Jake and Josh’s Grand Adventure

Josh here! After disembarking from the Queen Mary II, Jake and I made our way through the city of Southampton to an Air B&B in a neighborhood in north Southampton called “Shirley.” A delightful couple, Mandy and Alan, shared with us not only stories their home but of their family and the history of Southampton. In his retirement, Alan volunteers a great deal of time in a local historical society which often focuses on the “Spitfire,” a fighting aircraft used by the Royal Air Force during WWII. After a pair of major Spitfire production factories located near the city were bombed by Nazis during the Battle of Britain, officials instead of rebuilding elsewhere conscripted small garages, parish halls, and other buildings, secretly continued construction of the fighters. (Alan shared many other lovely stories, but I won’t drag on with those). If you are interested in reading more about the project please do at:  https://spitfiremakers.org.uk/ Our other main activity of the day was a...

  Josh here! Our Cunard cruise to the UK has now come to an end. My main takeaways: The potatoes were meh. Mashed, baked, roasted, but never very good. Several tasty desserts.  But the BUTTER! Amazing butter, perhaps some of the best I’ve ever tasted. A deep yellow with just the right balance of saltiness. Needless to say, I ate a lot of butter on the ship.  On a more serious note, our time onboard the Queen Mary II really was wonderful! Ongoing deck games, speakers, dance performances, choir recitals, quizzes, and live music kept us busy. We shared meals with folks from all around the world; Australians, Kiwis, Americans. Though of all the wonderful people we met, Jake and I shared a large portion of our time with two groups. Jo and her daughter Holly, a lovely couple of English ladies from Coventry, as well as Alex and Marie, teachers from Luxembourg. We met Jo on one of the very first days at a shuffleboard tournament and later on Alex and I were later paired as teamma...

Quick update:  We made it to New York City Wednesday evening in time to check in to a lovely little B&B overlooking Chinatown and grab some dinner at “Joe’s Shanghai” on the recommendation of a family friend of Jake’s. That evening we walked to Brooklyn and back across the Brooklyn Bridge.  Thursday we visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art where the current special exhibit features Van Gogh’s Cypresses. Among Josh’s favorite finds at the museum were a series of American stained glass windows, Greek and Roman floor mosaics, and French wood panels. Jake spent a good deal of time in the Egyptology section, particularly the ‘Book of the Dead.’ We walked through Central Park on our way to Times Square and Broadway. Lunch was enjoyed from an upstairs window overlooking the square. That evening Jake caught a performance of  Sweeney Todd  at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. “Lots of people died. It was funny.” Friday morning Josh grabbed a cup of tea and a lovely visit with a...

Jake here.  While on the train from Salt Lake to Chicago, we learned of the “zephyr salute” which is when someone pull down their pants and moons the train as it passes by. We however were discouraged from doing the salute back to the rafters as seeing cracks on trains is usually a safety concern. Rafters on the Colorado River were happy to demonstrate as we soon learned. We were graced with plenty of butts all throughout the day even as Josh pointed out while we ate dinner with a couple Garret and Georgia that just graduated from high school and are celebrating their one year dating anniversary on our train trip. They are both going to art school in Detroit this fall studying video game design and illustration respectively. We wish them a long happy relationship! We spent the afternoon playing cards with our new Amish friends Henry and Dan, they live in the Amish community in Whitefield, Maine. The game we played was called Dutch Blitz, an Amish card game that was fast paced and s...

Josh here! Today at about 6:50 AM marked our first of many train rides over the next several months as Jake and I trek across the US and around Europe from now until the end of November. Jake’s parents brought us down to Salt Lake City yesterday afternoon, and it was from the Salt Lake Amtrak station   this morning   that we embark on the first leg to Chicago—passing through Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois on the way.  There are a great many sites we plan to see, people we look forward to visiting with, stories we will undoubtedly collect, and pictures we look forward to sharing of our adventures. In light of the ever shifting world of social media, we found then most efficient means of documenting and distributing our travels with you all is though this blog. Please feel free to share it around with anyone interested in following along on our little trip! On a closing note for now, I love writing and sending postcards whenever I travel! If you are interested...