This week’s #Frifotos is #RoomWithAView. We travel frequently and stay in all different types of rooms. Most of them have spectacular views. This is our view from our hotel room at Pike’s Waterfront Lodge in Fairbanks, Alaska.
When Cigar City Brewing was founded they began with two simple goals in mind. The first goal is obvious, set out to make the world’s best beer, but the second is what sets them apart from the rest of the craft brew pack. The owner and brewers set out to infuse their beer with the flavors and heritage that represented their home town, Cigar City a.k.a. Tampa Bay. In doing so they somehow managed to infuse Tampa’s cultural melting-pot into an incredibly tasty and award-winning line of beers. While Cigar City Brewing is only four years old, they are rapidly becoming a legend in the craft beer world. We took a Cigar City Brewery tour to find out what makes them so hot and to sample a few (ok maybe a more than a few) of the beers that make them so famous.
One of the pains of becoming a “location independent” traveler is figuring out what to do with all your stuff. At some point you’ll have to make some sacrifices and sell off or giveaway pretty much everything you own but what do you do with those remaining things that are either too important or to practical to get rid of? Some travelers have the benefit of a friend or family members house or garage, but in our case the only choice we had was to find a long term self storage unit. We wanted to share our experience with you and share our tips for finding and packing a long term storage unit.
Visiting the Taj Mahal was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve ever had in my life. Strangely, it took me weeks of pondering to figure out why. I’ve seen beautiful buildings before and I’ve seen natural marvels that absolutely blow the Taj Mahal out of the water with their sheer size and magnitude. What makes this place so special? Then I had an epiphany. It finally dawned on me why I froze in my tracks with goose bumps when I first saw it: it’s the only man-made creation I have ever seen that fully embodies what it means to truly love someone. When I talk about love I don’t mean that Shakespeare style Romeo and Juliet, “star-crossed teenager I’m full of hormones and I just met you a week ago love crap” I mean the”I love you with every ounce of my being so I’m going to create something so powerful and beautiful people will fly half way around the world to see it” kind of love. The kind of love that makes a man “employ” 20,000 people and almost empty his entire royal coffers just to build something that the woman he loved wouldn’t ever even see. Once I put it in that context in my mind, it’s obvious why I (a self-proclaimed rambler) found myself speechless (and wordless) for weeks after seeing one of the greatest feats of architecture in the world. The Taj Mahal truly does prove the power of love in stone.
On our last visit to the beautiful city of Toronto we had the absolute pleasure of taking a tour through the arts district. However, we weren’t looking for galleries filled with sculptures or paintings with absurd price tags. We were searching for something fresh, fun, and different. We found exactly what we were looking for tucked away in Toronto’s alleyways and backroads. Using the bricks and concrete as their canvas, troupes of street artists have filled an otherwise drab urban landscape with bright colors and vivid images. Here are some of my favorite pictures from our Toronto Street Art Photo Tour.
