One thing about living/working in the D.C. region, is that it generally lends itself to the giant  pain and stress of ridiculous amounts of traffic and congestion on a regular basis… Oh there’s a protest today, that’ll be an extra 2 hours to get into work and get home. Oh there’s some kind of small unheard of holiday today, that’s 3 hours you’ll spend in your car pondering how much quicker it would be to walk. Oh it’s Thursday and people woke up today… yeah that’s an extra 5 hours.

Obviously being in this region means there’s always stuff going on, and sadly whether its important or not, the slightest thing seems to bring all travel to a standstill (we attempted to go to the ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ not only did using the Metro take almost 2 hours longer than normal, but another 3 extra hours on the way back home).

Today was one of those amazing reminders that its not always bad.

Yeah, that picture was taken from the parking lot of my office today without any fancy zoom lenses. The space shuttle Discovery made its way from Florida to Dulles Airport, which is maybe 600 yards from where I work, so it can take its place at its new home, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (the Udvar Hazy Center, the one with all the full size planes including the SR-71 etc., not the one in downtown D.C.). That meant me and thousands (millions?) of others got to see a space shuttle strapped to the top of a special 747 do repeated loops around the city, showing off, escorted by fighter Hornets. And it wasn’t a ‘need zoom lens or binoculars’ to see it kind of thing. They flew it in the 700-1500 ft. above ground range. You felt like it was within reach, and it was above your parking lot.this wasn’t like watching it on CNN (who were off by about 56 minutes telling us when this thing was landing), so I totally get when people say how awe inspiring it is to see a shuttle take off for space.

Its totally sad that the shuttering down of the space program is why this was happening. I really hope this isn’t the last opportunity in my lifetime to see a live space craft in flight, but nonetheless, even with the extra 2 hours of traffic this caused today, the awesomeness made it totally worth it.

We’ve been back from N.Z. for a week now and I’m starting to get many videos from our trip uploaded and was beginning to get to the pin adding task so I could start to create some info pages for this site, but alas it won’t be that easy this time. New Zealand turned out to be so awesome, that it has broken our map…

So back in 2005 when I decided to start this adventure/website, it was generally because of two things. Firstly when Kelly and I met, we were literally across the country (Baton Rouge – Salt Lake City), considering at the time we made a combined $22,000 a year, looking back  its amazing we were able to see each other in person almost once a month without sacrificing our jobs or schooling or going into any kind of real debt. But the more people I talked to about it, the more people became astounded with no knowledge of our finances, how could we afford it because travel is expensive and impossible?

Secondly, after going through Hurricane Katrina along with all our many friends and family in the New Orleans area too and experiencing all the loss and rebuilding; one note struck a particular chord for me. You can always replace stuff, but you’ll never need to replace experiences, and you can just keep on creating as many new ones as you want, no limit. Just try and take a few pictures along the way.

Later when Kelly and I started considering “our future” and where to live my good friend Cory and I had a conversation that went something like this:

Cory: “You can’t possibly be moving to Utah, there’s no way it’s better than Hattiesburg, MS”

Me: “Have you even been there?”

Cory: “No, but neither have you really.”

Allen: “Well then how do we know Hattiesburg is better?”

Cory: “I just know it is, I bet you it is”

Allen: “Well I need to make sure of that, so I’m going to have to try out all the places in the world to be sure none of them are better.”

Keep in mind that we were both mostly joking (neither of us lives in Hattiesburg anymore), but the conversation + Hurricane Katrina + a lot of people around me being so negative to the idea of travel struck me to start a self-created mission which later Kelly agreed to join: let’s try whatever there is to try, but without going broke. Our first goal was simple; Hit all 50 states. We decided only having some kind of memorable experience (good or bad) qualifies for a pin: no adding pins for driving through a state or for airport layovers.

We bought a $.50 map of the U.S.A. from good ole Rand McNally a few boxes of pins and started mostly with introducing each other to all the places either of us had been to growing up. (that’s pictures of the actual map all over the site). Then the web site started as a way to have a backup for photos and video (post-Katrina mindset) but also hoping that some people might stumble upon the site and get inspired to go out and experience more of the world.

Then came the first baseball road trip in the northeast and then perfecting the “road trip weekend.” Then we hit up the Gulf Coast, Grand Canyon, 3 more baseball trips, sand dunes, race tracks, Amish country and Vegas and we’re currently up to 31 states (past the halfway point). Two years back though, we asked “what’s our bigger dream places? Let’s hit them now rather than later” So we bought a new World Map from Rand McNally and put aside getting all 50 states in lieu of Italy, Greece, Turkey, Bahamas, Grand Turk and most recently New Zealand, and now we’ve broken our Google map… sort of.

See, if you go to our map page, you’ll notice that right now it only shows maybe 1 pin in New Zealand, but I promise you that is not “New Zealand on a low budget.” It turns out Google’s “My Maps” function limits you to only 200 markers displaying at a time. In other words, we’ve gone to too many place for the map to display correctly. New Zealand “on a budget” actually involved a camper van, holiday parks, making a lot of sandwiches or soup and still adding 61 totally awesome pins to the map. New Zealand is supposed to actually look a lot more like this photo on the side. Luckily I married a GIS analyst, and Kelly says she’ll be able to work with the Google API and get us all set to have as many markers as we want soon enough.

So I don’t really know where I’m going with this except to say that it feels awesome and also surprising to hit this achievement with our map, because we don’t stay in fancy hotels, we don’t fly first class, we don’t own an RV, or have a travel agent, yet we also manage to not need to stay in shady areas or facilities, or sleep on floors. But still now 6 years in, after meeting many people from many countries, the one consistency I still see in Americans overall is the big misconception that travel is really hard and/or super expensive.

I just wanted to say to anyone who might find this; I’m not saying it’s easy, or that it’s totally cheap (in fact, learning how to manage money when you aren’t traveling is as, if not more, important as the travel planning and execution itself) but adding pins to your map is nowhere near impossible; it can be as simple as a 1-hour road trip on a free Saturday. Of course it can also be as crazy as 20 hours’ worth of flying across the globe and then 11 days of road tripping in a camper van…  Whatever way you can, just keep adding pins to your map!

… and I’ll keep trying to figure out how the world compares to Hattiesburg, Mississippi : )

So it’s been a while since I’ve written, but there has been no shortage of travel and addition of pins to the map. The Empire State Building, Golden Gate Bridge, Hollywood Boulevard, Scottsdale Fashion Square, Pebble Beach … Shake Shack, McCovey’s, Lefty O’Doul’s and more, yum. But I’ll delve into that another time, for now I feel the need to plea with hipsters.

Dear trendy hipsters,

Stop it.

Best regards,

Wedge

I realize there is a very blurry line between art and “art” and being unique and “being unique,” being green and “being green,” but for those who are unaware of it let me put out a scenario that, I guess, in retrospect I should have been expecting seeing as it was L.A.

If I travel to a region, let’s call this place Scmollywood or Dos Jangeles (yeah that disguises it enough),  and everyone from the area is bragging about the oldest most awesomest farmer’s market in the area and how super awesome it is, I don’t expect to only be able to find root beers mass produced in New Jersey and Texas!? WTF!?

Look nothing wrong with Boylan and A&W root beers, they’re good, in fact Boylan is in my top 5 all time, and A&W which was founded in California but hardly local anymore, but what the heck is the point of a farmer’s market that doesn’t sell local or at least regional products?

What is more astonishing is that 2 of the more popular trendy eco root beers are from California (Natural Brew and Virgil’s). Those are even some very good brews. Though the whole “we’re natural and eco friendly” idea goes out the window when the only place I can find your products are at the Mecca of “green” Whole Foods around the nation, be it Nashville, D.C., N.Y.C., Louisiana, it never fails, you find those 2 brews shipped anywhere, just not in the California farmer’s market apparently.

This is coming off quite rant-ish, but what I’m getting at is the beauty and should be the point of travel; it is to find something new, unique or distinct to wherever, not to create safe haven bubbles that you can travel to. I’m probably a little more aware of all these idiosyncrasies when I travel because I’m a marketer by day. But, the distinction is between what is different and unique and what is a relaxing destination which is what most Americans confuse for –travel- basing it solely on whether or not a distance exists between point A and B, and usually complaining when people have accents or don’t speak English.

So back to the market, how should it be done? I don’t think there’s a definitive answer, but I’ll tell you one good place for a farmer’s market: Boise, Idaho. You can go out on the weekend and meet all the locals showing off what they’ve grown, raised, sewed, brewed etc. I got to meet the 2 founders of BuckSnort Root Beer there, who poured me a cup right out of their keg; and who I hope will begin bottling soon so I can add it to my root beer bottle collection. Kelly bought a nice handbag from a woman who (we think may have been high, but) designed and sewed them all as her job/craft; not because its was a decided non-trendy trend.

And more important, they take showers! For the love of all that is holy, all you hipsters being dirty and smelly on purpose doesn’t make you cool or non-trendy trendy, it just makes you dirty and smelly. Just like shopping at Urban Outfitters doesn’t make you homely, it just makes you support a corporation that is profiting off of you. Save money, buy at Wal-Mart and then wear clothes out yourself. But anyways, here in northern Virginia, I visit the local Buckland Farm Market where they sell their own products, or regional products from their partners, and also bring in random regional brews from time to time; always something new and unique to try, not something shipped across the world because it’s a safe marketable sell for hipsters.

I love the mentality of the Jones family brewery; include everyone and have fun. A lot of big drink companies claim to have ways to include their consumers (pick the new flavor… out of these 2 we already pre-tested), or prizes under the cap, but it doesn’t come near the great things Jones does on a regular basis.

I keep a collection of bottles for each root beer brew I’ve tried, and that task is very difficult with Jones because almost every bottle is different, literally. Jones encourages their fans to send in their own photos, of anything, and if they like it they’ll put it on their bottles and give you credit. The photos they choose don’t have a pattern: old cars, close-up of a tiger, deck at a lake, to a picture of a girl with a lamp shade on her head; they’ll use it so long as it’s interesting.

In addition to the photos, they also put something under each cap, but it’s not “Sorry try again,” instead its fortunes, and not just ones they made up, but ones that fans have submitted straight off fortune cookies. They include fans in their product so much, you’d almost think they’d let you help brew the stuff if there were a feasible way to pull that off, it truly lives its slogan: “Your photo. Your soda. Your brand.”

Jones – Root Beer – 3/5

So while Jones makes over 12 different regular sodas (plus plenty seasonal and crazy ones like ‘bacon flavor’), I’m focused on the Root Beer, and what a nice brew it is. As all Jones brews are, it’s made with pure cane sugar, and the taste shows with a nice smooth beverage with great flavor. It seems to have a bit of a vanilla to it which I’ve always liked as the kicker, but that brings me to my one complaint about Jones. I can’t be completely sure on the vanilla, because they don’t fully list all their ingredients, instead opting for: “NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS” which to me is a cop out in the world of root beer. Obviously some parts of recipes need to stay secret, but at least tell me what the main show is (though as a beverage I can’t dock points for that).

On the 5-point smoothness scale it’s a solid 4 with just that little bit of zip, but nothing to shock you. The other great thing is that Jones is popular enough that you can actually order 12-packs off the website, and that is a most definite worthy endeavor you should do if you can’t find this brew in a local store.