guzo: world

Awhile back, guzogal surprised guzoguy with a birthday trip (we have a bit of a birthday trip tradition brewing - for e.g. see Montreal - hopefully we can keep it up). The place this time? Napa Valley. The guzos had been once before, but just for a day trip. This was to be a relaxing three night splurge of fine eating, wine tasting, and relaxing - and it was just that.

So while the guzos don’t have a lot of time for tv, guzoguy has been watching some of ken burns’ pbs miniseries this week on the u.s. national parks. So just a quick shout out to one of our favorites: Crater Lake National Park.

Our next challenge comes from our friends, a Manhattan couple, who are looking for a 10-day international getaway around Thanksgiving. They are nature lovers and beach frequenters but looking for something unique.

I’m a New York Times daily news reader and crossworder (thus I subscribe to a full-fledged, daily paper copy, very un-Web 2.0, I know). Anyway, over the last few months, I’ve noticed that my home state of Oregon, which typically makes the news for the crazy choices of its inhabitants (for one of the better examples, google: whale blown up or recall this blast from the past: Tonya Harding), has been featured quite a lot as a travel and dining hot spot…

So while the guzos are generally committed to promoting all the positives of off-the-beaten-path travel, there’s no denying that we’ve had our share of dead ends, strikeouts, and disappointments around the world. Recently we came across a can’t miss site that celebrates just such experiences:

If you’ve read guzogal’s post on our Kenyan safari, then you know that the guzos are big fans of the CC Africa company. Well, over the last year (while we were busy working on our family expansion project), CC went global and not surprisingly changed their name to &Beyond.

One of guzogal’s and my first long trips together was to Thailand. We put our faith in Intrepid Travel, a tour company guzogal had used successfully on her own, to give us an authentic experience from Bangkok north to Chiang Rai.

So now that we’ve completed the first phase of our family expansion project (adopting our son from Ethiopia), we can return to our travel pastime and start dreaming of places to go again (we’ll report on Dubai and Addis Ababa soon - as we reported a couple of posts back, even adoption didn’t stop us from seeing some sights along the way). Of course, we may have to temporarily adjust the slate of possible destinations to accommodate our little one (although he survived the 13 hour flight from Dubai to NYC better than me so maybe not).