With just a few days left in our yearly autumn journey, we decided to travel farther north to the Italian lake country area. We stayed on Lake Maggiore, which is the second largest lake in Italy, after Lake Garda. Lake Maggiore is partly in Italy and partly in Switzerland.  After being socked in the first day, the next day brought high clouds and by noon, the sun was out and it was beautiful. We decided to take a long drive along the coastline. We made our way to the small to

The last few days in the Barolo region ends with four wineries that have been identified as having wines with the characteristics John is searching for: minerality, flintiness, tar, and graphite. Those may sound strange, but that’s his “quest”. What is stranger was how he identified the next four wineries. He used ChatGPT, the AI tool that’s all the buzz in the last few months. John has been having a running dialogue with “Chatty” and it  identified three of the four wineries

PSA : to all of the readers who think John writes this blog solo, you must know that John writes the first draft and then Nancy edits and embellishes it. And by embellish, we mean, adds the personal flavor to John’s, “just the facts, ma’am” approach, as in Joe Friday in “Dragnet.” So don’t just praise (or pan) John, Nancy is responsible too. Enough said. 😊 Monday was an open day—no wineries scheduled. So, we did laundry, went grocery shopping, and just chilled. We both alre

The rolling hills of Piedmont As we’ve mysteriously suggested   since our first post of this trip, we’ve had a very specific reason why we’re here in the Piedmont region of Italy. It’s a long story, but we’ll give you a brief rundown.  Many years ago John, his late wife Sandy, and his youngest son Andrew, along with another family spent a week on an island on a beautiful Canadian lake. One day John and the other dad went to the nearest Canadian liquor store. Not usually note

Croatia - Day 1 In our last blog, we flew from Copenhagen to Split, Croatia. Our driver,Igor,dropped us off at our Sail Croatia  ship, the Romantic Star , to begin our wine cruise. It was too early to board so we decided to explore Split, which is the second-largest city in Croatia, after the capital Zagreb. Split was founded in the 2nd or 3rd century BCE by Greeks. As we wandered the circuitous streets, we came upon a very old square built by Romans, next to the Emperor Dioc

We started our latest adventure when our neighbor, Liz, drove us to the beautiful, newly renovated Portland airport (ranked either one...

Just sending this pre-blog post out to let you know that we’re traveling again. We left Portland on September 29th and flew to Iceland...

Our next guests were John’s son Andrew, his wife Samantha and their son Wild. As a side note, Andrew and Sam just had their first feature...

As mentioned at the end of our last blog, the final day Dave and Sue were with us, Nancy’s granddaughter, Yarrow came to visit. She was...

Hello all! When we traveled as nomads, we generally posted a blog entry every 10 days. This time, here outside Puerto Vallarta, we’ve...

A Brief Introduction for Those New to this Blog Those of you who were with Nancy and John during their nomadic year are familiar with...

It’s been exactly one year since we set off on our nomadic adventures. That year has seen a lot of fun and crazy times: Sunday lunches...

On our last night in Aruba, we decided to go out to dinner. Nancy picked a beautiful place right on the ocean. As we watched the sun set...

Nancy and John often get asked how our vacation is going. Our answer is always, “this isn’t a vacation, this is our life.” The next...

We’ve been in Aruba for almost a month now. We were surprised that there are so many people visiting here in the summer, but as you can...

Wow, it’s been nearly a month since our last installment…time flies when you’re having fun. And what fun we’ve had in the last month. Let...

If you followed our last blog post, you’ll know that we were waiting for a new car rental in Moab, Utah.   It arrived at 6PM and the...

As we mentioned in our last post, our rationale for this part of our nomadic adventure is to locate a potential place to settle down...

We last left you in Panama, which if you remember, wasn’t our favorite stop. Since then, we returned to the Philadelphia area to check in...

We weren't planning to send another blog post this soon, but the mercurial nature of mother nature makes us send you this brief update....