the hop-on-hop-off bus around town, get a feel for the sites and hop-off on the second lap.
Berlin is so big that the hop-on-hop-off bus takes a couple of hours to make a loop, so we decided to hop off when we saw something interesting. I was a bit uninterested by the sites around Berlin, nothing really appealed to me, but Karalee was interested in Checkpoint Charles, and seeing the wall, so we jumped off there.
Before the stop, I spotted a number of Trabant 601s driving down the rode. The Trabant 601 was East Germany’s answer to the Volkswagen Beetle. They possess a beautiful mid-century, euro styling that I absolutely adore, and an engineering ingenuity that comes from being sequestered from the rest of the modern world.
The entire block around Checkpoint Charlie has grown to be a tourist attraction, with a section of the Berlin Wall and museum, souvenir shops and Trabiworld, a museum dedicated to one of the few remaining symbols of East German culture. In the backlot of the museum they had at least a hundred 601s, painted in every scheme from tiger stripes to giraffe spots, slowly disintegrating into a field. In addition to the museum, there was Trabi Safari, a group driving tour.
I regretted not going into the museum, or taking the driving tour, or doing anything but going into the gift shop. This was the destination I should have known about. There’s very little in Berlin that is more “me” than Trabiworld.
But regret is a waste of time and energy. If I’ve learned anything in life it’s that you can’t turn back the clock. Instead we learn from it.
Don’t go anywhere without doing the research. You don’t need a minute-by-minute itinerary, but a list with a few must-dos, and an accompanying map, will make sure you don’t miss out on the very cool thing you want to see.
Don’t waste time wandering. I’m not saying that wandering is a waste of time, or that you shouldn’t wander to discover new things. But, if you get stuck walking through a bunch of bland office buildings for half an hour because you don’t know where you’re going, then you lost some of your precious time.
Especially on a cruise, you’re probably in a city you will never return to, make the most of that time. Mark your favorites on a map, plot a walking course between them and use that time for discovery.
Don’t let four euros come between you and something you want to see. At Trabiworld I was worried about time and we were both miserable with the sweltering summer heat. I was planning to see the museum, but when I saw that it costed four euros and I would have to run my credit card a second time, I used that as an excuse.
Running a second credit card transaction is a small price to pay for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, I won’t let that happen again.
it’s not just a matter of learning these lessons, it’s about applying them in real-time. We need to build that list of must-dos well in advance, take them with us, and in the moment, when all you can think of is how much you have to pee, you have to remind yourself – you’re not coming back to Berlin, go for that ride in a tiny commie car.
Welcome
We are an old married couple who enjoys traveling, cooking and having adventures. We enjoy sharing all the wonderful things life has to offer. We’re here to share our travels and adventures, our cooking and fun home projects, and our thoughts and insights on what it’s like to be an old married couple.